From Reprisal to Reprise

Derrida reacted to Foucault’s History of Madness by insisting that the very project of that work, namely to “make madness speak,” was as mad as it was necessary. Sharing the commitments which gave sense and force to the gesture of the book, Derrida was drawn to identify the difficulties Foucault’s project could not, on his analysis, avoid. An untenable reading of Descartes, Derrida argued, was the symptom of the conflict between project and accomplishment; unsustainable by other standards, it held up the book’s architecture and claims. Thirty years later, Derrida professed not to want to return to the quarrel, declaring that those interested should refer to the archive already constituted. Exploring what Custer takes to be a delayed reactivation of the exchange, she considers why Derrida’s posthumous publications – notably his seminar on the Death Penalty and The Animal that therefore I am – should be added to this archive. Some implicit arguments in these works sound eerily the same as those with which Derrida had taken issue in his debate with Foucault. Custer suggests that this does not mark the possibility of a reconciliation but does offer a productive place from which to revisit the problem for which “Descartes” came to stand as a symbol. Today, when the project of giving voice to those who have been silenced has become a cliché of political activism and reading practices, it is useful to reactivate Derrida’s warnings about the mad nature of Foucault’s project.

Foucault, Derrida

Revel traces the exchange and interprets the effects of Derrida’s critique of Foucault. Tracking the move from archaeology to genealogy in Foucault's work of the late 1960's, she argues that this change can be read as a response to Derrida’s criticisms of Foucault’s earlier philosophy of history.

Looking Back at History of Madness

This essay offers an overview of History of Madness, including its place in Foucault's oeuvre, its publication and translation history. Huffer focuses especially on the significance of History of Madness as an under-read text whose philosophical and historical implications have not yet been adequately explored. She argues that a careful reading of History of Madness on its own terms offers resources for moving beyond some of the impasses that characterize not only twentieth-century French philosophy, but also many of the fields in the Anglophone world—especially feminist, queer, and critical race theory—that arose in the wake of a debate about madness.

“This Death Which Is Not One”

In his recently published seminars, Derrida makes a number of comments about Foucauldian epistemes, ruptures, thresholds, blood, sex and biopolitics which suggest that he was always running late for Foucault. Despite being ideally suited to do so, Derrida failed to press Foucault on ghostly sovereignty or sexual difference. In ascribing to Foucault the view that sovereignty was replaced in importance by biopower, Derrida attributed to Foucault a taste for linearity thereby reducing his work to its least interesting reading. As a means of locating Foucault’s challenges to thresholds and linearities, Deutscher revisits the families of the History of Sexuality vol 1 and Foucault’s Collège de France lectures. Deutscher argues that the segmentations and multiple techniques of Foucault’s family spaces, their sex and their strange sovereignties, manifest the countering swings of Foucault’s oscillations, a resistance to the Derridean reading.

“The Common Root of Meaning and Nonmeaning”

Khurana distinguish different ways in which Derrida’s deconstruction can be understood as an attempt at transforming the transcendental question. Derrida’s essay “Cogito and the History of Madness” might lead us to the assumption that Derrida’s primary interest lies in a move of radicalization: in identifying conditions that are even more fundamental or basic than the conditions of the acts of our theoretical and practical cognition that transcendental philosophy has highlighted. He suggests, however, that instead of a mere radicalization, Derrida’s decisive move in the transformation of the transcendental question resides rather in complicating the way we understand these conditions of possibility: (i) in an attempt to reveal conditions of the possibility of a certain type of act as being simultaneously the conditions of the impossibility of the purity of this act (a project that is sometimes termed “quasi-transcendental”); and (ii) an attempt to complicate the distinction between empirical and transcendental conditions (an investigation that is sometimes called “ultra-transcendental”).

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.

Violence and Hyperbole

The aim of this essay is to understand the underlying motivation behind Derrida’s initial objections to Foucault in his 1963 “Cogito and the History of Madness” and the way these objections anticipate so much of Derrida’s subsequent work. Beyond a disagreement over how to read a crucial moment in Descartes’ Meditations regarding the Cogito’s relation to madness, the “Cogito” essay provides a full-fledged theory of the relationship between history, language, and reason, on the one hand, and madness, silence, and death, on the other. Only through understanding this configuration is it possible to understand why Derrida would call Foucault’s The History of Madness not just a mistaken or misguided text but a “totalitarian” one. After outlining the reasons for Derrida’s strident critique of Foucault’s work on the basis of this underlying opposition between history and madness or reason and silence, Naas demonstrate how this same configuration is at work in early texts such as “Violence and Metaphysics,” right up through Derrida’s final seminars on The Beast and the Sovereign and, especially, The Death Penalty. Naas concludes by pointing out that while Derrida’s theoretical questions were always very different than Foucault’s, both thinkers ended up, curiously, on the same side in their critique of today’s carceral system and its forms of punishment. Only by taking into account both the similarities and the differences between Derrida and Foucault, in both their political positions and their philosophical texts, can we today really “do justice” to the history of their infamous debate.

The Truth About Parrhēsia

In his 1982-3 course at the Collège de France, Le gouvernement de soi et des autres, Foucault, developing his famous notion of parrhēsia (free speech, courageous speech, or “fearless speech”), is led on several occasions to make allusive but acerbic criticisms of Derrida’s readings of Plato. Starting from a symptomatic reading of the animus evident in these criticisms, Bennington shows that Foucault’s notion of parrhēsia as a guiding figure for philosophy is in fact incoherent, and that this incoherence can be related to a number of other incoherencies in Foucault’s thinking from early to late. These incoherencies arise most notably whenever Foucault attempts to address the (“transcendental”) question of the very possibility of what he claims to be doing in his work. Taking seriously Derrida’s objections to Foucault in “Cogito et histoire de la folie,” “Etre juste avec Freud,” and La bête et le souverain I, Bennington goes on to suggest that Foucault’s very inability to explain the possibility of what he is claiming to do (in brief, the absence of any plausible account of the question of reading in his work) has paradoxically been the ground of his enormous intellectual success, but that that success has been bought at the price of a historicism and a self-righteous moralism that inevitably undermine the very “political” relevance that Foucault and his followers claim for themselves.

Power and the “Drive for Mastery”

Trumbull reconstructs Derrida’s latter critique of Foucault, concentrating on Foucault’s relationship to Freud. He uses Freud, particularly on the death drive, to challenge and improve Foucault’s understanding of power. This, he argues, gives rise to a new understanding of and direction for deconstructive genealogy.

A Petty Pedagogy?

Haddad examines the work done by pedagogy in the Foucault-Derrida debate, and argue that it reflects and reinforces the differences between the two thinkers' understandings of philosophy and its teaching. Haddad begins with Derrida's Cogito essay, analyzing two key moments in which pedagogy appears. In the first, the famous introduction where Derrida reflects on having been a student of Foucault, a traditional conception of the teacher-student relation is advanced. This conception remains at work in the essay's second pedagogic moment, when Derrida reads Descartes' first Meditation as addressed to a naïve non-philosopher being inducted into the discipline. However, this relation is simultaneously called into question by the rest of Derrida's reading, since, even as he elevates the status of philosophy, he ends up implying that it resists being taught. This reflects, Haddad argues, Derrida's own ambiguous relation to philosophy as an academic discipline.