On The Genealogy of the Ereignis of Knowledge

Abstract

In this essay, I attempt an interpretation of what

Michel Foucault means by the term ’event’ in the period
from The Archaeology of Knowledge until his death in 1984.
The sense in which I propose to examine the role of
‘events’ in Foucault is a combination of the senses used by
Gilles Deleuze in The Logic of Sense and Martin Heidegger’s
understanding of ’event’ as Er-eignis in On Time and Being,
Identity and Difference and “The Way to Language.” I show
the ramifications of this understanding in terms of
Foucault’s genealogy and the mechanics of force and power
relationships. In doing so, I explicate an interpretation
of Foucaultian genealogy and demonstrate how the notion of
‘event’ discussed herein may aid in reconciling genealogy
with archaeology. Finally, I discuss the difference between
relations of force and relations of power in terms of the
‘event’ and genealogy in order to show how genealogy can be
a means of resistance to power and to demonstrate the
operative mechanisms of power relation reversal. I
demonstrate this by way of Friedrich Nietzche’s text “On
Truth and Lie in a Non-Moral Sense.” This paper explores
the construction of language and of power, knowledge and
discourse as events in Foucault. Ultimately force relations
are irreducible to power relations and vice versa. The
persistence of force relations beneath the relations of
power is precisely that which allows reversal and
instability, and genealogy operates on the level of
designating these points of confrontation or Emergences
“Entstehung” in order to either create and appropriate a
new form of knowledge, or to appropriate subjugated
knowledges in order to bring them to light and make use of
them in the reversal of the power relationship. In the
course of this, a better understanding of the relation
between knowledge and power is attempted in terms of the
‘event.’
This is an excerpt from a senior thesis project.
Other sections examine in greater depth the relation
between Foucault and Nietzsche as well as the relation
between this interpretation of ‘event’ and Foucault’s
archaeological concepts of the episteme and historical a
priori. I show that these concepts are still operative
after The Archaeology of Knowledge. The final chapter will
discuss the mechanisms of interaction between power and
positivity and the relation between strategy and power with
the aim of explicating the mechanisms operative in an
epistemic rupture. I will examine the particular case of
the break that, according to Foucault, occurred between
1775 and 1825. This chapter has been slightly abridged for
clarity of focus and for length.

