Foucault/Derrida Fifty Years Later: The Futures Of Genealogy, Deconstruction, And Politics 0231171951, 9780231171953

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
......Page 6
Acknowledgments......Page 10
Abbreviations......Page 12
Introduction, by Olivia Custer, Penelope Deutscher, and Samir Haddad......Page 14
Part I: Openings......Page 28
1. The Foucault-Derrida Debate on the Argument Concerning Madness and Dreams, by Pierre Macherey......Page 30
2. Looking Back at History of Madness, by Lynne Huffer
......Page 48
3. Violence and Hyperbole: From “Cogito and the History of Madness” to The Death Penalty, by Michael Naas
......Page 65
Part II: Surviving the Philosophical Problem: History Crosses Transcendental Analysis
......Page 88
4. Must Philosophy Be Obligatory? History Versus Metaphysics in Foucault and Derrida, by Colin Koopman......Page 90
5. “The Common Root of Meaning and Nonmeaning”: Derrida, Foucault, and the Transformation of the Transcendental Question, by Thomas Khurana
......Page 107
6. Philosophies of Immanence and Transcendence: Reading History of Madness with Derrida and Habermas, by Amy Allen
......Page 132
Part III: After-Effects
......Page 150
7. Foucault, Derrida: The Effects of Critique, by Judith Revel
......Page 152
9. Power and the “Drive for Mastery”: Derrida’s Freud and the Debate with Foucault, by Robert Trumbull
......Page 178
Part IV: Life, Death, Power: New Death Penalties
......Page 176
10. “This Death Which Is Not One”: Reproductive Biopolitics and the Woman as Exception in The Death Penalty, Volume 1, by Penelope Deutscher
......Page 193
Part V: Foucault’s and Derrida’s Last Seminars
......Page 212
11. From Reprisal to Reprise, by Olivia Custer......Page 214
12. The Truth About Parrhēsia: Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Politics in Late Foucault, by Geoffrey Bennington
......Page 232
List of Contributors
......Page 248
Index
......Page 252

Citation preview

Foucault/Derrida Fifty Years Later

The Futures of Genealogy, Deconstruction, and Politics

Edited by

OLIVI A CU S T E R , P E N E L O P E D E U T S C H E R , & S A M IR H A D D A D

FOUCAULT/ D E R R I DA FIFTY Y EAR S L AT E R

new directions in critical theory

new directions in critical theory

Amy Allen, General Editor

New Directions in Critical Theory presents outstanding classic and contemporary texts in the tradition of critical social theory, broadly construed. The series aims to renew and advance the program of critical social theory, with a particular focus on theorizing contemporary struggles around gender, race, sexuality, class, and globalization and their complex interconnections. Narrating Evil: A Postmetaphysical Theory of Reflective Judgment, María Pía Lara The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory, Amy Allen Democracy and the Political Unconscious, Noëlle McAfee The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment, Alessandro Ferrara Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, Adriana Cavarero Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World, Nancy Fraser Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory, Axel Honneth States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals, Jacqueline Stevens The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity, Donna V. Jones Democracy in What State?, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaïd, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Kristin Ross, Slavoj Žižek Politics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique: Dialogues, edited by Gabriel Rockhill and Alfredo Gomez-Muller Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics, Jacques Rancière The Right to Justification: Elements of a Constructivist Theory of Justice, Rainer Forst The Scandal of Reason: A Critical Theory of Political Judgment, Albena Azmanova The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics, Adrian Parr Media of Reason: A Theory of Rationality, Matthias Vogel Social Acceleration: The Transformation of Time in Modernity, Hartmut Rosa The Disclosure of Politics: Struggles Over the Semantics of Secularization, María Pía Lara Radical Cosmopolitics: The Ethics and Politics of Democratic Universalism, James Ingram Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life, Axel Honneth Imaginal Politics: Images Beyond Imagination and the Imaginary, Chiara Bottici Alienation, Rahel Jaeggi The Power of Tolerance: A Debate, Wendy Brown and Rainer Forst, edited by Luca Di Blasi and Christoph F. E. Holzhey Radical History and the Politics of Art, Gabriel Rockhill The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory After Hegel, Robyn Marasco A Political Economy of the Senses: Neoliberalism, Reification, Critique, Anita Chari The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory, Amy Allen Recognition or Disagreement: A Critical Encounter on the Politics of Freedom, Equality, and Identity, Axel Honneth and Jacques Rancière, edited by Katia Genel and Jean-Philippe Deranty What Is a People?, Alain Badiou, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Georges Didi-Huberman, Sadri Khiari, and Jacques Rancière

Foucault/ Derrida Fifty Years Later THE FUTURES OF G E N E A LO GY , D EC ONSTRUCTIO N , A N D PO L I T I CS

Edited by Olivia Custer, Penelope Deutscher, and Samir Haddad

columbia university pressnew york

columbia university press

Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2016 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Custer, Olivia, 1966–editor. Title: Foucault-Derrida fifty years later. the futures of genealogy, deconstruction, and politics / edited by Olivia Custer, Penelope Deutscher, and Samir Haddad. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2016. | Series: New directions in critical theory | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016023676 | ISBN 9780231171946 (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231171953 (pbk.: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231542999 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Foucault, Michel, 1926–1984. | Derrida, Jacques. Classification: LCC B2430.F724 F6856 2016 | DDC 194—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016023676

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Kathleen Lynch

contents

a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s  IX a b b r e v i at i o n s  XI i n t r o d u c t i o n  XIII

Olivia Custer, Penelope Deutscher, and Samir Haddad pa r t o n e Openings1 one



The Foucault-Derrida Debate on the Argument Concerning Madness and Dreams3

Pierre Macherey two



Looking Back at History of Madness21

Lynne Huffer three



Violence and Hyperbole: From “Cogito and the History of Madness” to The Death Penalty38

Michael Naas pa r t t w o Surviving the Philosophical Problem: History Crosses Transcendental Analysis61 four



Must Philosophy Be Obligatory?: History versus Metaphysics in Foucault and Derrida63

Colin Koopman

contents

vi

five



“The Common Root of Meaning and Nonmeaning”: Derrida, Foucault, and the Transformation of the Transcendental Question80

Thomas Khurana six



Philosophies of Immanence and Transcendence: Reading History of Madness with Derrida and Habermas105

Amy Allen pa r t t h r e e After-Effects123 seven



Foucault, Derrida: The Effects of Critique125

Judith Revel eight



A Petty Pedagogy? Teaching Philosophy in Derrida’s “Cogito and the History of Madness”133

Samir Haddad pa r t f o u r Life, Death, Power: New Death Penalties149 nine



Power and the “Drive for Mastery”: Derrida’s Freud and the Debate with Foucault151

Robert Trumbull ten



“This Death Which Is Not One”: Reproductive Biopolitics and the Woman as Exception in The Death Penalty, Volume 1166

Penelope Deutscher pa r t f i v e Foucault’s and Derrida’s Last Seminars185 eleven



From Reprisal to Reprise187

Olivia Custer

contents

t w e lv e



The Truth About Parrhēsia: Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Politics in Late Foucault205

Geoffrey Bennington c o n t r i b u t o r s  221 i n d e x  225

vii

acknowledgments

thank the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, New York City, and Fordham University’s Office of Research for financial support that aided in the publication of this book. The manuscript benefited from Karin Horler’s careful copyediting and from Susan Pensak’s engagement and attention to detail. Warm thanks also to Wendy Lochner and Christine Dunbar at Columbia University Press for seeing the project through from start to finish.

the editors would like to

abbreviations

t exts by m i c h e l f o u c au lt

AK GSO

HES

HM

HMP

HS

MB

The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1972) [L’archéologie du savoir (Paris: Tel Gallimard, 1969)] The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France 1982– 1983, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) [Le gouvernement de soi et des autres: Cours au Collège de France, 1982–1983 (Paris: Seuil Gallimard, 2008)] The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981– 1982, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) [L’herméneutique du sujet: Cours au Collège de France, 1981–1982 (Paris: Seuil Gallimard, 2001)] History of Madness, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2006) [Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, suivi de Mon Corps, ce papier, ce feu et La folie, l’absence d’œuvre (Paris: Gallimard, 1972)] Preface to 1961 edition of History of Madness, in History of Madness, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2006) [“Préface,” in Dits et écrits, I, 1954–1975 (Paris: Quarto Gallimard, 2001)] The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990) [Histoire de la sexualité 1: La volonté de savoir (Paris: Tel Gallimard, 1976)] “My Body, This Paper, This Fire,” in History of Madness, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2006) [“Mon corps, ce papier, ce feu,” in Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, suivi de Mon Corps, ce papier, ce feu et La folie, l’absence d’œuvre (Paris: Gallimard, 1972)]

a b b r e v i at i o n s

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RP

“Reply to Derrida,” in History of Madness, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2006) [“Derrida e no kaino,” in Dits et écrits, I, 1954–1975 (Paris: Quarto Gallimard, 2001)] t e xts by j ac q u e s d e rri da

BS

CH

DEP1

DEP2 JF

The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009) [Séminaire: La bête et le souverain volume I (2001–2002) (Paris: Galilée, 2008)] “Cogito and the History of Madness,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978) [“Cogito et histoire de la folie,” in L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967)] The Death Penalty, Volume 1, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013) [Séminaire: La peine de mort volume I (1999–2000) (Paris: Galilée, 2012)] Séminaire: La peine de mort volume II (2000–2001) (Paris: Galilée, 2015) “‘To Do Justice to Freud’: The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis,” in Resistances of Psychoanalysis, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998) [“‘Être juste avec Freud’: L’histoire de la folie à l’âge de la psychanalyse,” in Résistances: De la psychanalyse (Paris: Galilée, 1996)]

introduction



ol ivi a c u st e r , p e ne lo p e d e u ts che r, an d s a m i r h a d da d

never was a moment when Derrida and Foucault were sitting opposite each other, on display for an audience, arguing back and forth, controlled by a mediator or provoked by a journalist. There can be no images, no transcript. Of course, the history of philosophy is full of debates whose reality and vitality does not depend on an empirical encounter of the sort Foucault had with Chomsky: writers and readers frequently proceed by staging two authors as figures to stake out opposing positions. But the strange quarrel explored in these essays is not quite of that sort either. On first approximation, the debate with which we are concerned takes place through three texts: Foucault’s book History of Madness, Derrida’s “Cogito and the History of Madness” (first given as a lecture which Foucault attended), and “My Body, This Paper, This Fire,” a text Foucault wrote as an explicit response to Derrida’s essay. We can also include a fourth text: “‘To Do Justice to Freud,’” which Derrida qualified as a “postface” to the old, archived debate. But this simple sequence belies the complexity of identifying the relevant texts and even their sequence. It passes over, for instance, the decade between Derrida’s challenge in 1963 and Foucault’s response in 1972, a decade in which their respective oeuvres were taking shape in part as competing alternatives for addressing the problems over which they had clashed. It ignores the peculiar histories of the publications, which were truncated and modified in various editions and translations.1 It does not take into account the many other texts that the essays in this collection will show to be part of the debate as we understand it today.

t h e r e wa s n o d e b at e . There

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Despite some artifice in saying it is now “fifty years later” than an encounter that did not take place at a precise date, there are good reasons for marking this time. Rereading Derrida’s “Cogito” essay in 2013 first prompted the discussions that led to this collection. Reflecting on the fact that the first round of the exchange between Derrida and Foucault was half a century old provoked a number of questions about its relation to contemporary work in a range of disciplines. It also quickly became apparent that this is a particularly rich moment to explore the Derrida-Foucault debate. Interest in it was galvanized by the appearance, finally in 2006, of the first complete English translation of History of Madness (including both versions of Foucault’s response), which brought this work to the Anglophone world, as if for the first time. A little later, in France, the fiftieth anniversary of its first publication revived critical attention to Foucault’s seminal book.2 Furthermore, Foucault and Derrida scholars are now contending with the trove of new sources that have become public in recent years. The coming to light of archival material, including letters and testimonies, most recently in Benoît Peeters’s biography Derrida,3 gives us new resources to consider the history of the two thinkers’ relation. Finally, the publication of Foucault’s Collège de France courses (completed in 2015) and the first volumes of Derrida’s seminars have given access to swaths of research previously unavailable. These posthumous publications show how the debate continued even as Foucault and Derrida were moving far from the topics of the 1960s, toward their late work that has fueled recent discussions, notably around questions of sovereignty, governmentality, biopolitics, animality, the death penalty, and neoliberalism. With these newly published materials, and with the passing of time, the Derrida-Foucault debate is becoming a new object of study for today’s thinkers. The contributors to this collection range across generations. They work in fields as diverse as critical theory, literary criticism, human rights, queer theory, pragmatism, and psychoanalysis, but they have in common a relation to philosophy as a primary reference. They also have in common the fact that they have engaged in lengthy and close readings of both Foucault and Derrida. Here all explore, rather than elide, the difficulty of fitting together Derrida’s and Foucault’s respective projects and propositions. Collectively they clarify how, and why, the legacy of this encounter is inscribed in today’s debates.

introduction

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These essays can be organized in a number of ways and may be read in a variety of orders. Collectively they undertake a double project: on the one hand, they make accessible both the core texts and the central problems of the debate; on the other, they propose differing ways to understand the impetus it gives to future research. In their essays, Lynne Huffer, Thomas Khurana, Pierre Macherey, Judith Revel, Samir Haddad, and Robert Trumbull in particular offer careful and expert reappraisals of the core texts. Macherey returns us to the extraordinary organizing gestures of 1961’s History of Madness. He suggests that Foucault took his bearings from Nietzsche as he devised an alternative form of writing history that could undermine the dominating positivist account of madness as a disorder with immutable traits. Analyzing not just philosophical, scientific, and literary discourses about reason or madness, but also laws and institutions, the distributions of bodies, spaces, and conducts, Foucault demonstrated the multiple ways in which reason is secured through the exclusion and containment of madness. His provocative conclusions and his novel method depended on one another: the more than 600 pages of detail through which History of Madness allowed the contingency of reason and madness to emerge was exactly the sort of explosive gesture required to unsettle reason’s apparatus of containment and self-assurance. The consequences of that gesture would be at the heart of the debate that Macherey reconstructs with an ear for the way it echoed a division at the heart of the French academy at the time. Macherey sets out Foucault’s reasons for taking Descartes as “an exemplary witness of the current of thought that justified the expulsion of madness out of the unified field intended for reason alone, provoking its reclusion.” He shows us how Derrida in a sense turned Foucault’s own argument against him. “Not without malice,” as Macherey puts it, Derrida proposes that Foucault had himself underwritten a Cartesian representation of reason exempt from all madness when he credited Descartes’s Meditations with containing madness as decisively as did the stone walls of the General Hospital. With precise sympathy, Macherey details the alternative accounts of the separation between reason and unreason that emerge: Foucault’s account of reason’s inclusion of a necessary expulsion of madness on the one hand, Derrida’s account of reason whose “hyperbolic hubris” is its inhabitation by madness on the other. The peculiar rejection-assimilation of madness detected by Derrida functions according to what he will later

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come to call the logic of the pharmakon. Thus, although Derrida and Foucault may seem very close in their recognition that reason has defined itself against, and protected itself from, madness, Macherey situates the rift: the hyperbolic gesture that fascinates Derrida is “in no way comparable to the historical gesture of confinement evoked by Foucault.” In her essay, Lynne Huffer exhorts us to read History of Madness, arguing that in a real sense this remains to be done. She echoes Foucault’s lament that the general principles guiding Derrida’s influential critique of the work meant that there had been “no point” for Derrida in “arguing with the 650 pages . . . no point analyzing the historical material” (RP 576/1150), “the confinement of a few tens of thousands of people, or the setting up of an extra-judiciary State police,” no point in attending to “that which occupies the essential part, if not the totality of [Foucault’s] book: the analysis of an event” (RP 577/1151). Huffer argues that Derrida’s influential objections caused us to lose sight of the work’s extraordinary innovation. She returns us to Foucault’s entrancing archive in all its passion and detail. In the space of Huffer’s essay, we want nothing more than to abide with the records of the sodomites, and the lists of lugubrious prisons. We are at the same time reminded that to draw from these something like a history of madness, Foucault had to develop a very particular way of listening to the “mumbling of the world.” In a careful demonstration that working with the “dust and words” of the archive requires a specific reading practice, Huffer helps us rediscover the impact of a project that would be no less remarkable if published today. She also offers us an important lesson: if we read this early text with too much hindsight we risk missing the force of Foucault’s gesture. Samir Haddad proposes an analogous lesson about Derrida’s response to Foucault. He shows how one of Foucault’s most notorious quips— the accusation that Derrida’s method is a “petty pedagogy”—can lead to important insights about the relation between philosophy and teaching. Through a close reading of the “Cogito” essay, Haddad identifies both a classical model of pedagogy, to which Foucault’s objections apply, and an implicit model (teased out of what Derrida says about philosophy) that sets up a pedagogical scene quite different from the one Foucault accuses Derrida of perpetuating. He remobilizes Foucault’s accusation so that it points anew both to what is most innovative in Derrida’s analysis, and to the latter’s challenge to a sovereign philosophy, a sovereign reason, and to those charged with its pedagogical authority. Drawing attention to the fact that,

introduction

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for Derrida, the attempt to say the hyperbole of sovereignty is itself a linguistic practice, Haddad argues that this has consequences for philosophy that necessarily recast the pedagogical scene. Robert Trumbull leads us through Derrida’s return to Foucault in 1991. At that time, Derrida had decided “not to return to what had been debated close to thirty years ago” ( JF 71/94). Yet, as Trumbull shows, we find the earlier “Cogito” argument adjusted, but reconfirmed, in “‘To Do Justice to Freud.’” Moreover, its implications for the entire trajectory of Foucault’s work (from Birth of the Clinic and The Order of Things through the volumes published as The History of Sexuality, including his late ethics) could now be elaborated by Derrida. This allows us to update the debate, with a new sense of how it can be negotiated through Foucault’s subsequent work on episteme, psychoanalysis, the “monarchy of sex,” life, death and power. Such returns to the primary texts remind us of their complexity. However, one of the important points made by the collection as a whole is that a plethora of other texts do not just illuminate the debate but rather belong to it—if we understand debate in a wide sense. A number of essays show how Derrida’s late seminars continue a dialogue begun decades earlier (see Naas in particular), while others reveal that the debate lives on in mutations of Foucault’s work, sometimes in deletions as much as in inclusions (see Huffer and Revel in particular). Thus, working with an extended archive, the contributors move us toward contemporary choices for critical practice. To outline the choices Foucault and Derrida have made possible, this volume offers a range of options for understanding the central problems that arise from their debate (variously formulated as the relation between the transcendental and the empirical, immanence or transcendence, or deconstruction versus genealogy). In particular, it provides several vocabularies with which to describe Derrida’s and Foucault’s respective prescriptions for a practice of critique that would avoid both precritical naiveté and the political and ethical stances of any critical philosophy that refuses to acknowledge (its own) contingency. In canonical philosophical terms, both Foucault and Derrida negotiated the challenge by developing transcendental methods that contend with the fact that the transcendental cannot be free of the empirical. This problem is central to this volume and is tackled in several ways. Some essays provide detailed technical descriptions of the ways in which Foucault and Derrida

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revise the classical mode of transcendental analysis. Khurana, for instance, offers a possible organizing scheme for describing Derrida’s transformation of the transcendental. Acknowledging that Derrida’s “Cogito” essay can be seen as radicalizing the transcendental project, Khurana argues that this radicalization occurs in distinct ways. Derrida engaged in ultratranscendental inquiries that showed how transcendental conditions are irreducibly related to the empirical. But his work also comprises quasi-transcendental inquiries that show how conditions of possibility are also conditions of impossibility. Carefully tracking where in the essay these two gestures operate, Khurana shows that, although it is tempting to think of Derrida as “radicalizing” the transcendental, that image (with its implicit reference to moving to ever greater depth) cannot adequately render the complications Derrida is introducing. On this more precise account of Derrida’s analyses, the latter “enable and at the same time disable determinate shapes of reason” in such a way as to “elucidate the very form of historicity with which Foucault must be engaged.” Without erasing the differences in their respective critical methodologies, Khurana thus argues that there is more proximity than is generally perceived in the Foucauldian and Derridean revisions of the transcendental. In one of the direct challenges these essays present to one another, Amy Allen takes a different position on the relation between the two methods. She insists on the divergence as she offers an equally detailed look at Foucault’s and Derrida’s solutions to the shared aim of critiquing reason. She provides an alternative to analyzing the way they handle the irreducibly empirical element of the transcendental by turning to the vocabulary of transcendence and immanence. The convergence she underlines between Derrida’s and Habermas’s objections to Foucault may be considered noteworthy (these otherwise quite different thinkers are held to have both objected to a performative contradiction in Foucault’s History of Madness project). Allen argues that Derrida (and Habermas) fundamentally missed the point of what Foucault was attempting, namely an immanent critique of reason. This is the Foucauldian answer to the charge of performative contradiction: aware of the danger, Foucault develops an immanent critique of the historical a priori in order to “embed the fundamental ambivalence between the indispensability of our form of rationality and its intrinsic dangers into his own methodology.” According to Allen, the analyses of Foucault pursued by Habermas and Derrida prove unable to tolerate the

introduction

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decisive distinction Foucault makes between reason and forms of rationality. There is, for Foucault, no “reason as such.” The contingency of forms of rationality allows an articulation of the possibility of change that was the very aim of the project: to describe contingency was to describe the possibility of transformation. Thus immanent critique could be associated with a possibility of freedom. Colin Koopman and Huffer similarly side with Foucault, making unambiguous cases for the practice of Foucauldian genealogy. Koopman makes the additional argument that one must choose between genealogy and deconstruction. He characterizes the methodological difference as follows: deconstruction shows “that our most necessary limits are also contingent,” whereas genealogy shows “how that which is contingent has come to be taken as necessary.” Radically critiquing the most general principles presupposed in one’s practice is a different type of analytic exercise. Koopman further contends that it redirects us away from what the Foucauldian “patient labor” reveals. Some readers will use Koopman’s argument to claim that genealogy, rather than deconstruction, should be counted as the most radical gesture. A contrario, drawing on newly published seminars by Foucault and Derrida, Michael Naas’s and Geoffrey Bennington’s essays focus on concerns we should have with Foucault’s methodology. In very different ways, they show that the methodological questions are also political questions. Naas highlights how Derrida’s dispute with Foucault was always an argument about the “proper of man” insofar as Derrida’s understanding of the relation between madness and reason is necessary to attend to a “subjectivity [that] cannot become a rights-bearing subject.” Bennington is concerned to show how apparently subtle or technical philosophical problems translate into high stakes and urgent political summons. Working with the second year of The Death Penalty, Naas shows that, when Derrida turns to the problems of decision and calculability in relation to the sovereign decision over life and death, he is revisiting the objection he made in the “Cogito” essay to Foucault’s reduction of the hyperbolic project. In a careful reconstruction, showing how each of these texts allows us better to read the other, Naas leads us to understand the connections between the decision of the sovereign and the decision that would ground reason. Recasting the madness of reason as the madness of the death penalty illuminates both, and makes palpable their lurking violence. Naas  argues

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that this violence allows the leap, by association, from “eliding the origin of meaning and nonmeaning” to which the “Cogito” essay objects, to the “ignoring or overlooking the groundlessness of reason” that Derrida cautions against, after parsing Heidegger. In fact, the leap is an authorized move in a jeu de l’oie, the game that, Naas suggests, is the best image for describing the Derridean procedure for writing history. Naas thus manages to relay not only Derrida’s contention that “that which grounds cannot be grounded” but also Derrida’s mixture of “provocation and good sense.” Bennington does not shy away from provocation. He not only throws down a gauntlet with his essay but also makes popular provocation its theme. Starting with the famous image of Foucault with a bullhorn, Bennington wonders how it came to seem so apt. Is it just “enthusiastic readers,” as Bennington wryly puts it, who are in danger of turning Foucault’s careful analyses of parrhēsia into material sanctioning the philosopher as a figure entitled to tell the truth to the people? From Foucault’s Collège de France courses (The Hermeneutics of the Subject, The Government of Self and Others, and The Courage of Truth) Bennington draws a subtle and sustained argument that Foucault’s “discursive description of the way ancient philosophy (at least as exemplified by Plato) sets up the relations between philosophy, politics, and rhetoric shades into an identificatory affirmation on Foucault’s part.” Having shown that this slippage occurs, Bennington explains why, arguing that Foucault does not have the means to resist it, because, unlike Derrida, he does not have a theory of reading. Choosing not to face the need for a theory of reading is, on Bennington’s analysis, choosing to forgo fighting the dogmatism and moralism lurking in politics and political philosophy. But must we choose between Foucault and Derrida? While some contributors commit to the affirmative answer, others plead for different responses. Some contend that the very difficulty of “fitting” Foucault and Derrida together is instructive in considering the two bodies of work, while others offer positive examples of how their propositions might be combined. In the first category, Revel and Olivia Custer thematize the peculiar relation between Derrida and Foucault and explore what it indicates about the content of their work and the directions open to future uses of it. For Revel, the usual ways of describing a relation between two thinkers—in terms of positions, or generations, or moments of thought—are inadequate to account for the “tenuous, polemical, and subterranean [yet] essential”

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relation between Foucault and Derrida. She demonstrates that while the effects on Foucault of Derrida’s criticism do not take the form one might expect, they are nonetheless considerable. As she puts it, although Foucault responds with silence and then implicit adjustments, there are signs that, from the mid-1960s, Derrida’s objections “‘rework’ all of [Foucault’s] work and give it its stamp, starting in the mid-1960s.” Suggesting that the move from early archeology to genealogy is a major shift that is itself a response to the Derridean critique, Revel shows the link with Foucault’s development of a history of the present. She argues that while genealogy was a way out of a bad alternative between the history of philosophy and the philosophy of history, Foucault finds his best relation to history only when he gives up on the kind of history Derrida claimed was problematic. Thus she traces an intriguing parallel between Foucault’s evolving relation to history and his handling of Derrida’s objections. According to Revel, precisely when it seemed not even to be on Foucault’s agenda, Derrida’s essay was operating in a “subterranean” manner to guide him to his solution. In other words, Foucault’s ostensible dismissal of Derrida’s criticism is only the visible face of the relation: its underside is the long-lasting impact on Foucault’s complicated relation to history and philosophy. Surprising parallels to these suggestions emerge in another essay that considers silhouettes and delayed responses. Tracking the inverse hypothesis to that proposed by Revel, Custer identifies a “Foucault effect” in Derrida’s work. Rather than seeing the quarrel as determining Derrida’s development over decades, she situates it as having a delayed effect that becomes apparent in an unusual feature of two of Derrida’s posthumous works. Detecting the silhouette of Foucault’s story about Descartes in The Animal That Therefore I Am and the death penalty seminars, she shows how this plays a pivotal role in Derrida’s analysis insofar as it is crucial for understanding the very stakes of his project. This odd reprise of the gesture that Derrida had questioned decades earlier is a sign that the particular modalities of the Derrida-Foucault exchange do not fit the mold of a classical debate. Custer suggests that is precisely why the peculiar relation between Derrida’s and Foucault’s oeuvres might also be taken as a new model for collaboration consonant with the lessons they both offer as to the political effects of privileging certain forms of verbal or written exchange. Among those who argue against choosing sides, Trumbull and Penelope Deutscher both propose new methodologies that combine Derrida’s and

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Foucault’s analyses. Trumbull does so by calling on the insights of psychoanalysis. He begins by reconstructing the way in which Derrida uses Freud to argue that Foucauldian power reveals itself to be an “at best, problematic” principle. Foucault is famous for developing a concept of power that is multiple, is capillary, and functions according to an economy in which subjectivation is always to be understood in both senses of the word. Freud’s theory of drives provides valuable help: “the essentially malleable and dispersed character of unconscious drives” provides a good model for thinking “the manner in which sexuality is penetrated by effects of power, the massive effort, as Foucault describes it, aimed at seeking out, making known, and taking charge of pleasure.” But Freud is a complex figure who, while offering key resources to Foucault, also “undercuts one of Foucault’s most crucial concepts.” Through a careful reading of the death drive, Trumbull contends that “Beyond the Pleasure Principle in fact points to a notion of power Foucault does not and cannot think.” Thus Trumbull elegantly echoes Derrida’s charge in Resistances while insisting that to do so is “not to disable” genealogy, but rather one way of giving Foucault’s thought “new impetus.” Joining Bennington and Naas in calling for analysis capable of subjecting itself to critique of its own axiomatic principles, Trumbull names and speaks for the possibility of (accessing a term briefly used by Derrida) “deconstructive genealogy.” Deutscher offers an alternative approach to such a possible integration. Where Trumbull argues for a concurrent pursuit of the forms of critique both philosophers did in fact defend, Deutscher instead asks us to consider questions they both omitted, and those they each found least palatable in the other. In doing so, she amplifies and redoubles Derrida’s identification of suspended potential carried within Foucault’s text. She also argues for combining that with an exploration of similarly suspended capacities in Derrida’s work. In this way, an analytic working space forms from the points most averted by each in the other’s projects. Deutscher pursues this proposal by conjoining the occlusions of Foucault’s History of Sexuality and of Derrida’s The Death Penalty, Volume 1. Given that sexual difference and biopolitics are, respectively, Foucault’s and Derrida’s blind spots, this methodology would argue that interrogating the “aversions” of both gives rise to appropriately surprising results: a new conceptualization of reproductive biopolitics.

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Foucault and Derrida were both convinced that existing conceptual frameworks and methodologies must be retooled, and new versions invented. Both chose to do this with experiments in language, each with a delicate and powerful plume. They are allies from one perspective, and competitors from another. This ambivalence explains both their mutual admiration and the determination of each to defend the specificity, and necessity, of his work. This volume continues the debate in that spirit. The contributors have mobilized resources from both Foucault and Derrida to propose new formulations of the problems at the heart of the debate. Their essays manifest a commitment to understanding the specificities of the two authors in order to analyze how, and why, those specificities produce tensions and incompatibilities. Notwithstanding the many shared interests and insights of Derrida and Foucault, the contributors repudiate the blurring of Foucault and Derrida in monikers such as postmodernism, poststructuralism, “French Theory,” or “la pensée 68.” Instead, they negotiate with precision the philosophers’ differences, tensions, mutations, mimicries, returns, and resuscitations to reinvigorate their différend and its ongoing potential. It is no accident that, in collectively taking stock of Derrida and Foucault’s contentious exchange, this volume neither produces, nor promotes, unanimity. There are clear sympathies and argued defenses for very different positions, and yet the arguments articulated by these essays do not resolve into a neat set of alternatives. None of the contributors are interested in stylized warfare. Collectively, we pursue a debate that is no less polemical for being less stylized. We trace out the contours of a complicated discussion in which the boundary lines between positions are less than stable, interlocutors are partially phantasmatic, and propositions sometimes develop lives of their own. n ot e s

1. Foucault’s book was originally published in 1961 under the title Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique. In 1964 it was republished in French in severely abridged form, with the original 674 pages reduced to 311. This abridged version did not contain the original’s preface nor the three pages on Descartes (the sections of the text on which Derrida’s essay focused). In 1965 Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason appeared. This was an English translation of the 1964 volume, with some material from the 1961 volume added, but the original preface and the pages

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on Descartes were still missing. In late 1972 Foucault’s original book was republished under the title Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, but with a new, very short preface replacing the old one, and “Mon corps, ce papier, ce feu” as one of its two appendices. The complete text was published as a cheaper paperback by Gallimard in 1976, without the appendices. This edition is the one most commonly found in bookstores today. The original preface and “Mon corps” were republished in volumes I and II respectively of Dits et écrits in 1994. A first version of “Mon corps” was published in translation alongside Derrida’s essay in the Japanese journal Paideia, in an issue devoted to Foucault and literature in February 1972. This translation was titled “Derrida e no kaino” (“Response to Derrida”) and was later printed in French in Dits et écrits, II. An English translation of the original text from 1961, with the 1972 preface and both replies, was published in 2006 under the title History of Madness. Derrida delivered “Cogito et l’histoire de la folie” at the Collège Philosophique in March 1963. His essay was published at the end of that year in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale (vol. 68, no. 4, October–December). Six footnotes to this essay were published in the January–March 1964 edition of this journal, with the editors explaining that Derrida had submitted them after the previous issue had gone to the printer. This essay was reprinted in 1967’s L’écriture et la différence, with some changes made to the text. The book was translated into English in 1980. Derrida’s “‘Être juste avec Freud’: L’histoire de la folie à l’âge de la psychanalyse” was first delivered at a conference in Paris marking the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of History of Madness in November 1991. It was published in the edited collection Penser la folie: Essais sur Michel Foucault in 1992 and republished, with some changes, in Derrida’s 1996 book Résistances: De la psychanalyse. This volume appeared in English translation in 1998. 2. See Philippe Artières, Jean-François Bert, Philippe Chevallier, Frédéric Gros, Luca Paltrinieri, Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, and Judith Revel, eds., Histoire de la folie: Cinquante ans de réception 1961–2011 (Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen / IMEC, 2011); Daniele Lorenzini and Arianna Sforzini, eds., Un demi-siècle d’histoire de la folie (Paris: Kimé, 2013); and Philippe Artières and Jean-François Bert, Un succès philosophique: L’“Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique” de Michel Foucault (Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen / IMEC, 2011). 3. Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography (Malden: Polity, 2013). Archival material relevant to the debate is also contained in Philippe Artières, Jean-François Bert, Frédéric Gros, and Judith Revel, eds., Cahiers de L’Herne: Michel Foucault (Paris: L’Herne, 2011).

FOUCAULT/ D E R R I DA FIFTY Y EAR S L AT E R

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Openings

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The Foucault-Derrida Debate on the Argument Concerning Madness and Dreams 

p ier r e m ac h e r e y tr an s lat e d by j e nni fe r c a z e nave , o li vi a cu s t e r, an d s a m i r h a d da d

t h e s ta rt i n g p o i n t f o r t h e discussion between Foucault and Derrida was the 1961 publication of Foucault’s first major work, History of Madness. This began a trajectory that, over the course of the next twenty years, contributed considerably to transforming theoretical debates at the crossroads of the sciences, history, and philosophy. Let us recall that in speaking of a history of madness Foucault marked from the outset his decision to wrest madness, or rather what he called “the experience of madness,” from the supposedly natural status assigned to it by psychiatric medicine. This medicine, with its spontaneous and naive positivism, had identified madness with a sort of organic fatality defined once and for all by its immutable traits. Foucault’s initial idea was actually very simple: repeating Nietzsche’s thesis that there are no facts but only interpretations, rejecting the hypothesis that madness is an objective fact prior to any interpretation, he was led to explain madness in terms of the way it is looked at. This gaze is necessarily historical, thus subjected to conditions specific to a certain state of civilization and culture, and thereby set to change when this state is modified. However, according to Foucault, a key moment in the history in which the experiences of madness are situated is the development of the system of classical rationality. At that point, the gaze cast on madness takes the unprecedented form of a gaze of exclusion. This exclusion is concretely

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materialized in the gesture of confining mad people to the new institution that constitutes the visible emblem, the apparatus where the order of reason is realized in practice, that is, the order that reason both prescribes and identifies with: the General Hospital. Thus, what we understand reason to mean when we read Descartes corresponds to a historical formation that is quite distinctive despite its claim to universality. This formation is characterized specifically by enacting a division with regard to its Other, against which it is defined: unreason, a singular figure of madness. Titled “The Great Confinement,” the second chapter of the first part of History of Madness begins with a paragraph devoted to Descartes. Foucault takes Descartes to be an exemplary witness of the current of thought that justified the expulsion of madness out of the unified field intended for reason alone, provoking its reclusion. On this occasion Foucault offers his reading of the passage from the first meditation of the Metaphysical Meditations in which “Descartes came across madness beside dreams and all the other forms of errors” (HM 44/56). Madness must be discredited in order for reason to affirm its domination. Here is the passage as Foucault quotes it, using the Pléïade edition that reproduced the French translation carried out in the seventeenth century under Descartes’s authority by the Duc of Luynes: How could it be denied that these hands or this whole body are mine? Unless perhaps I were to liken myself to madmen, whose brains are so damaged by the persistent vapors of melancholia that they firmly maintain they are kings when they are paupers, or say they are dressed in gold and purple when they are naked, or believe themselves to be earthenware or to have bodies made of glass. (HM 44/56; translation modified)

This suggests that madness is of the order of a corporeal determinism. The humors invading the brains of the individuals affected by this phenomenon literally make them lose their reason. Once deprived of it, they are relegated to reason’s outside in the sense of a true extraterritoriality. As a consequence, if those who are beset by madness are deceived or deceive themselves, as is the case of those who dream or who often fall into error, it is in a way unlike any other. Foucault explains this with the following formulation: “But Descartes does not evade the danger of madness in the same way that he sidesteps the possibility of dream or error” (HM 44/56).

