Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida are thetwo authors to whom we most frequently
refer in order to characterize a certain orientationof contemporary thought usually called “post-structuralist” or “postmodern.” What do thesetwo authors have in common? Following on theheels of Nietzsche and Heidegger, both have triedto rethink the irreducible historicity of thoughtand, in a more general way, the irreducibletemporality of experience. This has led them toquestion radically the presuppositions thatgoverned the unfolding of the two great contem-porary branches of modern culture: the posi-tivism of the Anglo-American tradition and theidealism of the Franco-German tradition.
In the face of both traditions, Foucault andDerrida tried to show that neither empiricalobjectivity nor transcendental subjectivity can bepostulated with a greater chance of success as faras language is concerned, since language is thelimit and the horizon of all possible experience.Now, since the ideal and general code of langueis inseparable from the empirical and singularevent of parole – to use the already classicalterms of Ferdinand de Saussure – it is notlanguage but rather languages that are given.There is no universal language, either given oracquired once and for all that guarantees men acertain representation of the real and a trustwor-thy communication among themselves. Rather,there is a constant diversification of idioms, anendless series of speech events or, to use afamous expression of Wittgenstein, an aleatorycriss-crossing of distinct “language games.” Thisis to say that the meaning of such language gamesis condemned to an incessant “dissemination,”and to an infinite chain of “interpretations,” sothat the intelligibility of a discourse, of a text, orof a mark whatsoever, cannot be either groundedon an objectively given world, on a presupposedtranscendental consciousness, on a primaryorigin (anterior to, and independent from, the
very flow of discourse) or on an ultimate end(towards which this flow would be destined tele-ologically). We have here the irreducible historic-ity or temporality to which every language, everythinking and every experience are inevitablyreferred.
Nevertheless, the differences betweenFoucault and Derrida begin when we try to deter-mine the manner in which this historicity affectsthe author’s texts and particularly the philosoph-ical texts which are characterized by their voca-tion to universality and endurance, that is, bytheir claim to transcend all historical determina-tions. The differences begin when we try to deter-mine the manner in which these texts have to beread, quoted, interpreted and appropriated. Theybegin when we try to determine whether thisappropriation is an act of justice or of violence,whether it forms a part of legacy or of a conflict.The differences begin, therefore, when we try to
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FOUCAULT AND DERRIDAthe history of a debate on history1
AN GE LAK Ijournal of the theoretical humanitie svolume 5 number 2 august 2000
determine the response and the responsibilitywith which the reader must face, with his ownwriting and with his own authorial name, thewriting and the name of other authors. Finally,the differences begin with the very problem ofthe difference between texts and authors as amoral problem.
Given all this, the intellectual differencesbetween Foucault and Derrida are in no wayseparable from their different moral responses,towards others or towards the discourse and thename of others; in particular, they are not sepa-rable from their mutual, personal differences,from their encounters and separations, from theway in which each one of them tried to respondto the words and the name of the other. Thesedifferences initiated a debate between them, thepath of which we are going to reconstruct in whatfollows. This is a dramatic and strange debate,interspersed with long silences – a debate thathas been kept alive during more than thirtyyears. Its last episode occurred long after thedeath of Foucault, as a commemoration of thebeginning of the debate and as Derrida’s tributeto his interlocutor (both adversary and friend)who had already disappeared. This is not a meredispute between two discourses, but rather a liti-gation involving two proper names (aboutanother discourse and another proper name –that of Descartes).
I
In 1961, Foucault published the first of his greatworks – The History of Madness in the ClassicalAge.2 He dedicated the first chapter “StultiferiaNavis” to the “tragic” experience of madnessduring the Renaissance; the second chapter toldof the madmen’s “Great Confinement” thatstarted in the seventeenth century. In the begin-ning of this chapter, and in only a few para-graphs, Foucault commented on the first book ofDescartes’ Metaphysical Meditations, whereDescartes speaks about the errors of the sensesand about dream and madness, as so many obsta-cles to be overcome on the road of the doubt.According to Foucault, these obstacles are not ofthe same kind: “Descartes did not escape thedangers of madness the way he escaped those of
dream or error [ … ]. In the economy of doubt,there is a fundamental disequilibrium betweenmadness, on the one hand, and dream or error,on the other. The situation of madness is suigeneris in relation to truth and in relation to theone who seeks it. Dreams and illusions are over-come in the structure of truth; but madness isleft excluded by the subject that doubts.”Sensible error and the illusion of dreams can beovercome, because they affect what is talkedabout – the “object of thought” – but madnesswill in no way be overcome, because it affects theone who speaks – the “thinking subject.” It isexcluded, therefore, through a “stroke of force,”through a violent “decision” which, is a“rupture” between reason and madness and atthe same time an “exclusion” of madness“because I who think cannot be mad.”
Foucault thinks of this “decision” as an“event,” as a big historical novelty – one thatMontaigne still recognized – “that every thoughtwill be cloaked in unreason.” “A dividing linehas been drawn that would soon render impossi-ble the experience – so familiar during theRenaissance – of an unreasonable reason and ofa reasonable unreason. Between Montaigne andDescartes an event took place, something thathad to do with the advent of one ratio” – theratio precisely of modern rationalism. But this“event,” this “advent of the one ratio” does notconcern only the history of philosophy or of ideasin general. As soon as Foucault established a“structural” correlation between the exclusion ofmadness, carried out in the Cartesian text, andthe “great confinement” of the madmen, carriedout by all European societies during the seven-teenth century, the event was bound to be ofinterest also to the history of an entire society,the history of an entire age – the age of modernscience and politics.
Once the confinement started, it went throughtwo big phases: the “classical age” (seventeenthand eighteenth centuries), during which madnessis thought of, above all, as a “moral disorder,”as “unreason,” for the sake of which themadmen, along with other moral deviants and“asocial” types (beggars, perverts, blasphemers,libertines), will be confined and punished in“general hospitals”; and a second phase, “the
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modern period” (which starts at the end of theeighteenth century and the beginning of the nine-teenth century), during which madness is consid-ered as a “mental illness,” for the sake of whichthe madmen are going to be separately incarcer-ated in “psychiatric asylums,” and subjectedto constant observation and therapy in the handsof the new “medico-psychiatric” personages.Foucault would not admit that there is progresshere; he rather thinks that there is occultation:under the mask of medical science, madness isstill excluded and punished.
Now, the madmen themselves – a whole seriesof madmen of genius that have left us with a“work” that cannot easily be classified – begun toquestion the rupture between reason andmadness in the last century: Hölderlin,Nietzsche, Roussel, Artaud et al. It is preciselythe “work” of these madmen of genius thatopened the door to a new epoch of thought, andto a new experience of language: beginning withthem, the wall separating reason and unreasoncollapsed, and among its ruins there arose thebeginning of a linkage between madness andliterature, the “I of delirium” and the “I” of the“I write,” the scream and the song. Thus, theCartesian Cogito was challenged and the cycleopened by “classical reason” to include the“confinement” over which that reason wasfounded was now closed. According to Foucault,this new space made his own labor of writingpossible, along with his own “archaeology” ofknowledge and confinement, of reason andmadness. Later on, Foucault will go on toinscribe his own name and his own discourse onthis hereditary line of the family of these rebelmadmen, in the historical and discursive domainsopened by them. As for Freud, Foucault main-tained in this book (and in general in all hishistorical studies) one manifest ambiguity: some-times, he welcomed him as an heir of Nietzsche,and sometimes he condemned him as an heir ofthe medico-psychiatrists.
II
On 4th March 1963, at the CollègePhilosophique, Jacques Derrida gave a lectureentitled “Cogito and the History of Madness”;
Michel Foucault was present in it (having beeninvited by Derrida himself by means of a letterin which the latter’s enthusiasm as well as hisdisagreement were already anticipated).3 Derridawent on to confess his admiration, not only forthe book, but even more so for the teaching ofFoucault, of whom he considered himself “anadmiring and grateful disciple.” Nevertheless, heproposed to “engage in dialogue with the master”and moreover to “break the glass, or better themirror, the reflection and the infinite speculation[of the disciple] on the master.” Concretely, hewent on to challenge Foucault’s interpretation ofthe first book of the Cartesian Meditations.According to Derrida, “the reading of Descartesand the Cartesian Cogito proposed to us engagesin its problematic the totality of this History ofMadness” (CHM 32). In the sequence, Derridatried to show:
l That, on the road to the Cartesian doubt, theexample of the dream is much more decisiveand much more radical than the example ofmadness, when it comes to question the total-ity of the ideas of sensible origin.
l That the theme of madness is not treated prop-erly at the moment of doubt (where it appearsonly rhetorically as a possible objection oraccusation of a reader to the writer – an objec-tion to which the writer will answer, precisely,with the example of the dream). It is treatedproperly only later on, in the Evil Geniushypothesis, when the question bears also onthe ideas of intelligible origin. But in this casethe Cogito is not affirmed through the exclu-sion or the confinement of madness, but ratherthrough the opposition between a determinatereason and a determinate madness – now thatthe act of the “Cogito is valid even if I ammad,” even if the Evil Genius deceives mecompletely.
l That Descartes, at the moment of the Cogito,accedes to the “zero point” of thought, that is,to the point beyond the entire contradictionbetween reason and madness, beyond, there-fore, the total configuration of reason that ishistorically determined. Therefore, this“hyperbolic” point of the doubt cannot be
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reduced, and “confined” inside a historical“structure” or “totality” (that, Derrida says,would be “violence itself”) whose peculiarhistoricity is an always already renewed open-ing – an opening of the logos that exceedsevery discursive determination.
l That, finally, Foucault himself would not havebeen able to narrate as an “event” (and henceto problematize in a critical way) the “exclu-sion” of madness or the “confinement” and the“silence” to which it has been subjected by“classical reason,” if its problematization didnot repeat, in a certain way, the radicalness ofthe Cartesian Cogito; that is, if he did not lean,thanks to his historical account, on this “zeropoint” itself, on this abysmal and transhistori-cal depth from which thought will try to “thinkthe totality that escapes it.” And this, nomatter how much this thought would alwaysfall back again in it, no matter how much itwould not be capable of being said, withoutbetraying itself, without lapsing to a histori-cally determined discursive configuration; thisis what happened to Descartes, once he startedon the road of the regress to certainty, that is,to the “classical reason” that has excluded andimprisoned the madmen.