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 In his final interview, Michel Foucault stated that “Heidegger
has always been an essential philosopher… My entire philosophical
development was determined by my reading of Heidegger. I nevertheless
recognize that Nietzsche outweighed him.”i The manner in which Foucault
was influenced by Nietzsche has been the subject of a considerable
amount of literature, whereas there is a relative paucity of literature
concerning Heidegger’s influence upon Foucault. What I would like to
undertake here is an examination of the manner in which Heidegger’s
idea of Ereignis, along with certain concepts from Nietzsche and Gilles
Deleuze render Foucault’s genealogical-archaeological project
particularly coherent and lucid. Albert Hofstadter writes of Ereignis
that “Every shape of experience familiar to man is a shape of a limited
enownment [Ereignis]… every stratum and strand of history is thinkable
in its truth as a way of staying within some finite form of this mutual
ownness. The social order, for instance is an order of enownment
[Ereignis].”ii It will be seen that Foucault’s genealogy and archaeology
are premised upon a similar thesis; that is, knowledge-power consists
of events related to the forces that gave them rise in the same manner
as mans appropriation to Being in Heidegger.
What I would like to undertake in this essay is to explore the
way in which genealogy and additionally the rest of Foucault’s work,
can be seen as being founded upon a particular understanding of the
term ’event,’ which not only brings a new clarity to the method of
genealogy and clarifies the status of power, knowledge and discourse,
but also permits an integration of Foucault’s methodologies into a
coherent whole. An aspect of the sense in which the term ’event’
should be understood is suggested by the 1983 interview with Hubert
Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, “On the Genealogy of Ethics” in which
Foucault states that
Three domains of genealogy are possible. First, a historical
ontology of ourselves in relation to truth through which we
constitute ourselves as subjects of knowledge; second, a
historical ontology of ourselves in relation to a
field of power through which we constitute ourselves as
subjects acting on others; third, a historical ontology
in relation to ethics through which we constitute
ourselves as moral agents… The truth axis was studied
in The Birth of the Clinic and The Order of Things. The power axis
was studied in Discipline and Punish, and the ethical axis in The
History of Sexuality.iii
The term ‘historical ontology’ suggests Heidegger, and thus it would
not be unreasonable to connect Foucault‘s term ‘event‘ with Heidegger’s
understanding of Ereignis [event] and the related term Gestell
[enframing]. As will be shown, this particular understanding of the
‘event’ is not only suggested by the manner in which Foucault uses and
characterizes the term ‘event,’ but also by the fact that, while
Foucault was a student at the Ecole Normale Superieure “he went
regularly to hear Jean Beaufret, to whom Martin Heidegger had written
his ‘Lettre sur l’humanisme.’ Beaufret discussed Kant’s Critique of
Pure Reason but also talked a great deal about Heidegger.”iv Heidegger
notes in the “Summary of a Seminar” in On Time and Being that the
“Letter on Humanism” was the first time he wrote of Ereignis.v It is
also useful to think of the Foucaultian sense of ’event’ not only in
terms of Ereignis, but in the sense of ‘event’ developed by Gilles
Deleuze in The Logic of Sense, which was published in the same year as
The Archaeology of Knowledge.vi This understanding of ‘event’ is
suggested in “Theatrum Philosophicum,” written by Foucault as a review
of Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition. Here
Foucault criticizes “three major attempts at conceptualizing the event:
neopositivism, phenomenology and the philosophy of history”vii and writes
approvingly of Deleuze’s conceptualization of ‘event.’ Since the
aforementioned attempts that Foucault criticizes as having failed to
grasp the ’event’ are those which he has personally rejected, one is
led to believe that his notion of ’event’ bears some similarity to
Deleuze’s. Furthermore, the integrative potential of this proposed
understanding of ‘event’ is enhanced by the fact that Foucault
seemingly subsumes both archaeology and his later ethical project to
genealogy as shown in the previously cited passage. This passage
implies that what we can apply terminologically to genealogy, we can
also apply to the whole of his project.
Despite Foucault’s frequent use of the term event he only
discusses the term ’event’ explicitly in The Discourse on Language and
in an interview published in 1980 entitled “Questions of Method.” In
this piece he writes about the term ‘eventialization,’ from which we
can extrapolate a rudimentary understanding of that which Foucault
refers to as an ‘event.’ In “Questions of Method“ Foucault writes,
“What do I mean by this term? First of all, a breach of self-evidence.
It means making visible a singularity… rediscovering connections… that
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establish what subsequently counts as being self-evident…
multiplication or pluralization of causes.”viii Thus, we can see that for
Foucault an ‘event’ is a singular occurrence, and moreover, one that is
analyzable “according to the multiple processes that constitute it.”ix
Therefore the event is singular and not of the same ontological status
as that which constitutes it.x However, this is a skeletal definition
for such an important term.
It is necessary to examine Foucault’s texts more closely in order
to be able to understand his usage of the term ‘event’ in clearer
terms. In The Order of Things, Foucault writes that “only thought re-
apprehending itself at the root of its own history could provide a
foundation… for what the solitary truth of this event was in itself…
archaeology, however, must examine each event in terms of its own
evident arrangement…“xi In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault writes
that:
to disconnect the unquestioned continuities by which we organize,
in advance, the discourse that we are to analyze, in advance, the
discourse that we are to analyze: we must renounce… A wish that
it should never be possible to assign, in the order of discourse,
the irruption of a real event; that beyond any apparent
beginning, there is always a secret origin… Discourse must not be
referred to the distance presence of the origin, but treated as
and when it occurs.xii

Moreover, Foucault speaks of multiple kinds of events. He writes that

“the enunciation is an unrepeatable event; it has a situated and dated
uniqueness that is irreducible… but the statement itself cannot be
reduced to this pure event of enunciation.”xiii However, reciprocally,
“the archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that
governs the appearance of statements as unique events.”xiv Not only are
events discursive, it is also meaningful to speak of “statements in
correlation with ‘external’ events’,”xv which is to say, events outside
of a discourse. Foucault again writes in The Archaeology:
Instead of considering that discourse is made up of a series of
homogeneous events, archaeology distinguishes several possible
levels of events within the very density of discourse: [1] the
level of statements themselves in their unique emergence; [2] the
level of the appearance of objects, types of enunciation,
concepts, strategic choices (or transformations that affect those
that already exist); [3] the level of the derivation of new rules
of formation on the basis of rules that are already in operation…
a fourth level, at which the substitution of one discursive
formation for another takes place. These events which are by far
the most rare, are for archaeology, the most important…xvi
It could be argued that the significance of the notion of ‘event’ is
emphasized arbitrarily over other persistent elements of his
vocabulary. While this claim is legitimate, numerous statements suggest
the particular importance of the term ’event.’