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This formulation must be taken literally. From the standpoint of Foucault’s reading of Descartes, madness is a “danger that one evades,” while dream and error are “a possibility one sidesteps.” The risk of error and dream can be sidestepped because these do not attack the basis of reason. At most they modify its functioning: whether I am dreaming or awake, whether or not I am sufficiently vigilant with regard to what my senses claim to teach me, I remain a thinking thing. At any moment, this thing can think poorly, if it does not give itself the means necessary to formulate clear and distinct ideas on which to base the certainty of its representations. But it is altogether different with madness, which truly endangers the existence of reason. This is why the problem is not simply to sidestep its possibility, but to avoid it concretely, or in other words, to eliminate it, because of the radical risk it presents. In the case of the mad, it is not that the mind functions poorly; rather, it has ceased functioning altogether. No longer thinking, the soul has been led to a terrain where it can no longer find itself, a terrain of pure unreason. Given that this unreason consists in entirely surrendering to the law of the body, the soul’s powers are definitively abolished. This is what Foucault aims to make clear when he writes: “Thus neither sleep peopled with images nor the clear consciousness that the senses are deceived can lead doubt to its most universal point: we might admit that our eyes can deceive us and ‘suppose we are asleep’, but the truth will never slip  away entirely into darkness” (HM 45/57). This is why the hypothesis that I could very well be dreaming, while I think I am awake, is not deprived of meaning. One is perfectly free to contemplate the possibility. But the hypothesis according to which I could be mad, even though I think I am rational, is not only very unlikely; it is also completely unacceptable, inadmissible, unthinkable, insofar as it amounts to obliterating the very possibility of reasoning and thinking at all, whether well or badly. This is why madness cannot simply be presented as an error or a failure of reason: Madness is an altogether different affair. If its dangers compromise neither the enterprise nor the essential truth that is found, this is not because this thing, even in the thoughts of a madman, cannot be untrue, but rather because I, when I think, cannot be considered insane. When I think I have a body, can I be certain that my grasp on the truth is stronger than that of the man who believes his body to be made of glass? Assuredly, says Descartes, ‘such people are insane, and I would be thought equally mad if I took anything from them as a model for myself ’. It is not the permanence of truth

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that ensures that thought is not madness, in the way that it freed it from an error of perception or a dream; it is an impossibility of being mad which is inherent in the thinking subject rather than the object of his thoughts. If one admits the possibility that one might be dreaming, and one identifies with that dreaming subject to find some ‘grounds for doubt’, truth still appears, as one of the conditions of possibility for the dream. By contrast, one cannot suppose that one is mad, even in thought, for madness is precisely a condition of impossibility for thought: ‘I would be thought equally mad [extravagant].’ (HM 45/57)

To believe one is awake, when one is dreaming, is to make a mistake. In other words, it is to err from the truth. But to be mad is much more than that: it is to “rave [extravaguer].” It is to remove one’s self entirely from the realm of reason, to deprive one’s self of all means of thinking. One wakes from a dream, but one never escapes from madness because one is confined to it. This is why madness itself has to be confined. The absolutely negative state madness represents, one that excludes thought as such, and not just true thought, has to be rendered concrete. Hence the need to exclude madness, a need programmed insofar as, Foucault writes, “a specific decision has been taken”: Descartes . . . has now acquired that certainty, and he grasps it firmly: madness, quite simply, is no longer his concern. It would be an eccentricity for him to suppose that he were eccentric: as a way of thinking, madness implies itself, and thus excludes itself from his project. The perils of madness have been quashed by the exercise of Reason. (HM 46/58)

For one cannot see how reason could possibly define itself other than devoid of unreason. The latter constitutes the experience of non-thought that excludes itself from the exercise of thought. Hence the regime of exclusion through which “the danger has been excluded, and  .  .  . madness is placed outside of the domain to which the subject must belong in order to hold its rights to truth” (HM 46/58; translation modified). And, one might add, belonging to this domain also gives the subject its rights to error that normally ought to encourage it to correct its

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errors, undoing mistakes by means of a more controlled exercise of reason. However, this same belonging requires the subject to give up any right to madness. This is why in this logic madness is rejected, not condemned with the aim of being corrected. This rejection of madness is the unthought of the classical age: “But the advent of a ratio in the Western world meant far more than the appearance of a ‘rationalism’. More secretly, but in equal measure, it also meant the movement whereby Unreason was driven underground, to disappear, indeed, but also take root” (HM 47/58). Classical reason thus has its dark side. But it has carefully set it aside, parting with it, which is why it needed to build the walls of a prison within which it believed—what an illusion!— this dark side might always be contained. It is to this reading of Descartes that Derrida returned two years later, in 1963, in a lecture at the Collège Philosophique (directed by Jean Wahl) titled “Cogito and the History of Madness,” subsequently included in Writing and Difference. Offering his own commentary on Descartes’s text, Derrida’s conclusions clearly deviate from, or even contradict, those of Foucault. Derrida takes up the examination of the Cartesian cogito at its starting point, as the immediate self-grasping of thought. This leads him to “determine that what is in question here is an experience which, at its furthest reaches, is perhaps no less adventurous, perilous, enigmatic, nocturnal, and pathetic than the experience of madness, and is, I believe, much less adverse to and accusatory of madness, that is, accusative and objectifying of it, than Foucault seems to think” (CH 33/55; translation modified). In other words, the divide between reason and unreason is much less clearcut than Foucault sees it when, by adopting the representation of reason as pure light exempt from darkness, he perhaps falls unwittingly into the trap laid by triumphant reason, almost candidly confirming its message. This is because Foucault is more attentive to Descartes’s declared affirmation—let us recall the formula he uses: “a specific decision has been taken”—than to what is in fact written and inscribed in his text and exceeds the obvious content of the manifest speech. In a fragment of the Pensées quoted at the beginning of the preface of History of Madness, Pascal claims that “not being mad would be being mad through another trick that madness played.” Of course, he attributes this trick played by madness to the “half-clever ones [demi-habiles],” among

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whom he includes Descartes and his unequivocal model of abstract rationality. In a sense Derrida adopts Pascal’s point of view, reading Descartes between the lines to reveal a gap between, on the one hand, what Descartes says, when affirming the purity of reason, and, on the other hand, what he does, through an experience that is anything but clear, indeed is marked by ambiguity, or even another twist of madness. This gap is a “difference” that digs into the depth of the letter, the material writing of his text. Foucault, by contrast, remains at the surface, focusing on the fact that “a specific decision has been taken,” as if one always fully masters one’s decisions. Not without malice, perhaps even with a certain dose of malignance, Derrida declares his intent to “naively . . . reread Descartes” (CH 48/74; the expression “naive reading” is used again at 75/95). He claims this even as he is doing his utmost to detach himself from the fantasies bound to a simplistic reading that takes what the author of the text appears to be saying at face value. Derrida aims instead to be attentive to the fact that the author can actually say something completely different or, in the words just used, the author can do something different than what he says. This gap is inscribed somewhere in the letter of the text, it is in no way transparent to itself, and it is always out of phase, whether in excess or default, in relation to the speech that the text seems to directly enunciate. Such would be one of the teachings of what Derrida elsewhere termed “grammatology.” Austin’s expression “in saying something we do something” has become a classic. But what if one does something other than what one says? The later discussion between Derrida and Searle regarding the right reading of Austin’s thesis may well have its origins in this question. Moreover, the case at hand concerns less what is “said,” in reference to speech that can be correlated to an intentional disposition (“a specific decision has been taken”), than what is written. The latter is something else altogether. Regarding what is written by Descartes or under his name in the Metaphysical Meditations, to claim that he “says” it is improper or, at the very least, confusing. One can legitimately wonder what a philosopher’s “naive reading” would be, given that the notion of naiveté is among those most calling for critical analysis, or even “deconstruction.” Indeed, the reading of Descartes offered later in Derrida’s lecture is a scholarly reading that follows the text of the first meditation step by step. Foucault takes license to skip these steps as he hacks out his path in a rather less academic mode, concerned as he is to go straight to the crux of the matter. According to Derrida, precisely by

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rereading the text closely in its entirety, and attempting to grasp once again its overall movement instead of limiting oneself to a passage conveniently taken out of context, one notices that the relation between the two arguments concerning dreams and madness is exactly contrary to Foucault’s presentation: The reference to dreams is therefore not put off to one side—quite the contrary—in relation to a madness potentially respected or even excluded by Descartes. It constitutes, in the methodical order that here is ours, the hyperbolical exasperation of the hypothesis of madness. . . . What must be grasped here is that from this point of view the sleeper, or the dreamer, is madder than the madman. (CH 51/95)

Thus, the real danger for reason is not the empirical fact of madness. There is no need to linger on that peripheral accident, which by definition concerns only a few, those recognized as “insane.” The danger is the spectral reality of dreams, whose potentiality is inherent to reason. For unlike madness, dreams correspond to a known and practiced universal experience, from which neither the learned nor the wise are protected a priori. Their threat looms permanently over the activities of reason. Whereas reason should apparently be able to free itself easily from the accusation of being a mad reason, it cannot so easily exempt itself from the accusation of being a dreaming reason whose representations derive from fabricated sources. One can decide to confine mad people, but one cannot avoid the fatality that defines the dreamer’s condition, that of having confined himself to his dream, as under his sole responsibility, even though he can do nothing about it. Thus, if Derrida’s reading is correct, Cartesian reason is not the confident power that entirely displaced from its order the Other represented by madness cataloged as unreason, from the moment “a specific decision has been taken.” It is rather an anxious thought, gnawed by doubt, haunted by the fear of not being able to establish a clear divide between being asleep and being awake. This fear challenges the certainty of all of its representations, making it extremely difficult to take any decision whatsoever. That is what Derrida points out when he presents the hypothesis of dreams as the “hyperbolical exasperation” of that of madness. By hyperbole, we should

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understand this taking to the limit, this violence done to the natural dispositions of thought characterizing the trajectory followed in the first meditation where doubt first emerges for natural reasons, the mistakes of the senses leading to the assumption that if I am sometimes mistaken, I could well be always mistaken (a taking to the limit, in its first rough outlines). This doubt then moves and changes to the point of shedding all natural characteristics and becomes “hyperbolical.” No longer a mere suspicion directly derived from experience, it is a forced and artificial doubt whose consequences spread beyond all measure. This logic of hyperbole leads to the supposition that there could well exist an Evil Genius who manipulates all of my thoughts and deceives me, including when I form clear and distinct ideas that I relate spontaneously to objects existing outside of thought. Until proven otherwise, it is thus always possible to suppose that nothing exists outside of my thought and that life is only a dream that has no content attributable to reality. As we know, this problem will haunt Classical thought throughout its history, finding some sort of resolution only with Kant. For Kant, even if thought is a dream, it is normally structured and ordered. Its ways of manifesting itself maintain the claim to universality, and this should be sufficient to reestablish relative trust in it. If this is in fact correct, if the dream argument consists in the hyperbolic exasperation of the madness argument, it is because a trace of madness subsists in the possibility of dreaming, in a modified and even amplified form. And indeed, there is in the practice of hyperbolic doubt something that cannot do without a certain dose of madness. The singularity of Descartes’s enterprise consists in considering that in order to save reason, one must first test it, throw it into a panic, shaking its certainties through and through. This requires bringing it to the point where it begins of itself to doubt itself, to the point of madness, questioning its own existence. This would be the proof that Descartes, far from having expelled madness outside the order of reason, has instead integrated and assimilated it in a certain way, by making it an instrument and an ambivalent pharmakon in his quest for certainty: Now, the recourse to the fiction of the evil genius will evoke, conjure up, the possibility of a total madness, a total derangement over which I could have no control because it is inflicted upon me—hypothetically—leaving me no responsibility for it. Total derangement is the possibility of a madness that is no longer a disorder of the body, of the object, the body-object outside

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the boundaries of the res cogitans, outside the boundaries of the policed city, secure in its existence as thinking subjectivity, but is a madness that will bring subversion to pure thought and to its purely intelligible objects, to the field of its clear and distinct ideas, to the realm of mathematical truths which escape natural doubt. (CH 52–53/81)

There thus exists a sort of contamination of rationality by madness that literally “subverts” it, turning it upside down. This corresponds to the fact that, far from having been rejected once and for all as an impossibility, madness has become possible. Hence Descartes’s paradoxical approach which consists in affirming that “the Cogito . . . is valid even if I am mad, even if my thoughts are completely mad. There is a value and a meaning of the Cogito, as of existence, which escape the alternative of a determined madness or a determined reason” (CH 55/85). It follows that reason only stands a chance at regaining control over madness from the moment it ceases to keep it at a distance: “Thought no longer fears madness: ‘ . . . the most extravagant suppositions brought forward by the skeptics were incapable of shaking it’. The certainty thus attained need not be sheltered from an imprisoned madness, for it is attained and ascertained within madness itself. It is valid even if I am mad” (CH 55/86). Instead of being excluded, madness is tamed, trained. It can then no longer threaten a reason that, in engaging the movement of hyperbolic doubt, draws on the ambivalence of the pharmakon as both the poison and its remedy in order to play madness against itself. By doing so, reason is able to assure a safe ground from which to start again from the inaugural moment of the cogito. But this new beginning was only possible by making use of the violence, the excess of the hyperbolic hubris, which enables the rupture through which reason is brought back to its starting point or absolute origin. This extreme act is in no way comparable to the historical gesture of confinement evoked by Foucault. Put succinctly, it was necessary not to chain up madness, but on the contrary to unleash it [déchaîner]. This is why there is nothing more mad than this reason that has come to openly compromise itself with madness, in order to save itself. From this Derrida draws a lesson that not only applies to Descartes but renders his undertaking exemplary for all of philosophy. Insofar as it makes room for hyperbolic excess, which Plato himself does in a key passage of

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Book VI of The Republic, this approach cannot be contained within the framework fixed by a definite historical structure. Rather it refers to a transhistorical dimension of the philosophical undertaking which, in its radicalism, itself avoids being measured by temporality. It is with this idea that he concludes his paper: This crisis in which reason is madder than madness—for reason is nonmeaning and oblivion—and in which madness is more rational than reason, for it is closer to the wellspring of sense, however silent or murmuring—this crisis has always begun and is interminable. It suffices to say that, if it is classic, it is not so in the sense of the classical age but in the sense of eternal and essential classicism, and is also historical in an unexpected sense. (CH 62/96)

Ignoring the frontiers between eras and only deeming “classical” what is essential and eternal, this unusual historicity in fact belongs to another history, a deeper history that ignores the temporal succession of the “ages” and the constraints bound to its periodicity. The word “historicity” in fact improperly designates this other history. One should rather speak here of “historicality” in the Heideggerian sense. And this enables us to see that behind the two readings of Descartes offered by Foucault and Derrida there are also two readings of Heidegger. According to one, the gesture of obliteration inherent to the forgetting of Being, which marks a certain way of doing philosophy, occurs somewhere in the process of history, indeed making possible the account of history. According to the other, the forgetting of Being marks this history from one end to the other, constituting the ideal origin to which it incessantly returns as if to its ultimate condition of possibility. Hence the conclusion that the experience of madness cannot be included within the framework of a history in which its place would be presently marked, once and for all. Contrary to what Foucault claims, caught in a blatant historicism, there is no history of madness. The reading contained in Derrida’s presentation provoked cold anger in Foucault. We will not linger here on the very personal, even temperamental, aspects of this reaction, which heated the discussion until it became a stormy and rather stupid personal quarrel sustained by obscure resentments. What interests us is the core of the positions they defended, and the

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conceptions of the philosophical method they entail, which are clearly not the same for Foucault and Derrida. This is the difference we need to better understand in order to gauge the consequences. In response to Derrida’s analysis, Foucault wrote “My Body, This Paper, This Fire,” which he included as the second appendix in the 1972 edition of the History of Madness published in Gallimard’s Bibliothèque des idées series. In this text Foucault begins by specifying what, for him, constitutes the central issue of the debate: “Is it possible that there might be something anterior or exterior to philosophical discourse? Could it have its condition in an exclusion, a refusal, a risk eluded and, why not, in a fear? A suspicion Derrida rejects with passion. Pudenda origo (shameful origin!), said Nietzsche of religious people and their religion” (MB 556/584). Foucault means that, in affirming that classical reason developed from this “gesture” through which madness is in theory rejected from its order, and in practice confined within the walls of the institution of the General Hospital, he deliberately sought to attack the supposedly sacrosanct purity of the philosophical act. He had done so by assigning a nonphilosophical prerequisite to the philosophical act, a prerequisite not, or not only, of the order of ideas. This, however, is precisely what would have given Derrida pause. Foucault places Derrida in the rather inglorious position of gatekeeper. He is presented as a religious mind, profoundly shocked and outraged by the suspicion brought against the integrity of philosophical discourse, an integrity that he himself would have, backtracking, attempted to reestablish. In other words, Foucault responds tit for tat. Against the reproach that he historicized philosophical thought by rejecting it or placing it on the outside, Foucault suggests that it is Derrida who maintains the traditional positions of philosophia perennis. This must be what made Derrida so reticent both to put the arguments of philosophers into historical perspective, and to associate those arguments with “gestures” linked to decisional stances whose consequences are not only theoretical but also practical, for they are inscribed, as if carved in stone, in the walls of the institution that make these positions concrete. Having established this much, and cut to the quick by Derrida’s accusation that he carelessly skimmed through the Meditations, Foucault comes back to Descartes’s text. He refers to the original Latin edition, which he had blithely ignored on the occasion of his first reading. He takes pleasure in remarking in passing that Derrida did not even notice that some of his

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interpretations pertain to additions in the French translation by the Duc of Luynes, carried away as he was by his care to mobilize Descartes’s text in its entirety. And Foucault now proposes a detailed analysis with an eye to supporting his articulation of the relationship between the argument pertaining to dreams and that pertaining to madness. Derrida had opposed the habitual and common nature of the experience of dreams, thus universalized, to the exceptional and factual nature of the experience of madness. The latter is a distinctive experience from which it is impossible to draw any significant consequences concerning the very status of reason. Reason is thus in the end more shaken by the muted threat that dreams permanently embody than by the occasional danger, however noisy, that madness represents. Yet, Foucault observes, the problem is not whether this difference can be measured in terms of statistical frequency or intensity, as if that would suffice to endow it with an objective value. One would then risk missing the singularity of the experience of madness and thus missing what makes it of greater interest. Granted, the experience of dreaming is an “intimate” one, insofar as each and every one must acknowledge that it is possible to have it at any moment. But it is precisely the proximity of dreaming which confirms that it belongs to the same domain as reason. It confirms the reality and scope of this domain in its own way because “I think, therefore I am,” which also means “I doubt, therefore I am,” could also be “I dream (and doubt whether or not I am doing so), therefore I am”: However much [the dream] modifies the meditating subject on this matter, it does not prevent him, at the very heart of this stupor, from continuing to meditate, and to meditate in a valid fashion, and to see clearly a number of things or principles despite the indistinction, however profound it might be, between sleeping and his waking state . . . : even transformed into a ‘subject supposed to be dreaming’, the meditating subject can pursue, in a sure fashion, the path of his doubt. (MB 559/587)

This is what separates the mad person from the dreamer: the dreamer continues to doubt, or continues to be able to do so, and in any case prepares himself to do so, while the mad person is forever prevented from doubting. One thinks; the other does not. This is why I can always doubt whether or not I am dreaming but I cannot doubt if I am mad. Being mad means being

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deprived of one’s means to doubt. Consequently, if I am not mad, I am necessarily led to conceiving the experience of madness as something unthinkable. Barring a radical challenge to my nature as a thinking being, madness can never happen to me and is therefore utterly foreign to me. The dreamer might be me, but the madman must perforce be the other, as the interjection in Descartes’s text eloquently conveys, “But those people are insane!” Who? Isti, “them,” those ones over there, but definitely not me. One can feign to be dreaming, but one cannot feign madness. Either one is mad and one does not know it, or one is not, which one knows with firm conviction. In saying “I am lying,” one falls into insoluble paradoxes that are in the end comparable to those linked to saying “I am dreaming.” But saying “I am mad” is just impossible. To be mad is to be excluded from the perspective of the person who is in a position to see himself as thinking or as a thinking person and is thus able to affirm “I am.” Literally, I cannot think I am mad because madness prevents any kind of thinking. At least this is the point of view Descartes adopts, and so he is exemplary of the position defended by classical rationality. This renders madness a limit state, a frontier beyond which one is out of the game, insofar as the conditions necessary to exercise thought have entirely been suspended and abolished. This is why it is not permissible to place the two experiences of dreams and madness along the same line, and to claim, as Derrida does, that one is a hyperbole of the other, that dreams constitute a sort of madness that is incorporated into the order of reason and contests or destroys this order from the inside. For, being of a completely different nature, these two experiences are irreducible to one another. Foucault notes that this explains Descartes’s move when he seeks to characterize madness. To characterize madness as truly the unthinkable, in the sense not only of what cannot be thought but also of what should not be thought, of what must be forbidden, and what one must forbid oneself to think in order to guarantee and preserve the power of thought, Descartes moves from a constative or explicative terminology of a medical nature (which presents mad people as insani or “senseless”) to a normative and prescriptive terminology of a judicial nature (which presents them as amentes or dementes, deprived of or relieved from the exercise of reason of which they are deemed incapable, and in a way unworthy): “But when Descartes wishes not to characterize madness, but to affirm that I should not take my example from the mad, he employs the terms demens and amens,

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terms that are legal before being medical, and which designate a whole category of people who are incapable of certain religious, civil and legal acts” (MB 559/590). We are thus dealing with a legal disqualification, an institutional one. It expels madness before banning it, whereas it is not possible to ban someone from dreaming or even to contemplate doing so. Hence, again, the exclusion of madness: “Madness is excluded by the subject who doubts, in order that he may qualify himself as a doubting subject” (MB 561/592). We can thus see that Foucault’s new reading of Descartes’s text entirely confirms, and even reinforces, the conclusions reached previously. From his point of view, these conclusions need not be questioned or even nuanced. Madness in the classical age is indeed what excludes reason, which in turn entails that reason excludes madness. It thus constitutes reason’s condition of possibility as a “historical a priori,” the exclusion, both ideal and material, of madness. From this we can rightly conclude that the General Hospital is its visible image and institutional representation, the material symbol of a certain order of rationality that is neither timeless nor eternal. Having provided this confirmation, Foucault finally moves to more general considerations regarding the mode of enunciation specific to “the meditation,” the form chosen by Descartes to present his concept of the thinking subject. Seen in this light, Descartes’s text no longer appears as an academic lecture, a mere survey of ideas and arguments. It presents itself instead as the site of production of “discursive events,” a concept to which Foucault gives great importance and whose implications he elaborates on in The Archaeology of Knowledge and in “The Discourse on Language.” In what sense does meditation constitute a mode of discourse that produces an event? It does so in that it articulates two regimes of enunciation. The first is inherent to a demonstrative procedure that depends for its rigor on following a certain number of formal rules, as does any sort of reasoning insofar as it aims for absolute certainty—Martial Gueroult’s reading strictly adheres to that aspect. On a very different level is the second regime of enunciation, which corresponds to a practical disposition, as Ferdinand Alquié asserts. This is consistent with the establishment of a habitus, which pursues the objective, not of producing truths, but of bringing about a certain number of transformations in the subject for whom these truths are intended. These transformations render him, by way of the meditation, a subject of truth. This is a subject entirely invested in the

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reality of what it is thinking, a reality it can assimilate to what constitutes it in its being as a thinking and meditating thing. Ten years later, in his lecture of March 3, 1982 (2nd hour), in The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Foucault takes up this analysis again, showing how the Cartesian practice of meditation effects a resurgence of ancient wisdom and of its “spiritual exercises” that is not a game the subject plays with his own thought or thoughts, but a game that thought performs on the subject himself. . . . this idea of meditation, not as the game the subject plays with his thought but as the game thought plays on the subject, is basically exactly what Descartes was still doing in the Meditations, and is indeed precisely the meaning he gave to ‘meditation.’ So a history of this practice of meditation should be undertaken: meditation in Antiquity; meditation in early Christianity; its resurgence, and anyway its new importance and dramatic rise in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But in any case, when Descartes performs ‘meditations’ and writes his Meditations in the seventeenth century, he does so in this sense. It does not involve a game the subject plays with his thoughts. Descartes is not thinking about everything in the world that could be doubted. Let’s say that this is the usual skeptical exercise. Descartes puts himself in the position of the subject who doubts everything, without even wondering about everything that could be doubtful or what could be doubted. And he puts himself in the situation of someone setting out in search of the indubitable. This, then, is not at all an exercise carried out on thought and its content. It is an exercise by which, through thought, the subject puts himself in a certain situation. (HES 357–358/340–341)

In other words, meditation is an experience of thought that requires the bracketing of any thought content. Thought is no longer considered as content or as having a content, that is, as having one or several objects, and is instead approached in its very form as thought, insofar as it is thought that refers not to an object but to a subject that thinks. This turn back on the self, undertaken by means of meditation, creates the conditions for becoming a subject of truth. In order to demonstrate the difference between these two regimes of enunciation, one specific to the demonstrative procedure and the other specific to the practical disposition, we could employ terminology borrowed

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from the works of Austin and Searle, and say that the former is constative and the latter performative. In placing ourselves at the first level, we give an intellectual meaning to the statement “I am a thinking thing.” In placing ourselves at the second, we transpose this statement to a practical and existential level while giving ourselves the means to in fact become a meditating thing. Thus, the cogito is not only the theoretical revelation through which we recognize ourselves as a thinking thing; it is also the effective operation through which “I” concretely render myself a thinking thing, that is, a subject of truth. In offering this interpretation, Foucault to a certain extent parallels the performative reading of the cogito undertaken by Jaakko Hintikka. This explains why Descartes prescribes for the exercise of meditation a certain number of prerequisites to prepare it and render it possible (and from this point of view, the meditation is not unlike the spiritual exercises of Ignatius of Loyola). These prerequisites are to have a mature enough mind, to be free of pains and passions, to have ensured a peaceful retirement, and so on. Without these the machine producing discursive events— the Cartesian text—does not work. It cannot function to make subjects of truth. However, among these prerequisites, one is essential: to be of a sound mind, potentially reasonable, in other words, to be in no way mad. Descartes can envisage writing in a way such that he is read even by women, but he cannot concede that he might be read by the mad. Indeed, as we already saw, a mad person cannot meditate, since he lacks all the dispositions required to become a subject of truth. Conversely, the experience of dreaming is perfectly adapted to the initiatory path of meditation, constituting a driving element of it, or at the very least one of its steps. We could, for instance, imagine that it might be in the interest of the subject of the cogito to practice dreaming. He might be encouraged to do so as by a surrealist poet in order to develop his disposition to doubt. Didn’t Alquié bring together in his own person André Breton and Descartes? Dreams are within the field occupied by meditation, right in its center, while madness must be outside. Madness is thus excluded from meditation, not only in theory, as we have seen, but also in practice. According to Foucault, by reinstating madness within the field of meditation by means of dreams (here interpreted as a hyperbolic exasperation of madness), Derrida thus does not want to see what lies outside this field. He does not want to see what this field must exclude in giving itself the outside it needs in order to itself exist. In doing so, he brings in a certain way all of Descartes’s discourse back to the level of the enunciative regime

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of demonstrative theoretical argumentation, without taking into account the other regime, the practical regime of enunciation through which the subject of truth effectively constitutes itself. He does not understand that if dreaming is an integral part of doubt and determines its progression, so too is the rejection of madness. This rejection constitutes the unthought of this thought, not in the sense that it is incapable of grasping it intellectually. This it does all too well. Rather thought needs to produce this unthought, which is very different from grasping it. It produces it through an act whose effects occur not inside the order of thought, but outside this order. Hence, to interpret the hypothesis of the Evil Genius as a characteristic of rational madness, and thus as an integral part of the order of reason that tucks it toward the inside, is to “remove from Descartes’s texts themselves everything which shows that the episode of the evil genius is a voluntary exercise, controlled, mastered, and carried out from beginning to end by a meditating subject who never allows himself to be surprised” (MB 575/601). It is thus to mistake the games of understanding, which take place within, for those of the will, which take place with an eye to the outside, a real outside that the inside needs, and which, if necessary, it projects from itself, to affirm itself as inside. One might consider that the meditating subject who adopts the hypothesis of the Evil Genius is someone who acts the fool [fait le fou], acting as if mad. The “as if ” allows for the leeway separating the one who acts the fool, and in order to do so must not be mad, from the truly mad person. The latter is quite incapable of pretending anything, not because he does not naturally have the means to do so, but because historically we have deprived him of these means by confining him to a place where there is no room to pretend. This is why “the evil genius takes over the power of madness, but only after the exercise of meditation has excluded the risk of being mad” (MB 576/601). In other words, as History of Madness maintained from the start, a specific decision must have been taken and put into practice, a decision to exclude, an exclusion that has, so to speak, befallen the mad. In this way, the risk of going mad is excluded for those who are not the victims of this exclusion. This makes possible the discourse of meditation, with its two regimes of enunciation that complement each other in a certain way. They jointly maintain, albeit in two different languages, the necessary theoretical and practical divide of reason and madness constituted as unreason.

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Derrida did not wish to answer Foucault. When, many years after the latter’s death, in 1991, he agreed to participate in a commemoration of the publication of History of Madness during a session organized by the International Society for the History of Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis held at the Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris—how symbolic!—a session opened by Georges Canguilhem, he chose to speak of something else. Of course it is impossible to put ourselves in his place. But it is not very difficult to imagine the sort of answer he could have given Foucault, had he agreed to continue this discussion that, in the turn Foucault gave to it, had hurt him. He would have refused as logocentric, logocratic, perhaps even phallogocratic, any neat separation, be it by means of history, between the inside and the outside, insisting that they must always remain as indissolubly entangled as the two regimes of enunciation. Foucault is probably right to emphasize the practical dimension of philosophical discourse that cannot be reduced to uncoiling theoretical arguments along the chains of reason. But he yields to the temptation of a naive positivism when he interprets this dimension in terms of a radical exteriority produced institutionally. This amounts to yet another reenactment of the duality of the mind and the body, of idea and matter. Cartesian rationality does present a penal side. But it constructs its prison within its own order. It is a rational undertaking that sets itself rules and is frightened by the possibility of straying from them, a possibility that is integral to it. To maintain that classical reason has its mad people, and needs them in order to proclaim itself rational, is a superficial view of its reality which distracts attention from its profound reality, namely that it is itself completely mad. This madness is inscribed in the very letter of reason’s discourse, as the latter is in a position of excess in relation to itself, carrying its outside most profoundly inside. And the truly mad are the philosophers who, by a sort of trick that their own madness plays, believe it possible or want not to be mad. They practice the denial of their own madness by thrusting it back onto others as they cry, “But those people are insane!”

n ot e

This chapter originally appeared as Pierre Macherey, Querelles cartésiennes (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2014), 33–54. We thank Presses Universitaires du Septentrion very warmly for their generous permission to publish this excerpt, and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, New York City, for funding this translation.

2

Looking Back at History of Madness 

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A long time ago I made use of documents like these for a book. If I did so back then, it was doubtless because of the resonance I still experience today when I happen to encounter these lowly lives reduced to ashes in the few sentences that struck them down. m i c h e l f o u c a u lt , “Lives of Infamous Men”

since Derrida’s “Cogito and the History of Madness” triggered a philosophical quarrel whose reverberations still haunt us. But why concern ourselves today with what many regard as a debate whose moment has passed? I want to ask: In knowing the debate so well, have we passed something over?1 Have we really read the strange histoire—history and story—that compelled Derrida to “start to speak” (CH 32/52) in the first place? Michel Foucault’s History of Madness was first published in French in 1961 as Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique by a then unknown author. When Derrida responded to the book in his 1963 lecture, he spoke as a former student, as an “admiring and grateful disciple” who had finally decided to “break the glass, or better the mirror” of his master’s “interiorized” reflection (CH 31–32/51–52).2 Has the thrall of a dissension that helped catapult both master and disciple into fame come at the cost of actually reading the book that was the debate’s occasion? How are we to read, post-Derrida, the master’s massive, delirious text? Can we read it not as ventriloquists of a dead exchange, but as thinkers of the present? What

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would it mean to read the book on its own terms: as an early practice of that form of history-writing Foucault later called genealogy? And what are the stakes of that reading? a h i s to ry o f no nre ad i ng

My insistence that we actually read History of Madness, rather than comment on its commentaries, responds to the history of a certain nonreading in the Anglophone world. Indeed, Jean Khalfa begins his 2006 introduction to the first full English translation of the book with the assessment that “Foucault’s History of Madness has yet to be read” (HM xiii). Foucault himself complained that no one read it, despite its favorable reception by luminaries such as Blanchot, Barthes, Canguilhem, Dumézil, and the Annales School historians Mandrou and Braudel. Although the nonreading claim appears, at first glance, to be hyperbolic, it is supported by certain historical facts regarding the book’s translation. Crucially, by the mid-1960s its reception among Anglophone readers was shaped— and in many cases still is—by its severe abridgment to less than half its original length as Madness and Civilization.3 Historians in particular have long criticized Madness for its factual inaccuracies, its generalizations, and its romantic conception of a voice of madness freed from the archive. Contra these critiques, Colin Gordon has argued that many of these perceived flaws are due to distortions produced by the abridged translation. The result, Gordon claims in 1990, is a History of Madness that is paradoxically both “famous” and “unknown.”4 Those distortions of a still “famous” and “unknown” book have some bearing on the tradition of nonreading I take up here. I say “nonreading” in the context of the debate because the original French passages critiqued by Derrida were not included in the English translation that served Foucault’s Anglophone public for over four decades. In other words, until the very recent complete English translation of History of Madness in 2006, the debate’s actual sources, in their original context, have not been accessible in English. This is odd, to say the least. Even more odd is the fact that, as Gordon points out, Foucault himself was responsible for the abridgments and, in particular, a series of specific elisions directly related to Derrida’s critique. More oddly still, the specificity of those elisions has received scant notice in the massive commentary on the exchange.

