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

In 1971, within a volume honoring Jean Hyppolite, Michel Foucault published “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire”(hereafter NGH), a text now widely regarded as a turning point in the reception of Friedrich Nietzsche and a foundational moment in the articulation of genealogy as a critical historical method. This is regularly treated as a decisive rupture, marking Foucault’s radical departure from previous historiographical models. Yet, as this paper will explore, this framing obscures a more complex intellectual landscape—one in which genealogy was neither a pure Nietzschean legacy nor an ex-nihilo Foucauldian invention but the product of a broader set of debates within mid-century French thought.

Our first clue is that the original volume in which Foucault’s essay appeared included other contributions that also invoked “genealogy” in ways that complicate its presumed Nietzschean lineage and offer a striking counterpoint to the prevailing myth of methodological autonomy. Michel Serres, in “Ce que Thalès a vu au pied des pyramides,” mobilized genealogy in a counterfactual history of geometry, while Michel Henry, in “De Hegel à Marx: essai sur la critique de la philosophie de l’État de Hegel et de Marx,” developed an explicitly genealogical account of the emergence of the state and its corresponding subjectivities: yet in a manner he associated not with Nietzsche, but with Marx.

Far from being isolated gestures, these works exemplify a broader intellectual terrain stretching from Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche et la philosophie (1962) to Foucault’s NGH nearly a decade later—a terrain in which figures such as Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Paul Ricœur, and Michel Serres, alongside less-famous philosophers like Sarah Kofman, Jean Wahl, Étienne Balibar, Henri Birault, and Michel Henry, engaged in parallel interrogations of Nietzsche, genealogy, historical contingency, epistemic rupture, and sometimes even power. The events of 1968, with their widespread critiques of institutional authority and historical determinism, catalyzed many of these debates. While Nietzsche’s reception in France has been extensively documented, and Deleuze’s text is often rightly recognized as a landmark work, what remains largely unexamined is the degree to which a set of other French thinkers were also instrumental in formulating Nietzsche as a genealogist in the first place. Indeed, the very notion that Nietzsche possessed a “genealogical method” nearly ubiquitous from the 1968 was nearly absent from discussions of his work before the 1950s.

Furthermore, Foucault was not indifferent to broader methodological debates in historiography in roughly the same period. In interviews, he repeatedly situated his work in relation to the Annales school, whose foundational texts—such as François Simiand’s “Méthode historique et sciences sociales” and Marc Bloch’s Apologie pour l’histoire ou Métier d’historien (1949)—explicitly denounced the fetishization of origins, a concern that resonates deeply with Foucault’s rejection of linear history. Notably, the phrase “history of the present”—often taken as synonymous with Foucauldian genealogy—is conspicuously absent from NGH. The expression appears in Surveiller et punir (1975), where Foucault explicitly links it to genealogy. Yet, the phrase had already been used much earlier by Lucie Varga (1904–1941), a Jewish Austrian-Hungarian historian and member of the Annales school. That Varga’s work has been largely forgotten is itself a striking parallel to the occlusion of the broader French debates on genealogy that preceded Foucault.

This paper critically reassesses the dominant narrative that positions genealogy as either a purely Nietzschean inheritance or a Foucauldian innovation. Contemporary scholarship often assumes that genealogy follows a seamless intellectual lineage from Nietzsche to Foucault, while those uneasy with Nietzsche’s legacy have tended to sidestep him altogether, attributing to Foucault the primary conceptual labor of transforming genealogy into a viable method of historical analysis. The reality, however, is more entangled: genealogy emerged within a wider intellectual milieu in mid-century France, not only that focused on Nietzsche but also developing through engagements with historical epistemology, Marxist critique, structuralism, surrealism, hermeneutics, and phenomenology. At the same time, my research also shows how the term “genealogy” carried multiple, sometimes contradictory, meanings in this period—including in non-academic contexts tied to eugenics and racial classification. Recognizing this historical ambiguity does not undermine Foucault’s approach but rather sharpens our understanding of the conceptual terrain in which he was working.

By tracing these overlooked connections, this paper not only reconstructs a more historically grounded account of Foucault’s intellectual formation but also reveals an underappreciated complexity in how genealogy and history were conceptualized in mid-century France. Rather than undermining Foucault’s contributions, this work allows us to see them more clearly—situating his methodological innovations within a broader intellectual landscape that has often been flattened in retrospective accounts. In doing so, this study provides an important scholarly intervention: while much attention has been given to Foucault’s own methodological shifts, the intellectual prehistory of genealogy betweenNietzsche and Foucault remains disproportionately unexamined.

By reconstructing this intellectual context, this paper unsettles the prevailing mythology surrounding genealogy’s emergence, while also raising broader methodological questions relevant to the study of religion. If genealogy, in Foucault’s own hands, partially served as a means of problematizing regimes of truth, subject-formation, and historical contingency, then interrogating genealogy’s own conditions of possibility should open new avenues for research. Given the seminar’s interest in problematizing “tradition” through genealogical inquiry, this paper contributes by tracing how the tradition of genealogy itself was constituted as a method before Foucault, offering insights into how its latent possibilities might be extended into contemporary religious studies.