Must Philosophy Be Obligatory?
Michel Foucault's first reply to Jacques Derrida's 1964 critique of the first edition of the former's 1961 book on madness was published in a somewhat obscure Japanese journal in 1972, and later formed the basis for Foucault's more widely-circulated reply in “My Body, This Paper, This Fire” which was included as an appendix to the 1972 edition of the book. The more obscure first reply offers a version of the fierce textual demonstrations with which Foucault sought to rebuke Derrida in the more official reply published as an appendix. But the first reply begins with a methodological preliminary that did not make its way as such into the more widely-read reply. Foucault's reply at a methodological level focuses not so much on the lack of correctness of Derrida's interpretation of Descartes as on the lack of specificity of Derrida's classically philosophical argument against Foucault. In short, Foucault replies with historical specificity to Derrida's philosophical generality, or at least situates the debate on that level. What is at stake methodologically, not only for Foucault and Derrida but also for us today, in the difference between a philosophy that is resolutely historical and a philosophy that is not? Foucault's reply to Derrida invites us to this question, and in so doing invites a patient reconsideration of Foucault's own (not always self-conscious) methodological intervention.