Bila O. Michel Foucault's Genealogical Project As an Attempt to Overcome Historicism

The dissertation investigates Michel Foucault's genealogy as an exemplary methodological approach of the poststructuralist theory of history. The genealogy is analyzed in its capacity to overcome the historicist approach to history. The work traces the development and key antihistoricist aspects of Foucault's methodology, explores an authentic line of his early archeological approach and its connection with his late genealogical project, and shows their similarities and differences. It is stated that the genealogical project appears as an antithesis to the historicist attempt to discover an objective reality of the past, to learn the truth of history. To analyze or criticize from the genealogical point of view means to establish an element of difference, to be able to see "small beginnings" behind big teleological schemes. The history of thing becomes a history of coexistence and contest of powers, and its meaning is a result of interpretation. As such the genealogical project attains an emancipatory quality and becomes an instrument of political struggle.