l That the case of Descartes could not but exem-plify the paradoxical status of philosophicaldiscourse, finite and infinite, historical andtranshistorical, reasonable and delirious.According to Derrida, the separation of reasonfrom madness cannot, in the last analysis, beconsidered as a historical “event.” In the firstplace, because the separation between reasonand madness, between language and silence, isthe very condition of historicity and discourse,so that there cannot be a historical account ofthis separation which does not already presup-pose it; neither a “history of reason” nor a“history of madness” is possible, except as ahistory of the successive forms of the relationand distribution of diverse figures of reasonand madness. In the second place, becausethere is no reason which is not alreadytraversed by madness, nor madness which isnot already traversed by reason; so that purereason and pure unreason are equally impos-
sible. It is not possible, therefore, to questionreason from the standpoint of madness, fromthe standpoint of an absolute exterior; it is onlypossible to question reason from its own inte-rior, having recourse to “stratagem and strat-egy.” The only thing left possible is to questiona historically finite and determinate figure ofreason, but the questioning has to be madefrom the proper instance of reason – that is,from an instance, which is by itself, transhis-torical, infinite, indeterminate and in a certainway, “mad.” On the other hand, to speak ofthe separation between reason and madness asa historical “event” will force us to presupposean “origin” before the “fall,” that is a unitarylogos anterior to the event of separation (suchwill be the case of the Greek logos), suscepti-ble of being restored and re-establishedthrough the reconciliation of the divided andthe inclusion of the excluded. This, saidDerrida, is the old mythological and meta-physical image of reason, from which Foucaultdid not succeed in freeing himself in hisHistory of Madness and to which he seems tobe drawn in the very preface of this book – (apreface which, by the way, Foucault omitted inthe second edition.) Why did he omit it, since,at the same time, in an appendix to its secondedition, he claimed to have refuted the criti-cism of his old disciple? Isn’t the act itself ofomitting the preface, in order to play down thearguments of this critique, “a form of accept-ing it”?4 But let us not get ahead of ourselves;let us instead proceed one step at a time.
III
Foucault did not engage Derrida after the 1963lecture, nor did he engage him after the firstpublication of its text. Both maintained goodrelations and, in fact, during the 1960s, theyparticipated together on the editorial board of theCritique of which Derrida would become amember in 1967. Foucault went on to reaffirmhis ideas in various books and articles publishedduring the decade. He did it, for example, in anessay published in 1964 under the title “La folie,l’absence d’oeuvre” (soon after [in 1972] re-published as the first appendix to the second
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edition of his History of Madness).5 In fact, therelation between madness and writing occupied acentral place in his many studies publishedduring the 1960s, beginning with his grand“archaeological” investigations on the birth ofthe human sciences and the institution ofconfinement (History of Madness, The Birth ofthe Clinic and The Order of Things) and extend-ing into his short essays of literary criticism(above all, Raymond Roussel, and the essayspublished in the Critique). In both cases,Foucault tried to problematize the very boundarybetween knowledge and non-knowledge, reasonand unreason, truth and fiction.
In 1965, in an essay on Artaud, under the title,“Le Parole soufflé,”6 Derrida, once more, chal-lenged Foucault’s point of view, trying to showthat the alleged destructive or “transgressive”movement of delirious writing, to the extent thatit claims to erase or annul the separation betweenwriting and existence, between language and life,cannot but be re-inscribed in the metaphysicaltradition of what it thought to have left behind,even if it is taken to its most extreme conse-quences. So that madness and metaphysics wouldbe the two faces of the same logic and of the samedelirium, consisting in negating or suppressingthe literary as such, that is, the non-presence ofsense in the actually given discourse – its inces-sant deferral or dissemination.7
Throughout the 1970s, Foucault himself willabandon his “transgressive” conception of litera-ture.8 According to the Foucault of The Historyof Sexuality, the first volume of which appearedin 1976, it is no longer possible to imagine anabsolute exteriority with respect to the socialorder, a totally free experience, completely“mad,” that is, an experience in its wild state. Nolonger is there an inside and an outside which canbe clearly differentiated, a pure order and a purechaos, but only a multiplicity of powers and resis-tances whose battle lines never stop beingdisplaced and reversed. For this reason, neitheris there a language that would be intrinsicallylinked to power nor another language thatbelongs by right to the domain of resistance;rather, what is given is a “tactical polyvalence ofdiscourses.” Well then, isn’t this what Derridasaid in his 1963 lecture, when he affirmed that
reason cannot be questioned from the point ofview of madness, from the point of view of anabsolute exteriority, but rather that it can only bequestioned, from the interior, by means of arecourse to “stratagem and strategy”? And, in amore general way, does not the “tactical polyva-lence of discourses” resemble the difference thatDerrida had discussed in 1968?
IV
In 1967, Derrida published Writing andDifference, a collection of essays in which hebrought anew the text of the 1963 lecture.Foucault, it seems, did not welcome this editionhappily, even though he sent Derrida a veryfriendly letter, expressing his gratitude forhaving been sent the volume. About the sametime, the review Critique received an essay ofGerard Grannel in which there was praise forDerrida and critique for Foucault. The latterasked his colleague and friend to intervene to theboard of the journal in order for the essay not tobe published. Derrida, believed that he shouldnot intervene one way or another and the journaldecided to publish.9 From then on, the friend-ship between the two cooled off.10 A short timeafterwards, Foucault started to discuss publiclythe ideas of Derrida, and the first opportunitywas a seminar held on 22nd February 1969 in theSociété Française de Philosophie, under the title“What is an Author?”11
Nevertheless, in this first public discussion,Foucault did not reply to the critique thatDerrida had advanced in 1963, but he tookinstead into consideration other, later texts of hisformer disciple in which the latter was develop-ing his own “grammatological” thought.12
Specifically, Foucault seems to have alluded tothe text of a seminar that Derrida led at theSociété Française de Philosophie on 27thJanuary 1968, one year before Foucault came tothe same place and referred, without quoting it,to the same text. This is at least my suspicion.13
In view of the question “What Is an Author?”Foucault’s argument is twofold. On the one hand,he tries to question the privileges that came to begranted to the figure of the author in the historyof ideas, literature, philosophy, sciences and,
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finally, of writing. But, on the other hand, it isnot enough to take the minutes of this “death ofthe author.” We have to locate the empty spaceleft by this death – the space marked by thename of the author. We have to question what isin an author’s name and what functions does itcarry inside the text. And this is precisely whatFoucault proposes: to analyze the “author-func-tion,” in relation to written discourses.14
Before beginning the analysis, Foucault takesa moment to denounce two notions that lookeddestined to be done with, once and for all, alongwith the privileges of the author, but whichnevertheless did survive in a more or less openway. First, the notion of the “work.” Faced withthe claims of various formalist critics and struc-turalist historians, busying themselves with theanalysis of the internal form only or of the struc-ture of the work (whether philosophical or liter-ary) and dispensing with every genetic orbiographical explication, Foucault asks what is a“work,” what gives it its organic unity, whatallows it to group under a common heading aheterogeneous series of texts. The response isvery simple: the proper name of its author.
In the second place, the other notion thatinherits and preserves the privileges of theauthor, the very moment that it appears to rejectthem, is the notion of “writing.” Foucault doesnot name Derrida but the allusion to his “gram-matological” theory is unequivocal. The notion ofwriting, said Foucault, “should allow not only todispense with the reference to the author, butalso to assign status to his new absence.” In fact,“the notion of writing, as currently employed, isconcerned with neither the act of writing nor theindication – be it a symptom or sign – of a mean-ing that someone might have wanted to express.[On the contrary, the actual reflection] tri[es],with great effort, to imagine the general condi-tion of each text, the condition of both the spacein which it is dispersed and the time in which itunfolds” (WIA 208).
In my opinion, Foucault alludes here, veryeloquently by the way, to the neologism (or“neographism”) of differance by means of whichDerrida had wanted “to generalize” (and eo ipso“to deconstruct”) the classical concept of writing.Foucault alludes positively to the Derridean
notion of writing, although, at the same time,fails to mention its author. Perhaps, it is because,as Beckett said, “it is not important who speaks;”or, perhaps, because it is much more importantthan Foucault was willing to recognize; or finally,because praise was immediately followed by crit-icism. Foucault asked himself whether thisnotion of writing “seems to transpose the empir-ical characteristics of the author into a transcen-dental anonymity” (WIA 208). On the one hand,the marks of the empirical author are beingrubbed off; but, on the other, the two paralleland conflicting ways of characterizing him(“critique” and “religion” which assign respec-tively to the human creator, the philosophical orliterary text and to the divine creator, the sacredtext) still put him into play in order to charac-terize now the text itself.
Giving writing a primal status seems to be away of retranslating, in transcendental terms,both the theological affirmation of its sacredcharacter and the critical affirmation of itscreative character. To admit that writing is,because of the very history that it made possi-ble, subject to the test of oblivion and repres-sion, seems to represent, in transcendentalterms, the religious principle of the hiddenmeaning (which requires interpretation) andthe critical principle of implicit significations,silent determinations, and obscured contents(which give rise to commentary). To imaginewriting as absence seems to be a simple repe-tition, in transcendental terms, of both the reli-gious principle of the work’s survival, itsperpetuation beyond the author’s death, andits enigmatic excess in relation to him. Thisusage of the notion of writing runs the risk ofmaintaining the author’s privileges under theprotection of the a priori. (WIA 208–09)
This is “risking” to attribute a “transcendental”status to the notion of writing and this wouldconstitute, in the eyes of Foucault, the decisiveobjection. Actually, his criticism of Derridaended up with this question: “(isn’t there) animportant dividing line between those whobelieve that they can still locate today’s disconti-nuities [ruptures] in the historico-transcendentaltradition of the nineteenth century and those whotry to free themselves once and for all from thattradition [?]” (WIA 209).
