Gray Illuminations: Foucault and Warburg in the Kingdom of Shadows

Abstract

‘Genealogy is gray, meticulous and patiently documentary.’1 The opening statement of Michel Foucault’s 1971 essay ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ reiterates Friedrich Nietzsche’s polemics against ‘the genuinely English type’ of genealogy, ‘gazing around haphazardly in the blue,’ launched in the preface to On the Genealogy of Morals.2 As the antidote to the ethereal realms of the soul and sky hypothesized in earlier genealogies of humankind’s development, the German philosopher advances his own gray tactics, determined to mine ‘the entire long hieroglyphic record, so hard to decipher.’