§1 Toward the Event

It is in the demonstration of the thesis that asserts the

impossibility of neutral knowledge that I find the idea of ‘event’ to
be of most importance. Thus, it is here that we must treat the
connection of Foucault’s idea of ‘event’ to those of Deleuze and
Heidegger. The importance of Heidegger in terms of ‘event’ is of
further reaching importance and thus will be treated last. Notably, in
the texts currently under examination, Foucault at times uses
peculiarly Deleuzean terminology. First in “Nietzsche, Genealogy,
History” (1971), Foucault writes “The body is the inscribed surface of
events, the locus of a dissociated Self, and a volume in perpetual
disintegration. Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated
within the articulation of the body and history. Its task it so expose
a body totally imprinted by history…”xvii Second, and more importantly, in
“Truth and Juridical Forms” (1973), he writes: “Knowledge - a surface
effect, something prefigured in human nature - plays its game in the
presence of the instincts, above them, among them; it curbs them, it
expresses a certain state of tension or appeasement between the
instincts.”xviii
It is the second that is of the most importance regarding the
idea of ‘event’ and genealogy in Foucault. If one were to look for the
Deleuzean term ‘surface effect’ in The Logic of Sense, one would find
the following in a section entitled “Second Series of Paradoxes of
Surface Effects“:
All bodies are causes in relation to each other, and causes for
each other - but causes of what? They are causes of things of an
entirely different nature. These effects are not bodies, but
properly speaking, ‘incorporeal’ entities. They are not physical
qualities and properties, but rather logical or dialectical
attributes. They are not things or facts but events. We can not
say that they exists, but rather that they subsist or inhere.
They are neither agents nor patients, but results of actions and
passions.xix
Deleuze continues later in the same chapter, that:
The event, being itself impassive, allows the active and passive

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 to be interchanged more easily, since it is neither one nor the
other, but rather their common result. Concerning the cause and
the effect, events, being always only effects are better able to
form among themselves functions of quasi-causes or relations of
quasi-causality which are always reversible.xx
Thus we see a parallel to Foucault, indeed, one that is quite
illuminating. According to Foucault, knowledge , and “knowledge was
invented, then. To say that it was invented is to say that it has no
origin.”xxi Thus, if knowledge is an invention [Erfindung], and it is
also a ‘surface effect’, then knowledge qua invention is necessarily an
‘event.’ This is to say, allusively, Foucault brings us to the
fundamental equivalence of genealogy. This is to say, every invention
is an ‘event.’ Foucault confirms knowledges status as an event in “The
Will to Knowledge,“: “is not a permanent faculty; it is an event or at
least a series of events“xxii As both Foucault and Deleuze conceive it, an
event is an ‘effect’ of force/power relations, and cannot strictly
speaking be causally related to another ‘event‘. At this stage,
strictly speaking, history is composed of shifting power-relations and
a succession of disconnected invention-events. Something else has to be
introduced in order to show how a history of these can be written, and
most importantly, just how knowledge and other invention-events are put
to use; why, how and in what interest knowledge and other events are
constituted and put to use. This is where I see the importance of
Heidegger, and moreover, how we can bring our reflections on the
’event’ to bear on the project of Foucaultian genealogy.
Foucault writes of Nietzsche, that “this means that knowledge is
always a strategic relation in which man is placed. This strategic
relation is what will define the effect of knowledge; that’s why it
would be completely contradictory to imagine a knowledge that was not
by nature partial, oblique and perspectival.”xxiii Moreover, Foucault sees
the importance of Nietzsche to the lectures as his giving a model for
the formation of knowledge in terms of relations of force and power.
Foucault sees knowledge arising from human relations of force and power
and then projected upon the world. But if knowledge is an effect of
these power-relations, which, at least for Deleuze, are relations
between bodies, knowledge is not isomorphic with the things to be
known. Moreover, Foucault agrees with this, when he writes that
knowledge is the attempt to enforce order on an world that is un-
ordered. But still, how is this invention forced upon that which is
heterogeneous to it? Also, given that invention-events serve the
interests of one of the parties of the relationship of force or power,
how does this happen? Finally, what follows from this?
Heidegger’s thought of Ereignis, or literally ‘event’ has, until
this point been left by the wayside. This has been intentional,
however, and I shall now remedy this deficiency. The German word for
‘event’ is der Ereignis, which Heidegger understands as Er-Eignis,
which translates to something akin to the act of making something
proper. For Heidegger, ‘event’ is the act of appropriation. He writes
in On Time and Being, “What determines both, time and Being, in their
own, that is, in their belonging together, we shall call: Ereignis, the
event of Appropriation. Ereignis will be translated as Appropriation or
event of Appropriation. One should bear in mind, however, that ‘event’
is not simply an occurrence, but that which makes any occurrence
possible.”xxiv
Initially, in Heidegger’s Ereignis, we see an important
implication for Foucault’s genealogy. This is to say that when
Heidegger writes that “that ‘event’ is not simply an occurrence, but
that which makes any occurrence possible,” we can add to our
provisional understanding of the ‘invention-event’ of knowledge in
Foucault that the invention-event pertains to savoir as opposed to
connaissance. Particular elements of knowledge were not invented in the
same way that knowledge itself was. Moreover, the notion of Ereignis as
the event of Appropriation is tantalizing, given Foucault’s
understanding of interpretation as the appropriation and cooption of a
given system; Foucault even writes in “The Will To Knowledge”:
knowledge is invented by “forces distinct from it: an interplay of
instincts, impulses, desires, fear, will to appropriation. It is on the
stage where they clash that knowledge comes into being,”xxv moreover, it
is in this same text knowledge is referred to explicitly as an ’event.’
This would broach associations with Heidegger’s thought of Gestell or
Framing. Indeed, Heidegger writes that “Between the epochal formations
of Being and the transformation of being into Appropriation stands
Framing. Framing is an in-between stage, so to speak… It can be
understood as a continuation of the will to will, thus an extreme
formation of Being. At the same time, however, it is a first form of
Appropriation itself.”xxvi Der Ereignis, for Heidegger, is ambiguous.
Heidegger seems to envision it as a final or originary stage in the