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In fact, for Foucault, the alternative whichconfronts contemporary philosophy (and towhich Foucault did refer more specifically duringthat same year of 1969 in his introduction to theArchaeology of Knowledge) consists in adoptingone of these two perspectives: either the point ofview of a transcendental subject (for whichhistory would not be but the movement of itsself-constitution and the account of its self-consciousness) or the point of view of an “archae-ological” history (which would disregard thealleged identity of the subject in different andirreducible forms of experience, that is, whichwould negate all claims to universality and tran-scendental necessity of the “a priori conditions ofexperience” and would return them to a contin-gent historical diversity). The first road wouldstill be dominated by the long shadow of Hegel,while the second would be illuminated by writerslike Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. Well then, isn’tDerrida a lot closer to the latter rather than to theformer? Isn’t his notion of writing referring to ahistorical pluralism rather than to a transcenden-tal universalism? Or, perhaps, wouldn’t the pecu-liar position of Derrida consist precisely in beingsituated at the limit, at the border, on the “divid-ing lines” which separate the two roads? Isn’t thisthe “risk” that Foucault avoids and Derridaaccepts? But what is the risk exactly? What is thedifference between the historical pluralism ofFoucault and that of Derrida? Perhaps, they meeteach other, precisely, in the mode of confrontingthe difference, the plurality and the alterity ofthe other. Before facing the question, let us moveon with the chronicle of the debate.
V
The next episode of this debate took place threeyears later. In 1972, the second edition of TheHistory of Madness appeared. Foucault omittedthe preface of the previous edition and in itsplace he published a new and much shorter one– in order to denounce the very institution of thepreface as “the first act that will prevent the insti-tution of the monarchy of the author.” Moreover,he added to the book two appendices that hadbeen published earlier as separate essays. Ialready mentioned one of them. In the other,
Foucault, at last, replied to the criticisms thatDerrida formulated in 1963.15 He made it clearin his new preface that “he tr(ies) to challenge anotable critique of Derrida.” Foucault sentDerrida a copy of his book and, in the dedication,he did apologize for answering him so late. Whyso much delay in the reply? Why return to thisdistant critique after such a long time? Accordingto Daniel Defert, the reply was written duringFoucault’s staying in Japan. The suggestion forwriting it came from colleagues at TokyoUniversity that had invited him to give somelectures. As for the motive of writing it at thatmoment, it was no other than the spread of theDerridean thought in the Universities of theUnited States: “deconstruction” had begun torival “archaeology.”16 The disciple was beingtransformed to a master, to another master andFoucault did not seem prepared to allow thediscourse of his old friend to spread at theexpense of his own. As far as he was concerned,the relation between the two discourses – andeven more so, between the two proper names –did not seem capable to be thought as a friendlyand peaceful dialogue, but rather as a conflict oftwo interpretations, as a relation of forces inconflict.
Nine years had already gone by. These wereintense and decisive years, during which Derridaelaborated his “grammatology” and Foucault, his“archaeology” (which was elaborated againaccording to the “genealogical” perspective ofNietzsche, in an important essay of 1971,“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”). It was, then, ina sense, another Foucault who replied to Derrida,and another Derrida to whom Foucault replied.It is inevitable to speculate (no matter how nearlyimpossible it is to determine) on what each ofthem owed to the other in this becoming other ofeach one. Nevertheless, this other Foucaultclaimed to be still the same as before; at least, heclaimed to continue to endorse the text of longago – in re-appropriating it, he would defend itagainst another who himself was transformed(against a reader who was already another writer,against a disciple who was already anothermaster, but who, nevertheless, in re-editing histexts, he also seemed to continue being thesame). Foucault aspires to maintain the text
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under his paternal tutelage – under the “monar-chy of the author” that he himself haddenounced in his new preface. However, thelanguage he uses is new: the notions that heputs into play were not present in his earlierbook. Above all, the notion of the “discursiveevent” is new; it was coined by Foucault in theinaugural lecture that he gave to the Collège deFrance in 1970, under the title, “The Order ofDiscourse.”17
Foucault’s reply did not echo the generalobjections that Derrida had raised against thehistorical relation between reason and madness; itlimited itself to the debate of the exegesis of thefirst book of the Cartesian MetaphysicalMeditations and to the re-affirmation of thedifference of the treatment that dream andmadness receive in this text. Foucault’s mainargument consisted in showing, one more time,that the dream hypothesis affects only the matterof the meditation, that is, the object and value ofknowledge, and the truth of our most immediatesensory impressions (“my body, this paper, thisfire” of which Descartes speaks) whereas themadness hypothesis affects the epistemological ormedical characterization (insanus) and, above all,the social or juridical qualification (amens ordemens) of the meditating subject.
Foucault thinks that this disequilibriumbetween madness and dream is marked inDescartes’ text by a whole series of literarydifferences between the two paragraphs whichare about the two hypotheses, and he is surprisedthat a reader as attentive as Derrida passes themover in silence. Foucault underlines, above all,what he calls “discursive differences.” Thus, tothe “signifying organization of the text” (towhich, according to him, the Derridean notion of“writing” and his own “textual” reading of theCogito belong) Foucault opposes the recognitionof the Cartesian “meditation” as a specific“discursive practice,” comprising a series ofevents which are nothing but “the modificationsof the subject by the very exercise of discourse.”As we can see, Foucault has left behind the“structuralist” terminology to which he used toappeal in the 1960s and, instead, he is puttinginto play a pragmatic conception of discourse (ofall discourse, whether oral or written). “Any
discourse, whatever it be, is constituted by a setof utterances which are produced each in its placeand time, as so many discursive events” (BPF19).
According to this new perspective, theCartesian writing (and generally all writing) mustbe analyzed as “practice,” as an “event,” that is,as an act (or series of acts) of enunciation (or ofinscription) the analysis of which would permit todetermine, not only the sense of the utterance (orof the text), but also and above all the relationbetween the value of this utterance and the posi-tion of the subjects which utter it or receive it.There is now an effort to determine the positionthat the subjects maintain in relation todiscourse, and also the position that, by means ofdiscourse, the subjects maintain among them-selves. It is this double position that Foucaultwishes to establish very clearly in the Cartesianmeditation, that is, that the claim to secure forthe subject of discourse the right to enunciate anabsolute truth did require the exclusion of themadmen as subjects of rights from all meaning-ful discourse.
According to Foucault, we must pay attentionto the very title of the meditation in order toanalyze the “discursive events” which take placein it. In a “demonstration,” the utterances consti-tute events linked among themselves by means offormal rules, wherein the subject of discourseremains fixed and neutralized, being not affectedby the demonstration. In a “meditation,” on theother hand, each discursive event entails a modi-fication in the subject of discourse, a change ofposition or state. Descartes’ discourse, saysFoucault, is a hybrid discourse, “a demonstrativemeditation,” that is,
a set of discursive events which constitute atonce groups of utterances linked one toanother by formal rules of deduction, andseries of modification of the enunciatingsubject which follow continuously one fromanother (so that) the utterances which areformally linked, modify the subject as theydevelop.” (BPF 19)
One cannot read the Cartesian text withoutpaying attention to this specific “discursive prac-tice.” Foucault repeats the quoted passage ofDescartes, this time in order to show the inter-
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section of the demonstrative and the asceticplots, between “system” and “exercise.”Descartes begins with a systematic proposition:every truth received by the senses must be put todoubt. The examples of madness and the dreamare not invoked, as Derrida believes, in order togeneralize the doubt of every sensible knowledge,since this generalization has already been made;nor should it be thought, as Derrida claims, thatthese examples are mentioned by Descartes inorder to reply to the objection of an imaginedreader, more or less uncouth and naïve. Theresistance is generated from the very subject ofdiscourse; there are sensible things about which“we cannot rationally doubt.” Why can we not?“It is the impossibility of this subject’s reallyeffecting such a generalised doubt in the exercisewhich modifies him.” Above all, it is not possibleto pursue the doubt reasonably, “by wanting tocarry through this qualification ‘rational’ which Ibrought into play at the very beginning of themeditations,” presenting myself as “a sufficientlymature mind, being free of cares and passions,being assured of a peaceful retreat.”
The importance of the words “being able todoubt completely” in the fact that they markthe point of interaction of the two discursiveforms – that of the system and that of the exer-cise: at the level of ascetic discursivity, onecannot yet doubt rationally. It is thus this levelwhich will control the following development,and what is involved in it is not the extent ofdoubtful things, but the status of the doubtingsubject, the qualificative elaboration whichallows him to be at once “all-doubting” yetrational. (BPF 20)
The resistance comes from the subject ofdiscourse and, because of it, the sensible thingswhich “cannot be rationally doubted” are those“vivid” and “near” that concern the very act ofenunciation, the singular event of inscription ofthe text, “the entire system of actuality that char-acterizes this moment of my meditation” (mybody, this paper, this fire).
