Without wanting to unify genealogy, hermeneutics and deconstruction, this chapter will highlight the manner in which these three differing trajectories together ensure that sustained textual engagement, and a concern with culture and history (including the history of philosophy), constitute a method of sorts that undergirds large parts of contemporary continental philosophy. While the treatment of the history of philosophy by certain philosophers can seem negative, with apparently sweeping terms of critique such as “logocentrism”, “metaphysics of presence”, “incredulity towards grand narratives” and so on, there is a positive aspect to this attempt to “unearth” and extract from the archive some of the historical conditions of differing formations of subjectivity and objects of knowledge. Certainly all three trajectories insist on the conceptual and historical presuppositions of theoretical frameworks, and they hence all partake in what we will come to call the “temporal turn” characteristic of twentieth-century continental philosophy, a manner of proceeding that is distinct from some of the norms and methods of analytic philosophy, most notably those associated with the linguistic turn, but also perhaps the more general analytic concern with argument and rationality. This is not to say that there are not analytic philosophers engaged in hermeneutic activities, for instance in conducting historical enquiries; Ian Hacking's explorations of the historical origins of concepts of probability and statistics are of clear relevance to analytic philosophy of science but also clearly involve something like hermeneutic and genealogical techniques.

While there are important differences between hermeneutic and genealogical thinkers, and thus between hermeneuticists and poststructuralists (who tend to be aligned with genealogy), they do share a related lineage. In Being and Time, Heidegger argues that hermeneutics is essential to both Dasein’s self- understanding and the meaning of Being. He also undertakes a task of destructive retrieval in relation to the history of philosophy, and while his claims regarding the former are central to the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer and hermeneutics, it is his claims regarding the latter that are more central to Derrida and deconstruction.