earticle

영어

Although Michel Foucault’s works through the 1970s and 1980s have been understood in notions of genealogy and ethics, the works during these decades can be understood together within Foucault’s philosophy of history. Even though critics have viewed Foucault’s genealogy as a methodological stepping-stone for his next journey on ethics, the ways in which he understands history reveal that his genealogy, ethics, and history are interwoven with one other within a frame of ‘self-problematization.’ In this paper, I will suggest ‘self-problematization’ -- which is a mode of being ethical through a perpetual polemic attitude that motivates one to transform continually -- as a conceptual tool to grasp Foucault’s philosophy of history. Revisiting Foucault’s works through the 1970s and the 1980s and pondering how the earlier inchoate thoughts of history have been developed within the frame of ‘self-problematization’ in later years, I argue that Foucault’s investigation of history through genealogy becomes ethical, as the concepts of both history and genealogy undergo the continual reconfiguration within themselves. (Texas A&M University)