It is of the first importance that Descartes doesnot here involve the certainty that one mayhave in general of one’s own body but rathereverything which, at this precise instant ofmeditation, resists in fact the carrying out of
doubt by the subject who is currently meditat-ing. Clearly, it is not certain things which inthemselves (by their nature, their universality,their intelligibility) resist doubt but rather thatwhich characterizes the actuality of the medi-tating subject (the place of his meditation, thegesture he is in the process of making, thesensations which strike him). If he reallydoubted all this system of actuality, would hestill be rational? (BPF 21)
In order to break this resistance, Descartes hasrecourse to two examples which permit to put indoubt the system of my actuality: madness anddream. What is the difference between the two?Why is the dream preferable to madness? Why ismadness “a strong enough example” that permitsthe subject to doubt, although, at the same time,it completely disqualifies it from being a medi-tating subject? “The two qualifications ‘doubtingsubject’ and ‘meditating subject,’ are not in thiscase simultaneously possible”:
That madness is posited as disqualificatory inany search for truth, that is not “rational” tocall it up to carry out necessary doubt, that onecannot feign it even for a moment, that thisimpossibility is immediately obvious in theassignation of the term ‘demens’: this is indeedthe decisive point at which Descartes partscompany with all those for whom madness canbe in one way or another the bringer orrevealer of truth. (BPF 21)
Derrida, according to Foucault, was not able torecognize this intersection of system and exercise,of “demonstration” and “meditation,” by meansof which (or for the sake of which) madness isexcluded as a dis-qualification of the meditatingsubject: “by imagining that other naïve objectingvoice behind Descartes’ writing, Derrida hasfudged all the text’s differences.” And, with that,he erased the radical difference between madnessand dream. In acting this way, “Derrida iscontinuing the Cartesian exclusion.” Now, whydid Derrida continue Descartes by distorting histext? Why did he repeat the exclusion ofmadness, by excluding that there is such anexclusion in the discourse of the Cogito? It isbecause it would reveal a historical determinationof the philosophical discourse that Derridaopposes. Here, in very few lines, Foucault alludes
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to this trans-historical conception of philosophythat Derrida defended in his 1963 lecture:
For Descartes the meditating subject had toexclude madness by qualifying himself as notmad. And this exclusion is in its turn no doubttoo dangerous for Derrida: no longer for thedisqualification with which it threatens thephilosophising subject, but for the qualifica-tion with which it would mark philosophicaldiscourse; it would indeed determine it as“other” than the discourse of madness; itwould establish between them a relationship ofexteriority; it would send philosophicaldiscourse across to the “other side,” into thepure presumption of not being mad.Separation, exteriority, a determination fromwhich the philosopher’s discourse must indeedbe saved if it is to be a project for exceedingevery finite and determinate totality: thisCartesian exclusion must then be excludedbecause it is determining. (BPF 24)
Regarding the passage of the Evil Genius,Foucault does not seem to entertain seriously thehypothesis of madness, but rather the opposite;
since in madness I believe that an illusorypurple covers my nudity and my poverty,whilst the hypothesis of the evil genius permitsme not to believe that my body and hands exist[. … ]. If the evil genius takes on the powersof madness, this is only after the exercisemeditation has excluded the risk of being mad.(BPF 26)
Foucault quotes the text of Descartes in order toshow that
faced with the cunny trickster, the meditatingsubject behaves not like madman in a panic atuniversal error, but as a no less cunning adver-sary, always alert, constantly rational, andremaining in the position of master withrespect to his fiction. (BPF 26)
In a long and detailed reply of which I have onlymentioned the essential arguments, Foucault islaunching here a very bold accusation againstDerrida, against his way of reading philosophicaltexts and, from a more general point of view,against his conception of the historicity of writ-ing. Foucault’s objection is twofold: the methodof deconstruction as a method of reading, ininsisting on the dissemination and the decontex-
tualization of sense, not only leaves outside of theanalysis the historical contexts of the inscriptionof discourse – and especially the regimes ofspecific powers in which one finds inscribedevery “discursive practice” – but also, in sodoing, puts into play a very old discursive prac-tice, a political regime of discourse which is asold as philosophy itself: the pedagogical practiceof the “commentary.”18 This critique of Derridawith which the text concludes is developed quiteextensively by Foucault in the Japanese journal,Paideia.19
VI
Derrida did not answer Foucault’s violent reply.The personal and intellectual relation betweenthe two will be interrupted for the next nineyears. But the Foucauldian notion of the “discur-sive event” had already been problematized byDerrida in an important lecture given in 1971and published in 1972, “Form, Event,Context.”20 In this text, Derrida does not arguedirectly against Foucault, but rather againstAustin; however, Foucault had recognizedhimself indebted to the pragmatist theory of“speech acts,” in the seminar, “What is anAuthor?” It follows that Derrida’s critique of thenotion of “speech acts” and of its presuppositionscan be taken as an answer to the reproach of“textualism” that Foucault raised during thatseminar and that he will repeat in the 1972appendix on Descartes.
Derrida’s argument was this: the significationof a discursive act, whether oral or written (andin general of a gesture, a trace, a mark whatso-ever), cannot be determined once and for all, norcan be referred to the wanting to say, to theconscious intentionality, living or actual, of itsauthor (of the one who utters or writes it, or theone who sustains it or subscribes to it with hisown name and signature); nor can it be referredto the singular historical context, to the linguis-tic or non-linguistic scenario of its enunciation orinscription. And this, because there inheres inevery enunciation or inscription (beginning withthe enunciation of the name or the inscription ofthe signature) the possibility of being repeated,reinscribed, reactualized, by the same author or
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by others, in many different contexts of speechand writing. It follows that there is no primary ororiginary actuality (either on the side of theauthor or on the side of the context) to which theultimate sense of a discourse could be referred,and in virtue of which sense could be definitelydetermined, “confined” or closed. All sense willinevitably be found open, deferred, disseminatedand indeterminate. The transhistorical dimensionthat, in 1963, Derrida attributed to the Cartesiandiscourse and, in general, to philosophicaldiscourse, is now taken to be a characteristic ofall discourse, all writing, every mark and sign.This “grammatological” thesis appears to beirreconcilable with the “archaeological” and“genealogical” claims of Foucault, and in partic-ular with his notion of the “discursive event.”But we must not make a hasty judgment.
In a colloquium held with a group of histori-ans and published in 1980, Foucault describedhis genealogical investigations as a labor of“eventualization.” Where others presume toencounter a historical constant or an anthropo-logical necessity, he tries to show a “singularity”– a unique and aleatory event. But this singularevent, in turn, has to be analyzed “as [ … ] a‘polygon’ or, rather, a ‘polyhedron of intelligibil-ity,’ the number of whose faces is not given inadvance and can never properly be taken asfinite. One has to proceed by a progressive, andnecessarily incomplete saturation.”21
Already in 1964, during the seventhRoyaumont Colloquium dedicated to Nietzshe,Foucault gave a famous lecture (under the title,“Nietzsche, Freud, Marx”)22 where he spokeabout “interpretation” as an “infinite task.” Thisinfinite character of interpretation carried, forFoucault, a double implication. In the first place,“there is nothing absolutely primary to interpret,for after all everything is already interpretation,each sign is in itself not the thing that offers itselfto interpretation but an interpretation of othersigns”; on the basis of this, Foucault went on todeduce that interpretation “is as much a rela-tionship of violence as of elucidation [. … ]; itcan only seize, and violently, an already-presentinterpretation, which it must overthrow, upset,shatter with the blows of a hammer.” In thesecond place, “interpretation finds itself with the
obligation to interpret itself to infinity.” Thismeans that there is always a question about “thewho” of the interpretation, and about a move-ment which is not linear but “circular”; and fromthis again Foucault deduced that interpretation,in questioning the position itself of the interpret-ing subject, obliges the latter to move “in theintermediate region of madness and purelanguage” (NFM 275, 277, 278).
These same ideas about the “infinite” charac-ter of interpretation, about the “violence” whichit exercises on others and about the “sacrifice”which it requires with respect to oneself will berepeated by Foucault, seven years later, a proposof Nietzsche, in another equally important text(“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”): “If interpreta-tion is the violent or superstitious appropriationof a system of rules, which in itself has no essen-tial meaning, in order to impose a direction, tobend it to a new will, to force its participation ina different game, and to subject it to secondaryrules, then the development of humanity is aseries of interpretations. The role of genealogy isto record its history.” (NGH 86)23 This violenceinherent in all “interpretations” (including the“genealogical interpretation”) makes impossibleto “understand” the other, “to be recognized” init, “to be reconciled” with it. But it rendersequally impossible that we recognize, or reconcilewith, ourselves, in a secure self-identity.
This is precisely the problem of violence (inthe appropriation of the other’s discourse) whichseems to mark the difference between the histor-ical pluralisms of Foucault and Derrida. But weshould not hurry to reach conclusions, we shouldnot commit the violence of concluding, becausethe history of this debate has not yet come to anend (and this time we cannot and we must notpresent it as concluded).
VII
In December 1980, Derrida went to Prague,having been invited by a group of dissidents totake part in a clandestine seminar. The commu-nist authorities of the now extinct Czechoslovakiadetained him on the charge of drug trafficking.In France, the news provoked a great commotion,the intellectuals expressed their indignation and
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the President himself of the Republic, FrançoisMitterand, demanded from the Czechoslovakgovernment the liberation of the philosopher.One of the philosophers who was most active inthe protest, gathering up signatures and going tothe radio stations, was Michel Foucault. After hisreturn, on 1st January 1981, Derrida phoned himin order to thank him. From then on, and untilthe death of Foucault on 25th June 1984, the twomet on various occasions.
After Foucault’s death, Derrida occupiedhimself with him, on two different occasions, inthe context of tributes paid to the late philoso-pher. In April 1986, Thomas Bishop organized ahomage to Foucault at the University of NewYork, and Derrida participated with one unpub-lished lecture, entitled “Beyond the Principle ofPower.” In it, he tried to problematize theconcept of power, and especially the “spiral”power/pleasure with which Foucault himself hadbeen occupied in the first volume of his Historyof Sexuality. In the analysis of this “spiral,”Foucault questioned the “repressive hypothesis”and the ensuing proposal for sexual liberation (somuch fashionable in the Freudo-Marxism of the1960s); instead, he showed that the “apparatus ofsexuality” was a recent historical construction, astrategy made up of multiple knowledges andpowers, being the result of an entire “bio-politics” initiated in the eighteenth century anddeveloped in the nineteenth. In the last pagesof the volume, Foucault stated that the Freudianpsychoanalysis has only pushed this apparatusto an extreme, as it “reactivated,” with“admirable efficacy,” some of the practices mostcharacteristic of the “pastoral power” ofChristianity, in particular confession and spiri-tual care.
But for Derrida, this diagnostic is valid neitherfor the entire work of Freud nor for the entirepsychoanalysis after Freud. It does not apply, forexample, to the analyses that Lacan made of thecompulsion of repetition. It does not apply eitherto the analyses made by Freud himself in hisBeyond the Pleasure Principle, where Freudspoke of a space “beyond” sex, and even of adrive to power and domination to which neitherthe death drive nor the urge to survive would beforeign. A certain Freud and a certain psycho-
analysis did question the “monarchy of sex,” longbefore Foucault did it, choosing instead a dual-ism of drives and a dualism of principles thatwould exclude any unique principle, anymonism, any “monarchy,” being that of pleasureor power, sex or death.
