Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm's "The Genealogy of Genealogy"

Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm is Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Religion and chair of science and technology studies at Williams College. He is the author of Metamodernism: The Future of Theory and The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Genealogy of Genealogy: Nietzsche, Foucault, and the Coils of Critical History, and shared the following:

From page 99:

The three essays that make up Genealogy are perhaps, in terms of expression, purpose, and the art of surprise, the most uncanny thing that has ever been written. Dionysus, as is known, is also the god of darkness.
----FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Ecce Homo

In philosophical pedigrees, Friedrich Nietzsche regularly appears as the primeval progenitor or shadowy chimera beyond whom genealogy's history is irrelevant or perhaps vanishes into myth. But, as I demonstrate in this chapter, genealogy was not actually a central term in Nietzsche's work. To be fair, when Nietzsche published Zur Genealogie der Moral in 1887, the word Genealogie (genealogy) was not exactly in common usage in German, either. Nevertheless, genealogy was already interwoven with existing discourses in Germany at the time of Nietzsche's writing.

Addressing these discourses will help us contextualize Nietzsche's usage and provide clues about how he came to the term. It will turn out that Nietzsche's status as founder of a new historical methodology is misguided. Indeed, I will argue that, if we refuse Nietzsche the status of originator, if instead we trace the term back, if we explore the historical vicissitudes that accompany its usage, it will permit us to expose its primordial roots, lowly beginnings, and dangerous inheritance.

Page 99 turns out to be the very first page of my third chapter “Nietzsche as Progenitor.” It is both representative and, in a couple of ways, a little atypical of the book.

What is most representative about it is that in the book as a whole I’m turning the genealogical method—that is, a mode of critical, historical analysis that shows that what looks timeless is actually contingent, bound to shifting relations of meaning, knowledge, and power—back on itself. I am offering, in other words, a critical history of critical history: one meant to expose its blind spots, to see where it fissures and breaks, and where it might yet be remade.

What makes the selection somewhat less representative is that it might give the impression that the book is only engaged with a few philosophical big names. And yes, I do have chapters on Nietzsche, Foucault, and Deleuze. But much of the book is really about the history of history and philosophy as academic disciplines: including their entanglements with eugenics, racial essentialism, and power. In that respect, it blends intellectual history with philosophical analysis. And though much of the book is quite dark, it ends on a constructive note. More than a critical project, the monograph aims to be a philosophical reckoning with the limits of historiography itself. In so doing, I’m trying to open a path toward alternative historiographies, to invite scholars to imagine new ways of doing history and philosophy.

Learn more about The Genealogy of Genealogy at the University of Chicago Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Myth of Disenchantment.

--Marshal Zeringue