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history of Being; however, Foucault seems to be drawing more upon the
character and properties of Ereignis rather than its status in
Heidegger’s history of Being. The first property that Foucault takes is
the understanding in which Framing constitutes a form of Appropriation:
this can be construed as the construction of forms of
knowledge[savoir].xxvii
Fundamentally, it seems to me, thought, that the characteristics
of der Ereignis that Foucault incorporates most into his notion of the
’event’ comes from the following passages:
Even assuming that in our discussions of Being and time we
abandon the common meaning of the word “event” and instead adopt
the sense that suggests itself in the sending of presence and the
extending of time-space which opens out - even then our talk
about “Being as Appropriation” remains indeterminate…xxviii
And most importantly:
Appropriating makes manifest its peculiar property, that
Appropriation withdraws what is most fully its own from boundless
unconcealment. Thought in terms of Appropriating, this means: in
that sense it expropriates itself of itself. Expropriation
belongs to Appropriation as such. By this expropriation,
Appropriation does not abandon itself - rather it preserves what
is its own.xxix
Here, if we listen carefully, we can discern more echoes in Foucault,
particularly in a text that we have already treated, “Truth and
Juridical Forms.” The fact that Appropriation is equally also
expropriation, illuminates Foucault’s statement that “If these three
drives - laughing, lamenting, hating - manage to produce knowledge…
it’s because they have tried, as Nietzsche says, to harm one another…
they reach a kind of state, a kind of hiatus, in which knowledge will
finally appear as the ‘spark between two swords.’”xxx Thus, in the
“stabilized state of war” of mutual expropriation on the part of the
parties of the power-relation gives rise to the invention-event of
knowledge.
“Time is the way in which Appropriation appropriates,”xxxi writes
Joan Stambaugh in her Introduction to On Time and Being. This is to say
that temporality is the fundamental determinant of the mode of
appropriation. Thus, Appropriation is fundamentally historical; it is
either interpreted qua Being, qua Framing or as ’event’. In
interpreting Appropriation as ’event’, we see according to Agamben,
“access to a kind of propriety… In ’Time and Being’ Ereignis is defined
as the reciprocal appropriation, the co-belonging of time and being,
while in Identity and Difference, Being and man are led back to their
propriety.”xxxii It is this sense of Ereignis as access to propriety that
is particularly interesting in relation to Foucault. Much as power or
the instincts expropriate and their mutual expropriation is generative
of the invention-event. Despite the fact that “No one is responsible
for an emergence; no one can glory in it, since it always occurs in the
interstice,“xxxiii that ‘event’, if understood as Ereignisxxxiv is always
already mutually appropriated to a party of the conflict of force that
gave them rise. Moreover, it ensures the status of the subjugated by
its use as a mode of subjection that is expropriated to the other
force.
It is impossible for knowledge, or anything that was invented to
be neutral. It is in this that insofar as the subject constitutes an
invention, there can be no neutral independent subject. That neutral
independent subject is the appropriated invention of the force that
occupies a particular position in a power arrangement. It is an
invention that is already an interpretation that is forcefully imposed
by someone or something. This validates what Nietzsche writes in the
first essay of On The Genealogy of Morals, “This type of man needs to
believe in a neutral independent ‘subject,’ prompted by an instinct for
self-preservation and self-affirmation in which every lie is
sanctified.”xxxv Thus, this ‘subject’ is reciprocally appropriated to
those whom it benefits, and serves at the same time to expropriate
those over whom it serves to assert dominion. Thus, with this example,
I am asserting a universality of sorts for this notion of ‘event’ which
I will here codify into a few preliminary conclusions:
1. Event is to be understood at once as a Deleuzean surface-
effect and as an ‘event’ in which Appropriation is always already
operational.xxxvi
2. Therefore: Events cannot be causally related to one another.
Events cannot be neutral, in any way, shape, or form, except
insofar as an appearance of neutrality serves an interest.
3. The term Event only applies to occurrences that pertain to
savoir or operate at a formal level. The invention of a content
for a given proposition is not an Event, unless it modifies the
fundamental structure of knowledge, however, the invention of
a new form of proposition is an Event.
4. Discursive events are equivalent to Statements in The
Archaeology of Knowledge. A non-discursive event is any event
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 that is generative of a new form that knowledge may take.
