Genealogy’s Hidden Roots: The Forgotten French Debate That Shaped Foucault (1962–1971)

Michel Foucault’s Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire (1971) is often cast as the moment Nietzschean genealogy truly became as a critical historical method. But that story is too clean. It erases a messier, more dynamic intellectual landscape—one where genealogy wasn’t just a Nietzschean discovery or a Foucauldian recovery but the product of fierce mid-century debates. This paper reconstructs that forgotten conversation, tracing how thinkers like Gilles Deleuze, Michel Serres, Michel Henry, Jacques Derrida, and Sarah Kofman, alongside other structuralists and Marxists, were already grappling with genealogy before Foucault’s essay. At the same time, historiographical movements—Annales history, historical epistemology, surrealism—reshaped what genealogy could even mean. It wasn’t a singular rupture. It was a field of collisions, reworkings, and provocations. By placing Foucault back into that shifting terrain, this study unsettles the dominant narrative and opens new directions for genealogical inquiry in religious studies and beyond.