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In fact, Foucault excised from the original text all the key passages taken up by Derrida in his 1963 lecture. Those excisions included several pages from the 1961 preface, which contained sections I will address later about writing a history of madness itself and the double impossibility of that writing. Even more crucially, Foucault cut the three pages on Descartes at the beginning of chapter 2, “The Great Confinement,” that constitute what Derrida calls his “point of departure” and in which, he says, “Foucault’s entire project can be pinpointed” (CH 32/52); this is the claim in Derrida’s reading to which Foucault will respond in his 1972 essay, “My Body, This Paper, This Fire.”5 Finally, Foucault removed all but two paragraphs of the ten pages on Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew at the beginning of Part Three of the original text, mentioned by Derrida in the “Cogito” essay and revisited by him at length after Foucault’s death in “To Do Justice to Freud.” One might regard Foucault’s editorial suppressions of these Derridean passages as a tactical move on his part: less a play against Derrida, perhaps, than a trap set for Derrida’s future champions, readers-to-come whose disregard for the debate’s most important source is performatively enacted by Foucault’s cuts. Foucault would have enjoyed the irony of such nonreadings in a quarrel whose Derridean stakes are the importance of reading texts. Indeed, those critical acts of nonreading drive home one of History of Madness’s most salient political points, reiterated in Foucault’s 1972 response: that the juridical, archival exclusion of madness passes imperceptibly beneath the radar of reason’s history.6 r e a di n g h i s to ry o f m ad ne s s to day

How, then, might we reread—as a document in a debate whose time has passed—the text called History of Madness? And what are the stakes of that genealogical reading now? In Mad for Foucault, I argued that in a postqueer age, History of Madness offers untapped resources for rethinking sexuality and deviance in Foucault in ways that the more widely read The History of Sexuality (1976) cannot.7 Specifically, Foucault’s early “archeology of  .  .  . silence” (HMP xxviii/188) is also, avant la lettre, a genealogy of the disciplinary production of deviant individuals, a production whose mechanisms Foucault will analyze more extensively in his later work. As Foucault explains at the end of The History of Sexuality: “Through a reversal that doubtless had its surreptitious beginnings long ago . . . we have arrived

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at the point where we expect our intelligibility to come from what was for many centuries thought of as madness” (HS 156/206). This sentence condenses the six-hundred-plus-page story History of Madness tells about the transformation of “madness” into “our [sexual] intelligibility”: what was once madness is now reason; what was once unintelligible is now the inner truth we can tell about ourselves.8 This sexual take on History of Madness speaks directly to my concerns about the debate and its aftermath. For what are the stakes of Madness, really—not only for Derrida but for two generations after him—if not the problem of making “madness itself ” speak? And isn’t that problem directly related to the ruse of the repressive hypothesis Foucault exposes in The History of Sexuality? Isn’t the problem of crazy talk also the problem of sex talk, what Foucault calls the modern compulsion to put sex into discourse? And doesn’t Foucault consistently show that both forms of seemingly irrational speech are the products of a rational order that objectifies, measures, and distributes madness within a biopolitical dispositif? I want to return to History of Madness as a textual resource in the history of a debate; specifically, I approach History of Madness as a contestation of an “event . . . in the Western world”: “the advent of a ratio” (HM 47/58). Revisiting the archives that are the residue of that event, Madness is an intervention into the ratio’s project—historical, psychiatric, or philosophical— to make madness speak. My reading questions the ubiquitous philosophical critiques of Madness that fail to consider its archival force; it offers a different way to apprehend its stakes. Those stakes include not just the violence of meanings arrested by thought, but a juridical violence whose conjuring exclusions form the silent, objective ground of our knowledge. Let me begin, then, with a famous section from Foucault’s 1961 preface—a kind of “smoking gun” passage—that has supported countless readings of Madness as a romantic celebration of madness itself: This structure of the experience of madness, which is history through and through, but whose seat is at its margins, where its decisions are made, is the object of this study. Which means that it is not at all a history of knowledge, but of the rudimentary movements of an experience. A history not of psychiatry, but of madness itself, in all its vivacity, before it is captured by knowledge. (HMP xxxii/192)

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Derrida begins his critique of Foucault by citing key phrases from this passage. This, Derrida says, “is the maddest aspect” (CH 34/56) of Foucault’s project: that he “attempted . . . to write a history of madness itself. Itself. Of madness itself. That is, by letting madness speak for itself ” (CH 33/55–56). I want to note, in passing, the slippage in Derrida between Foucault’s original phrase—“A history not of psychiatry, but of madness itself ”—and Derrida’s elaboration of it through the use of italics, repetition, and, most important, an additional sentence that appears to repeat Foucault: “That is, by letting madness speak for itself.” That sentence, in fact, cannot be found in Foucault’s text. What we can find, a few pages later, is Foucault’s claim that “the most important part of this work is the place I have left to the text itself of the archives” (HMP xxxv/194, translation modified).9 I will show here, in both a close reading of the 1961 passage Derrida cites and, more important, a reading of some of the book’s archival sources, that Foucault is not attempting to resuscitate some essential, primordial voice of madness itself. Rather, already in 1961 Foucault writes and thinks as a genealogist whose task is to “record the singularity of events . . . and to define . . . the point of their lacuna, the moment when they did not take place [n’ont pas eu lieu].”10 Put simply, History of Madness’s archival task is to give a place, as story, to those madness-events that have had no place in the ratio’s history. But first a reading of the 1961 passage cited above. The passage’s context is that of a preface whose function is primarily to guide the imagined readers of a book whose ostensible object is a “history of madness.” This seemingly straightforward phrase, found in the subtitle, might easily give the impression that “the object of this study” will be a history of the knowledge—psychiatry, specifically—that has been elaborated around the object madness. But this initial impression would be misleading. It would be more appropriate, Foucault writes, to approach the book as a study of “the structure of an experience”: not a linguistic structure, but a historical one “whose seat is,” paradoxically, at that structure’s “margins [confins]” (HMP xxxii/192).11 This “experience,” Foucault suggests, does not reside outside of history (it “is,” after all, “history through and through”), but on the very border that tells us what history is, the very border that constitutes the experience of madness as limit, exclusion, or confinement (as the original French “confins” suggests). Indeed, Foucault will later describe those confins in epistemic terms as the margins that both delimit us and make

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our present strange: “the border of time that surrounds our presence, which overhangs it, and which indicates it in its otherness” (AK 130/179). Importantly, here in the early pages of History of Madness Foucault introduces what he will later call the historical a priori—a conception of history-writing as an experience whose seat is a place of “rupture” (AK 9/17, translation modified)12—where events did not happen because they have had no place, except as the non-lieu of history’s margins. Located, as it is, on a “border of time” that “deprives us of our continuities” (AK 130–131/ 179–180), that experience of history is an experience of madness. From that perspective, the history of madness “it is not at all a history of knowledge, but of the rudimentary movements of an experience” (HMP xxxii/192, emphasis added). What, then, are we to make of the next difficult sentence that so astounded Derrida: “A history not of psychiatry, but of madness itself . . . ”? Unlike the previous declarative sentence (“it is . . . ”), the “madness itself ” sentence is not a proposition; in fact, it is not a sentence at all. Rather, it is a sentence fragment without a subject or a verb. What is the status of that headless fragment? It is, at best, a deauthorized, stuttering proposition whose claim to truth remains ambiguous. The dubious authority of the claim is reinforced by the impersonal conditional of the verb in the following sentence: “Il faudrait” (“it would be necessary”), translated into English as “we need to.” “We need to strain our ears, and bend down toward this murmuring of the world” (HMP xxxii/192). This murmuring, or marmonnement,13 perhaps better translated as “mumbling,” might appear at first glance as a primordial voice of madness—madness itself—“before it is captured by knowledge” (HMP xxxii/192). But, Foucault continues, to “perceive” that “before” is “a doubly impossible task” (HMP xxxii/192) 1. because it would require the imposition of temporal order onto a materiality (“dust” and “words”) “that nothing anchors in time” (HMP xxxii/192) and 2. because that seemingly primordial murmuring or mumbling of the world is the post facto result of an act of confinement that retrospectively creates a “before” that would ground it. Again, we must pay attention to that act, we will remember from the previous paragraph, not for the knowledge it brings, but for what it reveals about a structure of exclusion that is not only philosophical and linguistic—as it is in Derrida’s Cartesian reading—but also historical and experiential. And that “structure of experience” is historical in a specifically Foucauldian, archival sense: not as a historical totality, but as a “precarious” (AK 17/29) seat on the border of

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time that Foucault calls “this blank space from which I speak” (AK 17/29). The “otherness” of that border constitutes the very possibility of history even as it destabilizes the present in which the ratio’s histories find their “victory” and their “right to victory” (HMP xxviii/187). This reading of the “madness itself ” passage in the 1961 preface counters a pervasive view of a Foucauldian celebration of madness itself. Lois McNay’s comments in her otherwise perceptive feminist reading of Foucault are typical of the perspective I want to question: it was only after History of Madness, McNay writes, that “Foucault abandoned the attempt to recover an authentic experience of madness and acknowledged the philosophical impossibility of such a project.”14 As McNay’s reference to “the philosophical impossibility of such a project” suggests, this typical assessment of madness in Foucault bears the marks of Derrida’s 1963 reading. As Colin Gordon puts it, Derrida’s account of Foucault’s “madness itself ” “is sufficiently tortuous as to have led more than one commentator to credit Foucault with the opposite of his real intention.”15 That “tortuous” reading of the Foucault passage I glossed above involves a linguistic argument about the pathos of Foucault’s recognition of “a difficulty” (CH 36/59) for madness in the face of logos. If the history of reason renders madness mute by excluding it from reason’s language, the “praise” of that silence “takes place within logos, the language of objectification” (CH 37/60). Thus, Derrida argues, the “silence of madness is not said . . . , but is indirectly, metaphorically, made present by its pathos” (CH 37/60). In Derrida’s reading, this “pathetic” (CH 33/55) making-present exposes yet another project in History of Madness “behind the admission of the difficulty concerning the archeology of silence” (CH 38/62): “the first dissension of logos against itself ” (CH 39/62) that is the classical “decision” to confine the mad. Derrida claims, in that regard, that Foucault’s attempt to write the history of that dissension—“the history of the decision, division, difference”—implies “the unity of an original presence” to be subsequently divided by a historically specific “event or a structure” (CH 40/65): the seventeenth-century Great Confinement, Descartes’s exclusion of the mad from the cogito. Foucault’s unacknowledged assumption of “the unity of an original presence” thus confirms, per Derrida, Foucault’s “metaphysics in its fundamental operation” (CH 40/65). But there is no original unity in Foucault. And despite the fact that Derrida adumbrates his original critique of such a unity—that Foucault

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attempts “to write a history of madness itself . . . by letting madness speak for itself ” (CH 33/56)—with a consideration of the “doubly impossible” passage and a turn to the problem of history, this subsequent, admittedly “tortuous” reading only intensifies the force of Derrida’s initial blow—a blow augmented by repetition and italics—against the totalizing foundations of History of Madness. In the end, Derrida paints Foucault as a metaphysician whose “structuralist totalitarianism” repeats “the violences of the classical age” (CH 57/88). Thus despite Derrida’s recognition of the genuine “difficulty” Foucault articulates with regard to madness’s silence, in the end he condemns Foucault for a “totalitarian” “metaphysics” that links “madness itself ” to “history itself ” (CH 42/67) as the shared “unity of an original presence” (CH 40/65). Most important, the circular structure of Derrida’s argument— whereby he begins with the claim that Foucault aims to restore to history a “madness itself ” excluded by Descartes, then loops back to Descartes and madness itself after an explicit critique of Foucault’s historicizing metaphysics—allows Derrida to telescope the entirety of Madness into its three explicitly Cartesian pages where, in Derrida’s reading, madness and historicity converge. In Derrida’s hands, “Foucault’s entire project can be pinpointed in [his] few allusive and somewhat enigmatic pages” (CH 32/52) on Descartes. This “pinpointing” abstraction—a bracketing move that reduces “the totality of this History of Madness” (CH 32/52)—to its noetic, philosophical essence, sets the stage for the nonreadings of History of Madness that characterize commentary on the debate. Indeed, Derrida’s pinpointing claim about these Cartesian pages— followed by an analysis of History of Madness almost exclusively devoted to a reading of Descartes—frames the subsequent string of ventriloquizing interpretations that catch Foucault naively celebrating a history of madness itself in the 1961 preface. John Frow’s analysis in Marxism and Literary History (1986) is typical of this move. “What Foucault attempts to do,” Frow writes, “is ‘to write a history of madness itself ’ (33).”16 I am less interested in the specifics of Frow’s argument here—one that is generally sympathetic to Foucault and critical of Derrida’s depoliticizing moves—than I am in Frow’s mechanical parroting of Derrida’s assertion, as if it were Foucault’s, that Foucault attempts “to write a history of madness itself.” In similar fashion, Alan Megill writes that “Foucault proposes to write a history ‘not of psychiatry, but of madness itself, in its vivacity, before any capture by

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knowledge.’”17 Lois McNay, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Ian Hacking, and myriad others make the same claim about the book.18 What all these readings share is both a nonreading of the sentences that follow about the double impossibility of writing madness and, more important, a nonreading of the book’s archival textures. read the book

Although readers across the disciplines have taken up this cliché about History of Madness’s attempt to make madness speak, the original Derridean critique of “madness itself” is explicitly philosophical. In that light, I frame this section with a focus on the difference between Derrida’s philosophical argumentation about a cogito that “is valid even if I am mad” (CH 55/85) and Foucault’s archival approach to a juridical exclusion that invalidates the mad. In doing so, I offer support to Colin Gordon’s charge “that it is strictly impossible to find in Foucault’s book anything remotely resembling a ‘history of madness itself. ’”19 This is not to dismiss the power and complexity of Derrida’s dazzling readings of Western philosophy. Those readings constitute, one might say, a remarkable Cartesian demonstration whose exemplary logic of systematic doubt is difficult to refute. But for all the conceptual elegance and logical validity of Derrida’s doubts and corresponding claims, his own textual cuts into Foucault’s text speak volumes about nonreading: he devotes twenty pages of a thirtythree-page essay to a philosophical interpretation of three philosophical pages of the more than six hundred pages in Foucault’s archival histoire. This alone is not a reason to condemn that reading, but it is worth asking about the stakes of Derrida’s conceptual condensation of a text that is replete with the traces of poetry, story-telling, visual art, legends, myths, theater, and, most important, the archives of confinement. In a direct refutation of Foucault’s original claim that the cogito excludes the possibility of its own madness, Derrida’s demonstration of the cogito’s madness misses the practical, experiential point of Foucault’s text. Again, as Foucault makes clear in his response to Derrida, the focus of Madness’s story of exclusion is less philosophical than it is “juridical” (MB 559/590, translation modified). Or to put it once more in the terms we’ve seen, it is not about “a history of knowledge” but “an experience” (HMP xxxii/192) of exclusion that is ethical and political. Far from the experience of a cogito that is “valid”

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in its madness, the experiences Foucault describes are “disqualifying” (MB 559/590) ones that deprive subjects of their status not only as thinkers but as citizens of a polis and as members of a culture. As Foucault puts it, citing a line from René Char’s 1948 poem “Suzerain” (“Lord”) from Fureur et mystère (Furor and Mystery): “all he had was the morose list of the prisons he had served in.”20 Foucault’s insistence on the subject’s practical experience of exclusion here highlights an important lesson about his methods as a thinker. Foucault’s primary aim in History of Madness and throughout his work is not the logical demonstration of the validity of his truth claims. Indeed, such demonstrations would serve to secure the “merciless” (HM xxvii/187) legitimacy of reason’s “sovereign violence” (HM 339/360). Rather, Foucault writes from the precarious, ruptured place of the archives in order to be transformed: the experience of madness that is the object of his study is, in part, the account of his own experience as a thinker of madness conducted from a place “on the margins” of both history and philosophy, on the border of a rationalist culture whose violences are justified by self-reinforcing procedures of legitimation. That archival experience of thinking madness transforms Foucault, not by allowing him to “know” madness, and not through an opposition or refutation of reason, but through a material encounter with the unstable, material grounds (“dust” and “words” [HMP xxxii/192]) of a justification of exclusion that is historically shifting and contingent. It is an attempt to think, not madness itself or history itself, but “the relationship of a culture to the very thing that it excludes”21 written from the unstable border space of that exclusion. To speak from that space on exclusion’s margins is not to invoke a metaphysical substance called “madness itself.” Nor is it to indulge in what Ian Hacking calls a “romantic fantasy”22 about a “purer, truer madness”23 that predates the classical incarceration of the mad. It is, rather, to take seriously events of juridical exclusion and how those events leave traces in the archive. So let me consider, briefly, this question of the archive and what it means to say that Foucault is not a propositional but an archival thinker. How can we reread History of Madness, not as a Derridean text whose philosophical pillars include the Greeks, Descartes, Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger, but as an archival thinking without pillars? How can that rereading reframe our sense not only of the book’s stakes but also of the post-Derridean cliché that Foucault wants to give voice to the silence of madness? How

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might Foucault’s directives regarding historicity and the archive—both in History of Madness and in later texts—shift the terms of the debate away from a Derridean, philosophical focus on the generalization of madness as différance (see CH 62/96) to a Foucauldian, genealogical focus on exclusions that are both historically specific and repeated: events that are both singular and recursive?24 fou ca u lt’s arc h i val th i nk i ng

In the 1961 preface, Foucault avers that a focus on the “doubly impossible” task of writing a history of “madness itself ” distracts us from the book’s real task: to trace a “historical ensemble—notions, institutions, juridical and police measures, scientific concepts—which hold captive a madness whose wild state can never be reconstituted” (HMP xxxiii/192). As in the earlier 1961 passage, it is worth noting here that the “wild state” of madness Foucault describes is not a primordial origin but, rather, the product of a perception. As Foucault puts it in the previous paragraph: “any perception that aims to apprehend [the “dust” and “words” of madness] in their wild state necessarily belongs to a world that has captured them already” (HMP xxxii/192, emphasis added). Foucault could not be more clear that the perception of a primordial madness is produced by gestures of confinement that leave behind “dust” and “words,” fragments of materiality that appear, archivally, as a “historical ensemble.” Just as we find, in Madness’s opening paragraph, a medieval culture that “conjured up” leprosy as “a new incarnation of evil” (HM 3/13) to be exiled outside the city gates, so too in Foucault’s story about the classical age we find a “historical ensemble” that “conjures up” madness in order to exclude it. But how exactly does that “historical ensemble” appear? The “historical ensemble” takes shape in “the place” Foucault has left “to the text itself of the archives” (HMP xxxv/194, translation modified). That shape is dictated by Foucault’s primary sources, the “dust” and “words” he encountered in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, the Bibliothèque Nationale, and other archival sites. When we look at the details of those primary sources, we can see immediately that the archival “text itself ” is not the voice of “madness itself ” but, conversely, the voice of its captors. A simple list of Foucault’s sources, found in the Annexes of History of Madness, illustrates this point. We find there, for example, a 1676 brochure from the

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Hôpital Général where the mad were confined in the mid-seventeenth century; a 1657 edict by Louis XIV, declaring the establishment of the Hôpital Général for the confinement of the poor; the regulations and rules of order of that institution; a 1758 medical treatise on diseases of the mind (frenzy, mania, melancholy, and imbecility); a plan for a prison for the insane; recommended treatments for diseases of the mind; an inventory of the houses of confinement in Paris on the eve of the French Revolution; a 1765 reform treatise that separates help for the sick from confinement as punishment. Along the same lines, Foucault’s primary bibliography provides a snapshot of an archive whose breadth and complexity is impossible to summarize, from Vincent de Paul’s correspondence and sermons to medical texts in French, German, and Latin, to administrative tables, engineering texts on asylum ventilation, and the correspondence of a nineteenth-century police commissioner. So too in Madness’s pages, the interplay of narrative and footnotes offers a further display of the archives as the stuff of Foucault’s thinking. Foucault’s description of confinement for reasons of sexual deviance offers just one of thousands of examples of an archival method he will refine over the course of his life. Take “The Correctional World,” the chapter that follows “The Great Confinement,” where Foucault writes: For a period of nearly 150 years, the venereal were to be penned in side by side with the insane in a single enclosure, and the result was a certain stigma which for the modern consciousness was the sign of an obscure kinship, leading to similar fates within the same system of punishment. The notorious Petites-Maisons in the Rue de Sèvres in Paris was reserved more or less exclusively for the insane and the venereal, and this until the end of the eighteenth century. (HM 86/100)

A footnote to this passage gives details from manuscript 18606 in the Bibliothèque Nationale on Petites-Maisons expenditures, dated February 17, 1664: 500 poor and old people, 120 paupers with scabies, 100 paupers afflicted with the pox, and 80 insane paupers. This archival detail paves the way for a conceptual claim in the same paragraph about confinement as an act of ethical exclusion that binds together “sins of the flesh and faults committed against reason” (HM 86/100). This point about “a whole

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reorganisation of the ethical world” (HM 82/96) that binds madness to sexual promiscuity in the space of confinement builds on claims throughout History of Madness about confinement as a technique whose purpose was to bring “the lost back to the truth by moral constraints” (HM 97/113). Thus, Foucault writes, the Cartesian certainty that dissipates “error  .  .  . should be understood above all as a question of ethics” (HM 97/113). Correspondingly, in the Petites-Maisons paragraph, Foucault’s archival details about the confinement of the venereal with the mad record a decisive turn in the genealogy of modern sexuality as a moral problem. Foucault continues to elaborate this archival-conceptual weave about the ethics of sexuality on the following page with yet another set of documents. Here we find a 1726 judgment against one Etienne Benjamin Deschauffours, “declared guilty as charged of committing the crimes of sodomy” and “sentenced to be burnt alive in the Place de la Grève, his ashes to be scattered to the winds” (HM 87/101). The next sentence tells us the execution was carried out on the same day the judgment was rendered. A footnote specifies the provenance of the judgment’s text as the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, manuscript 10918, folio 173. Foucault then frames the judgment with a contextualizing claim: “This was one of the last capital punishments to be handed out in France for sodomy” (HM 87/101). A footnote to that sentence, gleaned from the memoirs of a Marquis d’Argenson, informs us that two peasants were burned the same day. The next sentence describes widespread indignation at the severity of Deschauffour’s punishment, with a footnoted reference to Voltaire’s entry on “Socratic Love” in his Dictionnaire philosophique. The sentence that follows presents a new reality of confinement for those found guilty of sodomy. Yet another footnote refers to fourteen dossiers—some four thousand cases in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal “devoted to these minor police matters” (HM 605/102) of sodomitical acts. Four sentences, four footnotes: Foucault’s writing here clearly demonstrates what it means to leave a place for “the text itself of the archives” (HMP xxxv/194, translation modified). These archives of confinement are clearly not the voice of madness itself but the traces left by the captors that created it. The case of the Petites-Maisons example is just one of many places where “the text itself of the archives” opens a space for conceptual reflection on how rationality and morality are historically linked; crucially, it offers an early glimpse of what Foucault will develop in his later genealogical claims

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about the repressive hypothesis and the compulsion to liberate sex by making it speak. Further, Foucault’s use of a line from Rameau’s Nephew as an epigraph to the Introduction of Part Three of History of Madness enlists Diderot in a genealogy that began with the Petites-Maisons’s accounting documents in an archive: “For them,” Diderot’s Nephew says, “I was the incarnation of the Petites-Maisons” (HM 343/363).25 Just as the Nephew functions as a dialectical pivot in Part Three of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,26 so too he marks a turning point in the story Foucault tells: at the historical turn that is the French Revolution, a once silent madness emerges to speak on a social stage.27 The Petites-Maisons details form the stuff of that story: a “historical ensemble” that reads police reports on sodomites together with the sublation of consciousness as Spirit in Hegel. So too with the passage on Deschauffours. Like Damiens at the beginning of Discipline and Punish, Deschauffours is one of those “last” figures in Foucault who serve as reverse emblems of what readers might expect: not symbols of past horrors—the rack, the scaffold, the smell of burning flesh—to be remediated by the progress of Enlightenment humanism, but the inverted figures of a deceptive liberation whose triumphal story masks what Foucault calls “the colonising reason of the Occident” (HMP xxx/189). As Foucault explains in the case of Deschauffours: “The moment when sodomites were being burnt for the last time was also the moment when ‘erudite libertinage’ and a whole culture of lyrical homosexuality that the Renaissance tolerated unquestioningly, began to disappear” (HM 88/102). What was once the punishment of a crime—sodomy—increasingly becomes the moral condemnation of an individual with specific characteristics. Foucault’s conceptual claim about “a new relation between love and unreason” (HM 88/103) following the Deschauffours passage can then be linked to The History of Sexuality’s challenge to the modern liberation of the homosexual through speech. History of Madness displays the archival textures out of which Foucault created the conceptual game we know as The History of Sexuality.

With this brief foray into the archives of History of Madness we gain some sense of what is missed in partial readings of the book. Foucault’s “text itself ” — “the text itself of the archives”— is not the trace of a linguistic

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system, but the material residue of juridical acts of exclusion that the cogito cannot see, especially through the rationalizing lens of a Derridean madness. If Derrida’s Cartesian cogito “is valid even if I am mad” (CH 55/85), no amount of philosophical maneuvering will alter the juridical invalidation of “these lowly lives reduced to ashes in the few sentences that struck them down:”28 the “sodomite monk”29 or the “oddball usurer”30 whose madness led their feeble minds “down unknown paths.”31 The accumulation of the traces of those disqualifying acts is the stuff of Foucault’s thinking: “My object is not language [le langage],” Foucault says in 1967, “but the archive, which is to say, the accumulated existence of discourses.”32 Far from celebrating a romantic madness, History of Madness tells the story of a violence—the quiet, faceless, administrative violence of a recording apparatus whose aim is “to survey the tiny universe of irregularities and unimportant disorders” for an “enormous documentary mass” that is “gathered into dossiers and archives.”33 These archives of reason’s violence are the groundless ground of Foucault’s thinking, not only in History of Madness, but in all of his work. When Derrida condemns Foucault for risking “the violence of a totalitarian and historicist style” (CH 57/88), he misses Foucault’s aim to track that other juridical, archival violence. A fifty-year tradition of repeating this condemnation demonstrates, as Gordon puts it, “a failure of basic critical understanding of what Histoire de la folie is actually about.”34 n ot e s

1. In the 1961 preface to History of Madness, Foucault writes: “In our time, the experience of madness is made in the calm of a knowledge which, through knowing it too much, passes it over” (HMP xxxiv/193). 2. For the original version of Derrida’s 1963 lecture, which was slightly revised for the 1967 collection, see Jacques Derrida, “Cogito et histoire de la folie,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 68, no. 4 (1963): 460–494. For analyses of those revisions in the context of the end of the Algerian War that are relevant to my focus on the archive here, see Edward Baring, “Liberalism and the Algerian War: The Case of Jacques Derrida,” Critical Inquiry 36, no. 2 (2010): 239–261, and Lynne Huffer, “Un-Archiving Algeria: Foucault, Derrida, and Spivak,” in Unarchived Histories: The “Mad” and the “Trifling” in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, ed. Gyanendra Pandey (New York: Routledge, 2014), 159–178. 3. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Random House, 1965).

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4. Colin Gordon, “Histoire de la folie: An Unknown Book by Michel Foucault,” History of the Human Sciences 3, no. 1 (1990): 3. 5. Foucault included “My Body, This Paper, This Fire” (the revised version of “Reply to Derrida,” which had appeared in the journal Paideia 104 (1972): 131–147, after his 1972 Tokyo lecture) as an appendix to the 1972 edition of his original book, Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), although more recent French printings do not include this appendix. 6. Foucault specifies the differences between the medical (insani) and juridical (demens, amentes) terms for madness in Descartes’s original Latin. “Insanus,” Foucault writes, “is a term of characterization; amens and demens are disqualifying terms” (MB 559/ 590). 7. Lynne Huffer, Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 8. This reversal of madness into reason over the course of three centuries is a function of the tripartite temporal structure through which reason and madness emerge out of the unintelligible background or fond Foucault calls unreason in History of Madness. For a detailed analysis of the complex temporality of unreason, see Lynne Huffer, “Foucault’s Evil Genius,” in Foucault Now: Current Perspectives in Foucault Studies, ed. James D. Faubion (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), 52–70. Importantly, in his critique of “madness itself ” in History of Madness, Derrida fails to distinguish between unreason and madness. 9. The published translation reads: “Perhaps, to my mind, the most important part of this work is the space I have left to the texts of the archives themselves.” Although more elegant than a literal rendering, the English version inaccurately translates “la place” as “space” and also distorts the emphatic singularity of “le texte même” in the French original: “Et peut-être la partie, à mes yeux, la plus importante de ce travail est-elle la place que j’ai laissée au texte même des archives” (emphasis added). 10. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire” [1971], Dits et écrits, 2 vols. (Paris: Quarto Gallimard, 2001), 1:1004, translation mine. 11. The French original reads: “Cette structure de l’expérience de la folie, qui est tout entière de l’histoire, mais qui siège à ses confins, et là où elle se décide, fait l’objet de cette étude.” 12. The English translation of “cette rupture” as “this discontinuity” loses the force of the passage. 13. Van Kelly argues, convincingly in my view, that Foucault draws the term “marmonnement” from a title in René Char’s Poèmes des deux années (1955). See Van Kelly, “Passages beyond the Resistance: René Char’s ‘Seuls demeurent’ and Its Harmonics in Semprun and Foucault,” SubStance 32, no. 3 (2003): 125. 14. Lois McNay, Foucault: A Critical Introduction (New York: Continuum, 1994), 40. 15. Gordon, “Histoire de la folie,” 20. 16. John Frow, Marxism and Literary History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 215. 17. Alan Megill, “Foucault, Structuralism, and the End of History,” Journal of Modern History 51 (1979): 478.

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18. See Lois McNay, Foucault; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313; and Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). 19. Gordon, “Histoire de la folie,” 20. 20. Cited in HMP xxxii/192, modified translation from René Char, “Suzerain/Lord,” trans. Jackson Mathews, in René Char: Selected Poems, ed. Mary Ann Caws and Tina Jolas (New York: New Directions, 1992), 51. 21. Michel Foucault, “Madness, the Absence of an Oeuvre,” HM 542. Originally published in 1964 (La table ronde 196: 11–21) and included as appendix 1 in the 1972 French edition of History of Madness, this essay reworks the 1961 preface removed by Foucault from the 1972 edition. 22. Hacking, Historical Ontology, 7. 23. Ibid. 24. An explanation of the complex temporality of Foucault’s histories is beyond the scope of this essay. For a detailed analysis of time in History of Madness that engages Foucault’s debate with Derrida, see Huffer, “Foucault’s Evil Genius.” 25. For a detailed analysis of this epigraph, see Huffer, Mad for Foucault, 204–205. 26. See G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 317–318. 27. As Foucault writes in “The Great Confinement”: “Madness is placed in a zone of exclusion, from which it will only escape in part in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit” (HM 46/69). For a more detailed analysis of Foucault, Diderot, and Hegel, see Huffer, Mad for Foucault, 212–213. 28. Michel Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men,” in Paul Rabinow, ed., Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, 3 vols. (New York: New Press, 2000), 3:158. 29. Ibid., 159. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 158. 32. Michel Foucault, “On the Ways of Writing History,” in Paul Rabinow, ed., Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, 3 vols. (New York: New Press, 1998), 2:289. 33. Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men,” 166. 34. Gordon, “Histoire de la folie,” 20.

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Violence and Hyperbole FROM “ C OG ITO AND THE HISTORY OF MA D N E S S ” TO T HE DE ATH P ENALTY



mic h ae l na a s

through the second year of The Death Penalty, Derrida takes a step back for a moment from the texts and figures he has been reading for the past several weeks in order to reflect upon the progress of the seminar as a whole. He steps back from his readings of Kant, Heidegger, Theodor Reik, and others on questions of reason, calculation, cruelty, punishment, and, of course, the death penalty, in order to suggest that the question they have been revolving around from the very beginning of the seminar will have been less that of the death penalty strictly speaking than that of the nature or essence of the human, that is, the question of the “proper of man.” Because the death penalty has been justified by some, and most forcefully by Kant, as the very foundation of law, as that which raises man above the animal and gives him his unique dignity, the question of the death penalty is inseparable from, and perhaps even motivated by, this question of the proper of man or the essence of the human. To clarify his point, Derrida indulges in an extended analogy, comparing the various attempts throughout the history of philosophy, religion, and so on to answer the question of the essence of the human to a popular children’s board game known in French as the jeu de l’oie, that is, the Game of the Goose. The object of this game, similar to our Chutes and Ladders, is to move as quickly as possible through rolls of the dice along a closed track or circuit from the first square to the last, trying to avoid penalty squares that send one backward and to land on bonus squares that advance one more quickly. Derrida thus imagines a version of the jeu de l’oie in which all the squares on the board (sixty-three of them in a traditional jeu de l’oie) a b o u t t w o - t h i r d s o f t h e way

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represent different but related responses throughout the history of religion, philosophy, anthropology, and so on to the question “What is man?” Derrida describes it this way: There would be a finite series of squares, of given responses in the finite course of a given history, thus in a history whose circle was closed, without future; one would jump from square to square, according to the roll of the dice, or one would spend a longer or shorter time [on] one of the squares (what is proper to man is language, logos, reason, or else law, or else politics, or else freedom, or else responsibility, or else sovereignty, or else laughter, or else tears, or else the experience of death, or else time as such, or else rights, or else modesty, or else clothing and home, or else technology, etc.), and among all of these squares—and this would risk complicating things a little—there be one that would grab our attention, and this would be the death penalty. (DEP2 282–283)

The death penalty would thus be but a particular figure of the question of man, just one square among others on the board, though it, like all the others, would also have “a relation of solidarity, of essential concatenation . . . a relation of metonymy or synecdoche with the other traits or figures or predicates of what is said to be ‘proper to man’” (DEP2 283). Though each response would be unique, each would be related to all the others through a simple roll of the dice, and each would thus return at somewhat regular though not altogether predictable intervals. It would thus be a game of chance that is nonetheless regulated by probabilities and certain “rules of calculation.” I begin with this extended figure or analogy from the second year of Derrida’s The Death Penalty because I think it helps explain not simply how the various responses to the question of the “proper of man” are, for Derrida, related but also how one theme or topic is related to another in Derrida’s own texts. In other words, it helps explain what Derrida understands to be a certain “structural coherence” within the tradition he is reading and, as a result, the inevitable coherence of any corpus, beginning with his own, that would read that tradition. The two years of The Death Penalty would demonstrate this structural coherence in an exemplary way, for each of the two years, we can now see in retrospect, will have settled on different, though related, squares in this modified jeu de l’oie that is played under the title “The Proper of Man.”

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If Derrida in the first year of the seminar jumps from square to square or from theme to theme, it is, I would argue, to the theme of sovereignty, the theme of the sovereignty of man, sovereignty in relation to the death penalty, that he constantly returns. In the second year of the seminar, however, things change dramatically, as Derrida, working still within the same configuration, focuses more and more closely on another theme, another square, namely, that of reason, reason in relation to language, history, violence, and, of course, the proper of man. We are, in this second year of the seminar, always just one roll of the dice away from landing squarely on the question of reason, which appears to organize in a sometimes explicit, sometimes subterranean, fashion Derrida’s readings of such diverse figures as Kant, Heidegger, Reik, Freud, Cortés, and others on the obviously related but also very different themes of blood, sacrifice, Christianity, the equivalence between crime and punishment, talionic law, cruelty, somatic versus psychic cruelty, and so on. If the first year of the seminar on the death penalty can thus be gathered under the general rubric of the theologico-political and its principle of sovereignty, it is the principle of reason that seems to organize the themes, figures, and questions of the second year of the seminar. And that is in fact what Derrida seems to suggest in an interview with Elisabeth Roudinesco published in For What Tomorrow . . . . Derrida there says, as if he were giving an overview of years one and two of the seminar: The question of the death penalty is not only that of the political ontotheology of sovereignty; it is also, around this calculation of an impossible equivalence between crime and punishment, their incommensurability, an impossible evaluation of the debt . . . the question of the principle of reason, of the interpretation of reason as the “principle of reason,” and of this latter as the principle of calculability. The question of “accounting” and of the account to be given, of “giving reasons” (reddere rationnem), must be debated among others, but first of all, in my view, among the Heideggerian and Kantian interpretations of reason, both of which, although differently, attempt at once to remove rationality from and to submit it to its calculating vocation.1

Hence calculation or reason would be the overriding theme of the second year of the seminar, just as sovereignty was the central theme of the

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first year. While all the squares on the board, including those of sovereignty and the principle of reason, would be linked to all the others through relations of metonymy or synecdoche, these two, I would argue, came to have a certain priority because of their generality, to be sure, but also, and even more importantly, because both pose better than the others the question of the limits of the game, that is, the question of the very ground or foundation of the game, the question of what initiates, exceeds, and so can disrupt the game at its very foundation. We see this, for example, in session 10 of the seminar when Derrida turns to Schmitt and Cortés on the question of the sovereign decision, the decision that is in politics what the miracle is in theology, that is, a decision or an event that itself is not subject to calculation, that is as such beyond or outside the world of calculable causes and effects, that finds no place on the board or in the game even though it makes all subsequent moves on the board possible. And we find this as well in session 6, where Derrida first links the question of decision to that of calculation and then calculation to the principle of reason in order then to give us what seems to be one of the “principles” of his own jeu de l’oie, namely, the necessity of posing the question of what does or does not ground or found the game, what does or does not open the game up to what is outside it, or to what is outside it within it, what closes the game off to a future and what does not. It is this relation to what can be called a hyperbolic moment that links the question of theologico-political sovereignty to the question of reason and that, as a result, links the two years of the death penalty seminar. And it will be at this hyperbolic place that we are at once licensed and encouraged to think not just the relationship between the death penalty as what is proper to man and these dual themes of sovereignty and the principle of reason but the relationship, in Derrida’s own itinerary, between all these themes in texts ranging from The Death Penalty to Rogues, “Force of Law,” and “Declarations of Independence” all the way back to very early texts such as “Cogito and the History of Madness.” Though they are separated by nearly four decades, these two works, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” first presented in Paris on March 4, 1963, and the second year of The Death Penalty, also first presented in Paris, from December 6, 2000, to March 28, 2001, both treat as central the question of the relationship between reason and what exceeds reason, as well as the relationship between reason, language, and history, on the one hand,

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and violence, on the other. Reading the “Cogito” essay in light of The Death Penalty can thus go a long way to help explain, as I will try to argue, why Derrida went so far as to suggest that Foucault’s History of Madness risks being a “totalitarian text,” while reading The Death Penalty in light of the “Cogito” essay can help explain why the very questions of reason, language, history, and violence that are at the center of Derrida’s essay of 1963 return some thirty-eight years later in Derrida’s attempt to develop a more principled or philosophical abolitionism. So let me pick up Derrida in mid seminar, about halfway through the second year of The Death Penalty, where he first evokes the theme of the game—not yet the Game of the Goose, the jeu de l’oie, but the game, the jeu, of everything “in play [en jeu]” or “at stake [enjeu]” “in the places of the death penalty” (DEP2 187). After evoking, ever so briefly, this question of the game and the stakes of the game, Derrida quickly turns to what sets up, founds, or establishes and thereby exceeds the game. That is, he turns to the question of the decision in the death penalty, the decision that would found but also exceed the calculations that would seem to be the foundation for it. For condemning to death always implies, says Derrida, a calculating decision, “the project of a calculation, a will to master time” (DEP2 188). Like the decision to commit suicide, the death penalty always seems to imply a “power over time,” a supposed mastery over time—over time in general and over the time of the other—in the form of a program or calculating decision, a decision that would reduce, or would at least purport to reduce, the very opening to time that, for Derrida, experience essentially is.2 Without going much further in this direction, Derrida moves on to suggest that there is also a kind of calculation and calculability in the talionic law upon which most theories of the death penalty rely, “the automatic calculation of a mechanism, of some calculating machine” (DEP2 189), a calculability that would seem to convert quality into quantity and find a price even for life and death. But before going any further in this direction, Derrida again stops to ask, “But what is calculation?” Here Derrida begins to argue that there is always some incalculability or some non-calculability within calculation itself, something absolutely heterogeneous to the calculable that nonetheless functions as the ground of the calculable itself. Derrida writes: “Calculation is always busy, preoccupied, interested, provoked, put in motion by what remains properly incalculable. If that which

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is subject to calculation were calculable, if calculation were not always dealing with the incalculable, there would never be a problem” (DEP2 196). Derrida goes on to argue, as if to bring the question of sovereignty and the theologico-political back together again with that of the principle of reason, that the incalculable or the non-calculable that haunts calculability also haunts the decision, the calculating decision, and, thus, the very decision to enter into the game of calculation: There is calculation and a problem of calculation, a crisis of calculation, indecision or undecidability of calculation, and thus the responsibility of a decision, only there where—insofar as calculation is always calculating with some incalculable, as well as some non-calculable—we no longer know what “calculation” means, no more than we know what “to decide” means, and we must not pretend to know. (DEP2 196–197)

“The question of the death penalty is thus also the question of reason” (DEP2 197), Derrida concludes, as if to make explicit, just as he did in For What Tomorrow . . . , the connection between reason or calculation and the sovereign decision, that is, in short, the connection between the two guiding themes or squares of the two years of The Death Penalty. At this point Derrida turns to Heidegger, for even if Heidegger, this great thinker of being-toward-death, never asks the question of the death penalty, even if he never sees that “the question of the death penalty is the question of reason as principle of reason,” he nonetheless suggests, through his 1955–1956 reading of Leibniz on the Principle of Reason, that calculating reason has as its ground a certain non-ground or incalculability. That is because there are, according to Heidegger, two valences or two intonations, two accentuations, of the Principle of Reason. The first of these is indeed reason as calculation, calculation in its affinity with law, calculation as a means of insuring a just calculation between crime and punishment, a calculation of probabilities even, as a way to assure or ensure public safety. This, says Derrida, is Leibniz as inventor of calculus and life insurance (DEP2 203). From this perspective, “one can interpret the entire history and especially the modern history (I mean the last three centuries) of the death penalty, of the penal law that includes the death penalty, of the discourses justifying or debating the death penalty, as a history of insurances,

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social insurances, or even social security” (DEP2 204–205). To go back to the analogy of the jeu de l’oie, it would be as if this form of reason, this kind of calculative reason, were at once one of the squares of the game and that which regulates according to probabilities the movements around the board. Such a notion of reason as calculative reason would thus bring us back directly, without passing go, to the square of rationality or of calculating reason as the proper of man. But there is, as Derrida notes, a second intonation or accentuation of the principle of reason in Heidegger’s account and, it would seem, in Derrida’s, who is following him closely here. This would be a reason founded not on the calculable but on the incalculable or the non-calculable. Significantly for what I will argue in a moment, Derrida introduces this second intonation or accentuation by means of a reference to Kierkegaard, the same Kierkegaard who provides the opening epigraph to “Cogito and the History of Madness”: What cannot be entered into a reckoning calculation is what does not let itself be objectivated, objectified. Not necessarily the subject (for the subject can also be an objectifiable being) or else, yes, a subjectivity of the subject that, like the subjectivity defined by Kierkegaard, is the absolute singular of an existence that does not let itself be represented, objectivated, dialectized. This absolute subjectivity cannot become a rights-bearing subject or a calculable subject-object; it escapes radically and forever law, penal calculation, ethics, the ethical stage as stage of generality, equivalences and different figures of the talion. (DEP2 205)

This other accentuation or intonation of the principle of reason would thus have to do with singularities that exceed a calculable economy. As Derrida goes on to suggest, it would have to do with “what is given in death, what is posed in death, between calculation and the incalculable, between the Game according to the rule of the game as rule of calculation, and another thinking of the Game without measure, without calculation and without rule of calculation” (DEP2 206). Hence the question of the death penalty, “including its calculating principle of jus talionis, would have its place between the calculable and the incalculable in the essence of reason for the mortals that we are” (DEP2 206).