It will be, therefore, necessary, according toDerrida, to “complicate” (that is to say, to blendbut also to enrich) Foucault’s philosophicalpresuppositions and historical diagnoses. In thefirst place, it should be possible to establish acertain proximity, a certain contemporaneitybetween the Foucauldean power/pleasure spiraland the Freudian duality of erotic drive/deathdrive; in this case, a specific dimension ofpsychoanalysis must remain situated, not on theside of “the apparatus of sexuality” – the historyof which Foucault described – but on the sitewhich permits Foucault himself to delimit theapparatus, to describe and to problematize it. Inthe second place and as a consequence of thefirst, the possibility of establishing a clear anddistinct line between the one and the other sitewill have to be questioned in a more general andmore radical way; that is, we will have to ques-tion the line between the inside and the outsideof the historical analysis, between object-discourse and subject-discourse, between the ageof what is talked about and the age from which itis talked about.
In a later text, written on the occasion of thethirtieth anniversary of the publication of TheHistory of Madness, Derrida repeated theseclaims. The text had as its title an expression thatFoucault himself had used in his work “To DoJustice To Freud.”24 On the occasion of an invi-tation given to him to participate in “a commem-oration that would also be a reflection,” in “oneof these tributes where thought is plied to fidelityand fidelity honed by thought,” Derrida stressedcategorically: “I did not hesitate for a moment.”Not only for the “intense and multiple repercus-sions” that this “great book” exercised “deepdown inside (him),” but also for the sake of the“friendship” and the “admiration” that linkedhim with his author.
After 1972, what came to obscure this friend-ship, without, however, affecting my admira-
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tion, was not, in fact, alien to this book, and toa certain debate that ensued – or at least to itsdistant, delayed, and indirect, effects. (JF 57)
The “drama,” adds Derrida, “arose out of acertain postface, and even out of a sort of post-script added by Foucault to a postface in 1972.”
Nevertheless, Derrida rejected the invitation“to return to the discussion” and did it “fornumerous reasons” that he briefly lists: because“the other has departed,” because of the “exces-sive” character of the issue (texts of Descartes,Foucault, and Derrida himself were interlinked)and “of all those, in France and elsewhere, wholater came to act as arbiters”; because the subject“has become too distant from (him), and perhapsbecause of the drama just alluded to (Derrida) nolonger wished to return to it.” For all thesereasons, Derrida thought that “the debate isarchived,” so that those who would wish it “cananalyze as much as they want and decide forthemselves.” Derrida himself, however, a littlelater, will question the notion of the “archive,” socentral to the “archaeological” thinking ofFoucault; he will question precisely the possibil-ity for an archive to be given for closed, delim-ited and constituted. In fact, after affirming that“the debate is archived,” he recognized that“there is no privileged witness for such a situa-tion,” that there cannot be a testimony ofmadness, since every testimony tries to offerreasons and to objectify. The question thenarises: “Does it have an object? Is there anobject? Is there a possible third that mightprovide a reason without objectifying or evenidentifying, that is to say, without examining(arraisonner)?” (JF 58) All these questions obvi-ously affect the status and even the possibility ofthe chronicle which we are now elaborating – thechronicle of a debate which seemed to be “filedaway” and which nevertheless deals, precisely,with the possibility or the impossibility of some-thing like an “archive” that is definitely closed.
Didn’t perhaps the text of Derrida itselfreopen the archive of the debate on the archive?In line with the questions that I raised, Derridarecognized that it is absurd, obsessive and impos-sible “to give in to a sort of fetishistic denial andto think that (he) can protect (himself) from any
contact with the place or meaning of this discus-sion.” So that, effectively, to speak again aboutThe History of Madness, was allowing, not areturn to the old discussion about the CartesianCogito, but a return to “the schema or specter ofan analogous problematic.” He is not going tospeak of Descartes but of Freud, not of what isnamed in the beginning of The History ofMadness but rather of what is named at its end,and
this will perhaps be once again in order topose a question that will resemble the onethat imposed itself upon me thirty years ago,namely, that of the very possibility ofmadness. The question will be, in the end,just about the same, though it will be posedfrom another border, and it still imposesitself upon me as the first tribute owed sucha book. (JF 59)
And, in effect, Derrida quoted his lecture of1963, in order to take up again the issue that hehad put forward, that is the issue of the “today,”the issue of the space from which Foucault foundit possible to write The History of Madness.According to Derrida, such work was possible onthat occasion because “a certain liberation ofmadness has gotten under way,” because “psychi-atry has opened itself up, however minimally”(although now, almost thirty years later, hewould prefer to substitute “psychiatry” for“psychoanalysis,” in order to translate today “thequestion of yesterday, of the today of yesterday[. … ] transporting it in this way into the todayof today.” And Derrida will end up saying in the1963 fragment that he himself quotes that “ifFoucault, more than anyone else, is attentive andsensitive to this kind of questions, it neverthelessappears that he does not acknowledge their qual-ity of being prerequisite methodological or philo-sophical considerations.”
To what kind of questions was Derrida refer-ring? First of all, there is an entire series of ques-tions that refer to the relation between Foucaultand Freud. Derrida asked questions about therelation of contemporaneity between The Historyof Madness and the opening realized by psycho-analysis or more exactly by psychoanalyses. Healso thought that the question of “today” should
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have led him, already in 1963, not in the direc-tion of Descartes, but rather in the direction ofFreud. So, if he now returns to the question, hedoes it in order to “correct an oversight,” and toconfront “more directly a problematic that (he)had left in a preliminary stage, as a general,programmatic frame, in the introduction to (his)lecture of 1963.” It is true that Descartes occu-pies a strategic place in the work of Foucault. Itis also true that Descartes was the object ofspecial attention in the Lacanian psychoanalysisin the beginning of the 1970s, to the point thatLacan used to say that it was impossible to “dobetter” than Descartes. Now, however, the ques-tion will be raised in a different way:
It is no longer a question of the age describedby a History of Madness [. … ] It is a ques-tion today of the age to which the book itselfbelongs, the age from out of which it takesplace, the age that provides it its situation; it isa question of the age that is describing ratherthan the age that is described. (JF 62)
At this point, Derrida’s thesis is that Foucaultheld an ambiguous and ambivalent attitude aboutFreud and psychoanalysis – not only in TheHistory of Madness (but even before, in MentalIllness and Psychology) and afterwards, in allthe other “histories” (of medicine, the humansciences, and sexuality) written later on; but,at the same time, Derrida recognizes that thisambiguity “could indeed be on the side ofpsychoanalysis” in which case, the apparentinconsistency of Foucault would be “justly moti-vated”; Derrida, therefore, insists on speaking of“various” psychoanalyses and even of “various”Freuds. This plurality and ambiguity permit usto understand why it is so difficult for Foucault“to do justice to Freud”; why in intending to dohim justice, he both absolves him and condemnshim, placing him alternatively now on this andthen on that scale, like a pendulum. It is becausehe places him sometimes on the side of describedhistory and sometimes on the side of descriptivehistory; because he places him as much in theobject-state of the one who is talked about asmuch as in the subject-state from which he isspoken; as much on the side of the reason thathas been separated from madness as on the sideof madness that still carries on a dialogue with
reason – as much on the side of the others as onthe side of “us” (the “us” in which we findHölderlin, Nietzsche, Van Gogh, Nerval, Artaud,Roussel, the whole family, says Derrida, of the“grand witnesses of madness,” [ … ] “who arealso great judges, our judges, those who judgeus.” In Derrida’s opinion, Foucault does notseem to have been conscious of this ambiguity; atleast, he does not explicitly reflect on it, althoughit fully affects the presuppositions of his owndiscourse. At any rate, Derrida believes thatFoucault leans towards condemning psychoanaly-sis without appeal: “Foucault regularly attemptsto objectify psychoanalysis and to reduce it tothat of which it speaks rather than to that fromout of which it speaks” (JF 62).
Concerning this ambiguity, Derrida went on toanalyze in details the grand chiasm to whichFoucault was committed, even though, at thesame time, he recognized not having been able togive Foucault the proper attention, in his firstlecture of 1963. The question of the CartesianCogito reappears in the chiasm, along with thequestion of the exclusion of madness and of therole of the Evil Genius. In the final pages of thefirst part of The History of Madness, Foucaultpaired up Freud and Nietzsche, in order to setthem up against the Cartesian rationalism of theseventeenth century, against the rationalism thatexcluded madness. Nevertheless, Foucaulthimself added:
But this does not mean that classical man was,in his experience of the truth, more distancedfrom unreason than we ourselves might be. Itis true that the cogito is the absolute begin-ning, but one must not forget that the evilgenius is anterior to it. And the evil genius isnot the symbol in which are summed up andsystematized all the dangers of such psycho-logical events as dream images and sensoryerrors. Between God and man, the evil geniushas an absolute meaning: he is in all his rigorthe possibility of unreason and the totality ofits powers. He is more than the refraction ofhuman finitude; well beyond man, he signalsthe danger that could prevent man once andfor all from gaining access to the truth: he isthe main obstacle, not of such a spirit but ofsuch reason. And it is not because the truththat gets illuminated in the cogito ends up
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entirely masking the shadow of the evil geniusthat one ought to forget its perpetually threat-ening power: this danger will hover overDescartes’ reflections right up until the estab-lishment of the existence and truth of theexternal world. (JF 71)
Derrida underlined two of Foucault’s sentences:on the one hand, that “one must not forget thatthe evil genius is anterior to the (Cogito),” and,therefore, that the Cogito is not an “absolutebeginning,” as Foucault had maintained in hischapter on “the Great Confinement” andrepeated in this passage; and on the other hand,“that one (must not) forget its perpetually threat-ening power,” one must not forget that the threatpersists even after going through the certainty ofthe Cogito, so that this going through does notexclude, nor could it exclude, the possibility ofmadness, contrary to what Foucault himself hadaffirmed in the quoted chapter and contrary towhat he will repeat in the 1972 postface.
The conclusion that Derrida draws out of thischiasm is twofold: in the first place, Foucaulthimself is saying in this passage what Derridawould be saying a little later on, in his 1963lecture: that the Cogito does not exclude thepossibility of madness, and that the possibility iscontemplated by Descartes himself, in the figureof the Evil Genius, as a perpetual threat. “Thiscould have, as a result, indeed this should have,spared us a long and dramatic debate. But it istoo late now.” In the second place, what Foucaultrecognizes here is that “what is called contempo-rary had already begun in the classical age withthe Evil Genius, which clearly, to my eyes atleast, cannot leave intact the historical categoriesof reference and the personal identity of some-thing like the classical age (for example)” (JF 70).
