Frieder Vogelmann

Genealogy is no longer the name of a singular method. True to its descent in Nietzsche’s writings, it means a plethora of distinct philosophical methods, even if they are all concerned with concepts and their history. In Foucault’s creative incorporation of Nietzsche’s method, genealogy’s distinction from other modes of writing conceptual histories lies in the destruction of the origin as a sacred, singular place of truth, in its meticulous attention to violently embodied practices and in tracing the emergence of ideas and ideals to the contingent victories of conflicts within those practices. Genealogy in this radical sense is still rare as a philosophical method; applying it to the history of philosophy is rarer still. For it poses a difficult challenge: It requires writing a history neither of the mighty dead nor of their eternal philosophical problems, glorious ideas, or magisterial works but of conflict-ridden, embodied philosophical practices. This contribution spells out, and argues for, these two claims to draw a risky conclusion: Writing the history of philosophy as a genealogy of philosophical practices is possible by focusing on the mechanisms of exclusion that shape these practices. For the exclusions of topics and concepts, of groups and individuals, crisscross texts, institutions, and individual habits—they pertain to philosophical practices as a whole. Genealogy as a method for philosophy and its history that takes up Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s challenge must attend to philosophical practices in all their— often overlooked—institutional, bodily, and intellectual details to describe how mechanisms of exclusion have slowly formed what we know today as philosophy.

Political epistemology is the name of an ambitious task. In order to aptly conceptualise the internal relationship between truth and knowledge on one side, and politics and society on the other side, political epistemology must reformulate the concepts of epistemology and social and political theory. For the concept of knowledge, this task implies to consider the truth and the force of knowledge equally. Frieder Vogelmann shows in his book the far-reaching consequences of this endeavour: for the contemporary debate about untruth in politics, for the possible forms of social critique, and for the reflection upon philosophy and its history.

Although seldom examined and not explained by Robert Brandom himself, the concept of responsibility is as important as the concept of inference for Brandom’s account of discursivity. Whereas ‘inference’ makes explicit the propositional content of concepts as the inferentially structured totality of their relations of material incompatibility, ‘responsibility’ makes explicit the normative force of these relations. ‘Responsibility’ thus becomes the paradigm of understanding normativity’s binding force – and my critical reading demonstrates that it fosters a moralizing, juridifying and economizing understanding of normativity’s binding force. Furthermore, a diagnostic interpretation of Nietzsche’s genealogy of ‘responsibility’ reveals that Brandom’s concept of ‘responsibility’ is not an exception but exemplary for how ‘responsibility’ is used in philosophy.