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Having thus laid out to some extent his own thinking of the relationship between reason and the calculable, on the one hand, and reason and or as the incalculable, on the other, the question, therefore, of the ground and limits of reason, Derrida writes, more or less parsing Heidegger: The history of the West, of the West as thinking, is a history of reason, to be sure, but not that of Latin rationality, of calculation, of causality between beings, of objective sciences, etc.; rather it is a history of that which thinks being as ground, and a history of a ground that is not causal and objective grounding, a representable grounding but a ground of the ground, thus a ground without ground, a Grund that is also an Ab-Grund. . . . Reason without reason. One will never be able to justify the reason that justifies everything, one might say following a common-sense line of argument that is not Heideggerian in style. Reason is without reason. It rests only on itself, that is to say, on nothing. . . . Insofar as it grounds, being has no grounding, it is without ground, it is without reason, the without-reason, the withoutground (Abgrund), the fathomless (Bodenlose). (DEP2 207–208)

The seminar has thus covered quite a bit of terrain in a very short space of time; it has gone from the death penalty to the talionic law on which it is based to calculation or reason as the proper of man to the principle of reason and the Abgrund of the Grund of that reason. It is hardly insignificant, then, that right at what could be called this hyperbolic moment Derrida implicitly relates this reading of Heidegger as it bears on reason and the death penalty to many of his own texts, that is, to a way of reading or a way of playing the jeu de l’oie that can be found in so many other places in his work and that can help illuminate, I would argue, what is happening in The Death Penalty. He continues: This may appear to be both a provocative formulation and good common sense: that which grounds cannot be grounded. That which grounds, the grounding, is necessarily ungrounded, without ground. One could, as I do all the time, draw a million consequences from this fact: the grounding of anything whatsoever, for example, a state, a constitution, an institution is never grounded, legitimate, legal, since it grounds. The founding of a state is always violent, as the institution of a principle or a law. The positing of

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something (for example, a state . . . ) or a law or a constitution, this “positing,” this position (Setzung, if you like) is a leap [saut] since it is a matter of positing what was not there, and this by means of a gesture that is necessarily inaugural, violent, without prior justification, hence the relation of affinity between the Setzen, the positing, the positioning, and the proposition (Satz) but also the leap (Satz). (DEP2 208)

That which grounds cannot be grounded, cannot ground itself, says Derrida. For there is a leap between the grounding event and the event that is grounded, between the performative gesture that grounds or at least seems to ground and the event that is thereby grounded and that will later be spoken of in a constative gesture. Among the many consequences that could be drawn from this would be, of course, the kinds of analyses Derrida carries out with regard to the founding of law in “Force of Law,” the founding of a nation in “Declarations of Independence,” or the founding of a democracy in Rogues. What is less obvious, though potentially even more enlightening, are certain consequences that might be drawn from much earlier texts, for example, as I have suggested, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” where what is at issue is precisely the relationship between reason and madness, history and decision, history and the opening to history, as well as the violence that is involved in subjecting to reason or to history something in excess of reason or history, a subjectivity, for example, or the hyperbolic moment of a cogito. Though one must not overlook the many differences between these two texts, separated by almost four decades, we would do well to highlight, I think, not just a similar set of terms, and not just a similar series of moves within the same game, but the same hyperbolic move to the question of how the game begins and what implications can be drawn from the decision to begin to play the game in the first place. What this perhaps suggests for the topic at hand is that while the death penalty can always be justified by a certain form of calculation—talionic law, insurance and assurance in the form of deterrence and in the name of public safety—this calculability, the decision to act on this calculability but also this calculability itself, the foundation of this calculability, is indistinguishable, in the end, from a certain madness. Derrida will thus contest the Kantian justification of the death penalty by appealing both to the de facto impossibility of assuring oneself that one is not treating someone as

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a means rather than an end and the de jure impossibility of grounding talionic law in a reason that would not also always be a little bit mad. As Derrida says in a handwritten comment in the margins of The Death Penalty: “Incalculable madness of Kant: killing for nothing, condemning to death (DEP2 248n1). Kant’s justification for the death penalty, the categorical imperative of law, would appear to be not the height of rationality but, as Derrida puts it, an “incalculable madness.” We can understand what this means by referring to Heidegger’s Principle of Reason, but also, and perhaps even more fruitfully, to “Cogito and the History of Madness,” where, some forty years earlier, many of the questions posed in The Death Penalty were posed in a structurally similar way and where many of the themes and terms of his seminar were developed in a very different context but with, I think, a very similar aim. Recall that the initial drama of Derrida’s essay “Cogito and the History of Madness” revolved around the question of madness in Foucault’s History of Madness, the question of the role or status of madness in the texts Foucault reads and its role or status in Foucault’s own writing. Briefly put, it was by contesting Foucault’s interpretation of the supposed exclusion of madness in Descartes’s first meditation that Derrida was able to pose a series of methodological questions regarding Foucault’s overall project of writing a history of madness. Contesting Foucault’s thesis that madness is simply excluded from the cogito by Descartes at an earlier stage of the Meditations, Derrida will argue that, on the contrary, “recourse to the fiction of the evil genius will evoke, conjure up, the possibility of a total madness, a total derangement over which I could have no control” (CH 52/81). It is this possibility of a madness that spares nothing, not mathematical knowledge, not clear and distinct ideas, the possibility of a total madness brought on by the evil genius at the moment of hyperbolic doubt, that then allowed Derrida to pose a series of questions regarding Foucault’s overall project, questions which, again, arise at that point, that hyperbolic point, in the first meditation where reason encounters its limit and its foundation in unreason or in madness. It is thus no coincidence that Derrida, throughout the “Cogito” essay, characterizes this moment of hyperbole as, precisely, a point, a hyperbolic point, a zero point or point of departure, un point de départ, that would have to be distinguished, to refer once more to our jeu de l’oie, from anything like a “square one” or indeed from any other square on the board,

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though it might be compared, as we will see, to the very decision to begin playing the game in the first place, a point of departure that would find no place on the board itself but would condition every subsequent move on it. It is by following this point, this point of departure, that we will be able, finally, to arrive at the question of history and violence. First used by Derrida in “Cogito and the History of Madness” in a relatively straightforward, merely rhetorical way, the terms point, pointe, and then point de départ become essential operative terms by the end of the essay. Derrida thus begins the essay by saying that he has chosen as his “point of departure” Foucault’s History of Madness (CH 31/51); even more precisely, he says on the following page that his “point of departure” will be the few pages of the book devoted to the supposed exclusion of madness in Descartes’s first meditation. The notion of a point or point of departure thus appears here merely rhetorical or pedagogical, a way to describe Derrida’s point of access to Foucault’s book on the history of madness. But the term soon returns in Derrida’s critique of Foucault’s reading of Descartes’s first meditation, as he emphasizes, contra Foucault, that the moment—or point—of hyperbolic doubt after the introduction of the evil genius is perhaps even more radical or more mad than madness itself. This experience of the evil genius is “at its furthest reaches [pointe: at its extreme point],” writes Derrida, “perhaps no less adventurous, perilous, enigmatic, nocturnal, and pathetic than the experience of madness” (CH 33/55). Later in the essay, he will speak of the “extremity [pointe] of hyperbole” (CH 60/93), of “the instantaneous experience of the Cogito at its most intense [pointe], when reason and madness have not been separated” (CH 58/91). And then there is this passage, where Derrida speaks of this hyperbolic moment as a “zero point,” “the point starting from which [le point à partir duquel]” the determined forms of the opposition between reason and unreason can appear and be said, the “impenetrable point of certainty in which the possibility of Foucault’s narration, as well as the narration of the totality, or rather of all the determined forms of the exchanges between reason and madness are embedded,” the point at which “the project of thinking this totality by escaping it is embedded” (CH 56/86).3 By attempting to secure certainty regarding the existence of the cogito through the hyperbolic doubt of the evil genius, Descartes, according to Derrida, brings the cogito to the point where absolutely nothing is left untouched by doubt, the point where reason is indistinguishable from

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madness, sense from non-sense, or meaning from nonmeaning. There is, therefore, an incompatibility between this hyperbolic moment of the cogito and anything that might be called history, reason, language, or work. As Derrida writes, “the Cogito is a work as soon as it is assured of what it says. But before it is a work, it is madness” (CH 59/92). Though Descartes, following what seems to be the very vocation of philosophy, will try, immediately after this hyperbolic moment, to reassure himself and protect himself from this madness by grounding the cogito in the knowledge of God who is not a deceiver, this hyperbolic moment remains nonetheless legible in his work. Derrida writes: “It is therefore a question of drawing back toward a point at which all determined contradictions, in the form of given, factual historical structures, can appear, and appear as relative to this zero point at which determined meaning and nonmeaning come together in their common origin” (CH 56/86). Notice, first, then, that this zero point precedes or exceeds the separation of meaning and nonmeaning, of reason and madness, that it is “located” in excess of all historical structures, that is, all historical determinations of meaning and nonmeaning, reason and madness. It is at this point where meaning and nonmeaning have a common origin that, according to Derrida, something like meaning in general or history in general first opens up. It is at this point where seemingly opposing concepts, reason and madness, meaning and nonmeaning, touch, the place where—to use a term from The Death Penalty—they are no longer as airtight as they had once seemed, that the question of meaning in general, that is, a hyperbolic or transcendental question, must be posed. It is precisely this question, as Derrida will go on to argue, that Foucault failed to ask, and that, as Derrida will argue some four decades later, the vast majority of abolitionist discourses end up ignoring. This is not one lack or shortcoming among others, for it is at this hyperbolic point that history itself, the very possibility of recounting a history of madness, opens up. Derrida writes: Invulnerable to all determined opposition between reason and unreason, it [this zero point, the cogito] is the point starting from which [le point à partir duquel] the history of the determined forms of this opposition, this opened or broken-off dialogue, can appear as such and be stated. It is the impenetrable point of certainty in which the possibility of Foucault’s narration, as well as of the narration of the totality, or rather of all the determined

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forms of the exchanges between reason and madness are embedded. It is the point at which the project of thinking this totality by escaping it is embedded. By escaping it: that is to say, by exceeding the totality, which—within existence—is possible only in the direction of infinity or nothingness. . . . That is why, by virtue of this margin of the possible, the principled, and the meaningful, which exceeds all that is real, factual, and existent, this project is mad, and acknowledges madness as its liberty and its very possibility. . . . In this sense, nothing is less reassuring than the Cogito at its proper and inaugural moment. (CH 56–57/86–87)

Derrida seems to suggest that everything in Descartes’s discourse can be subjected to a historical structure except the hyperbolic moment of the cogito, that point where history itself becomes possible. To recast this claim in the terms of The Death Penalty, everything can be located on the board game except the opening move or opening gesture, the decision, we might say, that first makes the game possible. It is this that Foucault neglected in trying to justify his project, and it is for this reason that Derrida wishes to “interrogate certain philosophical and methodological presuppositions of this history of madness,” presuppositions that Foucault did not himself interrogate or did not do so adequately (CH 33/54). As you will have noticed, I just equated the hyperbolic moment or point of departure with a moment of decision, the moment of a seemingly sovereign decision, in order to try to rethink the “Cogito” essay in the terms of The Death Penalty some forty years later. That comparison may look somewhat arbitrary or forced. But, already in that earlier essay, the point of departure is explicitly and insistently thought in terms of decision, from the infamous epigraph attributed to Kierkegaard, “the Instant of Decision is madness,” to the claim that it is the Decision or the decisive act that, “through a single act, links and separates reason and madness” (CH 38/62).4 It is the decision, the decision as point of departure, that opens up from within, we could say, the game of reason itself—and so can be characterized neither as simply rational nor as simply mad. If, as Derrida says in the “Cogito” essay, this decision, this partage or division, is “the origin of history” or “historicity itself ” (CH 42/67), then such a decision clearly cannot be contained simply within the history of madness that Foucault is recounting or narrating; it is instead the very origin of the

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possibility of his narration, the very “possibility of history itself, the historicity of history.” What does it then mean, asks Derrida—who seems to be sketching out here the place of his own questions and project—“to write the history of historicity? To write the history of the origin of history?” (CH 42–43/68). Derrida concludes: If the decision through which reason constitutes itself by excluding and objectifying the free subjectivity of madness is indeed the origin of history, if it is historicity itself, the condition of meaning and of language, the condition of the tradition of meaning, the condition of the work in general, if the structure of exclusion is the fundamental structure of historicity, then the “classical” moment of this exclusion described by Foucault has neither absolute privilege nor archetypal exemplarity. (CH 42/67)

It is just after the characterization of this hyperbolic moment of the cogito as a point or zero point that Derrida gives us a clue about how to write such a “history of historicity,” when he compares Descartes’s project of “exceeding the totality of the world, as the totality of what I can think in general,” to “the dialectic of Socrates when it, too, overflows the totality of beings, planting us in the light of a hidden sun which is epekeina tes ousias,” leading Glaucon to cry out: “‘Lord! What demonic hyperbole? daimonias hyperboles’” (CH 56–57/87). Derrida’s comparison is telling, illuminating, both because of the terms in which it is couched and because it is, precisely, a comparison. While the determination of madness or of hyperbole would be unique, uniquely determined by the rules of the game in any historical period or epoch, the point at which the game as a whole, or the world as the totality of factual history, is exceeded can apparently go by the name of cogito or, indeed, epekeina tes ousias, the Good beyond Being. It would be this point, this point “between epochs,” so to speak, that would have to be thought. A history of philosophy, like a history of madness, would thus consist, it seems, in finding the legible traces of this excess or hyperbole in discourses ranging from Plato to Descartes to Husserl and Heidegger. It would be the attempt to track “a silence essentially linked to an act of force and a prohibition which open history and speech,” a silence that “bears and haunts language, outside and against which alone language can emerge” (CH 54/84). The history of philosophy would then be the history of the

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forgetting and reactivation of these various hyperbolic moments within particular historical structures, the history of these various coups d’envoi or opening moves (for example, those of Descartes, Augustine, or Husserl) in this jeu de l ’oie and their subsequent erasure or forgetting within a determined historical structure. In other words, the history of philosophy would be a history of the very becoming-history of philosophy in various historical epochs. “In question is a way of accounting for the very historicity of philosophy. I believe that historicity in general would be impossible without a history of philosophy, and I believe that the latter would be impossible if we possessed only hyperbole, on the one hand, or, on the other, only determined historical structures, finite Weltanschauungen” (CH 60/94). What Derrida thus finds problematic about Foucault’s History of Madness is that it did not ask, or did not ask explicitly enough, questions about the very possibility of its own writing or emergence. That is, it did not ask about the relationship between this determined history and history in general or the historicity that opens history. It is this criticism from 1963 that Derrida will repeat, it seems, in his reading of Heidegger in The Death Penalty in 1999–2000. In both cases, what is not made explicit enough is the relationship between history or a historical configuration of epochs or epistemai and historicity or the opening to history itself. Derrida writes in 1963: “If Foucault, more than anyone else, is attentive and sensitive to these kinds of questions, it nevertheless appears that he does not acknowledge their quality of being prerequisite methodological or philosophical considerations” (CH 38/61). And he writes in a similar vein, after a similar analysis of Heidegger, some forty years later: “And this risks disorganizing the whole epochal or historical schema that Heidegger lays out in Der Satz vom Grund” (DEP2 249).What is thus needed, Derrida argues in “Cogito and the History of Madness,” is another discourse, “a more ambitious project,” that of deconstruction, I think we could say, a project that would “devote all its efforts to discovering the common root of meaning and nonmeaning” (CH 43/68), the silent “wellspring of sense” (CH 62/96), a root or wellspring that would be anything but a present origin but, instead, the point where reason, language, and history can no longer be completely separated from madness, silence, and the opening to history in general. One might thus say, using terms from four decades later, that what Derrida finds problematic is that Foucault plays a certain jeu de l’oie in his History of Madness, a very reasonable game where reason and madness

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are two of the squares on the board, without asking the question of the loi du jeu, the question of the law or the conditions of the game, the question of what makes the whole game—the game of reason, of history, of language—possible. Without asking the general question of reason in its relation not just to madness but to history and language, Foucault never really gets beyond a certain idea of madness as it is conditioned by reason and language and as it is subject to history. Or rather, and worse, he thinks he can write a history of madness itself, madness before it becomes subject to reason, before it becomes the madness of reason. Hence Derrida wishes to ask whether one really can write a history of madness, whether one can carry out an archaeology of the silence that madness is, without turning madness into the madness of reason, that is, without speaking of madness, thereby submitting it to an order and a syntax and bringing that which is always in excess of history into history. Foucault’s project to write a “history of madness” in order to liberate madness thus ends up, Derrida suggests, subjecting madness to the language and reason that such a history entails. In other words, rather than liberating madness, Foucault subjugates or interns it in his own way. Derrida writes: “There is no Trojan horse unconquerable by Reason (in general). The unsurpassable, unique, and imperial grandeur of the order of reason, that which makes it not just another order or structure (a determined historical structure, one structure among other possible ones), is that one cannot speak out against it except by being for it, that one can protest it only from within it” (CH 36/58–59). To put it again in words from forty years later, there are no squares outside the game, and since the game is always the game of reason, there is no square that is not already determined by reason. There is no square outside the game, no meta-game for the game of reason—but there is a point of departure, and it is this point of departure that must be taken into account. For if the order of reason makes everything, including madness, submit to it, this does not mean that madness, the silence of madness, cannot make itself be heard within the work. It does not mean that the moment or point of hyperbole cannot be “located” within a text, that it does not leave a trace “within” history. As Derrida argues, once again in “Cogito and the History of Madness”: “I think, therefore, that (in Descartes) everything can be reduced to a determined historical totality except the hyperbolical project. Now, this project belongs to the narration narrating itself and not to the narration narrated by Foucault. It cannot be

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recounted, cannot be objectified as an event in a determined history” (CH 57–58/88; my emphasis). Rather than some square outside the game, and rather than some case départ, that is, some starting square or “square one” that would correspond to an origin or an originary power from which we depart and to which we would necessarily return, what must be thought is the moment that initiates the game itself—le point de départ, the ground without ground of reason, the point or moment of decision when narration narrates its own possibility. To think the death penalty, Derrida will thus suggest some forty years later, one must think reason both as founded and as founding, that is, in relation both to the calculative reason that is founded and to the incalculable moment that is intrinsic to this founding. This brings me to one final point regarding this point of excess, namely, the irreducibility of this point to history and the consequences of attempting such a reduction. As Derrida argues, again in “Cogito and the History of Madness”: The extent to which doubt and the Cartesian Cogito are punctuated by this project of a singular and unprecedented excess—an excess in the direction of the nondetermined, Nothing or Infinity, an excess which overflows the totality of that which can be thought, the totality of beings and determined meanings, the totality of factual history—is also the extent to which any effort to reduce this project, to enclose it within a determined historical structure, however comprehensive, risks missing the essential, risks dulling [émousser] the point itself. (CH 57/87–88)

The attempt to reduce the hyperbolic project to a determined moment within history risks missing the essential point, Derrida argues. It is a lack, an oversight, or a blind spot, a methodological shortcoming, though also, Derrida claims, a form of violence—indeed, not just one form of violence among others but among the very worst. It is precisely this kind of violence that Derrida accuses Foucault of risking if not actually committing by trying to write a history of madness, that is, a history of what resists history, reason, and language, without taking into account the hyperbolic moment that first opens history in general. Derrida pulls no punches here, going so far as to suggest that Foucault’s project risks doing “a violence of a totalitarian and historicist style which eludes meaning and the origin of meaning”

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(CH 57/88).5 In other words, Foucault’s project of liberation in History of Madness is, in the end, despite its best intentions, “a powerful gesture of protection and internment,” “a Cartesian gesture for the twentieth century,” “a reappropriation of negativity” (CH 55/85), insofar as it does not interrogate the point—the hyperbolic point—where meaning becomes possible. It is a strong critique, but it is one that is justified in the essay and one that would be echoed in many of Derrida’s subsequent works. After thus speaking in the “Cogito” essay of this “violence of a totalitarian and historicist style,” Derrida appends this footnote, which could really be cut and pasted into The Death Penalty and its reading of the Principle of Reason some forty years later. Derrida writes that Foucault’s project “risks erasing the excess by which every philosophy (of meaning) is related, in some region of its discourse, to the nonfoundation [that is, the without-ground] of unmeaning [or non-sense]” (CH 309n26/88n1). Since Derrida is speaking here about the point where sense and nonsense, meaning and nonmeaning, are confounded, he is in essence speaking of the without-ground, the sans fond, of sense as well as non-sense, in short, the groundlessness of reason in general. We can thus leap, if we want, in Derrida’s own jeu de l’oie that we have been following here, from the violence that consists in eliding the origin of meaning and nonmeaning in “Cogito and the History of Madness” in 1963 to the violence that consists in ignoring or overlooking the groundlessness of reason in the second year of The Death Penalty in 2000, the alibi of defending the death penalty on putatively rational or calculable grounds. As for his recourse to the word “totalitarian,” Derrida explains himself in this way, and we might wish to hear in this explanation something comparable to the violence Derrida identifies throughout The Death Penalty with every attempt or presumption to locate the instant of death in time or inscribe its hyperbolic point into a narratable history. I use “totalitarian” in the structuralist sense of the word, but I am not sure that the two meanings do not beckon each other historically. Structuralist totalitarianism here would be responsible for the internment of the Cogito similar to the violences of the classical age. I am not saying that Foucault’s book is totalitarian, for at least at its outset it poses the question of the origin of historicity in general, thereby freeing itself of historicism; I am saying, however, that by virtue of the construction of his project he sometimes runs

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the risk of being totalitarian. Let me clarify: when I refer to the forced entry into the world of that which is not there and is supposed by the world, or when I state that the compelle intrare (epigraph of the chapter on “the great internment”) becomes violence itself when it turns toward the hyperbole in order to make hyperbole reenter the world, or when I say that this reduction to intraworldliness is the origin and the very meaning of what is called violence, making possible all straitjackets, I am not invoking an other world, an alibi or an evasive transcendence. That would be yet another possibility of violence, a possibility that is, moreover, often the accomplice of the first one. (CH 56–57/88)

Insofar as Foucault restricts his attention to the history of madness where madness is included, inscribed, in the game, he risks doing a certain violence—a violence that Derrida goes so far as to call totalitarian—to what is not and should be simply included within that history. It is here, as I have suggested, that we might want to rethink some of the claims Derrida makes in The Death Penalty regarding the mastery or the putative mastery of the instant or of the experience of time by means of the calculating decision regarding the moment of death in the death penalty. To think either that this moment can be located outside the game, that is, outside history, or that it can be mastered or located squarely within it, to think that it can become subject to history, confined to history, is, for Derrida, the worst form of violence since it is a violence done to that point that exceeds all history without being transcendent to it, that point that is, as it were, the very opening to it and to a future that is not a determinate mode of presence— as a certain thinking of the death penalty would try to have it. And if one wished to distinguish the “Cogito” essay from The Death Penalty by arguing that the latter appeals to notions of life and death while the former does not, there is this from “Cogito and the History of Madness,” which suggests that what Derrida meant in 1963 by the hyperbolic point where reason is founded in nonreason was nothing other than the opening of life to its future: “In its most impoverished syntax, logos is reason and, indeed, a historical reason. And if madness in general, beyond any factitious and determined historical structure, is the absence of a work, then madness is indeed, essentially and generally, silence, stifled speech, within a caesura and a wound that open up [entament] life as historicity in general” (CH 54/84).

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One could thus say, perhaps, that the decision to execute or to carry out a death penalty is, like all decisions, ultimately mad, and, behind all the seemingly rational calculations, for nothing, and that, just as importantly, the assumption that the instant of decision is not madness but reasonable and that it can be included in a narratable history or in a story governed by calculative reason is at the origin of the worst violence or always risks the worst violence. For what is violent is the attempt to reduce the moment of hyperbole to history and the attempt to understand history without or before its relationship to historicity. It is, so to speak, something like a transcendental violence or, better, a violence toward the transcendental. For such a narratable history would be one that is closed and has no future, one that is thus not really even a history at all since all the moves, past, present, and future, are already made available and so have, in a sense, already been made. This is, as we have heard, precisely how Derrida characterizes the jeu de l ’oie—a game that is closed and has no future. In “Cogito and the History of Madness,” Derrida asks questions not just about Foucault’s reading of the history of madness but about the possibility of writing such a history. He asks not just about the reading of Descartes within that history but about what exceeds and thereby opens that history in the first place. In other words, he feels compelled to ask certain transcendental or transcendentalizing questions, which is why, some forty years later in The Death Penalty, he is so keen to take on Kant, who also places the death penalty in a transcendental position with regard to all law. As he puts it in For What Tomorrow . . . : There would be no more law, and above all no criminal law, without the mechanism of the death penalty, which is thus its condition of possibility, its transcendental, if you like (at once internal, included: the death penalty is an element of criminal law, one punishment among others, a bit more severe to be sure; and external, excluded: a foundation, a condition of possibility, an origin, a non-serial exemplarity, hyperbolic, more and other than a penalty). It is this, the death penalty’s paradoxical effect of transcendentalization, that a consistent abolitionism must take on.6

A consistent abolitionism, the kind that Derrida appears to be attempting in The Death Penalty, a philosophical abolitionism, would thus be an abolitionism that takes on this transcendentalism in the forms, it seems, of

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sovereignty and the decision, on the one hand, and the principle of reason, on the other—two places or two points where the entire question of the death penalty, and everything that goes along with it, including the history of the death penalty and the history of philosophy, first opens up or becomes possible. If Derrida is suggesting or urging anything, it would perhaps be the avowal or recognition within philosophy of an ineradicable originary violence. He would be urging not exactly a confession, not the confession that Foucault analyzes in his work and not the worldwide confession as a replacement for punishment that Theodor Reik advocated and Derrida considers during the second year of The Death Penalty, but philosophy’s avowal of a necessary and ineradicable relationship to violence. For if violence, like cruelty in Freud or in Nietzsche, has no contrary, then one must replace an economy of oppositions or binaries with one of differences, and so replace the opposition between peace and violence or peace and war with a differentiated thinking of violence. One must attempt to cultivate what Derrida calls, in his reading of Freud in “Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul,” a “differential transaction, an economy of detour and of différance”—in other words, a more complicated relationship to the game.7 Recounting the history of the death penalty, the history of the putatively calculable and calculated decision to end the life of another, thus requires rethinking nothing less than the question of calculation or of reason in relationship to history or historicity. That is why, for Derrida, a seemingly determined and determinate question encountered as part of the game, the question, for example, of the death penalty within history, ultimately became the question of the origin of history and the origin of reason, just as, in Derrida’s subsequent seminar, the question of the beast and sovereign within the history of philosophy and literature inevitably became the question of a hypersovereignty that conditions, opens up, and exceeds that history. In other words, Derrida will have done it again; he will have, in effect, said the same thing in two different contexts, in two different renditions of the jeu de l’oie. He will have begun with two quite different questions, on two very different squares, and he will have ended up returning not to the same squares, the questions of sovereignty or of reason, for example, but, each time, to the same point de départ or point of departure, the zero point that has no square on the board but is like the coup d’envoi or the “decision”—the ultimately ungrounded decision—to play the game in the first place. It is rather

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a leap onto or into the game itself, a leap, each time unique, like a revolution. Without that move, it seems to me, Derrida would be forced either to affirm a place outside the game, a place that comprehends all the moves of the game from the start and so brings the game, from the start, to an end, or to remain tied to certain determinate historical configurations within the game, unable to ask what makes them possible, what links and distinguishes them, and unable to think their essential historicity or finitude. Twice, then, in two different seminars in two different years, we see the same movement from the game to the conditions of the game. In both seminars, we see a certain relationship between system or structure, on the one hand, and the decision that first opens up any structure and keeps it open to the arrival of something new, on the other. As Derrida says near the end of the “Cogito” essay of what is obviously not Foucault’s project but his own: “[This attempt] is more written than said, it is economized. The economy of this writing is a regulated relationship between that which exceeds and the exceeded totality: the différance of the absolute excess” (CH 62/96). In other words, what is required is another thinking of the relationship between hyperbole and violence, between the point of departure that cannot be located in the game and the violence inherent in thinking that it can. As Derrida wrote in an oft-cited passage from Of Grammatology, a passage in which he was perhaps already dreaming of deconstruction as a unique, millennial edition of the jeu de l’oie: “We must begin wherever we are and the thought of the trace . . . has already taught us that it was impossible to justify a point of departure [un point de départ] absolutely.”8 Just as impossible, I think we could say today, as justifying absolutely—for ourselves or another—a point at which to depart.

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1. Jacques Derrida with Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow . . . , trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 151–152. 2. It is Derrida himself who relates the logic of the death penalty to that of suicide. Both, he says, imply “a calculating project, a decision, a logic of the calendar, a power over time, a possible decision as to the given moment, a program”—all those things, in other words, that annul the event or that close off the time of life (DEP2 189). 3. Though Derrida inserts a footnote at this last use of the word point, writing, “it is less a question of a point than of a temporal originality in general,” the repeated use of the term point is no less striking.

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4. Geoffrey Bennington has written a fascinating essay in which he traces Derrida’s use of the famous Kierkegaard epigraph to the “Cogito” essay in order to show that Derrida, through a sort of moment of madness of reading, misappropriates or misremembers that line of Kierkegaard’s, which is actually a paraphrasing of Paul, in order to make that line his own and, eventually, make it an essential part of his corpus. And so, quite apart from this misappropriation or this moment of reading, this quote is repeated and put to work, as Bennington shows, from one end of Derrida’s corpus to the other. Geoffrey Bennington, “A Moment of Madness: Derrida’s Kierkegaard,” Oxford Literary Review 33, no. 1 (2011): 103–127. 5. Foucault wrote to Derrida on October 25, 1963: “As for your text being published, in the final analysis I think it’s a good thing (I’m here speaking egotistically): only the blind will find your critique severe.” Cited in Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography, trans. Andrew Brown (Malden: Polity, 2013), 132. But it’s hard to hear the claim that Foucault’s text risks being “totalitarian” as anything but “severe.” 6. Derrida, For What Tomorrow, 142. 7. “Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul: The Impossible Beyond of a Sovereign Cruelty,” in Without Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 72. I cite this text in particular because it was written at the same time as The Death Penalty. 8. Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 162; De la grammatologie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967), 233.

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Surviving the Philosophical Problem HISTORY CROSSES TRANSCENDENTAL ANALYSIS

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Must Philosophy Be Obligatory? H ISTORY VERSUS M ETAP HYSIC S IN FO U CAU LT A N D D E R R I DA



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twentieth century were witness to a resounding critique of the traditional tasks of philosophy. During these years, many of the canonical aspirations of philosophy fell into a certain kind of disrepute on a number of fronts. In America the most influential spokesperson for the assault on the standard assumptions of modern philosophy was Richard Rorty. In Germany the scandal was associated with Jürgen Habermas and the Frankfurt School. But perhaps the North Atlantic milieu in which philosophy came under the severest critical attack was France, where a range of thinkers came to be presented as collaborators in a seemingly unified assault on traditional philosophical assumptions: Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault have all come to be synonymous with a certain latecentury critique of the last bastions of high philosophy. Yet this all-too-familiar story glosses over differences, even incompatibilities, that separate a whole range of French philosophers of the same generation from one another. Before we attend to what separates Rorty, Habermas, Derrida, and Foucault from the high modern philosophy whose collapse they heralded, it can be useful to interrogate the fractures that internally separate these thinkers once dubbed postmodernists from one another. This suggestion, of course, raises the specter of familiar debates: Habermas versus Foucault, Derrida versus Rorty.1 Before these debates are considered, however, other prior splinterings are worth digging out, particularly those focused on fractures within the camp of so-called poststructuralism. Why, for instance, are Derrida and Foucault often lumped together t h e l at t e r d e c a d e s o f t h e

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as the two highest priests of “French Theory”?2 A study of the exchange between Foucault and Derrida concerning the very status of philosophy itself reveals two philosophers very much of different persuasions about the nature, future, and history of philosophy. Interrogating the divides internal to so-called poststructuralism helps us recast the philosophical commitments of Foucault and Derrida, and also suggests a number of crucial implications for the wider debates noted above. These include implications for our familiar mappings of genealogy and deconstruction to pragmatism and critical theory. Remapping the proximities and distances among these traditions would also ramify into broader debates concerning the continuation today of the project of modernity.3 I shall here limit myself, however, just to those differences that separate the philosophical commitments of Foucault and Derrida. In attending to these specific differences, we have the opportunity to attend to nothing less than the stakes of philosophy itself as those have come to be clarified over the past fifty years. Derrida and Foucault usefully represent two competing images of the work of philosophy: philosophy as metaphysics versus philosophy as methodology. I thus propose to reread their debate not so much with an eye to competing interpretations of the history of philosophy, but rather with the intent of situating the debate in terms of its metaphilosophical implication. For here, I would argue, is where the differences that always separated these philosophers continue to matter to us today. Although the essays forming the Foucault-Derrida exchange are ostensibly focused on an interpretive dispute over the status of René Descartes as the founding figure of philosophy in his Meditations, my argument is that the interpretive dimensions of the exchange are only a surface show on which these two French theorists played out the deeper issue of the very status of philosophy itself. How do we make sense of these differing images of the work of philosophy? Derrida cast deconstructive doubt on the historical survey Foucault attempted in his archaeological and genealogical work. If Foucault sought to bypass a certain understanding of the necessity of philosophy, then Derrida sought time and again to show just how difficult, even impossible, it would be to evade precisely that. For Derrida, philosophy simply was that from which we cannot get away, even when we most desire to free ourselves from it—there always was, for Derrida, something obligatory about the residue of philosophy, even if that residuum cannot but be confronted as a

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kind of stain. For Foucault, by contrast, philosophy was the name of a discursive determination that has had a tight grip on us, to be sure, but whose operations are contingent and so capable of transgression. Thus Foucault throughout his work sought to recreate a new image of work according to which philosophy can maintain its achievements and elaborate its purposes without insisting that it is itself obligatory. For Derrida, a deconstructive methodology would reveal philosophy to be that in which we cannot but find ourselves entangled—or helplessly ensnared—even when we would want or hope to resist it. Philosophy would of necessity enroll us in itself, which means that it would enroll us in the meta-accounting of a metaphysics. For Foucault, by contrast, genealogical and archaeological analytics would be tools taken up in a critical attitude which need not be formulated in terms of, or operationalized through, traditional philosophemes. The casings of traditional philosophy are thereby cast off as merely optional stances such that philosophy dispenses with metaphysics in favor of a methodological reflexiveness concerning the ongoing task of critique. der r i da’s c ri ti q u e o f f o u c au lt

Derrida’s “Cogito and the History of Madness” is rather neatly divided into two sections.4 In the second half, he rigorously interrogates Foucault’s interpretation of Descartes’s Meditations, offering against it his own interpretation. The key textual moment at issue in this interpretive agon concerns the philosopher’s response to the possibility of his being mad in the fourth paragraph of his opening meditation. For Foucault, Descartes is representative of modern philosophy’s rejection of madness according to which “madness is simply excluded by the doubting subject” (HM 45/57). Madness, for Foucault, was not even a conceptual possibility for Descartes—to show that something is mad is to have already excluded it. There is, on this interpretation, no need for the philosopher to mount an additional argument against madness—to call something mad is already to show that it is philosophically unacceptable. Derrida counters in “Cogito” with an interpretation of Descartes according to which philosophy is not automatically situated on the side of reason against the possibility of madness, but is itself the very act of an interminable quarrel with madness. Derrida’s interpretation is best captured in this line: “Philosophy is perhaps the reassurance

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given against the anguish of being mad at the point of the greatest proximity to madness” (CH 59/92). Philosophy is at its very limit with madness. Crucially, however, it cannot avoid defining itself against this limit. Philosophy, whatever else it accomplishes, is a work of reassurance against the paradigm of nonphilosophy, namely madness. Derrida’s interpretation of philosophy’s inevitable quarrel with madness in the second half of his essay parallels his critique of Foucault in the first half. Two key themes structure the first half of Derrida’s critique. The first theme concerns Derrida’s reading of Foucault as a philosopher who is in opposition to a certain classical conception of reason. In two crucial lines in a single paragraph, Derrida first notes that “the revolution against reason can be made only within it” and then accuses Foucault of such revolutionist impulses in claiming that “an archaeology against reason doubtless cannot be written” (CH 36/59). There is no need to cast doubt on the Hegelian insight upon which Derrida here relies (and he is explicit in specifying this point in terms of “a Hegelian law”). Part of what is at issue for both Derrida and Foucault is the possibility of a philosophy that would depart from the grand assumptions of philosophical rationalism. But, Derrida is careful to point out, one cannot just be against reason. To be against reason is already to be within the space of reason, as any good Hegelian knows. And yet there is something curious about Derrida’s accusation here. He assumes that Foucault, in interrogating the limits of philosophy, is also thereby against philosophy, in the sense of being dialectically within and outside of philosophy as it has already been posited. Derrida thus concludes that Foucault’s text risks “the metaphysical closure of an archaeology” and is caught up in “confirming metaphysics in its fundamental operation” (CH 36/59, 40/65). But if Foucault’s form of philosophical history is neither for nor against philosophy itself, then it would be difficult to assign it to metaphysics. What if Foucault was not writing against anything at all? What if Foucault’s historical archaeology is not meant to dethrone reason so much as to historicize it? What if Foucault was just not a thinker of “the against”? Derrida insists that in Foucault we find “Hegel again, always” (CH 43/68). But what if it is Derrida who is reproducing Hegel, simply because he cannot help but see Hegel wherever he looks? In that case it is Derrida who is the Hegelian metaphysician. Any Hegelian worth their salt can dialecticize every thinker in the history of thought. Hegel himself was a true master of such syntheses. One cannot but stand in awe of the profundity

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of Geistesgeschichte in motion in The Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel masterfully reads the history of philosophy through his own, that is Hegelian, categories. That the good Hegelian today can read a later philosopher such as Foucault through these same categories does not show that Foucault himself was Hegelian anymore than Hegel’s own reading of Descartes would show that Descartes was Hegelian. All the deployment of such a method shows is that the historical figure can be read through Hegelian lenses. If Foucault was a decidedly non-Hegelian thinker, then he is not necessarily reproducing the Hegelian law, as Derrida would insist. Rather it is Derrida who insists on reiterating Hegel again, always. It is Derrida who was for Hegel in being against him. But Foucault sought neither to be for nor against Hegel. Foucault was not so much anti-Hegelian as he was, to put the point technically if not also awkwardly, ab-Hegelian. Foucault was, quite possibly, splendidly outside of the space of Hegelianism.5 And we must at least allow for that possibility—for to insist otherwise is to perform philosophical totalitarianism. The second theme in the first half of Derrida’s critique picks up from the first in terms of its philosophical stakes. Just before he turns to his interpretation of Descartes, Derrida pauses to encapsulate the first half of his paper. Of the brief passage on Descartes in Foucault’s book (again just 3 short pages out of 673, a fact that Derrida proudly notes and Foucault mockingly scorns), Derrida says that “it thus opens the book itself ” in such a way that, “more than anywhere else, the question I have just asked seems to me unavoidable here” (CH 44/69). Note two things. First, Derrida insists that there is something Foucault cannot avoid: the Hegelian law, or the dialectic. Derrida puts this question now in terms of the avoidability, within Foucault’s focus on “history,” of the domain of the “etiological.” Can the archaeological historian avoid the etiological question of origin? This is a question to which Foucault would indirectly respond, also nearly ten years later and just before his official replies to Derrida, in his famous 1971 essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” There Foucault elaborates a crucial distinction between a genealogical history of “emergence” and a classical history of “origins.”6 And he holds that “the genealogist refuses to extend his faith in metaphysics” because he is able to engage in the project of “listening to history.”7 That this is an indirect reply to Derrida is suggested by the fact that Derrida, in his earlier reply to Foucault, had insisted that “the question [of origin] I have just asked” is “unavoidable here” (CH 44/69).