This second conclusion brings us back fromDescartes to Freud, from one extreme to theother of the historical categorization thatFoucault elaborated, but only in order toacknowledge, once more, the ambiguous positionof Freud with respect to this categorization –given Foucault’s repeated attempts to situate iton both sides of the alleged historical boundariesthat would separate the classical from thecontemporary age, the “others” from “us.” Sothat this apparent movement of progress is, in
fact, a movement of return, of recurrence,compulsive repetition, perpetual obsession,madness, as if the Evil Genius would not stopthreatening reasonable historical categorizations,the demarcation of ages, states or epistemes, theubiquity of proper names, the categorical exclu-sions and inclusions, the lines of demarcationbetween the “ others” and “us” and, in the finalanalysis, condemning and absolving judgments(for instance, those a propos of Descartes andFreud).
In fact, the figure of the Evil Genius is evokedby Foucault many times – sometimes in order tobe identified with the eternal threat of unreason(as in the Introduction to the third part of TheHistory of Madness, or a propos of Diderot’swork, Rameau’s Nephew) and sometimes, on thecontrary, in order to be identified with thepsychoanalyst as a medico-thaumaturgue whoaspires to cast out unreason and the sick (as inthe last pages of “The Birth of the Asylum”where Freud features as the heir of Tuke andPinel). Many years later, in the last pages of thefirst volume of The History of Sexuality,Foucault will talk about the “good” and the “evilgenius” of Freud (although, as Derrida remindsus, Freud himself had already presented himselfas the “devil’s advocate” in Beyond the PleasurePrinciple), at the very point where he questionsthe pansexualist temptation of his earlier psycho-analytic essays. The Evil Genius, therefore,returns obsessively in Foucault’s discourse, andwhenever it does, it appears as much on the“good” side (unreason) as on the “bad” (medicalreason) and, therefore, it appears to destabilize,not only the boundaries between ages but also theboundaries between reason and madness, and ingeneral, all boundaries, every oppositional logicbetween an outside and an inside, betweenabsence and presence, between “evil” and “good”or between “others” and “us.” Derrida speaksabout a “recurring” function of the Evil Geniusand he relates it to what, in 1963, he had called“the hyperbolic point” of reason – precisely, thatis, the point which is historical or transhistorical.
And with this, we enter the second large groupof “methodological” or “philosophical” questionswith which Derrida wishes to confront Foucaultin relation to “today.” In fact, there are the same
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questions, except that they are taken to theirbroadest dimensions of generality and radical-ness, that is, to their “quasi-transcendental”dimension. Derrida thinks that Freud’s ambiva-lent position and the “perpetual menace” of theEvil Genius should have led Foucault to prob-lematize some of his presuppositions abouthistory, the historicity of thought and experience,and the possibility of establishing clear and defi-nite boundaries between ages – especiallybetween past and present – between absences andpresences, enemies and friends, the guilty andthe innocent or between “others” and “us.” If thedialogue with unreason was possible forMontaigne, if it was not totally absent fromDescartes, if it returns in Rameau’s Nephew, ifall that, according to Foucault himself,“announces Freud and Nietzsche,” then the veryconcept of “announcing,” Derrida concludes,“calls for another logic, it disrupts, in any case,the axiomatics of a history that places too muchtrust in the opposition between absence and pres-ence, outside and inside, inclusion and exclu-sion” (JF 72).
It is obvious that the entire “archaeological”and “genealogical” thinking of Foucault,precisely in order to escape the “risk” of beingtransformed to a “transcendental” philosophy,has been bent to reconstruct the historical orepochal conditions of our own experience, of ourown “historical a priori.” As Foucault said, in hisArchaeology of Knowledge, the thing is to intro-duce difference in the apparent continuity of ourown past, of our own historical identity. As hesaid much later on, in his famous seminars onKant, the thing is to respond to the question“who are we?”; provided that this “we” does notrefer to humans in general, but only to those ofus who feel contemporary, to those who feelaffected by the same historical conditions ofexperience. What Foucault wants is not to consol-idate or to stabilize this epochal identity as afinally conquered terra firma, as a reliable andinsuperable limit, but rather the entire opposite:what he wants is to destabilize it, fragment, clearup, and make it once again problematic, in orderto show its singularity and its historical contin-gency. Foucault did not claim to have savedanything like the objectivity of historical knowl-
edge; on the contrary, as he indicated in theessay, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” he triedto put into question and to carry to the limit ofthe sacrifice the very figure of the subject ofknowledge. Well then, what was Derrida sayingabout the subject of knowledge and this epochal“we,” of which Foucault had spoken so often?
But this “we” never stops dividing, and theplaces of its signature are displaced in beingdivided up. A certain untimeliness alwaysdisturbs the contemporary who reassures himor herself in a “we.” This “we,” our “we,” isnot its own contemporary. The self-identity ofits age, or of any age, appears as divided, andthus problematic, problematizable [ … ] as theage of madness or an age of psychoanalysis –as well as, in fact, all the historical or archaeo-logical categories that promise us the deter-minable stability of a configurable whole. [ … ]Such disturbances make the historians’ workrather difficult, even and especially the work ofthe most original and refined among them.This self-difference, this difference to self (àsoi) and not simply with self, makes life hardif not impossible for historical science. Butinversely, would there be any history, wouldanything ever happen, without the principle ofdisturbance? Would there ever be any eventwithout this disturbance of the principality?(JF 89)25
As we can see, it is not easy to determine whetherDerrida is saying anything radically different orclearly distinct from what Foucault had said inthe texts to which I just referred. But we willcome back to this point in a little while. What iscertain is that Derrida himself hastened to makeit clear that he, in no way, tries to defend the“purity” of psychoanalysis against the historicaldiagnoses of Foucault, nor that, in any way hetries to question the “interest,” the “necessity”and the “legitimation” of the grand historiesundertaken by Foucault (from The History ofMadness to The History of Sexuality). Hispurpose rather, in raising all the questions thatwe have summarized here, was to “seek – and thiswould be, in sum, a sort of modest contribution– to complicate somewhat an axiomatic and, onthe basis of this perhaps, certain discursive orconceptual procedures, particularly regarding theway in which this axiomatic is inscribed in its
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age, in the historical field that serves as a pointof departure, and in its reference to psychoanaly-sis.” (JF, 92)
From this complex and long debate, I wouldlike to underline the arguments that I consider tobe decisive. Derrida claimed that the sense of theCartesian text (and, therefore, its value, its range,its historical persistence) is neither exhausted nordetermined by the relation to its age, that is, bya determinate historical form of rationality and adeterminate form of opposition between reasonand madness. But in order to support this claim,he took recourse to two different – not to say“contradictory” arguments: on the one hand, heaffirmed that the exclusion of madness, as prac-ticed by Descartes on the road to doubt, is inreality a transhistorical or transcendental exclu-sion present in all meaningful discourse, in everydiscourse (we could add) with a proper name(including the discourse of Foucault himself). Onthe other hand, Derrida tried to show that, in theCartesian text, not only madness is not excluded,but rather that it is included under the form ofthe Evil Genius, as one possibility inherent in thediscourse of reason in its transhistorical point ofthe hyperbolic doubt; that is to say, as a possi-bility that would turn improper every propername, snatching up and expropriating the owner-ship of discourse.
Derrida tried to reconcile these two argu-ments, assigning to logos a double face, finiteand infinite, determinate and indeterminate,historical and transhistorical. Logos would alwaysbe historically singularized, but never suitablydetermined by the name of the author, the dateor the place. With respect to this line of division,drawn by Foucault between transcendental andhistorical perspectives, it is obvious that Derridasituated himself at the very limit between thetwo, since he did not defend the transcendentalunity of reason independently of its discursivityand, therefore, of its historicity; but nor did heaccept the diversity of ages or incommensurablelanguages that cannot be translated to each otheras a historical diversity of rationalities. The factthat every logos is historically inscribed does notmean that it cannot be re-inscribed in otherhistorical contexts, since every inscription,precisely because it is historical, it is already,
from the start, a re-inscription. In other words,we cannot suppose a primary, originary and a-historical inscription; but, for the same reason,we cannot suppose either a context-limit forinscription, a primary or final context, a suspen-sion or epoché of history, a closed or a-once-and-for-all determinate age that would be perfectlycapable of being separated and differentiatedfrom all others.
Nevertheless, this is precisely what Foucaultaspired to achieve: to determine epochal differ-ences, to make historical discontinuities appear –to oppose to the alleged unity of one subject orone reason the temporal dispersion of subjectivi-ties and the irreducible multiplicity of rationali-ties, in order to show their singularity andcontingency, their lack of universality and neces-sity. Foucault is suspicious of all historical conti-nuity, because he believes to have discovered init the Hegelian “astuteness of reason,” the total-izing and totalitarian movement of dialectics, thatis, the claim to re-establish definitively the neces-sity of our reason and the unity of our subject,the teleology of one spirit that reunites and re-appropriates itself, recovers and is reconciledwith itself, through – and even thanks to – itsapparent temporal dispersion. Faced with thisteleology, Foucault tried to reconstruct theepochal, the singular, and the contingent of expe-rience and thought, especially of the experienceand thought which determine our present, ouridentity – our “we” – and which, through his“archaeological” and “genealogical” reconstruc-tion, will come to be questioned, problematized,and subjected to doubt and to the epoché.
Now, in order to practice this doubt or epoché,shouldn’t we try to leave our own epoch, our ownepochal determination and to elaborate anuntimely thought? Shouldn’t we try to reach atranshistorical or “quasi-transcendental” point ofview? And hasn’t this been the gesture ofDescartes himself and, in general, the character-istic gesture of philosophical thought? Isn’t thisthe “risk,” and the “madness” in which philoso-phy has been permanently handed over, thehyperbolic point by means of which present andpast, “we” and “the others” communicate? Thisis the question that Derrida asks Foucault.Foucault, however, never stopped speaking of the
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“sacrifice” of the subject of knowledge (not onlyas the “risk,” but also as the hope and promise)of the philosophical adventure.26 At any rate, itis clear that Derrida does not defend a teleologi-cal continuity between ages, but rather that hedefends the relation of the inevitable deferral, re-inscription or translation between them. Hedefends it precisely because he believes that thisis the only way to think – as Foucault himselfclaimed about singularity, contingency and thehistoricity, inherent in every reason and everysubject, in every discourse and in every propername.