5. Therefore: Knowledge is and event that produces knowledge as a
formal structure, it is produced by power and always serves
or reinforces a power-relation, although it is not always the
dominant force who knowledge serves. Knowledge can be
appropriated by the subjugated force as a means of resistance.
6. Thus: The invention-event of a new form of Knowledge or Truth
can bring about rupture (which is also an event, albeit a complex
one).This event can only occur in the course of conflict.
What then are the consequences of these conclusions for Foucault’s
genealogy? Moreover, how does such an understanding of the event
underlie the interrelation of archaeology and genealogy, the
interrelation between knowledge and power?
Foucault’s all-consuming attention to events as opposed to the
“presupposed continuities of history” yields interesting ramifications
for genealogy. By speaking of ‘events’ or ‘statements’ Foucault is, on
one hand, seemingly dramatically reducing the amount of issues at hand.
On the other, genealogy is intended to uncover “’subjugated
xxxvii
knowledges‘” and as such, by takes into account “a whole series of
knowledges that have been disqualified as non-conceptual knowledges, as
insufficiently elaborated… naïve… hierarchically inferior… knowledges
that are below the required level of erudition or scientificity.”xxxviii And
moreover, by speaking of discursive and non-discursive events, he in
fact broadens his purview. In order to do genealogy, one must trace the
minute sequence of little events, micro-relations of power and force,
and meticulously record them. Thus in every relation of force that is
productive, an event, according to our previous definition occurs and
must be recorded by the genealogist. It is genealogy’s task, according
to Foucault to constitute, “a form of history that can account for the
constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects, and so on
without having to make reference to a subject that is either
transcendental in relation to the field of events or runs in its empty
sameness throughout the course of history.”xxxix Thus, by accounting for
every invention-event, mapping every emergence, the genealogist can
account for what Foucault refers to as the “micro-physics of power.” It
is a micro-physics insofar as productive power relations occur rapidly
and in great number. By charting the micro-physics of power, the
Foucaultian genealogist is able to account for the “constitution of
knowledges, discourses and domains of objects.”xl
Corollary to this, it is impossible for any invention-event to be
neutral in relation to the power relation in which they emerged, and
moreover, it is impossible for an event to be neutral at all, because
as a cardinal property of an ‘event’ in the Heideggerian-Deleuzean
sense that is Foucault’s operative sense, every event, despite always
occurring in a gap between powers, is always immediately appropriated
with respect either to the power relations in which they emerged.
Moreover, when transplanted into a different power-configuration, the
invention-event will become appropriated to the power involved. It is
very much as Foucault writes in “Society Must Be Defended”: that “once
we have excavated our genealogical fragments… isn’t there a danger that
they will be recorded, recolonized by these unitary discourses which,
having first disqualified them… may now be ready to re-annex them and
include them in their own discourses and their own power-knowledge
effects?”xli Thus is the risk of the ‘eventialized’ history; by recording
the history of the invention of knowledges [savoir], the dominant
knowledges have far easier to access to the previously suppressed
knowledges, and then can make use, appropriate if you will, the
subjugated knowledges in order to reinforce its hegemony.xlii
Moreover, now we can come to another, particularly significant
conclusion. What relation between knowledge and power is presupposed by
this envisioning of genealogy? It must be said that by virtue of the
peculiar status accorded to the ‘event’, that is, of being a surface
effect without the capacity of acting as a simple cause. This is
especially evident in the interrelation of force, power and the
invention-events knowledge and truth. In short: the nature of the
‘event’ prohibits the ‘event’ from being more than a ‘quasi-cause’ with
respect to another. This is even true of discursive events and non-
discursive events. An event requires force-relations in order to give
it a cause. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault writes that “the
carceral network constituted one of the armatures of power-knowledge
that has made the human sciences possible. Knowable man is the object-
effect of this analytical investment…“xliii Thus, the object of knowledge
is an effect of power-knowledge. Discursive effects and their non-
discursive correlates are in the end, effects of force and power
relations and the knowledge [savoir] that they create. However, the
invention-event of knowledge by virtue of its analogous nature to