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This is exactly why Derrida was the metaphysician who cannot tolerate the possibility that philosophy itself may be avoidable. For Derrida, there simply must be philosophy. Derrida crystallizes his concern in the penultimate paragraph of the first half of his essay as follows: “I do not know to what extent Foucault would agree that the prerequisite for a response to such questions is first of all the internal and autonomous analysis of the philosophical content of philosophical discourse. Only when the totality of this content will have become manifest in its meaning for me (but this is impossible) will I rigorously be able to situate it in its total historical form” (CH 44/70). For Derrida, philosophy stands as a kind of prerequisite to the sort of historical discourse that Foucault sought to develop. There can be no history without a preliminary, and always incomplete, confrontation with philosophy. This does not mean that the historian who has not taken up philosophy is barred from doing the work. It means, rather, for Derrida, that the work of history cannot but fail to take up philosophy such that the task of the historian is, like the work of every philosopher, always inevitably incomplete. This means that philosophy is both impossible and obligatory. Philosophy is the prerequisite that we can never satisfy. Philosophy is the labor that we are always helplessly engaged in and that we can never complete. Philosophy is, in a sense, endlessly dialectical. Philosophy is not so much the Absolute as it Absolutely is. Foucault would not oppose this. For who could? Foucault would, however, fail to find it as fascinating as Derrida seemingly did. Philosophy ceases to be obligatory not when some philosopher saunters along to show all the others that their work is not a prerequisite, but rather when some other philosopher shows that there is a way of doing the work of philosophy that need not entangle itself in exactly those questions. Foucault does not disprove the dialectic—any attempt to do so could only be dialectical. Foucault rather evades dialectics. He performs a philosophical energetics that would not enact its being beholden to certain assumptions that continue to exercise a tight grip on many of our philosophical contemporaries. The genealogist begins to casually renounce, but not thereby overturn, metaphysics. fou ca u lt’s re p li e s to d e rri da

Many of Foucault’s writings from the early 1970s, including his 1970–1971 course lectures at the Collège de France on Nietzsche and his 1971 essay

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“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” cited above, suggest early traces of a forming response to Derrida. Then finally, in February and June 1972, Foucault issued his explicit reply to Derrida’s 1963 lecture. Just as I have read Derrida’s critique above as focused on the crucial question of philosophy as an obligatory prerequisite, I will read Foucault’s replies as a denial of such a claim. I begin with his “Reply to Derrida” of February before going on to consider the revision of that text into the more well-known “My Body, This Paper, This Fire,” published in June. Foucault’s first reply can also be divided in two. In the second section, he counters Derrida’s critique of his interpretation of Descartes (RP 578/1153). But again, the interpretive sparring is here not the primary site of interest. Instead, the first section of Foucault’s reply offers, similar in form to Derrida’s essay, an extended metaphilosophical discussion of the stakes of philosophy itself. Foucault begins there by attributing three “postulates” to Derrida: that all rational discourse “entertains a fundamental relation” to philosophy, that philosophy must always actualize itself lest it risk the fault of naiveté, and that philosophy is originary rather than historical and eventual (RP 575–577/1150–1152). For Foucault, these mean that philosophy originates itself as a universal and invariable guard against unthinking naiveté such that rational discourse can address itself to its own fundamental conditions of possibility. Foucault frames this assembly of postulates as follows: “They form the framework of the teaching of philosophy in France” (RP 577/1151). Whereas Derrida is “the most profound and the most radical” of those working under the shelter of that system, Foucault would rather “try to free myself of them” (RP 577/1152). He can do so, he is clear, only if the postulates are themselves historical rather than universal, metaphysical, or transcendental preconditions to all possible inquiry as such. Foucault is clear as to the precise nature of the issue: “There are conditions and rules for the formation of knowledge to which philosophical discourse is subject” (RP 578/1152). If for Derrida philosophy was the form that thought would take whenever it interrogates its own conditions, for Foucault philosophy is itself subject to rules of formation. Thus, Foucault admits mockingly, his book would “inevitably appear quite exterior and superficial compared to the profound philosophical interiority of Derrida’s work” (RP 578/1152). The book is superficial because its author is concerned not so much with the interiority of philosophy itself as with the “forms of discourse, concepts, institutions, and practices” that condition

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its possibility (RP 578/1152). Foucault’s book is superficial, perhaps even casual, because it would risk being historical without being philosophical. Foucault thus concludes the first half of his reply to Derrida in a passage worth quoting at some length: For me, the most essential part of [History of Madness] was in the analysis of . . . those systematic forms that link discourses, institutions and practices, and these are all things about which Derrida has not a word to say in his text. But I had not yet managed to free myself sufficiently from the postulates of philosophical teaching, as I was unable to resist placing at the head of one chapter, and therefore in quite a privileged place, the analysis of a text by Descartes. This was no doubt the most expendable part of my book, and I willingly admit that I should have omitted it had I been more consistent in my casual indifference towards philosophy. (RP 578/1152)

To Derrida’s emphatic insistence that philosophy is a prerequisite to all rational discourse, Foucault responds with a “casual indifference towards philosophy” that would make any metaphysician shudder. Foucault’s point is not that we ought not do philosophy. It is, rather, quite simply that we ought not to have to do philosophy. We ought not to insist that philosophy is something that everyone who thinks is, by nature, obligated to take up. Philosophy, rather, ought to earn its hearing by way of its achievements. It ought not to demand a listening by imposing its voice. That latter is the path of metaphysics. It is a form of philosophy that Foucault would, consistently throughout his career, renounce. Renounce but not refute. And so the deconstructive demonstration of the impossibility of avoiding the possibility of metaphysics is met by Foucault with an indifference that he calls casual but that we might better regard as studied and careful. For after noting that he would just as well omit the passages on Descartes, Foucault then embarks without pause on an extended interrogation of Derrida’s interpretation of the passages at issue (RP 578–590/1153–1163). In his second reply to Derrida, in June, Foucault once again offers an extended rebuttal of Derrida’s interpretation focusing on many of the same scholarly details raised in the first reply (MB 552–572/584–601). This interpretive core of the reply is bookended by two very short passages in which Foucault discusses the metaphilosophical status of the interpretive

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debate (MB 550–552/583–584, 573–574/601–602). The metaphilosophical sections in the June appendix are much shorter than in the February reply (especially if one takes into account that most of the first bookend is devoted to a long quotation of Derrida). Though shorter, Foucault’s replies here are also much sharper. At the conclusion of the essay, Foucault accuses Derrida of enacting a “historically well-determined little pedagogy” (MB 573/602). What in the first reply was glossed as the “framework of the teaching of philosophy in France” (RP 577/1151) is now described as a “pedagogy” that “teaches the student that there is nothing outside the text” with an unmistakable reference to Derrida’s most infamous sentence from his 1967 book Of Grammatalogy (MB 573/602).8 The crux of this pedagogy is that it gives “to the voice of the masters that limitless sovereignty that allows it to restate the text indefinitely” (MB 573/602; translation modified). Derrida is here explicitly targeted by Foucault as a representative of the commentary engine and author function he had so relentlessly criticized in, among other writings, his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in December 1970, later published under the title “The Order of Discourse.”9 In the preceding paragraph Foucault had made clear just what in Derrida he most vehemently rejected: “a system of which Derrida is today the most decisive representative, in its ultimate light: a reduction of discursive practices to textual traces” (MB 573/602; translation modified). Whereas Foucault in his first reply had made a claim on behalf of the historical interrogation of networks of institutions, concepts, and practices as they congeal into discursive formations, Foucault is here more openly hostile to Derrida’s own methodology insofar as it enacts the “‘textualisation’ of discursive practices” (MB 573/602). While all of this may seem quite independent from Foucault’s other writings of the period, in fact it was not. Foucault was certainly thinking about Derrida, and his textualizing methodology, quite frequently in these years. In the final lecture of his Collège de France course in 1971, Foucault describes his project as “the analysis of what could be called discursive events.”10 Interestingly, Foucault’s analytics of discourse was itself often understood as a thoroughly linguisticizing form of philosophy. The analysis of discourse, it was frequently thought, and not without good reason, was the analysis of language, even perhaps textuality. But Foucault was in this lecture quite clear that his method is not Derrida’s: “The discursive event

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is never textual. We do not find it in a text.”11 Perhaps in 1966 Foucault’s methodology was tethered to the linguistic. But by 1971 Foucault’s archaeology is working its way out of a textualism toward a more capacious conception of discursive practice that would later be central to genealogy. By the time this development was finished, Foucault would in fact rarely refer to “discourse” itself, nor even to the “discursive practices” of the 1969–1973 period, preferring instead to refer to practices, actions, conducts, and of course power, which he once defined as “the conduct of conducts.”12 By the time he revisited History of Madness at the outset of his Psychiatric Power course lectures in 1973 he explicitly aimed to look beyond the “analysis of representations” toward “the practical dispositions of power.”13 A reading of Foucault’s vehement reply to Derrida, surely among the most polemical of his writings in a corpus that otherwise rigorously avoided polemics, could shed much light on the methodological transformations involved in Foucault’s shift from an analytics of archaeology to a methodology of critique that made use of both archaeology and genealogy. One cannot help but speculate that Foucault’s reaction to Derrida’s textualism has much to do with his own efforts in these years to shift his thinking from a focus on discourse to an analytics of conducts and practices.14 By folding Foucault’s methodological transformations back into his reply to Derrida, we meet with a possible explanation for its nine-year delay. For in that moment of the early 1970s it is possible that Foucault found it propitious to explicitly distance himself from the stain of the Derridean textualism whose influence was growing and indeed so much that it was increasingly attributed to Foucault too. Returning to the terms of that distancing, it is intriguing that Foucault sought to separate his own work from Derrida’s enactment of a “pedagogy.” For there was at least one other option that Foucault briefly considers: “I would not say that it is a metaphysics, metaphysics itself, or its closure, that is hiding behind this ‘textualisation’ of discursive practices. I would go much farther: I would say that it is a historically well-determined little pedagogy, which manifests itself here in a very visible manner” (MB 573/602). And yet Foucault does say it. Foucault does accuse Derrida of enacting a metaphysics. It is just that he does not do just that. Derrida does not only say that philosophy is obligatory in assuming the mantle of metaphysics. For he enacts this metaphysics in the service of a pedagogy that teaches us that the philosophy to which we are obligated is one that

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teaches that “there is nothing outside the text” such that “it is never necessary to look beyond it” (MB 573/602). Not only is philosophy obligatory, but it is obligatory in such a way as to seal up thought in the interiority of the text itself. Not only is philosophy obligatory as a prerequisite to history, then, but philosophy is obligatory in such a way as to show that history is unnecessary. Philosophy has become both a generalized prerequisite and the only thing worth doing. These are the exact terms within which Foucault situates the debate in the first bookend at the outset of his revised reply: “What is at stake in this debate is clearly indicated: is it possible that there might be something anterior or exterior to philosophical discourse? Could it have its condition in an exclusion, a refusal, a risk eluded, and, why not, in a fear? A suspicion that Derrida rejects with passion” (MB 552/584). For Foucault, however, the answer is affirmative. Just as Descartes recognized that he could exclude suppositions by referring them to madness, and without having to argue against madness itself (these being the precise stakes of the interpretive dimension of the debate between Derrida and Foucault), philosophy today depends on a series of exclusions that are exterior to the work of philosophical discourse itself. Contrary to what philosophers often like to think, we do not construct every type of barrier. There are some limits that are given to us. These limits, Foucault argues, cannot be interrogated by philosophy itself since they are the very condition of philosophy’s operation. Rather, philosophy can confront its limits only by going outside of itself, for instance into the work of history. It was the dream of metaphysics that philosophy could systematically, indeed absolutely, account for itself. This is why metaphysics is the name for philosophy in its obligatory mode. And this is why Lynne Huffer is correct to claim that “Foucault shatters metaphysics.”15 And also why Amy Allen is correct to conclude that “Derrida’s charge of metaphysics is not quite on the mark.”16 Indeed Derrida sees metaphysics in Foucault only because he himself is the metaphysician who cannot but witness metaphysics in every instance of his own confrontation with philosophy. p h i lo s o p h y ’s li m i ts

Does the debate between Foucault and Derrida conclude there? But how could it? Derrida’s essay “Tympan” can be fruitfully read as his most

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immediate reply to Foucault’s two belated replies to “Cogito and the History of Madness.” Derrida’s essay, dated May 1972, is the preface to the Margins of Philosophy collection, which includes such crucial texts as “Différance” and “Signature Event Context.”17 In introducing these writings, or at least preceding them, “Tympan” also seems to address a number of the themes raised by both Derrida and Foucault in their ongoing debate over History of Madness. Had Derrida read Foucault’s reply to him published in Japan in February? Was Derrida perhaps even able to read drafts or galleys of Foucault’s second edition of the book, which would be published the following month, with the more extended reply there? Did Derrida attend any of Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France in the spring of 1971 or perhaps receive reports of them from mutual colleagues? I do not know the answer to these questions. But it is difficult to not hear in Derrida’s “Tympan” the gentle thud of an insistent response to Foucault: “[This collection] interrogates philosophy beyond its meaning, treating it not only as a discourse but as determined text inscribed in a general text, enclosed in the representation of its own margin.”18 Philosophy, Derrida replies, is textual through and through and thereby not oriented only to discourse. Philosophy is, even when it is beyond its margins, textual. He continues: “Beyond the philosophical text there is not a blank, virgin, empty margin, but another text, a weave of differences of forces without any present center of reference.”19 There is always just more philosophy. In confronting its own limits, in the attempt to transgress itself, philosophy can only meet with more of itself. Philosophy is obligatory—perhaps helplessly so, but obligatory nonetheless. For Foucault, nothing could be more demoralizing than philosophy’s insistence on its own privilege. For Foucault, philosophy has no privilege by right but rather is a practice that must earn its privilege by accomplishment. Philosophy is not required of us and is not there waiting for us. Philosophy is a severe and patient labor. The work of philosophy, which Foucault, throughout his life, understood as the work of critique, takes place at the limits of our selves. Working there, we cannot afford to simply assume the viability of critical or philosophical interrogation. We cannot simply rely upon philosophy, as if it is always already there for us, allowing us to take a kind of cold comfort in its inevitability. Foucault throughout his life practiced philosophy in such a way as to make clear that he sought to deploy it contingently rather than insist upon its necessity. This is why Foucault, in

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1984, on the eve of his death, could write in “What Is Enlightenment?”: “Criticism is not transcendental, and its goal is not that of making a metaphysics possible: it is genealogical in its design and archaeological in its method.”20 For Foucault, this has everything to do with what he calls in the essay “the undefined work of freedom.”21 Philosophy, were it obligatory, would not be able to be itself the work of freedom. For the work of freedom cannot be an obligation, cannot be what is there anyway, cannot be what simply is required of us. Philosophy must be freely elected, chosen, and undertaken. Such a work of freedom oriented toward elaborating its own definition could not possibly be easy. It can only be, Foucault says, and these are among his very last written words, “a patient labor giving form to our impatience for liberty.”22 Derrida in “Tympan” and Foucault in “What Is Enlightenment?” are both obsessive about limits. Derrida’s text establishes itself, in its second sentence, as meditation on the possibility of “being at the limit.”23 This is a line appropriate to a prefatory series of remarks to a study of the margin. Foucault’s text famously specifies what he calls “the philosophical ethos” itself in terms of a conception of critique understood as a “limit-attitude.”24 But these two obsessions with limits are very differently positioned. o u r co n t e m p o rary li m i ts

So we can ask again: does the debate between Derrida and Foucault conclude there? But again: how could it? Today we are still interrogating limits. Though these limits are now our own, and not theirs, our critical inquiry still proceeds after the manners that formed the terms of the debate between Foucault and Derrida. Thus the debate ensues—for within it are represented two profoundly different means of interrogating the limits of who we today are. To bring these two styles up to our own living present, consider a more contemporary problem we face today, one that neither Derrida nor Foucault was all that well-positioned to consider. I offer as a closing index of this agon Cornelia Vismann’s recent study of the effects of media technologies on the elaboration of law as developed in her book Files.25 Vismann’s fascinating discussion ranges from Lévi-Strauss’s ethnography of practices of list-making that he himself provokes in his natives to the status of file folders as a media technology in the nineteenth century to the effects of

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the iconization of documents and files on our computer desktops in the twenty-first century. In the course of detailing these histories, Vismann canvasses in a crucial moment a difference between Derrida and Foucault in terms of their varying relation to limits, or what she calls, in a legal inflection of the idea, “barriers”: “Deconstructing barriers hardly results in a genealogy of the law, for it is a deconstructive impossibility to observe the erection of those barriers that enable the law in the first place.”26 Vismann’s own project is avowedly genealogical.27 Her book is best read as a historical interrogation of the media technological practices through which the law has instantiated itself. In her own terms, she wants to observe and interrogate the construction of the barriers that condition the stabilization of law. But why adopt such an approach? Why ask this particular question? Why genealogically interrogate the limits of the law rather than deconstructively destabilize those same limits? To understand the value of Vismann’s approach it is crucial to observe how she departs from standard historical and philosophical treatments of her subject. Studies of the law all too typically focus on abstract formulations of rulemaking, legitimacy, and authority. They all too often neglect the humble processes whereby legitimacy is made operative and powerful in the form of paperwork, folders, and files. The solitary figure of the law is all too often the judge. But who before Vismann had dreamed to write a philosophy and a history of the law as it is enacted by the clerks? For Vismann, the philosophical thematics of the judge issuing a decree must give way to a genealogical interrogation of the clerk whisking away files for sorting. It is the clerks with their files who enact a series of hitherto-unobserved operations that have enabled us to construct barriers to the law in the first place. My point in glossing Vismann is just that the sort of interrogation for which she is a contemporary paradigm is situated on one side of a decisive divide.28 Vismann’s interrogation cannot take place by way of deconstruction, for that method can only endlessly affirm for us our helpless entrapment in the law even when we are always on the verge of being right outside of it. Deconstruction can only show us that the barriers of the law are unstable and forever capable of being called into question. But the interrogation demanded by Vismann requires instead a genealogy: the patient labor that would specify the form of the limits to our freedom but also thereby the very conditions through which freedom can possibly come to be transgressed. Genealogy shows us how the limits of our selves were formed and

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thereby gives us bearings within that material such that we can begin the long and slow labor of freely remaking it and thereby our selves too. At least two branches of French theory continue to flow forth in contemporary philosophy. They are divided from one another: Derrida deconstructively shows us that our most necessary limits are also contingent, whereas Foucault genealogically shows us how that which is contingent has come to be taken as necessary.29 Seen from the perspective of a philosophical investment in metaphysics, these two projects appear the same, for they are united in their “poststructuralist” appeal to contingency in the place of necessity. But seen from the perspective of a philosophical investment in history, the two projects could not appear more different. One shows what history itself always had to be anyway, while the other shows what our history has actually come to be. It is only the latter that can be of use in the practical task of remaking what history has given us to be.

n ot e s

For comments on an earlier version of this paper, I thank George W. Shea IV and Penelope Deutscher. For helpful advice on translation issues, I thank Nicolae Morar. 1. On these two debates, see Chantal Mouffe, ed., Deconstruction and Pragmatism (New York: Routledge, 1996), and Michael Kelly, ed., Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994). 2. On the terms of this Anglophone lumping together of French differences, see François Cusset, French Theory, trans. Jeff Fort (Minneapolis: University of Minessota Press, 2008 [orig. 2003]). 3. I address some of these implications in chapter 7 of Koopman, Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). 4. The two halves of “Cogito and the History of Madness” are roughly defined as pages 31–45/51–70 and 45–63/71–97. 5. This suggestion is counter to Lynne Huffer’s recent reading of Foucault as explicitly Hegelian in History of Madness. For Huffer, Foucault “use[s] Hegel in order to undo him” (“Foucault’s Evil Genius,” in Foucault Now, ed. James D. Faubion [Malden: Polity, 2014], 65). This is a follow-on from Huffer’s earlier reading of Foucault as “dedialecticizing Hegel” by “undo[ing] Hegel from within” (in Mad for Foucault [New York: Columbia University Press, 2010], 199). Amy Allen offers a similar point through a reading of “Foucault’s attempt to historicize Hegel’s philosophy of history” by “tak[ing] up the project of History and transform[ing] it from within” (in The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory [New York: Columbia University Press, 2016], chapter 5, 178–179). Though I agree with Huffer and Allen in the broader

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7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

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outlines of their readings of Foucault (see more on this below), I depart from both with respect to their claim that Foucault is trying to do something to Hegel from within Hegel. I think that Derrida is surely right that one can transform Hegelianism from within only by way of becoming Hegelian oneself. On my reading, then, it is crucial that Foucault sought to avoid Hegelianism rather than transform it. For an extended discussion of Foucault (and Deleuze) as carrying philosophy itself outside of the Hegelian dialectic, see Koopman, “Critical Problematization in Foucault and Deleuze: The Force of Critique without Judgment” [forthcoming in Between Deleuze and Foucault, ed. Nicolae Morar, Thomas Nail, and Daniel Smith (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2016)]. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Essential Works, vol. 2, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion and Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1998), 370, 373. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 371. The reference is to Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976 [orig. 1967]), 158. Foucault, “The Order of Discourse,” appendix to Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972 [orig. 1969]). Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1970–1971, ed. Arnold Davidson, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 194. Ibid., 194; cf. 198. Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Essential Works, vol. 3, Power, ed. James Faubion and Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 2001), 241. See Foucault, Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973–1974, ed. Arnold Davidson, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 12, 15. On the terms of Foucault’s methodological transformations from “epistemes” and “discourses” to “practices” and “conducts,” see my argument in Koopman, “Conduct and Power: Foucault’s Methodological Expansions in 1971,” in Active Intolerance: Michel Foucault, the Prisons Information Group, and the Future of Abolition, ed. Andrew Dilts and Perry Zurn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 59–74. For a pragmatist reading of these transformations in terms not altogether different from my own, see the excellent recent work by Tuomo Tiisala, “Keeping It Implicit: A Defense of Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1, no. 4 (2015): 653–673. Huffer, “Foucault’s Evil Genius,” 59. Allen, The End of Progress, chapter 5, 183. Derrida, “Tympan,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982 [orig. 1972]). Derrida, “Tympan,” xxiii. Ibid., xxiii. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” in Essential Works, vol. 1, Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1998), 315.

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21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

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Ibid., 316. Ibid., 319. Derrida, “Tympan,” x. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 315. Cornelia Vismann, Files, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). Ibid., 20. Ibid., 13, 112–117. For other avowedly genealogical and archaeological interrogations of our contemporary political situation through analyses of media, files, computers, and data, see Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, ed. Jussi Parrika (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2013), and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Programmed Visions (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011). On the fact of contingency (that a limit is always already contingent) versus the emergence of contingency (how a limit was contingently composed), see my discussion in Koopman, Genealogy as Critique, 140–148.

5

“The Common Root of Meaning and Nonmeaning” DERRIDA, FOUCAULT, AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE TRANSCENDENTAL QUESTION



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debate about the History of Madness has been framed is as articulating the methodological contrast of their respective endeavors. On this reading, at stake in the debate is the way in which archaeology or discourse analysis, in Foucault’s sense, and Derridean deconstruction relate to each other. This is a rich question, and in what follows, I focus on just one of its dimensions—the transformation of the transcendental question that is at stake primarily on Derrida’s side of the debate. The transformation of the transcendental question is in fact a project that, in general, Foucault and Derrida share, even if they pursue it in diverging ways. At first, Derrida and Foucault’s debate about History of Madness and the cogito might give us the impression that it is only Derrida who insists on the transcendental question, whereas Foucault wants to leave it behind. While Derrida returns time and again to Foucault’s preface in the 1961 edition of the History of Madness that interrogates the conditions of possibility of Foucault’s own endeavor, Foucault seems to respond by deeming such questions dispensable and characterizing the pursuit of them as misguided. Indeed, he cuts this preface from the 1972 edition, abstains from any direct reaction to this line of questioning, and rearticulates his whole endeavor as an attempt to free himself from the foundational claims of philosophy that, according to Foucault, continue to dominate Derrida’s discourse.1

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However, if we consider Derrida’s and Foucault’s projects more broadly, it seems misleading to oppose them as either obstinately sticking to or blatantly dismissing the transcendental project. We fail to appreciate what Derrida is aiming at if we depict him as merely reaffirming the foundational claim of philosophy and as insisting on transcendental questions of the canonical sort. Rather, he seeks to transform our understanding of transcendental conditions by, first, rearticulating the relation between the empirical and the transcendental, and second, by outlining a series of investigations in which the conditions of possibility of a certain act or practice turn out to be conditions for the impossibility of its purity. And we trivialize Foucault’s endeavor if we equate his remarkable form of “happy positivism”2 with positivism of the traditional sort.3 His historical undertaking is not to just recount a certain body of events or facts, but to give a historical account of how certain objects, facts, subjects, and modes of speaking have become possible at all. Foucault’s archaeology of the human sciences, for example, does not recount a chronological succession of ideas, but tries to unearth deep, historically shifting discursive presuppositions that make certain ideas or judgments intelligible in the first place.4 Far from eliminating the investigation of transcendental conditions, Foucault rather wants to modify our understanding of such conditions in terms of the idea of a historical a priori.5 It is beyond the scope of this essay to follow both Derrida and Foucault equally in their attempts at transforming the transcendental question. I focus on a deeper understanding of Derrida’s transformation of the transcendental question in order to develop a different understanding of his position vis-à-vis Foucault’s History of Madness. By developing the way in which Derrida turns the transcendental approach, it is possible to bring out a deeper affinity with Foucault’s project than first suggested by the debate. We go beyond the false impression that there is nothing more to it than two incompatible approaches talking past each other. This debate is not the confrontation of a traditional transcendental, philosophical inquiry on the one hand and a positivist, historicist account on the other hand, but, as I will argue, the conflict of two ambitious transformations of the transcendental approach. We thereby understand the true stakes of this debate differently from the usual question as to whose reading of Descartes is more convincing or who seems more evasive—Derrida in neglecting the bulk of Foucault’s substantive historical theses or Foucault in evading the question

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of the very possibility of a history of madness. Instead we gain access to a more far-reaching issue: how to understand the ways in which Derrida and Foucault rearticulate the very project of critique. How does the transcendental question come up in Derrida’s “Cogito” essay?6 Derrida opens his critical essay by distinguishing two projects that are implied in Foucault’s investigation. According to Derrida, Foucault’s dominant project in History of Madness is an “archaeology of . . . silence” (HMP xxviii/188): Foucault ventures to tell the history of a complex and extended exclusion of madness that interrupts any possible dialogue between reason and madness, and that thereby systematically silences madness: “Modern man no longer communicates with the madman” (HMP xxviii/188). Derrida points out that Foucault himself, more or less explicitly, acknowledges the deep problems that surround such an archaeology of silence. How can we moderns write the history of our very own limits: the history of “obscure gestures” of exclusion “through which a culture rejects something which for it will be the Exterior,” gestures that have been “necessarily forgotten as soon as they are accomplished” (HMP xxix/189, emphasis added)? How do we avoid our attempts to include the silence of madness, or to make this silence speak, turning out to be the last ruse of its confinement?7 And in telling this history how do we overcome the continuation of the exclusion of madness, if the “possibility of history” itself is tied to this very exclusion, as Foucault himself argues (HMP xxxii/191)? Derrida suggests that these problems lead us to a second, divergent endeavor that is also present in Foucault’s book, even if only implicitly and partly repressed. Derrida characterizes this other endeavor as an inquiry into the “common root of meaning and nonmeaning” (CH 43/68), the “unitary foundation” or “unitary ground” (CH 39/62) of reason and unreason—a ground on which we have to draw in the attempt to tell, and hence to exceed, the history of the interruption of the dialogue between reason and its other. In order to delineate this common root and to show how it modifies our perspective on the history of madness, Derrida turns to Descartes. Foucault presents Descartes’s Meditations as symptomatic of the age of the great confinement insofar as Descartes explicitly excludes madness from consideration in the first meditation. Now, Derrida suggests that we can attain a richer interpretation of the Cartesian gesture that shows that he does not exclude madness in the way Foucault suggests. Descartes’s attempt to attain an unquestionable foundation for our knowledge

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rather leads us to a hyperbolic understanding of the cogito that points to a common ground of meaning and nonmeaning.8 In his critical responses to Derrida, Foucault rejects this reading of Descartes.9 It seems to me that Foucault does so, not only because he understands Descartes differently, but also because he takes Derrida to merely repeat a gesture of transcendental philosophy that stifles the possibility of any history of reason and unreason. In doing so, Foucault fails to appreciate that Derrida tries to delineate an understanding of conditions of possibility that is quite alien to the way in which the philosophical tradition has itself understood transcendental conditions in general and the cogito especially. The hyperbolic cogito that Derrida outlines is precisely not meant to preclude, but to account for the possibility of a history of reason and unreason. In order to get a more adequate understanding of Derrida’s position in this debate, we thus need to get clearer about the peculiar character of the transcendental conditions Derrida tries to delineate. In what follows, I begin by schematically distinguishing different ways of understanding the transformation of the transcendental question in Derrida’s work more generally. In the next section, I turn to the ways in which these different understandings are at play in his interpretation of Descartes. In a third section, I will briefly indicate that the two main complications of the transcendental have counterparts in Foucault’s own approach. I will close with some considerations of the implications for the debate on the History of Madness. t r a n s form ati o n o f th e trans c e n de n ta l q ue st io n

How can we generally conceive of Derrida’s relation to transcendental philosophy?10 According to a first way of understanding, suggested by the “Cogito” essay, Derrida’s take on the transcendental question amounts to a project of radicalization. With an exquisitely German word—one that is used primarily with regard to metaphysics and to cars—we could specify this radicalization as a project of Tieferlegung, of descending the level. If we understand Derrida in these terms, he is interested in something that is “older,”11 more fundamental than the conditioning structures identified as fundamental in the philosophies he deconstructs. On this account, Derrida seems to try to identify an origin even “more originary”12 than the one already identified, a condition even more fundamental than the one

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already described. Sometimes this understanding is subsumed under the term “ultra-transcendental.”13 Although Derrida gives the term a different twist, as we will see, it is understandable that one might associate it with a descending of the level. Derrida’s project could be ultratranscendental in the sense of being even more transcendental than transcendental philosophy: it would ask after conditions of possibility that are broader or more fundamental than the transcendental conditions that Cartesian, Kantian, or Husserlian forms of philosophy understand as enabling our forms of rational cognition and action. Radicalization in this sense would mean that Derrida tries to outdo or overbid preceding philosophical endeavors. It is hard to deny that there are elements in Derrida’s rhetoric that give rise to such an understanding.14 In the “Cogito” essay we see this in his frequent talk of a common root (CH 39/62, 46/68)15 or a unitary ground (CH 39/62)16 that lies at the foundation of reason and unreason, reason and madness: a root or a ground that is “older” than their distinction and that is the ground in which this distinction can take place. But there are a number of reasons to be wary of this characterization of the transformation of the transcendental question: Derrida repeatedly criticizes other philosophers—most prominent among them is Heidegger—for merely outdoing or overbidding the foundational project of philosophy present in former approaches without properly displacing the logics of founding. And Derrida often hastens to qualify his talk of a common root or unitary ground or more originary origin by saying that they are common or unitary or older only “in a very strange way,” which entails precisely that they do not designate a positive commonality, unity, or origin. In the “Cogito” essay, Derrida points explicitly to the danger that we might understand the unitary ground of reason and unreason in terms of an “original presence, thereby confirming metaphysics in its fundamental operation” (CH 40/65). So it seems clear, if Derrida is indeed trying to point at something that is “more fundamental” than the established conditions of possibility, he cannot mean a condition that relates to what it conditions in the same way the former conditions have related to what they make possible. Otherwise Derrida would reproduce the same type of project that he is out to transform. Hence, instead of a radicalization in the sense of merely descending the level, Derrida’s decisive move in transforming the transcendental question must lie somewhere else. It resides not so much in descending the level at which he locates the conditions, but rather in complicating the way we

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understand conditions of possibility: the very way in which they enable and condition the conditioned.17 It is not absurd to construe the transition from one transcendental program to the next in terms of a radicalization. But for Derrida—a philosopher who does not directly present a positive transcendental philosophy of his own, but rather presents critical readings of diverse transcendental philosophies in order to unfold some of their implications and to transform our understanding of them—it is not the level but the form of the conditioning that is decisive. It might be helpful in this regard to compare and contrast the step from Descartes, Kant, and Husserl to Derrida with the step that takes place from Descartes to Kant. According to a proposition from James Conant, we should distinguish between a Cartesian and a Kantian variety of skepticism:18 where Cartesian skepticism is mainly concerned with the truth of various cognitions, the Kantian skeptic asks whether our cognition has objective purport in the first place. Instead of searching for a foundation of certainty that allows us to ensure the truth of our cognitions, Kant tries to make out conditions that make experience so much as possible. He tries to identify a ground on the basis of which it can be averted that our “perceptions would . . . not belong to any experience, consequently would be without an object, merely a blind play of representations, less even than a dream.”19 Where the Cartesian skeptic is worried that our experience of the world might just be a dream and that our sensible knowledge is illusory, Kant thinks we should find it astonishing and in need of justification that our experience has the mere unity of being about something at all and does not disintegrate into something that is even less than a dream. Depicted in these terms, Kantian skepticism can be quite appropriately called a radicalization of the Cartesian variety, in that it questions what the Cartesian skeptic had still taken for granted. Such a radicalization has deep consequences for the shape skeptical doubts take and for the type of responses that they provoke.20 However, in both cases we are confronted with a fundamentally similar dynamic. Skeptical questions lead us to the conditions for cognitive success. Even if Kant brackets the question of actual truth and falsity in order to raise the more fundamental issue of whether our cognition has the necessary form to be about something at all, the transcendental conditions he then specifies are meant to ensure the possibility of such contentful cognition. And in both the Cartesian case and the Kantian case we are ultimately directed