Foucault’s reply to Derrida could be formu-lated as follows: if we affirm that the relationbetween reason and madness is a transhistoricalrelation, endlessly re-elaborated and re-inscribed,how can we recognize the singularity of eachinscription, of each historically given relation,unless we underline their differential characteri-zation in relation to other inscriptions? And, inorder to underline such differences, how can wenot reconstruct the historico-linguistic context ofthose inscriptions and re-inscriptions? As long asno context whatsoever could be definitely closedor saturated, as long as the intelligibility of adiscursive event cannot be determined exhaus-tively, as long as interpretation is an infinite task,how can we move from the philosophical or the“quasi-transcendental” analysis of history (under-stood as infinite difference of singular marks) tothe historiographical or “quasi-empirical” analy-sis of the movement of difference, withoutintending to reconstruct, to the limit of the possi-ble, the singularity of each mark and of its owncontext of inscription?
We could then attempt an approximation, a“dialogue” or a “reconciliation” between Derridaand Foucault;27 we could attempt to soften thedistance that separates them, pacify the conflictwhich opposes them; we could, lastly, attempt toheal the wound and close the debate, hastilyconcluding that the difference between them isno more than a difference of style or accent, amerely “methodological” difference. Both viewscoincide in the claim that philosophical thoughtought to think radically the historicity of experi-ence, beginning with the experience of thinkingitself. But Derrida believes it necessary to do this
by means of a “quasi-transcendental” analysis ofthe general or regular conditions of historicity,whereas Foucault believes it necessary to do it bymeans of a “quasi-empirical” analysis of theparticular or singular conditions of it. This is whyDerrida tends to accentuate the longitudinalmovement of persistence, deferral, re-inscription,and endless “translation” between the differenthistorical configurations of thought, through hispreferred reading of texts – philosophical and/orliterary. Foucault, on the other hand, tends moretowards indicating the transversal movement ofrupture, discontinuity, incommensurability andincommunicability between ages, epistemes,discourses, and does it by means of readingjuridical and scientific texts, directly related toinstitutional practices of controlling and govern-ing individuals. “Grammatology” as much as“genealogy” are ontologies of the historicity ofthe mark, and the mark is conceived at the sametime as sign and as force, but also as a singularevent, as serial or regular element of a differen-tial system of signs and forces. What happens isthat “grammatology” tends to accentuate themark/sign in its movement of persistence,whereas “genealogy” tends to accentuate themark/force in its movement of rupture.
But behind this mere difference of emphasisbetween the two historiographic perspectives or“methodologies,” it is possible to recognize onedeeper philosophical difference, that is, a moraldifference, a different way of responding to thedifference and to the alterity of the other.Whereas Derrida would consider a certain rela-tion to welcoming, hospitality and alliance to beirreducible, Foucault would consider as irre-ducible a certain relation to violence, hostilityand force. For Derrida, one cannot appropriatethe other, the discourse and the name of theother, without expropriating oneself (from one’sown self), without welcoming the other in thesame, without bringing about that the onebecomes, in a certain way, the other; withoutbringing about that one’s own discourse andone’s own name are no longer one’s own; withoutstriking up, with the other names and the otherdiscourses, a certain chain and a certain commu-nity that would be always open, always infinite,always indeterminate. If one can never be a
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unique subject, it is because s/he is originarilyunfolded, pluralized, engaged with the others andwith himself or herself as an other. For Foucault,on the other hand, one cannot appropriate theother, the discourse and the name of the other,without committing violence, without subjectingoneself to it, without imposing one’s owndiscourse and one’s own name; but this sameviolence cannot stop being committed againstone’s own self, since the plurality of forces inconflict is always open, infinite, indeterminate,never ceasing to modify the boundary betweenthe inside and the outside, between the other andthe own: if one can never be a unique subject, itis because s/he is originarily unfolded, pluralized,faced by the other and even by himself asanother.
This different moral philosophy is alreadypresent in the early works of Derrida andFoucault, but it has become more explicit in thelater writings of both, because in these later writ-ings, morality (the morality inherent in historic-ity and the historicity inherent in morality) hasbecome the dominant motive of reflection.Derrida’s moral philosophy is forged in thedialogue held with Levinas’ thought, and ingeneral with the Judeo-Christian tradition (begin-ning with an important essay of 196428 andreaching his later texts on the relation between“law” and “justice,”29 and on the “ethics of thegift”).30 As for Foucault, his moral philosophy isclosely linked to his reading of Nietzsche and ingeneral to his intention to retrieve the Greco-Roman thought, in open opposition to the hege-mony of the Judeo-Christian tradition. His laststudies, therefore, of the Greco-Roman ethicswish to retrieve the ethics of self-government,understood as an ethics without the law, as aninvention of the self and as an “aesthetics of exis-tence.”31 But we should not be in a hurry: it isnot that Derrida leans toward the Christian ethicsof charity and Foucault, toward the Greek ethicsof freedom. Rather, we should say that Foucaulttends to establish a clear contraposition betweenthe two, while Derrida, one more time, tends tomove towards the “dividing line” that separatesthem; he tends to maintain the “undecidability”between the Greek and Jewish sides of theWestern tradition; this is what distinguishes him,
not only from the paganism of Foucault but alsofrom the Judaism of Levinas.
In a 1977 interview, Foucault expressed thethought that the decisive conflict in the historyof the West is the one that confronts the “modelof language” (already elaborated by Plato and,later on, reworked by Christianity), to the“model of war” (defended by the Sophists andretrieved by Nietzsche): “I believe one’s point ofreference should not be to the great model oflanguage (langue) and signs, but to that of warand battle. The history which bears and deter-mines us has the form of a war rather than thatof a language: relations of power, not relations ofmeaning. History has no ‘meaning,’ though thisis not to say that it is absurd or incoherent. Onthe contrary, it is intelligible and should besusceptible of analysis down to the smallest detail– but this is in accordance with the intelligibilityof struggles, of strategies and tactics” (TP 114).32
If the model of language permits us to think ofthe communicability of sense, the continuity ofmemory, a peaceful dialogue and a reconciliationbetween individuals and ages, the model of warputs into questions all presuppositions, and intheir place it introduces an endless struggle offorces, a discontinuity that separates us fromothers, and fragments our proper being.
It is possible to think that Derrida adopted themodel of language and Foucault, the model ofwar. It is possible to think that Derrida wasinclined towards Judeo-Christian charity andFoucault towards pagan freedom. This is reallywhat Foucault himself seems to object toDerrida. Derrida, however, seems to question thealternative itself between the two models; hetends to destabilize the security with which eachone of them affirms itself against the other, andit is this security for which he seems to bereproaching Foucault. This is the “risk” thatDerrida nurtures and Foucault avoids: the risk ofgoing through the edge, through the hinge thatopens and closes the door between the twomodels, maintaining at the same time the possi-bility and the uncertainty in the play betweenforce and sense, violence and justice, the Greekand the Jew.
This is the risk also that I run in this essay, asI went through the debate (litigation and/or
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dialogue?) between these two different discoursesto which my own discourse owes a big debt: toreopen the archive, the history, the difference(war and/or alliance?) betweentwo proper names which havebecome a part of my own name.
Translated byConstantin V. Boundas
notes1 This essay was originally published in Spanishunder the title, “Foucault y Derrida: Historia de unDebate – Sobre la Historia,” Daimon, Revista deFilosofía 11 (1995) 59–82. It is translated by per-mission of the editorial board of the review and ofits author.
2 Folie et déraison: histoire de la folie à l’âge classique(Paris: Plon, 1961). There has been an abbreviatedversion of this work in the collection 10/18 (Paris:Union Générale d’Editions, 1964) which wentthrough several printings. Madness and Civilization:A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason is the trans-lation of the abbreviated version, with some addi-tional material from the original edition.
3 The text was published for the first time in Revuede Métaphysique et de Moral 3/4 (1964). SeeJacques Derrida, “Cogito and the History ofMadness,” Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978) 31–63. As for theletter of invitation, see Michel Foucault, Dits etÉcrits (1954–1984), 4 vols. Ed. Daniel Defert,François Ewald and Jacques Lagrange (Paris:Gallimard, 1994) vol. 1, 25. The “Chronology” wasestablished by Defert, Foucault’s companion from1963 until the latter’s death.
4 Also, we must mention that The History ofMadness was re-edited, in an abbreviated form in1964, and the abbreviated version omitted thepassage on Descartes. In 1972, the complete ver-sion was re-edited but it substituted a new prefacefor the original one and included as an appendixthe answer to Derrida. The omitted preface (pp.i–xi of the first French edition) can be found nowin Michel Foucault, Dits et Écrits (1954–1984) vol.1, 167ff.
5 “La folie, l’absence d’oeuvre,” La Table Ronde 196(May 1964). [Reprinted as an appendix to the 1972edition of Histoire de la folie 575–82.] Trans. PeterStastny and Deniz Sengel. “Madness, the Absence
of Work” in Foucault and His Interlocutors. Ed.Arnold I. Davidson (Chicago: U of Chicago P,1997) 97ff.
6 Tel Quel 20 (Winter 1965); reprinted later on inWriting and Difference 169–95.
7 Derrida, from the first page of his essay onArtaud, alludes to Foucault and to the problem “ofmadness and work.” Although he quotes onlyFoucault’s essay on Hölderlin [“The Father’s ‘No’in Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–84, vol. 2:Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology. Ed. James D.Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1928) 5–20],it is obvious that his criticism aims at the entirethought of Foucault, and, especially, at his claim tobe inscribed in the “family” of the madmen. In afootnote to this essay, Derrida indicates that“Artaud is the first to attempt to reassemble, on amartyrological tree, the vast family of madmen ofgenius. He does so in Van Gogh, le suicidé de lasociété (Paris: Gallimard,1990).”
8 On this turn in Foucault’s thinking, see my essay“El autor, la ficción, la verdad,” Daimon, Revista deFilosofía 5 (1992) 24–45; esp. n 11.