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Heidegger’s Ereignis, can mold, modify or reinforce power. By
appropriating and being appropriated, knowledge [savoir], more often,
particular knowledges [savoir], appropriates power. In doing so, the
idea of the event firmly entrenches the mechanism for, and the manner
of the fundamental inter-relation of power with knowledge (or other
events).
Now, we can address the issue that at the outset I claimed that a
proper understanding of ‘event’ and genealogy would illuminate just how
archaeology and genealogy are inextricable. According to Deleuze,
“Archaeology put forward a distinction between two types of practical
formations: the one ‘discursive,’ involving statements, the other ‘non-
discursive’ involving the environment.”xliv We can fill in Deleuzes’
elision, that Archaeology deals with the practical formations of
‘discursive’ events and ‘non-discursive’ events. Deleuze would advance
the idea that in his ‘genealogical period‘, Foucault merely dealt
primarily with the non-discursive. However, this would contradict
Foucault’s statement in The Discourse on Language regarding the
relation between genealogy and archaeology; they have the same domain,
and thus differentiating based upon the discursive versus non-
discursive division would be fallacious, by virtue of constituting
separate domains. Moreover, Deleuze asks, if “there is a mutual
presupposition operating between the two forms, yet there is no common
form, no conformity, not even correspondence… One the one hand, outside
forms, is there in general a common immanent cause that exists within
the social field?.. What do we mean here by immanent cause? It is a
cause which is realized, integrated and distinguished in its effect… is
realized, integrated and distinguished by its effect.”xlv In short: the
immanent cause about which Deleuze is speaking consists of the
relations of force themselves; their effects constitute both the
discursive and non-discursive events, the province of archaeology.
However, it is the history of these events, with which genealogy is
concerned, rather than their topology. Genealogy, as stated in
“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” and in The Discourse on Language
delimits its perspective to concern the historical emergence of events,
and that “unlike the history of the sciences [the archaeological
project], the genealogy of knowledge is located on a different axis,
namely the discourse-power axis or, if you like, the discursive
practice - clash of power axis.”xlvi And rather than study discourse
synchronically in order to account for discontinuity, as did
archaeology, genealogy studies events, inventions, emergences
diachronically. In doing so, genealogy does what archaeology cannot;
trace the constitution of the epistemic foundations of knowledge for a
particular period in the manner in which that foundation was
constituted. Archaeology is the temporally and spatially localized
correlate to genealogy. Genealogy creates a narrative of events that
captures the interplay of force beneath the events and, if one is
careful enough, it is possible to discern the relation between the
knowledge constituted by power, and power itself. Genealogy enables the
appropriation of knowledge by the subjugated force or its allies.xlvii