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at a transcendental ground—the Cartesian cogito or the Kantian Ich denke of transcendental apperception—that resides on a different level than what it grounds or unifies. Along these lines, radicalization for Derrida would involve trying to reveal the positive conditions for an even more fundamental cognitive achievement, not only beyond truth or falsity, but even beyond contentful or contentless cognition, experience or unexperience (something “less than a dream”), taken for granted by Descartes and Kant alike. Such a radicalization would thus involve identifying a ground that enables this more basic cognitive achievement in a way similar to the cogito’s grounding of objective validity or the enabling of experience by the I think of transcendental apperception.21 Rather than pursuing the same type of project on a more fundamental level, however, Derrida investigates existing foundational philosophical projects and questions the very way in which the respective grounds might enable or ensure the requisite cognitive achievements. If we can indeed call Derrida’s approach “radical,” it is not because he is primarily interested in a more basic stratum of our cognitive achievements, but rather because he directs our attention at the presuppositions and the form of transcendental accounting itself. Derrida thereby seeks to modify our understanding of the way in which transcendental conditions might relate to the conditioned. There are two basic complications in the understanding of conditions of possibility that are crucial to Derrida’s work. The first one questions the sense of enabling and tries to reveal conditions of possibility to be simultaneously conditions of impossibility; the second one questions the relation of the empirical and the transcendental. Whereas the first complication turns the endeavor of transcendental justification into a project of quasi-transcendental accounting, the second complication implies a critical investigation of the possibility of transcendental accounting: a project of ultratranscendental questioning.22 The quasi-transcendental form of inquiry works to show that the conditions of possibility of a certain type of act or capacity are simultaneously the conditions of impossibility of its purity.23 This is the type of complication that we find in most of Derrida’s major analyses. Iterability, for example, is presented as a condition of possibility of meaning and at the same time as the condition of the impossibility of its pure determinacy.24 Différance might be understood as the condition of possibility of identity, but at the

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same time it subverts each identity through its differential constitution. The cogito might be regarded as the condition of possibility of reason, but it simultaneously seems to endanger each determinate form of reason and opens it up to the threat of unreason. Now, this cannot be established just by decreeing that we ought to construe conditions of possibility always also as conditions of impossibility.25 Only a detailed analysis can show that certain conditions of possibility are of such a nature that they are at the same time conditions of the impossibility of the purity of what they condition. By simply referring to this quasi-transcendental project, we haven’t demonstrated anything against the aspirations of transcendental philosophy, yet. We have only clarified what it is that Derrida aims to show. This project of describing conditions of possibility as conditions of impossibility should not be construed as skeptical or nihilistic, as a primarily negative endeavor aiming to show that transcendental philosophy simply fails. If transcendental arguments are understood as a response to skeptical doubts, it could seem that Derrida allies himself with the skeptic insofar as he shows that certain prominent transcendental conditions do not ensure the cognitive success they are usually taken to warrant. However, this is a deep misunderstanding of Derrida’s project. Critiques of skepticism, relativism, and historicism are to be found throughout his whole work,26 so it is unlikely that he aims to show that the skeptic prevails.27 In his attempt to show that the conditions of possibility are tied up with conditions of impossibility, Derrida is trying neither to strengthen the skeptic nor to merely subvert the whole transcendental project. He rather aims at reconceiving our notion of conditioning and of enabling, and our sense of success and failure. The point is not to claim the ubiquity of failure nor the sheer impossibility of definite success, but rather to point out the complex way in which success is only won against, in, and even through “failure.” The conditions of possibility of our practices are aporetic. This thought is not the ground of their nullity but rather of their complexity. Their complexity—the entanglement of success and failure—has both a negative and a positive aspect. Usually in Derrida’s reception the negative aspect is highlighted: every success seems to be haunted by failure and tainted by doubt. Yet especially in his later writings, Derrida is much more interested in the positive aspect: in events, practices, or ideas that are only possible through their impossibility (the gift, the pardon, justice, etc.).28 The co-implication of success and failure is therefore most adequately expressed not in terms of

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a generalized doubt, but in an expressive intensity that characterizes performances that truly succeed. If we understand success as an achievement and not just as mechanical repetition, success in the full sense is marked by its exceeding the mere fulfillment of conditions of success and by not merely overcoming but drawing on “failure.” We are here encountering a failure that is not external to success, but a failure that is “constitutive of success.”29 Let us now briefly turn to the second dimension in which Derrida tries to complicate our understanding of conditions of possibility: the ultratranscendental inquiry. Vis-à-vis different varieties of transcendental philosophy that try to elucidate a given type of act, capacity, or practice by delineating something that ensures or guarantees its possibility, Derrida reflects on the very presuppositions of such forms of transcendental accounting. On what grounds are the transcendental inquiry and the grounding relation that it describes possible? One major issue to which Derrida returns time and again in this regard is the difference and relation between the empirical and the transcendental. In Of Grammatology and Speech and Phenomena, Derrida had designated his own approach as “ultratranscendental” precisely in view of the opposition between empiricism and transcendental philosophy:30 his project strives to be ultratranscendental insofar as he tries to question the critical project without relapsing into a precritical naiveté. His project therefore has to go through the transcendental endeavor and question it from within. It does not try to deny the right to the transcendental question or the fact that it allows us to accede to a possibility beyond what is given to us empirically. Rather, it highlights the way in which the transcendental condition is irreducibly related to the empirical level. That concerns both our ability to arrive at a transcendental condition (by departing from concrete, specific experiences) and the mode of that condition’s actuality (as being implied or present in enabled experiences). Derrida exposes this problematic especially in his analyses of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. In his introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, Derrida explicates the fundamental historicity of ideal objects in Husserl and highlights the role that Husserl accords to language and writing as conditions of possibility of transcendental historicity.31 Derrida points out that the ideality at which Husserl arrives by reducing and bracketing factual history in turn reveals itself to be dependent on forms of mundane, empirical embodiment that open it up to the possibility of destruction and disclose a possibility

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usually foreign to transcendentalism: “the possibility of truth’s disappearance.”32 In Speech and Phenomena, Derrida engages in the ultratranscendental investigation by raising the question of what allows for the necessary relation between the empirical and the transcendental subject in transcendental phenomenology. He terms this desideratum an “ultratranscendental concept of life.”33 The ultratranscendental line of questioning argues that any properly critical transcendental endeavor must consider and account for the articulation of the empirical and the transcendental. This leads us to a different understanding of the mutual dependence and mutual contamination of the empirical and the transcendental. Given the way in which Derrida executes these ultratranscendental investigations, they do not lead to a separate new level of further conditions that account for the relation of transcendental conditions and empirical phenomena, but rather produce a rearticulation of this relation. In Derrida’s own analyses, transcendental conditions cannot be specified once and for all, independent of the particular contexts and varying empirical experiences that need to be accounted for. We don’t have any timeless knowledge of the ideal; it can only be actualized and known from within our historical, contingent, factual experience. q u a s i - t r ans c e nd e ntal i nq u i ry a n d u lt r at r a ns c e nd e ntal c o m p li c at io n s o f t he c o gito

How can we locate these two complications in Derrida’s “Cogito” essay? I had said that Derrida’s strategy with regard to Foucault’s project might appear to search for an even more fundamental ground in which reason and unreason are as yet undivided. Accordingly, he would try to show that, contrary to Foucault’s reading, Descartes has precisely uncovered such a ground that underlies reason as well as unreason. In this way, Derrida would aim to show that Foucault should rather investigate this common ground than confine himself to an archaeology of silence. The crucial point is, however, that Derrida is pointing not only to the problems that surround an archaeology of silence, but just as much to the problems of the possible alternative project of delineating the common ground of reason and unreason. Most importantly, Derrida emphasizes that this alternative project fails entirely if this “unitary ground” of meaning and nonmeaning is conceived as an “original presence.” That means that the articulation of

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reason and unreason cannot reside in the fact that they share an underlying unity. That is why the second part of the essay is so important, as Derrida takes Descartes to have reached a more appropriate and more complicated articulation of reason and unreason. They do not share a common ground, they rather meet at a certain “point”: the point of the cogito. In articulating this point at which reason and unreason meet, Derrida does not deny that the classical age is marked by an exclusion and confinement of madness, but proposes a different understanding of this exclusion. This different understanding is dependent on, first, the quasi-transcendental and, second, the ultratranscendental complication he in general works to introduce. Derrida takes Descartes to employ a method of radical reduction that brings out a certain inner tension in the foundational, transcendental project. According to the transcendental tradition, in order for a condition to be really able to ground and make possible the conditioned, it has to be qualitatively heterogeneous from what it conditions.34 Just in this sense, Descartes’s method of radical doubt brings to light that only something that differs from all our determinate cogitationes can serve as a true foundation. By means of an epoche of the totality of our sensibly informed knowledge and, in a second step, even our intellectual knowledge, he arrives at something that can escape doubt insofar as it is qualitatively different from all these distinct elements of knowledge. And that which escapes all doubts as the ground of our cognition is ironically something that is operative precisely in this very doubt itself. What is more, the heterogeneity requirement implies that there is an irreducible distance between the cogito and each of its cogitationes. The cogito that grounds all the cogitationes in their validity is so far beyond these cogitationes that it doesn’t itself possess the form of knowledge per se; it can manifest itself just as much in entertaining a thought as in doubting this very thought. This means that on Derrida’s account the cogito appears as a condition of possibility of the validity of our knowledge that, at the same time, is the condition of the impossibility of its certainty: in order to ground our thought, the cogito has to be transcendent; but if it is, this also means that it gives us the very ability to exceed and transgress every thought grounded by it. I will not try to defend this as a reading of Descartes; I only want to expose the main thrust of Derrida’s reading: that in order for the cogito to actually fulfill the grounding and enabling function it is supposed to, it takes on such a shape that it at the same time endangers what it enables.

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Of course, Derrida does not want to suggest that Descartes directly aims for or rests content with such a result. On the contrary, once this hyperbolic cogito is reached, a new movement begins in which the rational order is reconstructed.35 In the course of this movement it is revealed, among other things, that the idea of an almighty being that deceives me is contradictory. There is a special irony, not explicitly noted by Derrida, in the fact that we only reach the ultimate point of certainty, the cogito, by means of a hypothesis—the hypothesis of an evil genius—that this cogito, once it has grasped itself as a certainty, has to dismiss. Derrida recognizes the fact that Descartes eventually excludes madness and occludes the precarious character of the hyperbolic cogito. But he maintains that on the way to this exclusion Descartes had opened up a radical doubt that does not directly exclude madness, and cannot help but include it in the hyperbolic cogito. In this sense Derrida does not deny the exclusion of madness in the classical age that Foucault demonstrates so forcefully, but rather proposes that we can attain a deeper understanding of its complex and ambiguous form if we understand it against the background of the quasi-transcendental complication. The second dimension of complicating the transcendental project is present in the essay as well. Derrida seems at first glance to object to Foucault that he is in danger of relapsing into a precritical and merely historicist project, or at least that Foucault himself does not take seriously the questions that he himself raises: how to produce a work on unreason, if unreason is by definition the absence of the work? how to locate the origin of the division of reason and unreason historically, if this division is the condition of possibility of history itself ? But these critical considerations are not meant to discredit Foucault’s historical project in the name of a philosophical investigation that would be situated outside of history: Derrida emphasizes, explicitly, that he does not want to object to Foucault’s historical project in the name of a philosophia perennis. Consider the cogito: we arrive at the cogito in departing from a natural subject and its experience, by going through natural doubt and a natural reassurance (a normality that de facto prevails and thereby belongs to the very structure of meaning and sense), and by then radicalizing this doubt. We arrive at the cogito not outside a historically determined empirical moment, but by hyperbolically “transgressing” it from within. This cogito at which we arrive, secondly, can only become operative and effective

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insofar as it is again temporalized, turned into a determinate appearance and enacted as the foundation of a normative order. Derrida writes: By separating, within the Cogito, on the one hand, hyperbole (which I maintain cannot be enclosed in a factual and determined historical structure, for it is the project of exceeding every finite and determined totality), and, on the other hand, that in Descartes’s philosophy (or in the philosophy supporting the Augustinian Cogito or the Husserlian Cogito as well) which belongs to a factual, historical structure, I am not proposing the separation of the wheat from the tares in every philosophy in the name of some philosophia perennis. Indeed, it is exactly the contrary that I am proposing. In question is a way of accounting for the very historicity of philosophy. (CH 60/93–94)

So Derrida is not, at least if we trust his words, aiming at isolating an ahistorical, ultratranscendental stratum. Rather he points to the very articulation of the transcendental and the empirical: the “transition” or “dialogue” between hyperbole and finite structure. Such a dialogue is the very element of a history of knowledge: only in the articulation between finite structure and hyperbole can knowledge become the object and subject of history. In this sense, Derrida’s reading of Descartes is supposed to elucidate the very form of historicity with which Foucault must be engaged. cou n t erparts i n f o u c au lt

Derrida’s “Cogito” essay may seem especially prone to the view that he is pursuing ever more fundamental conditions, an “origin that is more than originary” (RP 577/1151), resides outside of history, and is the exclusive object of philosophical investigation. But a closer look suggests that he is not so much trying to descend the level of transcendental inquiry. Rather he complicates the way in which we understand transcendental conditions: he tries to show that in the case of the cogito these conditions exceed and at the same time depend on their empirical-historical determination. They enable and at the same time disable determinate shapes of reason. As I briefly indicated at the outset, the two dimensions of complication that I have just located in Derrida’s reading of Descartes connect to two general tendencies in Foucault’s own work: his effort to redescribe putative

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conditions and origins in a way that captures their multiplicity and contradictoriness, and his attempt to reach a different notion of the a priori that he calls historical.36 Regarding the first dimension of the complication of conditions, it is a persistent motif of Foucault’s work across its diverse methodological paradigms to question the idea of a univocal origin. For the archaeological level that Foucault investigates in Les Mots et les choses in order to outline the deep historical conditions of possibility of certain forms of knowledge, it is vital that this level can explain conflicting and even contradicting theories of the same epoch. Foucault is therefore not concerned with conditions of possibility of a single type of cognitive success, but with conditions of a whole field of conflicting positivities.37 For the genealogical method that avoids explicit reference to the transcendental, but continues to investigate the deep conditions of forms, objects, and subjects of knowledge, it is obvious that it aims at a multiplication of beginnings. Instead of tracing phenomena to the “inviolable identity of their origin,” genealogy is supposed to refer them back to the “dissension of other things,” “disparity,” and “numberless beginnings.”38 In understanding the conditions and beginnings of our ways of being and knowing in such a way, Foucault aims at conditions that can account for the way in which our being and knowledge are historical. Insofar as the conditions of our being allow for conflicting actualizations and insofar as our constitution is to be traced back to multiple beginnings, it becomes possible to understand to what extent we can transgress the achieved form of our constitution. For all the positivism to which Foucault likes to attest, his positivism is only “happy” to the extent that he understands the positivities as inherently multiple and as rooted in conditions that can exceed them. Concerning the second dimension, we can point to the idea of a historical a priori that aims for a historicization of the transcendental. Contrary to most versions of such a historicization, Foucault is not merely trying to define “a formal a priori that is also endowed with a history” (AK 128/176) but outlines an a priori of a different sort. This a priori consists of conditions that are historical in a double sense: they are not only subject to historical shifts and differ from epoch to epoch; they are also historical in that they are themselves the conditions of history. They are not merely formal conditions of possibility, but historical conditions of actuality: conditions of the emergence, the existence, and the life of statements.39 Insofar as these conditions are both constitutive conditions of history and themselves subject

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to history, they complicate a clear-cut division between the empirical and the transcendental.40 To understand this complication properly, however, we have to remind ourselves that Foucault is deeply critical of a certain confusion and superimposition of the empirical and the transcendental that marks our epoch and has subjected us to a new kind of dogmatic slumber: the anthropological idea of man introduces an empirico-transcendental doublet that undermines the critical difference of the empirical and the transcendental in such a way that it threatens to reintroduce a precritical naiveté.41 We have to assume that Foucault’s concept of a historical a priori is supposed precisely to avoid such a relapse, even though it itself seems to aim at bridging the gap between the empirical and the transcendental. The difference between the anthropological slumber and the archaeological enlightenment might be put like this: where the anthropological paradigm tries to give the empirical a transcendental value and naturalizes and dehistoricizes the conditions of our knowledge, Foucault attempts to historicize the transcendental, without giving up the critical difference between the condition and the conditioned and the transgressive excess of the conditions over what they condition.42 If that is true, Foucault pursues a line of questioning that is very close to Derrida’s attempt to outline a mutual dependence of the empirical and the transcendental without giving up their critical difference.43 Now, both dimensions are developed and articulated in Foucault’s work not so much by a direct reflection on the transcendental philosophical program, but by a highly original type of historical work. It seems that the transformation of the transcendental program is for Foucault not the main focus or the ultimate end of his endeavor, but rather a means to enable different historical accounts of our discursive practices. It is a means, to be more precise, that for Foucault seems to have a strategic value and that can in turn be substituted by different theoretical levers. Although I would defend the claim that the structure of Foucault’s work never ceases to be informed by the transcendental question of the conditions of possibility of our modes of being and knowing, the transcendental vocabulary and apparatus definitely recede into the background: Foucault drops the notion of the historical a priori after The Archaeology of Knowledge and repeats, time and again, that he in fact wants to avoid transcendental terms and substitute them with historical ones.44 What seems to be a complete rejection of the transcendental is, however, dependent on a restriction of the term to

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its traditional shape. Rather than giving up the critical questions raised by transcendental philosophy, Foucault chooses to continue the transformation of the transcendental under different names and masks. i mp l i cat i o ns f o r h i s to ry o f m adn e ss

By pursuing the transformation of the transcendental question, we have seen that there is a deeper methodological affinity between Derrida and Foucault, even if they pursue this transformation according to a different line of flight. Whereas Derrida, embarking from the most diverse discourses, directs our attention to their transcendental complications time and again, Foucault tries to utilize these complications in order to project different historical accounts of how we have become the peculiar beings we are. Against this background it becomes understandable that Foucault was frustrated that Derrida did not actively engage with his rich historical account of the different regimes of the separation of reason, unreason, and madness and considered the (quasi-)transcendental discussion of Descartes as beside the point. From Foucault’s perspective, Derrida’s insistent focus on the audacious point of the cogito seems to leave us with a much too abstract result: an overall concession that reason is rooted in a point at which it touches unreason, a concession that does not help us see how to supersede the forms of exclusion that have become prevalent in the classical age. Only by telling the actual detailed history of this exclusion does it become a truth, and not merely an abstract certainty, that we could live and be ruled differently. Only such a historical enlightenment can truly reach for the aims of critique in the full sense of the word.45 It seems to me that Derrida could not disagree with the necessity of such a historical enlightenment—and his works prove that he is in fact not interested in an abstract or schematic lesson to be won in the investigation of transcendental approaches, but rather in specific and material interventions into the ways we understand ourselves and shape our practices.46 The point of such interventions is, just as Foucault says, to give a “new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom.”47 By insisting on the Cartesian cogito so excessively in this exchange, Derrida has not tried to demonstrate that the mere mundane history of our ways of relating to and treating madness is without proper value. On the contrary, the specific interpretation of the cogito is supposed to enrich and extend our

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understanding of the complexity and depth of this very history of madness. This is the case in two main respects: with regard to the very form of the exclusion that the classical age performs and in view of our understanding of the conditions of possibility of a history of madness itself. In the first respect, we have to start from a fact that seems buried under the fierce polemics of both protagonists but is important to note: Derrida’s essay does not in any way try to repudiate Foucault’s critique of the great confinement of madness or his linking of it to Descartes’s “infinitivist” rationalism (CH 58/89–91, 310/90). Derrida explicitly affirms that Descartes participates in the exclusion of madness that Foucault tries to trace.48 What must be taken into account, he contends, is that Descartes excludes madness only by opening reason up to its possibility.49 The relation between exclusion and inclusion is, therefore, not that of a simple contrast. It is much more ambiguous, in a way that in fact seems congenial to the type of history that Foucault tries to write: a history of madness in which the inclusion and exclusion of madness, its recognition and denial, its liberation and enslavement are revealed to be complicit in various ways.50 Secondly, contrary to some of its passages that seem to praise all philosophy (CH 309/88) and to grant it an irreducible privilege, the hyperbolic cogito that Derrida traces is not supposed to be exclusively active in works of philosophy. Derrida rather presents his whole reading as an attempt to elucidate the condition of possibility of the voice recounting the history of madness (CH 58/88).51 What Foucault sarcastically describes as the position of the philosopher—that he seems to be, in Derrida’s world, “on the far side and the near side of any event” (RP 576/1151)—seems structurally necessary for the voice that recounts history. Consider Les Mots et les choses: If we take seriously that the different orders of knowledge laid out by Foucault are incommensurable and incompatible, how should we understand the voice that articulates the intelligibility of each of them? This narrative seems to be dependent on a cogito that exceeds these different historically determinate forms of reason. Only by means of the mad audacity of the narrator’s cogito can he or she tell the story of different orders of knowledge that appear to each other as errant, nonsensical, mad.52 By following Derrida’s transformation of the transcendental question in this essay, we have seen that Derrida and Foucault cannot be opposed in the way their debate suggests: as the conflict of a traditional philosophical program that “denies all pertinence to the event” (RP 577/1151—Foucault’s

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polemical account of Derrida) and a positivist, historicist program (Derrida’s take on one of the dangers that Foucault’s book runs). Instead, we are confronted with the conflict of two closely related transformations of the transcendental approach that strive to account for and enable a critical history of reason and unreason. Certainly, this does not dissolve their disagreement, but it allows us to locate it more adequately and to open a more fruitful debate between Foucauldian archaeology and Derridean deconstruction, guided by a shared question: how to renew the project of critique.

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1. For the latter see especially Foucault’s first response to Derrida (RP 578/1152). Foucault goes as far as to suggest that it would have been better had he omitted the whole contested passage on Descartes that, in hindsight, reveals to Foucault that he hadn’t sufficiently freed himself from philosophy. 2. See Foucault, “The Order of Discourse,” in Untying the Text: A Post-Structural Reader, ed. Robert Young (Boston: Routledge, 1981), 73. 3. Foucault’s reservations regarding positivism of the classical sort are also prominent in History of Madness itself: the present form taken by the exclusion of madness is precisely a positivistic attitude that transforms madness into an external object of knowledge. This approach makes impossible any relation to madness insofar as it might concern ourselves and precludes the sense that encountering madness may involve an experience of our own ground. In Foucault’s description, this positivism thus contrasts with the depth of a tragic experience of madness that finds in madness not a mere object of knowledge, but an exposition of fundamental conditions of our own being. See, e.g., HM 155–156/174–175, 339/360, and 460/480. 4. Foucault does not try to specify the conditions that a certain proposition must fulfill in order for it to be true or false, but for it to be acceptable as an intelligible proposition in a specific discursive formation, to be “in the true,” as Foucault says, borrowing the words of Canguilhem (Foucault, “The Order of Discourse,” 60). 5. For Foucault’s use of “a priori” in History of Madness, see HM 130/147, 376/397, and 528/548; see also the characterization of his project as concerning a “constitutive but historically mobile bedrock” (HM 522/541) and the following self-description: “In writing the history of the mad, what we have done—not on the level of a chronology of discoveries, or a history of ideas, but by following the links in the chain of the fundamental structures of experience—is to write the history of the things that made possible the very appearance of a psychology” (HM 529/548, emphasis added). To determine the precise role and function of the transcendental in Foucault’s shifting methodological paradigms would be a difficult task. For a highly instructive discussion of this complex question, see Béatrice Han, Foucault’s Critical Project: Between the Transcendental

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and the Historical (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). At this point I make no determinate claims about the function of the transcendental in Foucault other than rejecting the idea that Foucault was engaged in a mere dismissal of the transcendental. Certainly, the use of the term “transcendental” might seem questionable in this context, the term belonging to Kant and Husserl rather than Descartes. I use it here nevertheless, as I think that Derrida conceives of Descartes’s philosophy as a variant of the transcendental endeavor. For a broad understanding of the term “transcendental philosophy” that has generally informed Derrida’s approach and that describes Descartes as the original founder of the transcendental motif, see Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 68–70, 97–98 (§§14, 26). In Foucault’s account, psychoanalysis seems to embody this very danger. Regarding the shifting role of psychoanalysis that according to Foucault, on the one hand, “took up madness at the level of its language” and “restored . . . the possibility of a dialogue with unreason” (HM 339/360) and, on the other hand, “will never be able to hear the voices of unreason” (HM 511/530), see Derrida’s JF. That does not mean that Descartes does not partake in the exclusion of madness, as Derrida points out explicitly; however, this exclusion only takes place once Descartes has reached the “mad audacity” (CH 56/86) of the cogito that escapes madness only “because at its own moment, under its own authority, it is valid even if I am mad” (CH 55/85). See MB, RP; see also Foucault’s allusions to the debate in Foucault, Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973–1974, ed. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Graham Burchill (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 283; HES 18/19. For the idea of understanding Derrida against the background of transcendental philosophy, see the groundbreaking study by Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), esp. 142–176. For an instructive recent overview of Derrida’s take on the transcendental problematic that includes Derrida’s later works, see Maxime Doyon, “The Transcendental Claim of Deconstruction,” in A Companion to Derrida, ed. Len Lawlor and Zeynep Direk (London: Blackwell, 2013), 132–149. For this manner of speaking, see Derrida, “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1982), 22: “Différance, in a certain and very strange way, (is) ‘older’ than the ontological difference.” See Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 23: “The ontico-ontological difference and its ground (Grund) in the ‘transcendence of Dasein’ . . . are not absolutely originary. Differance by itself would be more ‘originary,’ but one would no longer be able to call it ‘origin’ or ‘ground,’ those notions belonging essentially to the history of onto-theology, to the system functioning as the effacing of difference.” For a recent example, see Dirk Setton, “I Think, I Am Mad: Derrida, Gaslight and the Irony of the Cogito,” Oxford Literary Review 36, no. 1 (2014): 81–93. Setton thinks that Derrida’s interpretation of the cogito lends itself to such an ultratranscendental under-

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standing, but at the same time reveals that such an understanding is a dead end. The reason is this: insofar as the ultratranscendental analysis of the cogito leads us to a “primordial unity, earlier than any determining transcendental unity of reason, encompassing both reason and unreason,” it “provides the condition of possibility of any determined form of reason and unreason,” and, that is, it does not explain or elucidate any of them specifically: “it remains unclear how exactly the Cogito in its hyperbolic instant could make anything in particular possible. . . . Derrida’s gesture of surpassing transcendental philosophy towards ultra-transcendental ‘roots’ thus risks running empty” (86). A clear example where Derrida presents his own project in such a way can be found in his essay “The Ends of Man”: Under the heading of a “reduction of meaning,” Derrida envisages the project of reaching a level below meaning in order to surpass the “reduction to meaning” that is characteristic of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger in different ways: “determining the possibility of meaning on the basis of a ‘formal’ organization which in itself has no meaning.” It is noteworthy, however, that Derrida understands this not as a project of erasing or destroying meaning, but still as an attempt at a different, more radical account of its very possibility. See Derrida, “The Ends of Man,” in Margins of Philosophy, 134. See also Derrida, Of Grammatology, 101: “This common root, which is not a root but the concealment of the origin and which is not common because it does not amount to the same thing except with the unmonotonous insistence of difference . . . could be called writing only within the historical closure, that is to say within the limits of science and philosophy.” See also Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 293. For this reason I doubt that the main shift that Derrida is introducing can reside in the turn to broader conditions not limited to the subject. Martin Hägglund seems to suggest that this is the crucial point of Derrida’s ultratranscendental approach. With regard to the condition of time, Hägglund says: “While Kant restricted time to a transcendental condition for the experience of a finite consciousness, I maintain that for Derrida the spacing of time is an ultratranscendental condition from which nothing can be exempt” (Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 10; see also 19, 28). Hägglund prefers the term ultratranscendental rather than quasi-transcendental, as he explicitly says, because it “reinforces the radical status” (211) of the conditions Derrida is interested in. It is certainly true that Derrida is very critical of the privileged status of the human subject in metaphysics, but I don’t think that it can be his decisive move of displacement with regard to the transcendental question to merely search for conditions that are broader in scope and not limited to the human subject. The decisive move resides rather in rethinking the way in which transcendental conditions enable the conditioned. James Conant, “Varieties of Skepticism,” in Wittgenstein and Skepticism, ed. Denis McManus (London: Routledge, 2004), 97–136.

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19. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1961), A112, emphasis added. 20. See Conant’s meticulous accounts of the Cartesian and Kantian genres in Conant, “Varieties of Skepticism,” 105–115. 21. However, it seems hard to tell what this cognitive achievement below objective validity and objective purport might be in the first place, and why exactly Derrida should feel moved to give a transcendental justification for it. 22. This terminology is, in a sense, arbitrary, as Derrida mostly uses the terms “quasi-transcendental” and “ultra-transcendental” interchangeably in his later writings. In suggesting these terms to distinguish the two complications, I rely on Derrida’s uses of “ultratranscendental” in his early writings and the way “quasi-transcendental” has often been used after its introduction by Gasché. 23. For this formulation, see, e.g., Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” in Margins of Philosophy, 328: “But the condition of possibility of those effects is simultaneously, once again, the condition of their impossibility, of the impossibility of their rigorous purity.” 24. For a detailed account of the relation of iterability and meaning, see Thomas Khurana, Sinn und Gedächtnis (Munich: Fink, 2007), chapters 1 and 2. 25. In this sense, I doubt that it is adequate to call the thought that conditions of possibility are at the same time conditions of impossibility a “transcendental axiom of deconstruction,” as Maxime Doyon does in “The Transcendental Claim of Deconstruction,” 145, 140, 147; emphasis added. 26. For one early and one later example, see Derrida, “‘Genesis and Structure’ and Phenomenology,” in Writing and Difference, 154–168, here: 159; Derrida, “Afterword: Toward an Ethic of Discussion,” in Limited Inc (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 137. 27. It seems true that Derrida does not take transcendental philosophy to have attained a direct refutation of skepticism. However, this is not to say that we can rest content with a skeptic’s position; rather we need to advance to the “truth of skepticism,” to use Cavell’s turn of phrase. I take it that a transformed understanding of the transcendental endeavor is supposed to help us attain this goal. For the view that it restricts our picture of the transcendental tradition to assume that it can only aim at a direct refutation of skepticism, see Paul Franks, “Transcendental Arguments, Reason, and Scepticism,” in Transcendental Arguments: Problems and Prospects, ed. Robert Stern (Oxford: Clarendon, 2003), 111–145, here: 113. 28. See, e.g., Derrida, “Une certaine possibilité impossible de dire l’événement,” in  Dire l’événement, est-ce possible?, ed. Alexis Nouss (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001); see Derrida, “Force of Law,” in Cardozo Law Review 11 (1990): 947 (“Justice is an experience of the impossible”). On the latter case see the brilliant account in Christoph Menke, “Ability and Faith,” Cardozo Law Review 27, no. 2 (2005): 595–612. 29. See Alexander García Düttmann, “The Feeling of Life,” Oxford Literary Review 36, no. 1 (2014): 49–61, here: 51. 30. See Derrida, Of Grammatology, 60–61; Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison and Newton Garver (Evanston:

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Northwestern University Press, 1973), 14–15. For a recent rearticulation of the problematic, see Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 174. Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry”: An Introduction, trans. John P. Leavey Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), chapters 5 and 7. See Derrida, Origin of Geometry, 93. For more on this question, see also Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). “But the strange unity of these two parallels, that which refers the one to the other, does not allow itself to be sundered by them and, by dividing itself, finally joins the transcendental to its other; this unity is life. . . . ‘Living’ is thus the name of that which precedes the reduction and finally escapes all the divisions which the latter gives rise to. But this is precisely because it is its own division and its own opposition to its other. . . . This concept of life is then grasped in an instance which is no longer that of pretranscendental naïveté, the language of day-to-day life or biological science. But if this ultratranscendental concept of life enables us to conceive life (in the ordinary or the biological sense), and if it has never been inscribed in language, it requires another name” (Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 14–15). Paul Franks calls this the heterogeneity requirement. See Paul Franks, All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 103. The first step being that Descartes does not only proceed from the cogito to “sum,” but to “sum res cogitans”: the thinker recognizes himself as a thinking thing. Descartes thereby identifies the cogito that had been certain only in its hyperbolic momentary act with the reflected cogito (CH 58/89). According to Derrida, this is the beginning of “the hurried repatriation of all mad and hyperbolical wanderings” (CH 58/90). See AK 126–131/166–173. See Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2004), 83: “One must reconstitute the general system of thought whose network, in its positivity, renders an interplay of simultaneous and apparently contradictory opinions possible. It is this network that defines the conditions that make a controversy or problem possible, and that bears the historicity of knowledge.” See Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 76–100, here: 79, 81. See also Foucault, “Titres et travaux” (1969), in Dits et écrits 1954–1988, vol. 1, 1954–1969, ed. Daniel Defert and Francois Ewald in collaboration with Jacques Lagrange (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 842– 846, here: 845: “Au lieu de rechercher, comme on l’a fait dans certains projets de type phénoménologique, l’origine première d’une science, son projet fondamental et ses conditions radicales de possibilité, on essaiera d’assister aux commencements insidieux et multiples d’une science.” AK 127/174: “What I mean by the term is an a priori that is not a condition of validity for judgments, but a condition of reality for statements. It is not a question of rediscovering what might legitimize an assertion, but of freeing the conditions of emergence

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of statements, the law of their coexistence with others, the specific form of their mode of being, the principles according to which they survive, become transformed, and disappear.” 40. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault indeed claims that, compared to formal a prioris, the historical a priori appears as “a purely empirical figure” (AK 128/175). 41. See Foucault, Order of Things, 270, 347–351, 371–374. See also Foucault’s introduction to Kant’s Anthropology, written at the same time as History of Madness and just as critical of contemporary philosophical anthropologies that claim a “natural access to the fundamental.” Foucault, Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology, ed. Roberto Nigro, trans. Roberto Nigro and Kate Briggs (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 121. That these issues are directly relevant to History of Madness is already clear from the fact that this book closes with a section on the “anthropological circle” in which we find ourselves entrapped. The deepest confinement of madness and unreason is reached precisely through a certain form of positivist “naïveté” (HM 122/139) and an anthropological conceptualization of madness. 42. Béatrice Han argues that a number of Foucault’s attempts at realizing the transformation of the transcendental in fact relapse into forms of the confusion of the empirical and the transcendental that he himself had attacked. Without denying that Foucault did not carefully distinguish all of his proposals from the anthropological confusion of the empirical and the transcendental, it seems obvious to me that he was at least aiming at a third way beyond the alternative of pure transcendentalism (a strict division between a formal, ahistorical a priori and its completely derivative empirical instantiations) and anthropology (a confusion between the empirical and the transcendental in the knowledge of man). 43. On the affinity of Foucault and Derrida in this regard, see also Len Lawlor, “Eschatology and Positivism: The Critique of Phenomenology in Derrida and Foucault,” Bulletin de la Société Américaine de Philosophie de Langue Française 14, no. 1 (2004): 22–42. 44. To give just two examples, see again Foucault, Titres et travaux: “D’un mot, il s’agit du problème théorique de la constitution d’une science quand on veut l’analyser non pas en termes transcendantaux, mais en termes d’histoire” (845), as well as his exchange with Giulio Preti: “Tout au long de ma recherche, je m’efforce, à l’inverse, d’éviter toute référence à ce transcendantal, qui serait une condition de possibilité pour toute connaissance.” Foucault, “Les problèmes de la culture: Un débat Foucault-Preti,” in Dits et Ecrits 1954–1988, vol. 3, 1970–1975, ed. Daniel Defert and Francois Ewald in collaboration with Jacques Lagrange (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 369–380, here: 373. Whenever Foucault distances himself from transcendental terms, he opposes them to historical terms; this suggests that he cannot be targeting the forms of historical-transcendental conditions he had himself specified in his archaeological studies. 45. See especially Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” in Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 32–50: Criticism is no longer going to be practiced in the search for formal structures with universal value, but rather as a historical investigation into the events that have

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led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying. In that sense, this criticism is not transcendental, and its goal is not that of making a metaphysics possible: it is genealogical in its design and archaeological in its method. Archaeological—and not transcendental—in the sense that it will not seek to identify the universal structures of all knowledge or of all possible moral action, but will seek to treat the instances of discourse that articulate what we think, say, and do as so many historical events. And this critique will be genealogical in the sense that it will not deduce from the form of what we are what it is impossible for us to do and to know; but it will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think. It is not seeking to make possible a metaphysics that has finally become a science; it is seeking to give new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom.” (45–46) 46. See also Derrida’s characterization of deconstruction as involving two registers: a quasilogical one and a genealogical one: “Deconstruction is generally practiced in two ways or two styles, although it most often grafts one on to the other. One takes on the demonstrative and apparently ahistorical allure of logico-formal paradoxes. The other, more historical or more anamnesic, seems to proceed through readings of texts, meticulous interpretations and genealogies” (Derrida, “Force of Law,” 957–959). 47. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 46. 48. In more recent works, Derrida has added the charge of an exclusion of life and a mechanistic reduction of animality. See Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. MarieLouise Mallet, trans. David Willis (New York: Fordham, 2008), 72–87. On this more recent reading of Descartes, see Paola Marrati, “Animals, Ghosts, and the Husserlian Legacy,” Oxford Literary Review 36, no. 1 (2014): 63–79. 49. While Foucault’s first treatment of Descartes seems to deny this and states that “madness, quite simply, is no longer [Descartes’s] concern” (HM 46/58), at later points in the book Foucault himself makes clear that things are more complex: although Descartes’s cogito appears as “an absolute beginning,” it “should not be forgotten that the evil genius”— and that means: “the possibility of unreason and the sum of all its powers”—actually “has preceded it” (HM 157/175). Descartes thus reaches the cogito only by opening up to the possibility of an evil genius, a “perpetually threatening power” that concerns not only the individual mind but “reason itself.” In this sense, the Cartesian progression of doubt is not simply the “exorcism of madness,” as the English translation has it (HM 244), but rather its conjuration, as the French original indeed says: “En ce sens la démarche cartésienne du doute est bien la grande conjuration de la folie” (262). 50. In this sense, Foucault’s characterization of the coup de force with which Descartes silences madness seems exceptionally unambiguous. Instances where Foucault’s history turns on ambiguous gestures intertwining inclusion and exclusion, recognition and denial, liberation and enslavement include the following: the idea that the “strange hospitality” that the early seventeenth century has vis-à-vis madness at the same time excludes the very possibility of a tragic experience of madness (HM 42–43/55); that in its exclusion

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of madness, classical rationalism was, in a way, more receptive to the “peril of unreason, the threatening space of absolute liberty” (HM 157/175) and more revelatory of the “perpetual possibility of unreason” (HM 158/176) than our recent positivism; the fact that the new positive modes of recognition of madness in the modern age exclude madness as a “real element in which the mad would recognize themselves” (HM 205/223); that the supposed “liberation” of madness by the reforms of Pinel and others rather amounted to a new form of confinement by which madness was even more thoroughly separated from the sovereign subject of knowledge that constitutes itself as knowing and mastering madness (HM 461/481); and, finally, that psychoanalysis in its attempt to liberate the patient from the asylum to which the former “liberators” had condemned him has continued and even perfected the exclusion (HM 510–511/529–530). 51. For this line of questioning, see also JF, in which Derrida further engaged with the conditions of possibility of Foucault’s history. As he tries to show there, the narrator of a Foucauldian history has to reflect his own peculiar position in the form of ambiguous figures of his history, such as Freud, that serve as hinges. 52. Foucault stresses the fact that the ideas and theories that “less than twenty years before had been posited and affirmed in the luminous space of understanding . . . topple down into error, into the realm of fantasy, into non-knowledge,” once a shift on the archaeological level of the episteme has occurred (Foucault, Order of Things, 235).

