Genealogy is a diachronic method, one that attempts to reconstruct the origins and development of discourses by showing their rootedness in a field of forces. Genealogy is a Nietzschean effort to develop a critical method that undermines all absolute grounds, that demonstrates the origins of things only in relation to and in contest with other things. Genealogy disallows pure beginnings, those historical formations that deny their historicity by naturalizing themselves, absolutizing themselves, grounding themselves in some transcendent principle. From the vantage point of those who hold to absolute principles, genealogy appears as nihilist, relativist, amoral. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow argue more convincingly that together with archaeology, genealogy constitutes "an analytic of finitude," one that undercuts metaphysical pretensions, overblown notions of reason's ability to ground discourse, but not ethical action in the best sense of the term.

he archaeological-genealogical method is best designed to explore the interplay between discourse and practice. As an interpretive strategy it is far less purely textual than Semiotics or Deconstruction. Unlike the work of Derrida and Barthes, Foucault's work is difficult for writers inured to New Criticism. Deconstruction and semiotics, claims to the contrary notwithstanding, are formalist enterprises, ones carried out comfortably without ever investigating the context. Foucault, on the contrary, rejects the haven of the text, literary or otherwise, on the grounds that the disciplines that have developed in the course of the past two centuries around such texts are themselves part of the problem that needs to be analyzed. For Foucault, disciplines such as language are not neutral tools or containers serving the pursuit of truth without interference. A major issue for interpretation is precisely the way disciplines constitute "rules of formation" for the regulation of discourse. And with regard to the disciplines of literary criticism, the first "move" has been to denigrate or place into obscurity the role of the discipline as context of discourse. In this sense New Criticism and deconstruction constitute a continuous line of development: in the one case, a disciplinary strategy of formalism and aestheticism; in the other case, a movement of subversion of hierarchies. Yet in both cases the traditional apparatus of textuality is affirmed and the sanctity of the kinds of things done under the rubric of literary criticism is reinforced.

-The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Criticism, Michel Foucault

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