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Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and

Schizophrenia Volume Two, Translated by Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987)

Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism

and Hermeneutics 2nd Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1983)

Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, Translated by Betsy Wing, (Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1991)

Michel Foucault The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, Volume One:

Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, Translated by Robert Hurley and
Others (New York: The New Press, 1997)

The Essential Works of Michel Foucault Volume Two:

Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, Translated by Robert Hurley
and Others(New York: The New Press, 1998)

Essential Works of Michel Foucault Volume 3: Power,

Translated by Robert Hurley and Others, (New York: The New Press,
2000)

The Archaeology of Knowledge and Discourse on

Language, Translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith and Rupert Swyer,
(New York: Tavistock, 1972)

The Order of Things, Translated by Alan Sheridan,

(New York: Vintage, 1994)

Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Translated by

Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1977)

Discipline and Punish, Translated by Alan Sheridan

(New York: Vintage, 1979)

The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An

Introduction,
Translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990)

Philosophy, Politics, Culture: Interviews and Other

Writings 1977-1984 edited with introduction by Lawrence D.
Kritzman, translated by Alan Sheridan and others (New York:
Routledge, 1988)
 “Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at The College De
France 1975-1976“, Translated by David Macey (New York: Picador,
2003)

Gary Gutting, Ed. The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1994)

Beatrice Han, Foucault’s Critical Project: Between the Historical and

the Transcendental, Translated by Edward Pile, (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2002)

Martin Heidegger Identity and Difference, Translated by Joan Stambaugh

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002)

Off the Beaten Track, Translated by Julian Young and

Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)

On The Way to Language, Translated by Peter D. Herz

(San Francisco: HaperSanFrancisco, 1971)

On Time and Being, Translated by Joan Stambaugh

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002)

Albert Hofstadter “Enownment” in Boundary 2, Volume 4, Issue 2 (Winter

1976) 357-378

Friedrich Nietzsche On The Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo,

Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, (New York:
Vintage,1967)

Martin Saar “Genealogy and Subjectivity” in European Journal of

Philosophy, Volume 10 Issue 2, 2002, 231-245

Jacqueline Stevens “On The Morals of Genealogy” in Political Theory,

Volume 31, Number 4, (August 2003) 558-588

-15-
i Michel Foucault, “The Return of Morality” in Philosophy, Politics, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984 edited with
introduction by Lawrence D. Kritzman, translated by Alan Sheridan and others (New York: Routledge, 1988), pg. 250.
ii Albert Hofstadter, “Enownment”, pg. 374
iii Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics” in The Essential Works of Michel
Foucault: Volume One: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, Edited by Paul Rabinow, (New York:
The New Press, 1997), pg. 262
iv Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, Translated by Betsy Wing, (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1991), pg. 31
v Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, Translated by Joan Stambaugh (Chicago, University of
Chicago Press, 2002), pg. 36
vi James D. Faubion, in his introduction to volume two of The Essential Works of Foucault
speaks of the relationship of the idea of event in Foucault to the idea of event in Deleuze:
“In 1970, he appeared to strike an ontological alliance with the premier French philosopher
of events - his friend and contemporary Gilles Deleuze… [“Theatrum Philosophicum”] asserts
clearly enough two principles that Deleuze and Foucault shared. The first establishes the
general priority of the event over the object: the second establishes the specific
ontological priority of thought as an event over thought as any structure or system…” James
D. Faubion “Introduction” in The Essential Works of Foucault Volume Two: Aesthetics, Method
and Epistemology, (New York: The New Press, 1998), pg. Xxi-xxii
vii Michel Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum” in Language, Counter-Memory. Practice,
Translated by Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977).
viii Michel Foucault, “Questions of Method” in Essential Works of Foucault Volume 3:
Power, Translated by Robert Hurley and Others, (New York: The New Press, 2000), pg. 226-227
ix Ibid, pg. 227
x C.F. “Truth and Juridical Forms”, pg. 8 on knowledge and truth.
xi Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, (New York: Vintage, 1994), pg. 217-218
xii Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and Discourse on Language, Translated by
A.M. Sheridan Smith and Rupert Swyer, (New York: Tavistock, 1972), pg. 25
xiii Ibid, pg. 101-102
xiv Ibid, pg 129
xv Ibid, pg. 169. In his “On The Archaeology of the Sciences: Response to the Epistemology
Circle” pg. 308 ,Foucault writes “the aim is to grasp how these statements, as events and in
their so peculiar specificity, can be articulated to events that are not discursive in
nature, but may be of a technical, practical, economic, social, political or other
variety.”
xvi Ibid, pg. 171
xvii Ibid, pg 148
xviii Foucault, “Truth and Juridical Forms” pg. 8
xix Gilles Deleuze The Logic of Sense, pg. 4-5
xx Ibid, pg. 8
xxi Foucault, “Truth and Juridical Forms” pg. 7
xxii Foucault “The Will To Knowledge” Translated by Robert Hurley, in The Essential Works
of Michel Foucault, Volume One, pg. 14
xxiii Ibid, pg. 14
xxiv Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, Translated by Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2002), pg. 19
xxv Foucault “The Will to Knowledge” pg. 15
xxvi Martin Heidegger, “Summary of a Seminar on the Lecture, ‘Time and Being’” in On Time
and Being Translated by Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pg. 33
- Heidegger also discusses the way in which Gestell constitutes a form of appropriation in
“The Way to Language” in On The Way to Language, Translated by Peter D. Herz (San Francisco:
HaperSanFrancisco, 1971), pg 132: “Language always speaks according to the mode in which the
Appropriation as such reveals itself or withdraws. For a thinking that pursues the
Appropriation can still only surmise it, and yet can experience in… Framing (Ge-Stell).
Because Framing challenges man, that is, provokes him to order and set up all that is
present being as technical inventory, Framing persists after the manner of Appropriation.”
And in “The Age of the World Picture” in Off the Beaten Track, Translated by Julian Young
and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) pg. 68: “The world picture
does not change from an earlier medieval to a modern one; rather, that the world becomes
picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of the modern.” Gestell forces one to view
the world in its terms, it gives order to the world, much like the power-knowledge, episteme
and historical a priori do for Foucault.
xxvii Foucault can be seen as criticizing Heidegger for reserving the term Ereignis for the
pure event of being as such. It is particularly evident in the text “On The Archaeology of
the Sciences: Response to the Epistemology Circle” in The Essential Works Of Michel Foucault
Volume Two. In which he writes:
 It is crucial to renounce two postulates… The one assumes that it is never
possible to find the irruption of a genuine event in the order of discourse; that, beyond
every apparent beginning, there is always a secret origin - so secret and primordial that
it can never be entirely recaptures in itself… The point itself could only be its own
emptiness; all beginnings from that point could only be recommencements or occultations
(strictly speaking both…). pg 305