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Philosophies of Immanence and Transcendence RE ADIN G H ISTORY OF M AD NESS W ITH D E R R I DA AN D H ABERM AS



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work, particularly his early work, is marked by a curious convergence. Two of Foucault’s staunchest critics are philosophers who otherwise have very little in common, indeed, who had their own, quite heated and very public, debate: Jacques Derrida and Jürgen Habermas.1 Moreover, the content of Derrida’s and Habermas’s criticisms of the early Foucault is strikingly similar; both philosophers deploy a kind of performative contradiction argument against Foucault’s critique of reason (though only Habermas uses that specific terminology). As Colin Koopman puts the point: “Thinkers who usually see themselves as opposed to one another—for example, Derrida and Habermas—found themselves aligned against Foucault on the very same points and by deploying the very same assumptions. It is remarkable that two thinkers as otherwise disparate as Derrida and Habermas would find common ground not only in disagreeing with Foucault, but also in the terms in which they articulated that disagreement.”2 With the exception of Koopman’s astute analysis, the reasons for this curious convergence have largely gone unexplored in the scholarly literature. Koopman suggests that the convergence can be explained by the fact that both Derrida and Habermas, but not Foucault, are committed to a basically Weberian understanding of modernity. In the present essay, I explore this convergence further and offer a different (though not necessarily incompatible) explanation: although Derrida, Habermas, and Foucault all share the aim of critiquing reason, t h e c r i t i c a l r e c e p t i o n o f f o u c a u lt ’s

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Derrida and Habermas remain committed to a notion of reason’s transcendence, whereas Foucault’s critique of reason is thoroughly historical and immanent.3 Derrida and Habermas’s commitment to the transcendence of reason—or at least to the possibility of a wholly transcendent or unconditional moment within reason—lead them to misunderstand the nature of Foucault’s project, particularly of his early work. Both construe Foucault’s project as a radical critique of Reason as such. Neither critic appreciates the degree to which Foucault’s critique of reason is a contingent and immanent critique of a historically specific form of rationality, and thus is completely at odds with the very idea of a transcendent reason or Reason as such. This essay thus aims to situate the Foucault-Derrida debate in its broader philosophical context. By aligning Derrida and Habermas on one side of the question about the status of reason and Foucault on the other, I challenge the received wisdom about what is usually presented as a debate between so-called poststructuralists and Frankfurt School critical theorists. By emphasizing the centrality of the critique of reason to the Foucault-Derrida debate, I also show that what is at stake in this debate is something more and something different than a family quarrel or the narcissism of minor differences. Rather, what is at stake is a fundamental methodological disagreement about how to do critical philosophy, one that cuts across and through various accepted divisions in contemporary European philosophy in sometimes surprising ways.4 Finally, I aim not only to redescribe the contemporary philosophical landscape but also to suggest how Foucault’s thoroughly immanent and contingent critique of reason can be defended against the common challenge put forward by Derrida and Habermas. In what follows, I begin by reviewing Derrida’s methodological critique of Foucault in “Cogito and the History of Madness” and then reconstruct Habermas’s critique of Foucault in lectures 9 and 10 of his Philosophical Discourse of Modernity.5 Next, I identify three specific points of convergence between Derrida’s and Habermas’s critiques of Foucault: both Derrida and Habermas assume that Foucault’s aim is a radical, revolutionary critique of reason; both further contend that such a project is performatively contradictory; and, finally, both maintain that the only way out of such a contradiction would be through a certain kind of romantic embrace of the point of view of madness itself that would also be a metaphysical gesture. Finally, I explore the reasons for this convergence further and, on the

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basis of this analysis, sketch out a reply on Foucault’s behalf to Derrida’s and Habermas’s convergent critiques. der r i da’s c ri ti q u e o f f o u c au lt

My discussion of Derrida’s critique of Foucault’s History of Madness focuses not on the spirited disagreement over the proper interpretation of Descartes’s Meditations, but rather on the fundamental methodological questions that Derrida raises in the opening third of his seminal essay, because here is where we can see the convergence with Habermas’s critique. Derrida’s methodological critique in these opening pages is quite complex and subtle, but, as I see it, Derrida puts forward two distinct readings of the methodology of History of Madness, and finds both of them wanting. The first reading is what we might call the “archaeology of silence” reading. This reading turns on the claim that Foucault’s aim in History of Madness is to write the history of madness itself, not a history of madness as described from within the language of reason. As Derrida famously claims, this is “the maddest aspect of his project” (CH 34/56), since it would require, in order to be carried out, bypassing the language of reason altogether. But it isn’t possible to write an archaeology while bypassing the language of reason altogether, because an archaeology is a work, a history, an organized language, and thus is necessarily written in the language of reason. Moreover, Derrida writes, “Nothing within this language [i.e., the language of reason] and no one among those who speak it, can escape this historical guilt . . . which Foucault apparently wishes to put on trial” (CH 35/58). Indeed, the trial itself may well be impossible for, Derrida continues, “by the simple fact of their articulation the proceedings and the verdict unceasingly reiterate the crime” (CH 35/58). Although Derrida doesn’t use the term performative contradiction, this is quite clearly a version of a performative contradiction argument: the performative utterance of Foucault’s radical critique of reason contradicts the substance of that critique by mobilizing the very language of reason his critique substantively rejects. It is worth pausing for a moment to consider why Derrida thinks that it is impossible to escape this historical guilt of the language of reason. What he suggests is that reason is a totalized structure, marked by what he calls an “unsurpassable, unique, and imperial grandeur” (CH 36/58). So it

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is not possible to write an archaeology of the silence of madness without finding oneself within reason’s grand structure. Hence, Derrida continues, “one cannot speak out against it [i.e., reason] except by being for it” and “the revolution against reason can be made only within it” (CH 36/59). One implication is that the very idea of a history of reason—which is actually Foucault’s project in History of Madness—makes no sense to Derrida, because “despite all appearances to the contrary, the concept of history has always been a rational one” (CH 36/59).6 Now, Foucault himself is well aware of the difficulties inherent in the idea of writing a history of madness itself. In fact, he makes his awareness of the looming performative contradiction involved in this project explicit in the preface to History of Madness, in a passage that Derrida himself quotes, at least in part: this history of madness itself is, Foucault writes, a “doubly impossible task” because “any perception that aims to apprehend them [insane words; experiences of madness] in their wild state necessarily belongs to a world that has captured them already” (HMP xxxii/192). And this is why Foucault goes on to claim in the preface that writing the history of madness will have to take the form of “making a structural study of the historical ensemble—notions, institutions, judicial and police measures, scientific concepts—which hold captive a madness whose wild state can never be reconstituted” (HMP xxxiii/192). But this suggests that his aim is not, after all, that of writing a history of madness itself but rather a history of the ensemble of discursive and nondiscursive practices that have constituted madness as a historical object. This leads us to Derrida’s second reading of the methodology of History of Madness, which I will call the “dissension of logos” reading. Because Foucault is aware of the difficulties inherent in the attempt to write a history of madness itself, he speaks, toward the end of the preface, of the need for a “relativity without recourse” (HMP xxxv/194). Derrida understands this as a discourse that operates “without support from an absolute reason or logos” or that declines “to articulate itself along the lines of the syntax of reason” (CH 37/60). And here Derrida sees the outline of another project, or another possible methodology for History of Madness, distinct from the archaeology of silence. This would be the attempt to articulate a language that is somehow beyond or outside of the broken dialogue between madness and reason, and to find that decision point where madness and reason bifurcate or break off from one another.

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Derrida sees two conceptual problems with the dissension of logos version of Foucault’s methodology.7 The first turns on Derrida’s famous charge of metaphysics: Foucault’s methodology refers to the unity of an original presence that precedes the division or the split between reason and madness, but this is a metaphysical gesture (CH 40/65). Second, Foucault claims, in the preface to History of Madness, that this division between reason and madness founds the possibility of history. As he writes, “the necessity of madness throughout the history of the West is linked to that decisive action that extracts a significant language from the background noise and its continuous monotony, a language which is transmitted and culminates in time; it is, in short, linked to the possibility of history” (HMP xxxii/191). Derrida interprets this complex and difficult passage as meaning that Foucault’s aim in History of Madness is that of writing the history of historicity, that is, the history of the origin of history, the project that Derrida thinks makes no sense.8 Derrida writes, “If there is a historicity proper to reason in general, the history of reason cannot be the history of its origin (which, for a start, demands the historicity of reason in general), but must be that of one of its determined figures” (CH 43/68). So, to sum up, Derrida outlines two possible readings of the methodology of History of Madness, both of which he finds deeply flawed. On the archaeology of silence reading, Foucault’s aim is to write the history of madness itself, but, as Habermas would put it, this methodology falls prey to the charge of performative contradiction. On the dissension of logos reading, the aim is to find the common ground before the split between reason and madness, to recover the possibility of a lost dialogue. But this methodology is open to the charge of metaphysics and to the worry that it ultimately turns on a quixotic attempt to jump over one’s own shadow by writing a history of historicity. h a ber mas ’s c ri ti q u e o f f o u c au lt

Habermas’s critique of Foucault in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity is much wider ranging than Derrida’s essay, covering not only History of Madness but also much of Foucault’s later work (though not his late work on ethics). I will focus my attention on some of the problems that Habermas identifies in Foucault’s early, archaeological work, since this is where the interesting convergences with Derrida’s critique emerge.

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With respect to History of Madness specifically, Habermas sketches out— more quickly and in a much more compressed form than in Derrida’s essay—the very same two methodological readings of History of Madness delineated above. He begins by claiming that this text is marked by a “romantic motif ” that “Foucault will later give up” (PDM 240). The romantic motif, according to Habermas, is that Foucault sees in madness itself “something authentic whose sealed mouth need only be opened up” (PDM 240). Thus, like Derrida, Habermas initially presents the aim of History of Madness as that of writing the history of madness itself, which means giving voice to that authentic experience. And yet, also like Derrida, Habermas acknowledges that Foucault himself recognizes the impossibility of this task, since the truth of madness can only be expressed in the language of reason. This acknowledgment leads Habermas to the second methodological option sketched by Derrida, namely, that Foucault’s aim is to trace the discourse of madness back to the “original point of the initial branching off of madness from reason in order to decipher what is unspoken in what is said” (PDM 240).9 Like Derrida, Habermas also assumes that the aim of Foucault’s early work in general is that of a radical critique of reason. According to Habermas, this takes the form of a “historiography of the human sciences,” and Habermas wonders whether such a project can possibly succeed “without getting caught in the aporias of this self-referential undertaking” (PDM 247). A central issue in Habermas’s critique, just as in Derrida’s, is, as Habermas puts it, “the methodological problem of how a history of the constellations of reason and madness can be written at all” given that “the labor of the historian must in turn move about within the horizon of reason” (PDM 247). In other words, the fundamental methodological question for Habermas is, how can one write a history of the human sciences the goal of which is a “radical critique of reason” (PDM 248)? The idea that this is Foucault’s aim is connected to another of Habermas’s points. It concerns his assumption that the aim of Foucault’s thinking about history is to negate or to escape the horizon of the historical framework—namely, the historical consciousness of modernity—that Foucault subjects to critique. In this vein, Habermas writes, genealogical historiography can only take over the role of a critique of reason qua antiscience if it escapes from the horizon of just those historically

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oriented sciences of men whose hollow humanism Foucault wants to unmask in his theory of power. The new history has to negate all those presuppositions that have been constitutive for the historical consciousness of modernity and for philosophy of history and the historical Enlightenment since the end of the eighteenth century. (PDM 249)

Because Habermas views Foucault as attempting to negate the presuppositions of the historical modernity that he subjects to critique, he argues that Foucault adopts a transcendental historicism, a historical methodology that has the completely paradoxical aim of bringing “synthetic performances a priori back into the realm of historical events” (PDM 256). In other words, Habermas finds the very notion of a historical a priori—a notion that is central not only to Foucault’s early work, but also arguably to his work as a whole, since even though the term historical a priori disappears in Foucault’s later work, the idea reemerges in the notion of historical ontology that is central to his late work—to be paradoxical and aporetic and thus to generate certain kinds of paradoxes within Foucault’s methodology. Thus, for example, Habermas argues that Foucault turns to the project of analyzing power in the 1970s in an attempt to resolve this paradox in his methodology that emerges when he presents discourses as regularities that regulate themselves. By subordinating discourse to power, as Habermas characterizes the work of Foucault’s middle period, Foucault would see power as regulating the regularities of the historical a priori (PDM 268).10 However, Habermas also maintains that this move doesn’t solve the problem. The fundamental paradox seeps into his theory of power as well, emerging in its attempt to be both empirical and transcendental at the same time (PDM 270). Ultimately, for Habermas, Foucault’s entire methodology is marred by the paradoxes inherent in its founding assumptions. The theme of escape, which pervades Habermas’s reading of Foucault, also emerges in Habermas’s contention that Foucault turns to the theory of power in order to “lead his research out of the circle in which the human sciences are hopelessly caught” (PDM 275) or to “overcome” the human sciences (PDM 275). In his attempt to do this, Foucault, as Habermas reads him, makes three key methodological substitutions: for a hermeneutic analysis of the meaning of historical practices, Foucault substitutes the idea of meaningless structures; for the notion of normative validity, Foucault

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substitutes a putatively normatively neutral analysis of power relations; and for a value-normative horizon he substitutes putatively value-free historical explanation. These three substitutions lead Foucault into the famous problems that Habermas characterizes as presentism, relativism, and cryptonormativity. Foucault’s approach is presentistic inasmuch as “the attempt . . . to explain discourse and power formations only on their own terms, turns into its opposite” and ends up being “narcissistically oriented toward the standpoint of the historian” (PDM 278); it is relativistic because the claim that “the meaning of validity claims consists in the power effects they have” ends up self-referentially destroying “the foundations of the research inspired by it as well” (PDM 279); and it is cryptonormative because the only possible basis it could find for its implicit normative judgments would be the kind of romantic appeal to a space outside of power that the mature Foucault realizes is a metaphysical illusion. Though wider ranging than Derrida’s critique of History of Madness, Habermas’s critique of Foucault thus embarks from the very same methodological considerations raised by Derrida. Starting from this shared basis, Habermas then develops his critique in the direction of an articulation of the paradoxes entailed by Foucault’s alleged abstract negation of modernity and his radical critique of reason. If, however, it turns out that Foucault’s aim is not a radical critique of reason,11 then much of Derrida’s and Habermas’s criticisms can be shown to miss their mark. Before showing that this is the case, I will briefly sum up the three common themes that emerge in both Derrida’s and Habermas’s critique of Foucault. The first and perhaps most obvious common theme is that both Derrida and Habermas assume the goal of Foucault’s critique to be what Habermas calls a “radical critique of reason” (PDM 248) or what Derrida calls a “revolution against reason” (CH 36/59). This is an important interpretive convergence that lays the groundwork for the rest. The second common theme follows directly from the first: both Derrida and Habermas maintain that such a project is performatively selfcontradictory—Derrida may not use that term, but it captures the content of his criticism—since the radical critique of reason can only be carried out by using the tools of reason itself. This not only means that Foucault can’t help but repeat the very violent exclusionary gesture vis-à-vis madness that he aims to criticize, as both Derrida and Habermas argue, but also that his methodological approach gets mired in certain aporias or paradoxes that he

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is never able to resolve, as Habermas maintains. With respect to this latter point, Habermas writes: “Foucault did not think through the aporias of his own approach well enough to see how his theory of power was overtaken by a fate similar to that of the human sciences rooted in the philosophy of the subject. His theory tries to rise above those pseudo-sciences to a more rigorous objectivity, and in doing so it gets caught all the more hopelessly in the trap of a presentist historiography, which sees itself compelled to a relativist self-denial and can give no account of the normative foundations of its own rhetoric” (PDM 294).12 The third common theme is that both Derrida and Habermas see a certain romantic gesture as providing Foucault with the only possible way out of the problem of performative contradiction. In other words, both Derrida and Habermas suggest that the only way that he could escape the performative contradiction charge would be to try to give voice to madness itself in its own language—because this would mean presenting it in its wild and primitive state, not capturing it within the confines of reason—but this would be a kind of romantic gesture, and ultimately also a metaphysical gesture. Thus, both Derrida and Habermas place Foucault in a double bind: either he can tell the history of madness using the tools of reason, in which case he is caught in a performative contradiction, or he can really try to escape the performative contradiction, but can only do so by gesturing toward a romantic, and ultimately metaphysical, notion of an experience of madness itself that represents a radical outside to reason. t r a n s ce nd e nc e and i m m ane nc e i n t h e cr i ti q u e o f re as o n

What accounts for this curious convergence of Derrida and Habermas’s critiques of Foucault? They seem to converge on a worry about the impossibility of Foucault’s methodology, specifically his attempt to write something like a history of reason, and the various contradictions and aporias that this project seems to generate. My argument is that what accounts for this convergence is an assumption shared by Derrida and Habermas about the transcendence of reason, namely that reason is characterized by what Derrida calls its unsurpassability, uniqueness, and imperial grandeur (CH 36/58), or that it carries within it a moment of what Habermas calls “unconditionality” that is the “transcendent moment of universal validity”

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that “‘blots out’ space and time” and transcends all local contexts (PDM 322–323). Obviously Habermas and Derrida have very different ways of understanding this moment of unconditionality. My suggestion is not that they offer the same account of reason’s transcendence or its transcendent moments. Nor is it evident that Derrida holds on to this idea of the grand, imperial, unsurpassable order of reason in his later work. For example, in the second essay of Rogues, Derrida talks about reason as being intrinsically historical in a way that might bring him closer to Foucault’s project, and his claim in “The Force of Law” that deconstruction is always partly genealogical reinforces this impression.13 Moreover, Derrida was interested in the history of metaphysics from the very beginning of his career, and a fuller treatment of Derrida’s own conception of reason would necessitate telling a more complicated story about the development of this aspect of his thinking over time. Still, it seems to me that the explicit emphasis on the historicity of reason in Derrida’s later work is new, and distinct from the position from which he criticizes Foucault in the “Cogito” essay. Moreover, even in Rogues, Derrida emphasizes the aporetic entanglement of the transcendent aspects of reason (which he links to justice, the event, the unconditional, the singularity of the absolutely other, messianicity without messianism, and democracy to come) with the conditional, with the calculable, with force, and with law. And that, of course, is quite different from Habermas’s emphasis on context transcendence as emerging from within a particular context but nonetheless transcending that context. Yet both Derrida and Habermas can be seen as offering two different ways of characterizing the transcendence of or at least a certain transcendent moment of reason, a moment of unconditionality within reason.14 This idea of the transcendent or unconditional moment of reason is not exactly the same as the idea of normative transcendence, though the two are closely linked, for both Derrida and Habermas. For Habermas, for example, the transcendence of reason is rooted in rational validity, which provides the binding/bonding force of good reasons. This force is, in turn, central to the background normativity that constitutes communicatively structured lifeworlds. Similarly, Derrida, in Rogues, describes deconstruction as an unconditional rationalism that never renounces—and precisely in the name of the Enlightenment to come, in the space to be opened up of a democracy to come—the possibility of suspending in an argued, deliber-

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ated, rational fashion, all conditions, hypotheses, conventions, and presuppositions, and of criticizing unconditionally all conditionalities, including those that still found the critical idea, namely, those of the krinein, of the krisis, of the binary or dialectical decision or judgment.15

What is striking in this passage is, first of all, the characterization of deconstruction as an unconditional rationalism, and, second, the way that Derrida links the idea of rationalism to the notion of democracy to come. In other words, he links a certain understanding of the transcendence or unconditionality of reason to a normative transcendence. My guiding suggestion is that in this respect, Derrida and Habermas are much more like each other than either of them is like Foucault, who explicitly rejects the idea of a transcendent reason, of Reason as such, or even of a moment of transcendence or unconditionality inherent in reason. Rather, Foucault prefers to speak of specific historically articulated forms of rationalities that make possible certain kinds of games of truth. He characterizes his work as an attempt to write a history of those forms of rationality or of those systems of thought, saying quite clearly: “For me, no given form of rationality is actually reason [as such].”16 To be fair to Derrida and Habermas, it must be said that Foucault is not particularly clear about this distinction between Reason as such and specific historically articulated forms of rationality in History of Madness. He makes this distinction more explicit in some of his late works. Interestingly enough, in doing so he not only replies to Derrida’s claim that his aim had been to put reason on trial; he also compares his own approach to the critique of reason with that of the Frankfurt School. After noting the evident relationship between power relations and processes of rationalization, Foucault asks: “Shall we try reason? To my mind, nothing would be more sterile. First, because the field has nothing to do with guilt or innocence. Second, because it is senseless to refer to reason as the contrary entity to nonreason. Lastly, because such a trial would trap us into playing the arbitrary and boring part of either the rationalist or the irrationalist.”17 If the goal of Foucault’s critique of reason is not, as Derrida had suggested, to put reason, understood as a single, unified, totalizing order, on trial, then what of the approach of “some of the members of the Frankfurt School,” which Foucault characterizes as an investigation of the “kind of rationalism which seems to be specific to our modern culture and which originates

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in Enlightenment?”18 Although he doesn’t specify which members of the Frankfurt School he has in mind here, it is clear from the context and also from the substance of his critique that he is talking about Habermas. Notwithstanding the appreciation Foucault expresses for other members of the Frankfurt School elsewhere in his late work,19 he insists here that Habermas’s approach is too totalizing: “I think that the word ‘rationalization’ is dangerous. What we have to do is analyze specific rationalities rather than always invoking the progress of rationalization in general.”20 Foucault does not make these distinctions between reason or rationalization as such and historically specific forms of rationality explicit in his earlier work. But the notion of historically specific forms of rationality is operating implicitly in History of Madness even if he doesn’t explicitly make this clear. Indeed, I would contend that the only way to make sense of that book’s methodology is to read it in light of this distinction, which he makes explicit in his later work.21 Furthermore, the fact that Derrida and Habermas are more like each other than either of them is like Foucault is, I suspect, what leads them both to misconstrue History of Madness as a radical critique of Reason as such, or a revolution against reason understood in transcendent terms. This is just not what is going on in Foucault’s text. Rather, I read History of Madness as offering an immanent critique of reason. Its motivation is well articulated in the following passage from another of Foucault’s late interviews: “I think that the central issue of philosophy and critical thought since the eighteenth century has always been, still is, and will, I hope, remain the question: What is this Reason that we use? What are its historical effects? What are its limits, and what are its dangers? How can we exist as rational beings, fortunately committed to practicing a rationality that is unfortunately crisscrossed by intrinsic dangers?”22 The task of critical thought, Foucault goes on to say, is to accept and to think through the spiral formed by the indispensability of our rationality and its intrinsic dangers. If the aim of Foucault’s critique of reason is not to mount a radical critique of or a revolution against Reason as such, but rather to offer an immanent critique of the historically specific forms of rationality that are for us indispensable but also dangerous, this also suggests a possible response to Derrida and Habermas’s charge of performative contradiction. There may well be something paradoxical about what Foucault is trying to do, and yet it would be deeply misleading to suggest that he is unwittingly caught in

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some kind of performative contradiction. Rather, Foucault tries to embed the fundamental ambivalence between the indispensability of our form of rationality and its intrinsic dangers into his own methodology. This methodology is that of a participant-observer engaged in what Foucault once called “an internal ethnology of our own culture and our rationality.”23 The goal of this internal ethnology is to make strange our form of rationality or our historical a priori, so that we can open up a critical distance between ourselves and the historical a priori within which we are constituted as rational subjects. This way of understanding Foucault’s method also shows how he can escape the charge of performative contradiction without lapsing into romanticism and thus into metaphysics. It is true that Foucault frequently invokes the experiences of madness and of unreason in History of Madness and that these experiences are presented as in some way outside of or other to the language of reason. This, more than anything else, gives the impression of a certain romanticism and also of a certain residual metaphysics in History of Madness: he seems to link either the experience of madness or of unreason with freedom from the violent, exclusionary constraints of modern, Enlightenment rationality.24 On my reading, however, the purpose of invoking the figure of unreason is not to delineate a space of freedom that lies wholly outside of rationality. Unreason is linked to freedom for Foucault, but in a different way. As I read him, the figure of unreason as the “outside” of our form of rationality serves to open up what Foucault calls “lines of fragility” and “kinds of virtual fracture” within our form of rationality, allowing us to see it as a form of rationality that is historically contingent yet indispensable for us.25 Those lines of fragility and fracture create immanent spaces of freedom within our historically specific form of rationality. They allow us to reflect critically on our own historically contingent constitution as rational subjects, but without lapsing into irrationalism.

This analysis of the convergence of Derrida’s and Habermas’s critiques of Foucault suggests that there may be more common ground between Derrida and Habermas than there is between either of them and Foucault. Both Derrida and Habermas are committed—in different ways, to be sure— to the transcendence or unconditionality of reason, whereas Foucault, by contrast, is a theorist of the immanence and contingency of specific

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rationalities. Clarifying this difference not only reveals the shortcomings of Derrida’s and Habermas’s critiques of Foucault and shows how Foucauldians might best respond to such criticisms, it also scrambles the commonly accepted divisions in contemporary European philosophy between “poststructuralists” and Frankfurt School critical theorists. Both of these camps are much more internally heterogeneous—and therefore also much more interesting—than this standard way of carving up the philosophical landscape suggests.

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I am grateful to the audience at the Northwestern University Critical Theory Cluster in May 2014 and especially to Penelope Deutscher for helpful comments and suggestions on this essay. 1. For an overview of their debate, see Lasse Thomassen, ed., The Derrida-Habermas Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Despite the sharp and dismissive nature of their initial exchange, Derrida and Habermas eventually became friends and intellectual collaborators. Much of that story is told in Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 2. Colin Koopman, “Revising Foucault: The History and Critique of Modernity,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 36, no. 5 (2010): 545–565. 3. Even though my explanation for the convergence of Derrida’s and Habermas’s critiques differs from Koopman’s, the argument that I offer here is very close in spirit to his resolutely nontranscendental reading of Foucault in his essay “Historical Critique or Transcendental Critique in Foucault: Two Kantian Lineages,” Foucault Studies 8 (2010): 100–121, though with some important differences in emphasis and interpretation. 4. Indeed, the situation becomes still more complicated if we take into account the disagreements within the Frankfurt School over the status of reason. As Foucault himself notes in one of his unfortunately rare explicit discussions of the Frankfurt School, there is a thread in this tradition that engages in the same kind of “rational critique of rationality” that Foucault’s work develops, a critique that aims at “isolating the form of rationality presented as dominant and endowed with the status of the one-and-only reason, in order to show that it is only one possible form among others.” Foucault, “Structuralism and Post-structuralism,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Michel Foucault, vol. 2, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 1998), 441. Foucault doesn’t specify which texts or authors he has in mind here, but his characterization aptly describes Dialectic of Enlightenment and Adorno’s later work. Later in the same interview, in response to a question about Habermas’s critique of postmodernism

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on the grounds that it constitutes an attack on modern reason, Foucault replies: “That is not my problem, insofar as I am not prepared to identify reason with the totality of rational forms which have come to dominate—at any given moment, in our own era and even very recently” (“Structuralism and Post-structuralism,” 448). Thus, Foucault here makes clear not only that his work aligns with that of certain members of the Frankfurt School, but also that this school itself does not offer a unified position on the critique of reason—thus his rational critique of rationality also diverges sharply from the position of Habermas. A more complex rendering of the different positions with respect to the critique of reason would most likely put Adorno and the later Horkheimer together with Foucault (and also Deleuze) on one side of the debate, with Derrida and Habermas on the other. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987). Henceforth cited parenthetically in the text as PDM. I discuss this aspect of the Foucault-Derrida debate more fully in “The History of Historicity: The Critique of Reason in Foucault (and Derrida),” in Between Foucault and Derrida, ed. Yubraj Aryal, Vernon W. Cisney, and Nicolae Morar (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016). He also raises the interpretive question about whether Foucault is correct to say that the Greek logos had no contrary and that the split between reason and madness emerges only in the Renaissance, but I will set this issue aside. See CH 39–42/63–67. As I argue in more detail elsewhere, I think that Derrida is right to say that Foucault’s aim is to write the history of historicity, but that this project is much less quixotic than Derrida seems to assume. The main thought is that Foucault denies that there is a historicity proper to reason in general—rather, his aim is to write a history of reason, that is, a history of forms of rationality, which is an attempt to think reason in thoroughly historicized terms—and this is why he thinks it makes sense to talk about the history of historicity. I see this as a fundamental distinction between Foucault’s and Derrida’s methodologies and their critiques of reason, as I argue in more detail in my essay “The History of Historicity.” For related discussion of the necessity of madness and the possibility of history, see my “Feminism, Foucault, and the Critique of Reason: Re-reading the History of Madness,” Foucault Studies 16 (2013): 15–31. Habermas interestingly compares this methodology to Adorno’s negative dialectics, specifically Adorno’s attempt to “break out of the enchanted circle of identifying thought [i.e., identity thinking] by means of such thought itself ” (PDM 240). This is a fascinating comparison but one that Habermas leaves undeveloped; I explore the connections between Adorno and Foucault further in chapter 5 of my book The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). I am skeptical not only of Habermas’s claim regarding Foucault’s motivation for turning to the analysis of power, but also of his suggestion that in his analysis of power Foucault subordinates discourse to power, but for reasons of space I won’t pursue either line of thought here.

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11. I also think that it is wrong to say that Foucault’s work aims at an abstract negation of modernity, but this is something that I have argued elsewhere. See my “Foucault and the Enlightenment: A Critical Reappraisal,” Constellations 10, no. 2 (2003): 180–198, and The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), chapter 2. 12. It is worth noting, just as an aside, that Habermas makes a very similar criticism of Derrida. With respect to Derrida, he writes, “the totalizing self-critique of reason gets caught in a performative contradiction since subject-centered reason can be convicted of being authoritarian in nature only by having recourse to its own tools. The tools of thought, which . . . are imbued with the ‘metaphysics of presence’, are nevertheless the only available means for uncovering their own insufficiency” (PDM 185). This makes the convergence of their critiques of Foucault all the more curious and in need of explanation. 13. See Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), and Derrida, “The Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson (New York: Routledge, 1992), 21. 14. For a related characterization of Derrida as a thinker of transcendence, see Daniel Smith, “Deleuze and Derrida, Immanence and Transcendence: Two Directions in Recent French Thought,” in his Essays on Deleuze (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 271–286. 15. Derrida, Rogues, 142. 16. Foucault, “Structuralism and Post-structuralism,” 448. This statement immediately follows the passage quoted above, in note 5, where Foucault distinguishes his conception of reason from Habermas’s. 17. Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Power: Essential Works of Michel Foucault, vol. 3, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 2000), 328. 18. Ibid. 19. See, for example, “Structuralism and Post-structuralism,” 440–441. Again, he doesn’t specify which members of the Frankfurt School he has in mind, but the substance of his remarks indicates that he is thinking of Dialectic of Enlightenment. 20. Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” 329. 21. I develop this argument in more detail in Allen, “Feminism, Foucault, and the Critique of Reason.” 22. Foucault, “Space, Knowledge, Power,” in Power: Essential Works of Michel Foucault, vol. 3, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 2000), 358. 23. Foucault, “On the Ways of Writing History,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Michel Foucault, vol. 2, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 1998), 293. Here is another way in which Habermas’s reading of Foucault goes awry, because he reads Foucault as always taking up the third-person, objectivating stance of the observer, and therefore being completely blind to the normativity of the form of life that he’s trying to critique, because Habermas further assumes that rational validity and normativity are only accessible from a first-person, participant point of view.

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24. As I argue in more detail elsewhere, I think that a careful reading shows that if Foucault is guilty of such a romantic gesture, it would have to be unreason and not madness that he views as the locus of freedom. However, the complexities of the difficult and shifting distinction between unreason and madness in History of Madness need not concern us here. For further discussion, see my “Feminism, Foucault, and the Critique of Reason.” 25. Foucault, “Structuralism and Post-structuralism,” 449–450.

part

III

After-Effects

7

Foucault, Derrida T H E E FFE CTS OF C RITIQUE



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too often reduced to a “silhouette” that one thinks is a summary. In thus personifying the work of philosophy, we take away its thickness. But this complexity does not exist in isolation, any more than it can be frozen in time in the form of an unchanging position. Bodies of thought enrich and transform each other through the play of interactions and reactions, strategies and exchanges, and conflicts and ruptures. One body of thought thus implicates others. This relation is not constructed simply by borrowing from, or subscribing to, other thoughts, any more than the absence of relation necessarily marks a lack or an empty space. I would like to respond to precisely this impossibility of accounting for the effects of a relation in terms of “positions,” “figures of thought,” “moments,” and “generation” for the case of Derrida and Foucault. Their relation was tenuous, polemical, and subterranean but also, in so many ways, essential. . . . Derrida appeals to the major argument: history. It is clear that it can indeed represent a logical flaw in Foucault’s reasoning, or at least raise some serious questions. But Foucault responds by transforming this argument into another. Foucault maintained that he was criticized for his work’s historicity, not because this historicity itself was problematic, but because philosophy cannot stand being, as it were, stained by history. Hence Foucault identifies three postulates that he thinks he can decipher in Derrida’s remarks, and to which he imputes all of Derrida’s criticisms: a b o dy o f t h o u g h t i s

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1. He supposes first of all that all knowledge, or even in a broader sense all rational discourse, entertains a fundamental relation with philosophy, and that it is in this relationship that this rationality or this knowledge have their foundation. . . . Consequently, there is no point arguing about the 650 pages of a book, no point analyzing the historical material that is brought to bear therein, and no point criticising the choice of this material, its distribution and its interpretation, if one has been able to denounce a defect in the founding relationship to philosophy. 2. . . . One sins in Christian fashion against this philosophy by averting one’s eyes from it, by refusing its blinding light and attaching oneself to the positivity of things. . . . 3. Derrida’s third postulate is that philosophy is on the far side and the near side of every event. Not only can nothing happen to it, but everything that can happen is already anticipated or enveloped by it. In itself, philosophy is only the repetition of an origin that is more than originary, and which infinitely exceeds, in its retreat, anything that it could say in any of its historical discourses. . . . For Derrida, what happened in the seventeenth century could only ever be a ‘sample’ (i.e. a repetition of the identical) or a ‘model’ (i.e. the inexhaustible excess of the origin). He does not know the category of the singular event; it is therefore pointless for him—and probably impossible—to read that which occupies the essential part, if not the totality of my book: the analysis of an event. (RP 575–577/1150–1151)

We must, of course, stop for a moment on this long quotation. The first surprise is the weight Foucault gives to the opposition between philosophy and history, and the way he makes the latter the real key to the disagreement opposing him to Derrida. Now, if one looks closely, in “Cogito and the History of Madness” there is only a single passage that could actually make us think that Derrida plays the ahistoricity of philosophy against Foucault’s historical and historicizing discourse. In fact, the relevant passage is no more than a phrase. When Derrida wonders whether Foucault has not made Descartes say totally foreign things in order to put him in the frame of a “total historical structure,” he ends up asking the following double question: does Descartes’s declared intention “have the historical meaning assigned to it? Does it have this meaning, a given meaning Foucault assigns to it? Or, second, does it have the historical meaning assigned

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to it? Is this meaning exhausted by its historicity? In other words, is it fully, in each and every one of its aspects, historical, in the classical sense of the word?” (CH 33/54). Contrary to what Foucault would like to believe, the first part of the Derridean question does not contest the introduction of history into an exercise of philosophical reading. It aims much more at the reduction of this attempt at historicization to a single and unique totalizing model, the reduction to a single structure. Derrida’s point is that it is difficult to understand the claim of this structure to be the only possible signification of an infinite variety of phenomena. Furthermore, it is difficult to see how this model can account for the arbitrary character of the interpretative key it mobilizes. (“A given meaning,” Derrida aptly notes. It is thus a question of a hermeneutical choice, or at the very least of a methodical stance that ought to have been justified and not passed over in silence.) In short, Derrida’s question amounts to the following objection: how can one justify a mechanism of reduction to a unity that never interrogates its own historical foundation? (The unity in this case being the structure, or, since that term appears only very rarely in either Foucault’s or Derrida’s work,1 the division reason/unreason thought to be a constant in the mode of dividing history.) Or again: how can one accept that the element supposed to found the historicizing approach, that is, the historical cut corresponding to the periodization “classical age,” has no history in turn? How can one accept that the only blind spot of the will to historicization of phenomena, so obvious in Foucault’s thought, is precisely that which he uses to introduce discontinuity (the emergence of the division reason/unreason at a given moment, and its function as a caesura, breaking with that which precedes it), as if this division itself did not in turn have to be read inside a certain history? For Derrida, the criticism thus focuses on three things at once— the unity Foucault chooses to guide his reading, via Descartes, of the whole of the classical age; what is perceived as a “structure” ’s claim to totality; and the nonhistoricity of what is paradoxically supposed to found the possibility of history, while being an object of archaeology. Moreover he clearly insists on this: “That all history can only be, in the last analysis, the history of meaning, that is, of Reason in general, is what Foucault could not fail to experience—we shall come to this in a moment. What he could not fail to experience is that the general meaning of a difficulty he attributed to the ‘classical experience’ is valid well beyond the ‘classical age’” (CH 308n4/54n1).