9 “Jacques Derrida et la rature de l’origine,”Critique 246 (1967).
10 All dates mentioned here concerning the breakbetween Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucaulthave been taken from the biography of DidierEribon [Michel Foucault 1926–1984 (CambridgeMA: Harvard UP, 1991) 144–47]. Although Eribondoes not say it explicitly, it is obvious that this ver-sion of the facts is provided by Derrida, sinceFoucault had already passed away. Later on, I hadthe occasion to confirm this, as I was listening tothe account of Derrida himself, during his visit toMurcia in November 1990, on the invitation ofPatricio Peñalver.
11 “Qu-est-ce-qu’un auteur?” Session of Saturday,22 February 1969, Bulletin de la Société Française dePhilosophie 63 (1969) 73–95 (followed by a discus-sion, 96–104). “What is an Author?” EssentialWorks of Foucault, 1954–84, vol. 2, 205–22.
12 In 1967, La Voix et le phénomène: Introduction auproblème du signe dans la phémoménologie deHusserl (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France)and De la grammatologie (Paris: Editions de Minuit)appear. To these two works, we must add a seriesof conferences and essays that Derrida presented,orally or in writing between 1965 and 1971; thosewere collected in 1972 in two important books, La
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dissémination (Paris: Editions du Seuil) and Margesde la philosophie (Paris: Editions de Minuit).
13 “Différance” in Speech and Phenomena andOther Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Ed. DavidB. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1967).The French original was published in the Bulletin dela Société Française de Philosophie (July–September1968) and in Théorie d’ensemble (Paris: Editions duSeuil 1968); in this latter volume, Foucault’s essay,“Distance, aspect, origin” was also published; theessay was on the writers clustering around thereview, Critique.
14 On the investigation of the figure of the“author,” see my essay, “El autor, la ficción, la ver-dad.”
15 “My Body, This Paper, This Fire,” trans. GeoffBennington. Histoire de la folie The Oxford LiteraryReview 4.1 (Autumn, 1979) 9–28. The first versionof this text was published under the title, “MichelFoucault e no Kaino” (“Réponse à Derrida”) in aspecial issue that the Japanese journal Paideia (no.11 [“Michel Foucault”] 1 February 1972, 131–47)dedicated to Foucault (Derrida’s text was alsopublished here). The text of this first version cannow be found in Michel Foucault, Dits et Écrits1954–84, vol. 2, 281–95.
16 This is, roughly, the version given by the biog-rapher David Macey in The Lives of Michel Foucault(London: Vintage, 1993) 238
17 “Discourse on Language,” The Archaeology ofKnowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York:Harper and Row, 1972). For an analysis of thistext, see my “¿Como no hablar de MichelFoucault?” in Textos de Filosofía. Ed. Xabier Palacios(Bilbao: Universidad del Pais Vasco, 1990) 557–73.
18 Here are Foucault’s own words: “Perhaps weshould ask how it is that an author as meticulousas Derrida, and as attentive to texts, could havebeen guilty of so many omissions, but could alsooperate so many displacements, interversions andsubstitutions? But perhaps we should ask this tothe extent that in his reading Derrida is doing nomore than revive an old old tradition. He is, more-over, aware of this; and this conformity seems, jus-tifiably, to comfort him. He shies in any case fromthinking that the classical interpreters have missedthrough lack of attention the singularity of the pas-sage on madness and dreaming.
On one fact at least I am in agreement: it is notas an effect of their lack of attention that before
Derrida and in like manner the classical inter-preters erased this passage from Descartes. It is bysystem. A system of which Derrida is the mostdecisive modern representative, in its final glory:the reduction of discursive practices to textualtraces; the elision of the events produced thereinand the retention only of marks for a reading; theinvention of voices behind texts to avoid having toanalyse the modes of implication of the subject indiscourse; the assigning of the originary as said andunsaid in the text to avoid replacing the discursivepractices in the field of transformations wherethey are carried out.
I will not say that it is a metaphysics, meta-physics itself or its closure which is hiding in this‘textualisation’ of discursive practices. I’ll go muchfurther than that: I shall say that what can be seenhere so visibly is a historically well-determined lit-tle pedagogy. A pedagogy which teaches the pupilthat there is nothing outside the text, but that init, in its gaps, its blanks and its silences, therereigns the reserve of the origin; that it is thereforeunnecessary to search elsewhere, but that here,not in the words, certainly, but in the words undererasure, in their grid, the ‘sense of being’ is said. Apedagogy which gives conversely to the master’svoice the limitless sovereignty which allows it torestate the text indefinitely.” Histoire de la folie II,370–71.
19 In this other version, before beginning to ana-lyze the Cartesian passage, Foucault talks aboutthe way in which philosophy is taught in Franceand the presuppositions governing this teaching: 1.Philosophy as a universal, critical instance, withrespect to which all particular, empirical knowl-edges are situated in relation to exteriority andinteriority; 2. Philosophy as an ultimate moralinstance, as a “law” (in a Christian or Freudiansense) which has nothing to account for but infront of which we all must confess our guilt andour faults, our “sins” (in the Christian sense) orour “lapses” (in the Freudian sense); 3. Philosophyas a self-referential reflection whose historicityconsists in reduplicating itself, in an infinite com-mentary of its own texts, having excluded fromitself all events as coming from the outside.Foucault believed that Derrida’s critique of hisHistory of Madness (and, especially, of the threepages in which he proposed a new interpretationof the Cartesian passage on the Cogito) rested onthese three presuppositions. Among living Frenchphilosophers, Foucault added, Derrida is “themost profound and the most radical” defender of
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these presuppositions. On the basis of these pre-suppositions, Foucault thinks: 1. “That philosophyis neither historically nor logically a foundress ofknowledge, except that there exist conditions andrules for the formation of knowledge to whichphilosophical discourse submits itself in every age,just as any other form of discourse with rationalaspirations”; 2. “That the systematicity that linkstogether forms of discourse, concepts, institutionsand practices is neither of the order of a radicalthought that is forgotten, covered up, and deviat-ing from itself nor of the order of the Freudianunconscious, as if there existed an unconscious ofknowledge that would have its own specific formsand rules”; 3. Finally, that one must “study andanalyze the ‘events’ that can be produced in theorder of knowledge and cannot be reduced toeither the general law of ‘progress’ or to the rep-etition of an origin.”
20 Communication made to the InternationalCongress of the Philosophy Societies of FrenchLanguage (Montreal, 1971), later published inMargins of Philosophy 309–30.
21 “The Impossible Prison” in Foucault Live(Interviews, 1961–86). Ed. Sylvère Lotringer (NewYork: Semiotext(e), 1989) 275–86.
22 “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx” in Essential Works ofFoucault, 1954–84, vol. 2: Aesthetics Method, andEpistemology. Ed. James D. Faubion (New York:The New Press, 1998) 269–78.
23 “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in The FoucaultReader. Ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon,1984) 76–100.
24 “To Do Justice to Freud: The History ofMadness and the State of Psychoanalysis.” Trans.Pascal-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Foucault andHis Interlocutors. Ed. Arnold I. Davidson (Chicago:U of Chicago P, 1997) 57–96.
25 Derrida underlined the word “problematiz-able” because he thought, as he will say muchlater, that the Foucauldean idea of “problematiza-tion,” to the extent that it alludes to unity and tothe whole, is as problematic as the idea of an “age”or of an “apparatus.”
26 The last time, a little before he died, in a much-quoted passage of his Introduction to the secondvolume of The History of Sexuality: The Use ofPleasures. Trans. Robert Hurley (New York:Pantheon, 1985) 12.
27 This is, for example, what Roy Boyne intends inhis Foucault and Derrida: The Other Side of Reason(London: Unwin Hyman, 1990).
28 “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on theThought of Emmanual Levinas,” Writing andDifference 79–153. Derrida’s dialogue with Levinashas continued and produced one more essay, “AtThis Very Moment in This Work Here I Am.”Trans. Ruben Berezdivin. Re-Reading Levinas, ed.Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley(Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991).
29 Du Droit à la philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1990); Lafilosofía como institucion (Barcelona: Joan Grancia,1984).
30 Donner le temps. 1. La fausse monnaie (Paris:Galilée, 1991). Trans. P. Kamuf. Given Time: 1Counterfeit Money (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992);The Gift of Death (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996).
31 Besides the second and third volumes of TheHistory of Sexuality, see “The Subject and Power,”Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault:Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: Uof Chicago P, 1982) 208–26; see also “On theGenealogy of Ethics,” ibid. 229–52.
32 “Truth and Power” in Power/Knowledge: SelectedInterviews and Other Writings: 1972–77. Ed. ColinGordon (New York: Pantheon, 1972) 109–33. Onthe “model of war” see my “On War: The Spaceof Knowledge, Knowledge of Space,”Reconstructing Foucault: Essays in the Wake of the80s. Ed. Ricardo Miguel Alfonso and SilviaCaporale Bizzin (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi,1994) 277–99.
abbreviations
BPF Foucault, Michel. “My Body, This Paper, ThisFire.” Trans. Geoff Bennington. The Oxford LiteraryReview 4.1 (1971): 9–28.
CHM Derrida, Jacques. “Cogito and the History ofMadness” in Writing and Difference. Trans. AlanBass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. 31–63.
JF Derrida, Jacques. “To Do Justice to Freud: TheHistory of Madness and The State ofPsychoanalysis.” Trans. Pascal-Anne Brault andMichael Naas. Foucault and His Interlocutors. Ed.Arnold I. Davidson. Chicago: U of Chicago P,1997. 57–96.
NFM Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx”in Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–84, vol. 2:
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Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology. Ed. James D.Faubion. New York: The New Press, 1997.269–78.
NGH Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy,History” in The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow.New York: Pantheon,1984. 76–100.
TP Foucault, Michel. “Truth and Power” inPower/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and OtherWritings, 1972–77. Ed. Colin Gordon. New York:Pantheon,1980. 109–33.
WIA Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” inEssential Works of Foucault,1954–84, vol. 2:Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology 205–22.
Antonio CampilloDepartamento de FilosofíaUniversidad de Murcia30001 MurciaSpainE-mail: [email protected]
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