Genealogy of concepts

Genealogy may be defined as "a patient tracing of the descent of authoritative discursive practices that structure the application of power to bodies and subjects."

What does this mean? It means that a genealogy functions as a "denuding, unmasking, stripping away pretensions of universality and merely self-serving claims to spirituality"

Example: Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality demonstrates that morality is nothing more than the "development of a special set of particularly pragmatic 'prejudices' of an unusually downtrodden lot."

Genealogies allow us to realize that morals shouldn't be ultimately JUSTIFIED, but merely ACCOUNTED FOR. They are just social phenomenon. Such a view is demystifying, in a sense, because if you ultimately try to justify something, it doesn't get you anywhere. There is no solid absolute principle that underlies everything... at least not that we've discovered yet. (I'm assuming we're all secular, by the way)

I would love a more scientific approach of ACCOUNTING FOR morality; more scientific than Nietzsche's historical and social psychology, anyways. But morality is too big to control. You can't just start a set of 50 societies over from year 2500 BC and see what would happen. History and social psychology are as close as we can come.

It seems to me the main thing a genealogy needs is an argument to debunk-- specifically, an argument in favor of a universal concept. For example, I could focus on the idea of existentialism and how it's changed from say Kierkegaard to Beckett. Or Nietzsche to Beckett.

Once the concept is found, a difference is pointed out (with historical data). Then the difference is described; Nietzsche did this with social psychology and etymology.

Accounting for the morality of today is the ambitious task that one would pursue if one should wish to extend the Genealogy of Morality. Nietzsche suggested only one break of note in his genealogy, so I would be required to identify a second break; one that may have happened after him. The break of existentialism, perhaps? It is, after all, something that appeared as a reaction to Nietzsche. Such a break could also be analyzed in terms of Nietzsche's conclusions at the end of Genealogy of Morality.

That's a decent thesis, then. Reading Beckett's Trilogy and critics' interpretations of it as evidence for existentialism surfacing in response to a break that occurred at some point in history AFTER the good/evil and good/bad break.