Foucault credits Nietzche with formulating the notion of a history capable of being analyzed and recovered by a process known as genealogy. It provides a "history of the present" -- a history of the events that make possible struggles in the present such as the prisoners' movement, sexual liberation movements, etc. "Genealogy makes no presumptions about the metaphysical origins of things, their final teleology, the continuity or discontinuity of temporally contiguous elements, or the causal, explanatory connections between events." (Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 145) "An affirmation of the unsettling nonfinality of all knowledges, genealogy in Foucault's reading of Nietzche is about the ways in which history affects bodies , the interface between bodies and knowledges, how knowledges are extracted from and in their turn help to form bodies." (145-6)
genealogy
in theory