Genealogies

Abstract

We have two ways we can interpret the term genealogy: tracing our family origins and tracing our historical-political origins. The symbolic value of any genealogy does not revolve around the debt we have contracted with previous generations of women; such a term would make it tantamount to credit and then we would be mired in the world of economic exchange. In reality, genealogy is something born of a kind of acknowledgement that perhaps we could call ‘renewed awareness’, or in other terms a way to reinvent the knowledge passed down to us by previous women and make it our own. In this sense it means finding, in the philosophical thought and the lives of those who came before us, something which somehow belongs to us but we were unaware of: we didn’t have the right words to recognize it with. This creates a symbolic circle of genealogy, which isn’t the result of an act of will that would deliberately lead us into the sphere of genealogy. It’s rather the insight that there is something true that concerns us in women who have gone before us and, above all, that by understanding this about ourselves sets us in motion and transforms our lives. This forms the roots of women’s politics.