• My research project aims to pave the way for a history of genealogical receptions of Nietzsche in the 20th and 21st centuries. The corpus of the project includes the readings of On the Genealogy of Morality and the specific genealogical practices of authors like Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and Bernard Williams, who all invoked the word “genealogy” with explicit reference to Nietzsche. I use a Nietzschean methodology in the sense of § 12 of the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morality: in other words, I don’t presuppose the existence of o common conceptual kernel permeating the whole genealogical tradition, but I simply follow the thread of successive reinterpretations of an unchanged term ("genealogy"). The main objective is to obtain a synoptic view of the post-Nietzschean genealogical tradition.
• An important conclusion of this research is that Foucault’s major role as an interpreter and disseminator of the Nietzschean word “genealogy” needs to be recognized. Indeed, there are many signs that Foucault’s reception served as a decisive intermediary between On the Genealogy of Morality and the English-speaking world, especially in the context of American gender studies.
• This project has epistemological and cultural implications. From an epistemological standpoint, it focuses on genealogical thinkers who successfully avoided essentialism in their treatment of history, by questioning the operative value of supposedly universal concepts, such as “morals”, “state” or “gender”. Understanding this tradition is crucial to develop non-teleological historiographies in all areas, but especially in the fields of history of science, history of ideas and history of philosophy. From a cultural standpoint, the genealogical tradition opened new perspectives on our European and Western culture: it brought apparently well-known cultural phenomena, like Christianity or criminal law, under a new light. However, differences of interpretation did occur among genealogists as to the origin and/or value of these great phenomena. By highlighting such differences, I would like to contribute to problematizing our own culture, a task which appears to me as a crucial social function of philosophy.
