ABSTRACT
This chapter has two main, interconnected goals. On the one hand, it will be argued that, even though the major forms taken by genealogy throughout the history of philosophy seem to make it impervious to truth, there is an important sense in which genealogy, specifically as conceived of and practiced by Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault, is a practice of truth. How to make sense of this claim? The first two sections address this question and show that the (Nietzschean and Foucauldian) genealogist aims to produce “new truths” that function as disruptive ethico-political forces destabilizing current modes of thinking and being, and creating the concrete possibility for the emergence of new possibilities for thought and action. The third and final section, on the other hand, builds on these insights to argue that Frantz Fanon’s psychiatric writings, too, can be construed as genealogical practices of truth. By doing so, it will not only muster further evidence for the conclusions presented in the second section but also provide an alternate framework to make sense of Fanon’s contribution to critical theory broadly construed—one that doesn’t reduce him either to the tradition of historical materialism or to critical phenomenology or phenomenological psychiatry alone.