Linked to this is the thesis that ever manifest discourse secretly rests on an
‘already said’; but that this ‘already said’ is not just a phrase already pronounced, a
text already written, but a ‘never said’ - a disembodied discourse, a
voice as silent as a breath… It is thus resume that all that discourse happens to put
into words is already found n the half silence which precedes it… which it uncovers
and renders quiet. Pg. 305-306

Each moment of discourse must be welcomed in its irruption as an event; in the

punctuation where it appears; and in the temporal dispersion that allows it to be repeated,
known, forgotten, transformed, wiped out down to its slightest traces and buried far from
every eye in the dust of books. There is no need to retrace the discourse to the remote
presence of its origin; it must be treated in the play of its immediacy. Pg. 306

Albert Hofstadter in his article “Enownment” writes of “mode of enownment [Ereignis], that
Gestell is not merely a precursor to Ereignis but a historical mode of Ereignis. Albert
Hofstadter, “Enownment,” in Boundaries 2, Volume 4, Issue 2 (Winter 1976), pg 375-376.
xxviii Heidegger, On Time and Being, pg. 21
xxix Ibid, pg. 22-23
xxx Foucault, “Truth and Juridical Forms” pg. 12
xxxi Joan Stambaugh, Introduction to On Time and Being, pg. Xi.
xxxii Giorgio Agamben, “*Se: Hegel’s Absolute and Heidegger’s Ereignis” in Potentialities,
Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pg 129
xxxiii Foucault, LCP pg. 150
xxxiv Here I am trying to show Foucault’s appropriation or use of similar concept, I am not
making any claim to veracity regarding Heidegger’s position. And moreover, I have restricted
the idea of Ereignis to apply only to invention-events that pertain to savoir.
xxxv Nietzsche, Genealogy, pg. 46
xxxvi Regarding Foucault’s placement of appropriation in the category of ‘critical’ or
archaeological questions,
xxxvii Michel Foucault “Society Must Be Defended” Lectures at the College De France 1975-
1976 Translated by David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003). Pg. 7
xxxviii Ibid
xxxix “Truth and Power” in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault Volume Three: Power, pg.
118
xl See section 3
xli Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”, pg. 11
xlii “Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible
to thwart it. In like manner, silence and secrecy are a shelter for power, anchoring its prohibitions; but they also loosen its holds an
provide for relatively obscure areas of tolerance.” Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Part One: An Introduction, Translated by
Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), pg. 101
xliii Michel Foucault Discipline and Punish, Translated by Alan Sheridan (New York:
Vintage, 1979), pg. 305
xliv Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, Translated by Sean Hand, Foreword by Paul Bove (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pg. 31
xlv Ibid, pg. 33
xlvi Foucault “Society Must Be Defended”, pg. 138
xlvii Genealogy, for Foucault is a means for resisting power. Moreover, it is not power
that one resists when one conducts genealogy; it fights “the power-effects of any discourse
that is regarded as scientific.” Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”, pg. 9 These power-
effects, of course are the accepted domains of verifiability; domains within which it is
possible to predicate truth or falsity of a statement. The task of genealogy is then to
unearth discourses which cannot be adapted into these forms of knowledge, and watch to make
sure that they do not get coopted by the power-effects of a discourse. However, one must
wonder, does this not make genealogy a counter-power? Foucault admits that genealogy can be
seen as constituting an anti-science. And thus, a counter-power in conflict with power would
concomitantly give rise to new power-effects, new inventions, it would constitute a new
place of emergence. So ultimately the concerns previously raised are merited more on the
possibility of generating new invention-events rather than on the possibility that the
events revealed by a genealogy could be “re-annexed, reassimilated,”