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The second part of Derrida’s question is quite distinct from the first. Here it is easier to understand Foucault having taken it as an attack on everything that, in History of Madness, was of the order of a historian’s project. It is not by chance that Foucault defends himself by immediately referring to “the historical material” and “the 650 pages” of his work. When Derrida asked himself whether the sense of the Cartesian gesture did not exhaust itself in its historicity, and whether Foucault’s work was in fact nothing other than an excessive reduction, he seemed to imply that something is likely to escape historical inquiry, thus that not everything is historicizable. Foucault dryly retorts that Derrida’s three postulates form the framework of the teaching of philosophy in France. It is in their name that philosophy presents itself as the universal criticism of all knowledge (the first postulate), without any real knowledge of the content or the forms of this knowledge; as a moral injunction to awaken only by its own light (the second postulate), as a perpetual reduplication of itself (the third postulate) in an infinite commentary of its own text and without any relation to exteriority. (RP 577/1151–1152)

It is true that French philosophy did often resemble what Foucault describes in this terse judgment. But once again, this does not really correspond to the objection Derrida offers. The Derridean critique does seem to focus on the project of a “history” as it is constructed in History of Madness, but only to the extent that this project also tries to perform the archeology of a silence from before the founding division between madness and unreason. Now it is one thing to want to describe the parallel constitution of an object (“madness”) and the system of discourse and practices that immediately apply to it. It is another thing to make the constitution of this object the very emblem of the way a given epoch’s discourse of knowledge functions (with all the problems of periodization that we have already mentioned: does the object legitimate the periodization, or, inversely, does the periodization allow the construction of the object?). And it is yet a third thing to claim to go back to before the division reason/unreason, a division that enables something like a “madness” to be defined in the classical epoch. To go back beyond the division is to want to oppose another history to the history of madness understood as a paradoxical history of reason. A history of this history, a counterhistory, an

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archaeology. In such a history it would be possible to bypass modern reason and uncover the truth of things before they had been redefined and remodeled, all at once denatured, masked, and subjugated by this reason. The critique no doubt gives the most weight to this point. . . . Foucault seems initially not to have perceived—or not to have wanted to understand—what was really at stake in these criticisms. In the second version of his response, which would be published as the second appendix to the 1972 edition of History of Madness, he even decided to suppress four pages of the Japanese version of the text, which tried all the same to account for the foundational objections to the project and method of his book.2 And yet, these objections would in fact “rework” all of his work and give it its stamp, starting in the mid-1960s. No philosophy can afford to do without its own relation to history, because no use of thought is anything but the product of a given historical configuration, the effect of an epistemic system in an equilibrium whose historical nature precisely must be revealed. But to reveal historical determinations is not to escape them.

Sometimes the effects of critique do not take the form one would be entitled to expect. For Foucault, we have seen, there was no immediate response; he avoided Derrida almost totally for eight years after the latter’s objections. But it is striking to see that from the time he distanced himself from structuralism, Foucault recentered his inquiry away from any attempt at tracing back through history, an attempt that archaeology still resembled. Rather, he refocused his work on another level, that of the present. It was as if, in order to truly respond to Derrida, he had to replace an archaeology made from both a risky periodization and a “thought of the outside” with a genealogy charged with bringing the questioning back toward our own historical location. Toward, that is, what Foucault will call much later a “critical ontology of ourselves.” However, strangely, while in his double response to Derrida in 1972 he seemed to still hold the same positions as in 1961, in fact from the second half of the 1960s Foucault had already largely modified his relation to history. Some might object that until 1969, the year of the publication of The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault still defended archaeology and that during the following decade, far from weakening, the interest in history would only increase.

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Nevertheless, on closer inspection, things are less simple than they seem. First of all because, very early, it seems that it is precisely a sort of “adjustment” or correction to Foucault’s own relation to history that makes possible an important modification in his work bridging the end of the 1960s and the very start of the 1970s. Thus in 1967, in an interview whose title rings like a declaration of principle—“Structuralist Philosophy Allows Us to Diagnose What ‘Today’ Is” (“La philosophie structuraliste permet de diagnostiquer ce qu’est ‘aujourd’hui’”)—he clarifies: “The philosopher has actually stopped trying to say what eternally exists. He has the much more difficult and elusive task of saying what is happening. To this extent, we can speak of a sort of structuralist philosophy which could be defined as the activity that allows us to diagnose what today is.”3 Not only is the structuralism that Foucault claims for himself not conceived as the bringing to light of a metahistorical structure (a characteristic that is in fact proper to Foucault’s work from the beginning, since both the reference to the division of reason/unreason and the concept of épistémè are developed with history as a background), his structuralism is also directly linked to the new theme of today. From this point of view, the only possible history seems almost to have become for Foucault a history of the present. Or more precisely—and the nuance is revealing in itself, since the term history no longer appears in the text just cited—a “philosophy” of the present. The disappearance of the word history thus leads us to think that far from giving up on a historicization of thought, Foucault made a different move. Leaving behind the project of a history before history (a project explicitly integrated into the larger project of History of Madness), as well as abandoning the idea of a history of history within an archaeology of the human sciences, he envisioned instead what he would from then on call a “genealogy.” The opposition between the history of historians and the genealogy of philosophers is of course not unrelated to Foucault’s new and explicit interest in Nietzsche at this time.4 But more interesting still is to understand how this opposition between history and philosophy allowed Foucault to redefine another relation to history and historians. This relation excluded neither discussions nor collaboration nor borrowings, as in Pierre Rivière, the product of seminar work with historians; Le désordre des familles,5 coauthored with the historian Arlette Farge; a sizable portion of the critical apparatus of the Collège de France lectures in the second half of the 1970s; and much of the last two volumes of the History of Sexuality. But the new

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relation nevertheless freed Foucault from a millstone that he had had trouble managing although he had welcomed it, that of aspiring to make his work the work of a true historian. The situation is therefore paradoxical: in 1967, it is as a historian of the present that Foucault conceives of his task as philosopher, but it is as a philosopher that he redefines his relation to history as a “genealogy.” Doing history as a philosopher and philosophy as a historian do not have here the meaning one might easily suppose. In both cases—and they may not be mutually exclusive, quite the contrary—Foucault simultaneously challenges both a disciplinary divide and two models of discursivity and the organization of knowledge. He is neither fully on the side of history, nor fully on the side of philosophy. Rather, refuting the history of philosophy as much as the philosophy of history, Foucault seeks another relation to history that could become the driving force of a new philosophical problematization of the present. The critique of disciplinary limits is of course recurrent in Foucault’s work. But consider the way he reacted to Pierre Rivière’s memoir in 1973, or to the way he transformed the records of imprisonment immediately into a “gray legend” of the infamous, somewhere between herbarium, literary production, and genuine historical analysis. Those give a measure of the road traveled since History of Madness. In short, it is as if Foucault’s true relation to history became possible only when he paradoxically accepted to forgo it.

n ot e s

Excerpt from a work to appear in French as Judith Revel, Une controverse philosophique: Foucault, Derrida, et l’affaire Descartes. 1. We will not return here to Foucault’s relation to structuralism. It is enough to note that Foucault’s claim of proximity to the structuralists, which came shortly before the contradictory rejection of such a proximity, appeared in Foucault’s thought when The Order of Things was published in 1966. On this, see, for example, “La philosophie structuraliste permet de diagnostiquer ce qu’est ‘aujourd’hui’” (interview with G. Fellous), reprinted in Foucault, Dits et écrits, I, 1954–1975 (Paris: Quarto Gallimard, 2001), 608–612. Derrida, on the contrary, and despite what Foucault himself says, identifies the Foucauldian approach with the structuralist method from History of Madness onward. This is because Foucault’s interpretation of Descartes’s text is understood as an attempt to establish a relation between what Descartes says and “on the other hand, let us say, with intentional vagueness for the moment, a certain ‘historical structure,’ as it is called, a certain meaningful historical totality, a total historical project through which

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we think what Descartes said—or what we think he is believed to have said or meant— can particularly be demonstrated” (CH 32/53). It is precisely this structure as totality that is the problem. “My Body, This Paper, This Fire” begins directly with reference to the incriminating passage from History of Madness. The twenty-three pages that follow are devoted exclusively to Foucault’s and Derrida’s divergent readings of Descartes. Not another word, therefore, about the powerful criticisms formulated by Derrida against the Foucauldian use of the word “history.” “La philosophie structuraliste,” 609. Recall that the text cited dates from 1967. In the same year Foucault and Deleuze edited volume 5 of Nietzsche’s Complete Works for Gallimard. Michel Foucault and Arlette Farge, Le désordre des familles (Paris: Gallimard-Julliard, 1982).

8

A Petty Pedagogy? T E ACH IN G P HILOSOP HY IN D ERRIDA’S “COGITO AND THE HISTORY OF M AD NE S S ”



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Le Monde published a two-page spread with the title “Jacques Derrida: Le déconstructeur.” Aimed at introducing Derrida’s work to a broader public, it consisted of a number of short articles, such as a summary of his publications, a glossary of several “Indécidables” (trace or gramme, différance, supplement, etc.), a list of pithy one-liners culled from his texts, and an interview with Philippe Sollers on Derrida’s relation to literature. The articles were uniformly positive, with one exception—a short column in the center of the right page, which read as follows:

on june 14, 1973,

accordi ng to m i c he l fou c a u lt «a petty pedagogy »

Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida have been engaged in a polemic over Descartes. In his re-edition of his History of Madness, Michel Foucault, expanding the debate, formulates this critique against Derrida’s approach: I would not say that it is a metaphysics, metaphysics itself, or its closure, that is hiding behind this ‘textualisation’ of discursive practices. I would go much further: I would say that it is a historically well-determined petty pedagogy, which manifests itself here in a very visible manner. A pedagogy which teaches the student that there is nothing outside the text (…), that it is never necessary to look beyond it, but that here, not in the words of course, but in words as crossings-out, in their lattice, what is said is ‘the meaning of being’. A pedagogy that inversely gives to the voice of the masters that unlimited sovereignty that allows it indefinitely to re-say the text . . . 1

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First published a year earlier in “My Body, This Paper, This Fire,” these words would have already made their mark in the small world of Paris intellectual life. But one can imagine their sting redoubled when reprinted in a venue as public as Le Monde. A few short lines amid a sea of praise dismiss the entirety of Derrida’s project as the most traditional of enterprises, an insignificant and impotent institutional practice. “A petty pedagogy”—the title says it all. Foucault’s words are well-known today, having been cited and recited ever since they first appeared. But perhaps this is a case in which Foucault’s brilliance as a writer is just a little too dazzling. His charge is so strongly expressed that it tends to elicit either enthusiastic embrace or flat-out rejection, and any attempt to explore it in view of its literal target—the pedagogical practice that Derrida’s work implies—seems somewhat beside the point.2 My wager, however, is that Foucault’s polemic contains an important insight, namely the privilege it grants to pedagogy in Derrida’s work. A philosophy of teaching is hiding behind Derrida’s critique of Foucault. But this philosophy is not, as Foucault claims, “historically well-determined,” nor does it “manifest itself here in a very visible manner.” Rather, the view of teaching contained in “Cogito and the History of Madness” takes some work to uncover and, once exposed, reveals itself to subtly challenge, not confirm, existing convention.

As with much of his work, the force of Foucault’s criticism against Derrida at the end of “My Body” is due in large part to its upending of expectations. No longer the great challenger threatening the western tradition, Derrida is reinscribed into this tradition’s core, a conservative actor reinforcing the status quo. This is echoed in Foucault’s claims, just prior to the passage quoted in Le Monde, that Derrida’s “faithfulness [to the tradition] seems, quite rightly, to comfort him” and that the tradition’s erasure of Descartes’s remarks on madness “is part of a system, a system of which Derrida is today the most decisive representative, in its waning light” (MB 573/602). The image of impotency is further enhanced by the strikingly literal understanding of “text” that Foucault here appears to imply. From Foucault’s words it would seem that for Derrida a text is simply a physical object, detached from events or experiences in the world, and so Of Grammatology’s famous slogan “there is nothing outside the text” calls for nothing more

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than a narrow little game played by teachers and students involving books and pieces of paper. Derridean practice, like the traditional system he is said to represent, ends up being the repetition of endless textual commentary referring only to itself, whose sole achievement is to shore up the power that the masters or schoolmasters [maîtres] hold over their students.3 The force of Foucault’s words derives also from the economy of their delivery. Isolated at the end of the essay, there is no visible argument leading to this conclusion. The knockout punch comes in a single blow. Nonetheless, the charge is subtly signaled in the preceding text. Particularly relevant are two aspects of Foucault’s criticism of Derrida’s interpretation of Descartes. First, Foucault focuses on the fact that Derrida postulates the existence of a second voice in Descartes’s text in order to make sense of the supposed exclusion of madness in Meditation 1 (MB 568–569/597–599). According to Derrida, it is not Descartes who is afraid of the hypothesis of insanity, but a naive nonphilosopher, whose voice Descartes feigns. This shows, in Derrida’s words, that madness “is not a useful or happy example pedagogically” (CH 51/79). In reading the Meditations as a pedagogical project, and in refusing that it is the philosopher who needs to exclude madness, we can see thus why Foucault might claim, at the end of “My Body,” that Derrida grants the masters a sovereignty untouched by an exclusion that would reveal their limitations. Second, Foucault claims that even if correct, this pedagogical interpretation is at best only half the story. A meditation, Foucault argues, does not only present deductive truths. It also seeks to transform the reader’s subjectivity through a series of experienced events, and Derrida ignores this dimension completely (MB 562– 563/593–594). While not reaching the level of generality of his conclusion, this gives some support to Foucault’s claim that for Derrida “it is never necessary to look beyond [the text].” Derrida’s misreading of Descartes would be a symptom of the broader fact that he is interested only in texts and logical arguments, and not in events taking place in the world. “My Body” could thus be said to contain partial support for its polemical conclusion. But on their own these links remain tenuous. To find further justification, we need to turn to the first version of Foucault’s response, “Reply to Derrida,” published several months earlier in the Japanese journal Paideia. Here the order of analysis is reversed: rather than end with global remarks on Derrida’s approach, in “Reply” Foucault places them at the start. And here Foucault helpfully provides more detail to explain his

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claims. “Reply” begins with Foucault proposing that three postulates guide Derrida’s reading of History of Madness: 1. that all knowledge and rational discourse “have their foundation” in philosophy; 2. that with “something like a blend of Christian sin and Freudian slip . . . the fault par excellence against philosophy is naivety, naivety that only ever thinks at the level of the world”; and 3. that “philosophy is only the repetition of an origin that is more than originary, and which infinitely exceeds, in its retreat, anything that it could say in any of its historical discourses” (RP 576–577/1150–1151). Foucault then remarks: These three postulates are considerable and highly respectable: they form the framework of the teaching of philosophy in France. It is in their name that philosophy presents itself as the universal criticism of all knowledge (the first postulate), without any real knowledge of the content or the forms of this knowledge; as a moral injunction to awaken only by its own light (the second postulate), as a perpetual reduplication of itself (the third postulate) in an infinite commentary of its own texts and without any relation to exteriority. Of all the people who currently philosophize in France, sheltered by these three postulates, Derrida, without a shadow of a doubt, is the most profound and the most radical. (RP 577/1151–1152)

With an explicit link drawn between the principles governing Derrida’s work and the teaching of philosophy in France, the criticisms delivered at the end of “My Body” are given greater explanation. In particular, the first and the third postulates do the most work.4 In the first, Foucault’s accusation that Derrida posits philosophy as the foundation of all other knowledge would explain Derrida’s focus on the philosophical dimension of Foucault’s text, coinciding with the traditional pedagogical view of philosophy as universal criticism. In the third postulate, Foucault claims Derrida sees philosophy as a repeating origin that exceeds its appearance in history. This Foucault associates with the idea that to teach philosophy is to practice infinite textual commentary, a practice that has no connection to actual events. Put together, these two postulates, with their explicit translation into the framework of traditional teaching, thus provide a more coherent justification for Foucault’s criticism of Derrida in “My Body.”

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If Foucault is right, then Derrida’s method could well be described as “a historically well-determined petty pedagogy,” since the principles of his work coincide with those of the teaching of philosophy in France. And this method would give “to the voice of the masters that unlimited sovereignty that allows it indefinitely to re-say the text,” because it assumes that philosophy, as foundational, has universal scope, and because it is constituted by the repetition of an origin that gets translated into the practice of endless commentary. But is Foucault right? To find out, let’s turn to Derrida’s essay.

My task is thus to bring to light the theory of teaching implied by “Cogito and the History of Madness” and see if it matches the theory articulated in Foucault’s replies. As I will show, the pedagogical model that can be gleaned from Derrida’s text differs across three moments in the essay. In the first two moments, Derrida assumes a view of the teacher-student relation that more or less conforms to the traditional model, thus giving credence to Foucault’s criticism. But the third moment, in which Derrida articulates a position on the nature of philosophy, gives rise to a more original vision of philosophical teaching, one that resists the Foucauldian charge. The first moment to discuss is Derrida’s opening, where he reflects on the challenge he faces engaging the work of his former teacher. He invokes the framework of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, modifying it to speak of the relationship between the master (or schoolmaster) and disciple. Having studied under Foucault, Derrida states that he retains “the consciousness of an admiring and grateful disciple” (CH 31/51), and argues that this consciousness is constituted not so much through dialogue with the actual master, but through a silent, interminable dialogue with an internalized version of him.5 As a consequence, when he starts a dialogue in the world, Derrida carries within himself the feeling of having been admonished by the master, simply for thinking he could respond. Such a disciple feels ‘caught in the act,’ like the ‘infant’ who, by definition and as his name indicates, cannot speak and above all must not answer back. . . . He feels himself indefinitely challenged, or rejected or accused; as a disciple, he is challenged by the master who speaks within him and before him, to reproach him for making this challenge and to reject it in advance, having elaborated

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it before him; and having interiorized the master, he is also challenged by the disciple that he himself is. (CH 31–32/51–52)

What is the pedagogical relation articulated here? It is one that takes place years after the event of teaching, in the interior space of the student’s mind. What is important is not any content transmitted by the teacher, but rather a particular teacher-student relation that has been subsequently formed. In this relation, the teacher is an internalized voice that claims to already possess all the knowledge the student will attain. The student thus comes to his thoughts too late, after the fact, after they have been thought by the one who came before. He cannot speak, since it has been determined from the outset that he cannot speak anything new. The pedagogical relation projected by the student in this passage is thus one of a particular kind of hierarchy, one in which the teacher disciplines the student and keeps him trapped in place. Pedagogy is a relation of confinement and restriction. In this way, the picture Derrida here paints is a very traditional one. The all-powerful and all-knowing teacher penetrates and dominates the student’s mind; his knowledge is a commodity that is transmitted and reproduced. One less traditional element in play is the fact that this all takes place after any actual event of teaching, at a time in the future within the student’s mind. This complex, nonlinear temporality of delay offers a different possibility for conceiving the teacher-student relation. But Derrida does not pursue this possibility here. Instead he resists his confinement by diagnosing its source: “This interminable unhappiness of the disciple perhaps stems from the fact that he does not yet know—or is still concealing from himself—that the master, like true life, may always be elsewhere” (CH 32/52). Derrida suggests, in his echo of Rimbaud, that this relation is an illusion of sorts. The teacher is not in fact inside him (and may never have been present), and so the student need not feel frozen, reduced to silence. Inspired by this realization, he claims that “the disciple must break the ice [briser la glace], or better the mirror, the reflection, his infinite speculation on the master. And start to speak” (CH 32/52, translation modified). In breaking out of his silence through a show of force, Derrida at the same time confirms the very structure that confined him. Now he speaks in his own voice. Now he can be a master in turn.

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This conformity to tradition continues in the second moment in the “Cogito” essay in which pedagogy is in play. This is the moment I mentioned earlier to which Foucault draws attention. The specific point at issue is whether madness receives special treatment in comparison to sense perceptions and dreams in Descartes’s method of doubt. Foucault claims that it does, and Derrida disagrees. But in disagreeing Derrida still needs to explain what looks like the unique status given to madness in Descartes’s text. It certainly seems in the way Descartes expresses himself that he drops madness as a possibility, whereas he embraces dreaming. It is here that pedagogy appears, for Derrida resolves the discrepancy between Descartes’s expression and what he maintains is the underlying structure of Descartes’s text by interpreting this moment in pedagogical terms. Derrida argues that the paragraph in which madness explicitly appears in Meditation 1—the site of its exclusion for Foucault—should not be understood as expressing Descartes’s point of view. It represents, instead, “the astonishment and objections of the nonphilosopher, of the novice in philosophy who is frightened” by Descartes’s claim that we should doubt all that our senses present. That is to say, this exclusion of madness is part of a “feigned objection” that Descartes “echoes” (CH 50/78). On this reading, Descartes thus has no special interest in excluding madness from the method of doubt. Rather, the exclusion lies on the side of his imagined interlocutor, the one whom Descartes is trying to induct into his method. Madness is thus “not a useful or happy example pedagogically, because it meets the resistance of the nonphilosopher who does not have the audacity to follow the philosopher when the latter agrees that he might indeed be mad at the very moment when he speaks” (CH 51/79). Limited by the intellectual timidity of the nonphilosopher, Descartes must choose his path carefully so as not to leave him behind. Similar to what we saw in the first moment, the teacher-student relation implied here conforms to the model of the all-knowing teacher, Descartes, expertly guiding the novice through the meditation. It is true that his aim is not to paralyze the student; indeed he avoids the hypothesis of madness precisely so that the student can continue on the path of thinking.6 But the hierarchy between them remains in place. The teacher is always one step ahead, for he possesses the knowledge that the student lacks, and his ultimate aim is to transmit this knowledge by bringing the student to comprehend it in turn.

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Thus in these first two moments of the “Cogito” essay, in which the teacher-student relation explicitly appears, Derrida describes this relation in more or less traditional terms. These passages do not contain, however, the final word on the matter, for there is a third moment in Derrida’s essay that is relevant to this issue. Here pedagogy is not explicitly discussed. But philosophy is, and it is theorized in such a way that it implies a different understanding of how teachers and students might relate. It should first be noted that Derrida’s interpretation of Descartes goes well beyond the specific mention of madness in Meditation 1, the passage that is Foucault’s primary concern in History of Madness. After pursuing madness through the end of this meditation, identifying it with both the hypothesis of dreaming and the thought experiment of the evil genius, Derrida then moves into Meditation 2. Here he links madness to the cogito. Against Foucault, who claimed that “I, when I think, cannot be considered insane” (HM 45/57), Derrida asserts that “the act of the Cogito is valid even if I am mad” (CH 55/85). The cogito holds in the face of madness, which it thereby has no need to exclude. In the few pages that follow, Derrida goes on to give his own detailed reading of Descartes’s cogito. He describes it as a hyperbolic movement that seeks to escape language and reason, and, relevant to my concerns, he locates philosophy in relation to its structure. These pages are dense, and tracking the intricacies of Derrida’s moves can be dizzying. There is thus, I would suggest, a temptation to pass over its unique complications. This temptation might lead one to collapse some of the distinctions that Derrida draws (for example by strictly identifying philosophy with the cogito, an interpretation I will argue is incorrect), or to read Derrida’s specific argument here through the lens of his later work.7 But I want to resist this temptation, and propose instead to slow down and take a short detour in order to present the very specific interpretation Derrida offers here of the cogito. This is crucial to understanding the status of philosophy in this essay, which will then allow us to return to the question of teaching. How, then, does Derrida interpret the cogito? Primarily he speaks of it as an act, movement, or hyperbolic project of thinking that seeks to exceed the totality given by determined reason. It is not that which lies at the origin of reason, as its secure foundation, but rather the very moment of escape from what is rational. Derrida thus inverts Descartes’s explicit understanding of the cogito, and it is in this sense that it can be described as mad:

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“By virtue of this margin of the possible, the principled, and the meaningful, which exceeds all that is real, factual, and existent, this project is mad, and acknowledges madness as its liberty and its very possibility” (CH 56/87). The cogito is mad because it attempts to break with reason. This displacement of the cogito’s position from the origin does not mean, however, that the structure as a whole is without any kind of foundation. In describing the broader field in which the cogito is found, Derrida does refer to an origin of sorts, a “zero point at which determined meaning and unmeaning come together in their common origin” (CH 56/86). This point lies outside of history and language, outside of the opposition between reason and unreason. In thus being beyond the determined totality, at the same time as it is the foundation of both reason and madness, this zero point maintains a very particular relation to the hyperbolic movement. It lies at the origin of the project of exceeding reason (“it is the point at which the project of thinking this totality by escaping it is embedded” [CH 56/86]), and it is that toward which this thinking aims (“The hyperbolic audacity of the Cartesian Cogito . . . its mad audacity thus consists in the return toward [à faire retour vers] an original point which no longer belongs to either a determined reason or a determined unreason” [CH 56/86, translation modified8]). In functioning as both origin and goal, the zero point is thus distinct from the hyperbolic movement. At the same time, Derrida suggests in the course of his description that the two can coincide. He speaks, for example, of Descartes reaching the “hyperbolic extremity [pointe hyperbolique],” and of “the instantaneous experience of the Cogito at its sharpest point [en sa pointe la plus aiguë], when reason and madness have not yet been separated” (CH 58/89, 58/91, translation modified). This contact would take place beyond all reason. But such contact could only ever be for a moment, if it can occur at all, since Derrida also insists that the cogito must necessarily fall back into the totality that it is the domain of reason. This inevitably takes place when Descartes communicates the cogito in language, when he seeks to understand it, to make sense of it and tame its folly within the rational system of the Meditations.9 The movement of the cogito thus appears in Derrida’s text as a kind of oscillation. While the hyperbolic project may attain its goal of reaching the zero point from time to time, this is only for an instant; for the rest of the time (“almost always [presque tout le temps]” [CH 58/91]), it remains tied to the sphere of language and reason that it seeks to escape.

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With this rereading of the cogito in mind, let us now turn to the question of philosophy. Where in this structure does Derrida locate the practice of philosophy? It might first appear to be identified strictly with the hyperbolic movement. This is because Derrida inscribes the hyperbole into a venerable philosophical lineage, comparing it to Socratic dialectic and its relation to the Good beyond being: “The project of exceeding the totality of the world, as the totality of what I can think in general, is no more reassuring than the dialectic of Socrates when it, too, overflows the totality of beings, planting us in the light of a hidden sun which is epekeina tes ousias” (CH 56–57/87).10 And a page later Derrida names philosophy explicitly in a long footnote, writing that “if philosophy has taken place—which can always be contested—it is only in the extent to which it has formulated the aim [a formé le dessein] of thinking beyond the finite shelter” (CH 310n28/90n1). Finally, at the close of the essay, Derrida defines philosophy as “the attemptto-say-the-hyperbole [vouloir-dire-l’hyperbole]” (CH 62/96). However, to identify philosophy only with the hyperbole is to miss a crucial point, namely that philosophy is essentially tied to language, that it always takes place in the reduction of the hyperbole to reason. As the last two citations suggest—having “formulated the aim” and as an “attemptto-say-the-hyperbole”—philosophy is necessarily also a linguistic practice. This being the case, rather than locate philosophy only as the movement of excess, it is more correct to say that philosophy as it is practiced is to be found lying between the movement of excess and its fall: The historicity proper to philosophy has its place and is constituted in the passage, in this dialogue between hyperbole and the finite structure, between the excess over the totality and the closed totality, in the difference between history and historicity; that is, in the place where, or rather at the moment when, the Cogito and all that it symbolizes here (madness, excessiveness, hyperbole, etc.) are pronounced, reassured and then fall, necessarily forgotten until their reactivation, their reawakening in another saying of excess which also later will be another decline and another crisis. (CH 60/94, translation modified)

Philosophy as a practice thus lies not solely in the movement of hyperbolic excess seeking to escape the totality of reason. Nor is it found within reason alone, absent the push to go beyond. Philosophy takes place in the

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transition between the two. But even as Derrida here repeats the image of an oscillating movement, this movement of philosophy differs in one important respect from the movement of the cogito. Derrida nowhere in this description, nor elsewhere in the “Cogito” essay, claims that philosophy ever touches the zero point of origin. If it did, then this would mean we could conceive of philosophy lying outside of language, even if only for a moment. But Derrida is explicit in his opposition to such a claim. Immediately before the passage on historicity just cited, he writes By separating, within the Cogito, on the one hand, hyperbole (which I maintain cannot be enclosed in a factual and determined historical structure, for it is the project of exceeding every finite and determined totality), and, on the other hand, that in Descartes’ philosophy (or in the philosophy supporting the Augustinian Cogito or the Husserlian Cogito as well) which belongs to a factual historical structure, I am not proposing the separation of the wheat from the tares in every philosophy in the name of some philosophia perennis. Indeed, it is exactly the contrary I am proposing. In question is accounting for the very historicity of philosophy. (CH 60/93–94)

Thus Derrida resists the idea that philosophy could ever lie fully outside of history, and it never coincides with the origin that would lie outside the totality of reason. Philosophy remains, instead, on a kind of threshold of a threshold, oscillating between reason and its limit.11 Returning now to the theme of pedagogy, what kind of teacher-student relation does such a conception of philosophy entail? It is one in which the teacher’s mastery is partial at best. Lying at the limit between the movement of excess and the rational order, philosophy is inherently unstable and elusive. If we try to place it wholly within reason and language, we lose the movement of excess that is also a part of it. This is the “structuralist totalitarianism” that Derrida accuses History of Madness of risking (CH 57/88). But neither can we hold ourselves out at the hyperbolic project’s point of extremity, in some mystical state beyond all language or reason. This position is beyond philosophy’s reach. Philosophy is caught in the unstable place of being in the totality while simultaneously straining to escape. This is not a place one can inhabit in a fully coherent way. Thus conceived, the practice of philosophy will never generate a complete knowledge that can

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be fully grasped by the teacher, and then transmitted to the student. Such knowledge is not to be had. Now this is also not to say that mastery has disappeared altogether for the teacher. The teacher can know of the inevitable failure of the hyperbolic project to fully escape the totality, and of philosophy’s need to pursue it nonetheless. And this knowledge can be communicated. Indeed, I would suggest that the polemical force of the “Cogito” essay is due precisely to Derrida’s having this knowledge and communicating it to Foucault. It is through this very act that Derrida claims the position of master, teaching this lesson to Foucault the student. But even in this move Derrida’s mastery falls short of being complete. Thus my claim is that “Cogito and the History of Madness” harbors at least two understandings of the teaching of philosophy. The first understanding conforms to the traditional view, and is found in those moments of the essay where Derrida has explicit recourse to the language of pedagogy. Here the teacher has total mastery of the material, and takes full advantage of this mastery in relating to the student. By contrast, the second understanding offers something different. Unspoken in the text, and yet implied, now the teacher’s mastery has been reduced, for the philosophy being taught will always evade full comprehension. Not because philosophy would lie beyond one’s reach, outside the totality altogether at a purely transcendent point. But because it will always slip from one’s grasp while remaining within reach, caught in the passage between reason and its excess.

Given this interpretation of the “Cogito” essay, we can see why Foucault might have made the charge that he did. When Derrida explicitly invokes pedagogical concepts in his text, he does so in a very traditional way. And throughout his essay Derrida does place philosophy in a position of unmistakable privilege. It is thus not surprising that Foucault would connect these two features, assuming that the conception of philosophy promoted in Derrida’s text would match the conception of teaching he seems to accept. I hope to have shown, however, that this is not the case. Digging deeper, we see that Derrida theorizes philosophy in a way that is more complex than might first appear. In particular, his understanding of philosophy does not correspond, as Foucault claims, to “the repetition of an

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origin,” even one “in retreat,” but rather is constituted precisely in its failure to ever reach such a zero point. And this conception of philosophy does not fit with the traditional model of the teacher-student relation, for it prevents the teacher from ever becoming a full master. That is to say, standing behind Derrida’s practice is not “a historically well-determined petty pedagogy,” and the method he promotes does not give “to the voice of the masters that unlimited sovereignty that allows it indefinitely to re-say the text” (MB 573/602).12 Of course, this alternative pedagogical relation remains only implicit in Derrida’s text, an implication of his remarks regarding philosophy to which he in no way draws attention in the course of his argument. And the fact that when he does speak of pedagogy he invokes the traditional model suggests that Derrida may well have not fully realized the implications of his view.13 It is perhaps therefore most accurate to claim that the “Cogito” essay is ambiguous on the issue of the teaching of philosophy, caught between the tradition and that which would call this tradition into question. But is this not an apt characterization of Derrida’s own position when the “Cogito” essay was first delivered? In 1963 he was the assistant to Paul Ricoeur at the Sorbonne, fresh from the prizewinning success of his introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry. Standing at the threshold of the institution of philosophy, one might expect that his first lecture at Wahl’s Collège Philosophique would sound like a request to be admitted, even as an unspoken current was at the same time pulling him away.

n ot e s

My thanks to Penelope Deutscher and Olivia Custer for comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this essay. 1. Le Monde, June 14, 1973, p. 23. The elision in the citation is made by the newspaper editors, and reads “but that in it, in its indices, in its blanks and silences, the reserve of the origin reigns” (MB 573/602). “Petite pédagogie” is standardly translated as “little pedagogy.” I have modified this throughout to highlight its resonance with “petite bourgeoisie,” thus better capturing the disdain the words communicate. 2. An exception is one of the earliest comparative discussions of Derrida and Foucault in English, Edward Said’s “The Problem of Textuality: Two Exemplary Positions,” Critical Inquiry 4, no. 4 (1978): 673–714, which takes pedagogy as one of its themes. Said agrees in large part with Foucault’s critique of Derrida, and also discusses claims made by Derrida in “Where a Teaching Body Begins and How It Ends” in Who’s Afraid of

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4.

5.

6.

7.

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Philosophy? Right to Philosophy 1, trans. Jan Plug (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 67–91 (an essay first published in an edited collection that also contained an interview with Foucault; see Dominique Grisoni, ed., Politiques de la philosophie [Paris: Grasset, 1976]). But Said does not examine the views of pedagogy expressed in the “Cogito” essay itself. “Maître” can be translated equally as “master” or “schoolmaster,” and I would suggest that the latter is perhaps more appropriate in this instance. This is also the case for Derrida’s passage on the master-disciple relation at the beginning of “Cogito and the History of Madness,” which I discuss below and Foucault here is implicitly signaling. I would suggest that the second postulate, concerning the moral tone of Derrida’s criticism, is barely present in the conclusion of “My Body.” A trace of it could perhaps be read into the description of the masters’ unlimited sovereignty, this height carrying with it a whiff of moral superiority. But this is quite distant from the comments on sin and Freudian slip in “Reply.” I follow Bass’s translation in using the masculine pronoun to describe both master and student throughout my paper, since at the time these were assumed to be male in the ideal. Later in his career Derrida would draw attention to such assumptions concerning gender, often being explicit in writing “he or she” when giving examples such as this. But no such remarks appear in the “Cogito” essay. Of course, this does not mean that Descartes is guaranteed to achieve his aim. One could argue that the danger of paralysis, of being reduced to silence, is a possibility inherent in any view of pedagogy that assumes the intellectual superiority of the teacher. For such an argument made in general terms, see Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. Kristin Ross (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). The latter in particular is understandable, since Derrida constructed his oeuvre in such a way as to invite reading across his texts. I am not suggesting that such an approach is illegitimate, but I do want to highlight that it is an interpretative decision. My motivation for not taking it comes from the fact that my interpretation is tied to certain claims in the “Cogito” essay that one does not find made elsewhere in Derrida’s work. I would also recall in this regard that this essay was one of Derrida’s first publications, written in particular before the insights regarding speech and writing found in Of Grammatology. Despite changes made to the text between its 1963 publication in Revue de métaphysique et de morale and its 1967 reprinting in Writing and Difference, it is thus perhaps not surprising that the later version of the “Cogito” essay might still contain elements that do not sit well with Derrida’s thought as it had developed in the intervening few years. For a discussion of changes Derrida makes across the essays republished in Writing and Difference, including “Cogito and the History of Madness,” see Edward Baring, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 186–201. For a very interesting discussion of Derrida’s deletion of a reference to Fanon in the “Cogito” essay, see Edward Baring, “Liberalism and the Algerian War: The Case of Jacques Derrida” Critical Inquiry 36, no. 2 (2010): 239–261, 257, and Lynne Huffer, “Un-archiving Algeria: Foucault, Derrida, and Spivak,” in Unarchived Histories:

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8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

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The “Mad” and the “Trifling” in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, ed. Gyanendra Pandey (New York: Routledge, 2014), 159–178. Here Bass translates “à faire retour vers” as “the return to.” But as far as I am aware this is the only time he does so. Three sentences later in a parallel phrase he translates “vers” as “toward”: “It is therefore a question of drawing back toward [de faire retraite vers] a point at which all determined contradictions, in the form of given, factual historical structures, can appear, and appear as relative to this zero point at which determined meaning and unmeaning come together in their common origin” (CH 56/86). On the following page he translates “vers” as “in the direction of ”: “an excess in the direction of [vers] the nondetermined, Nothingness or Infinity” (CH 57/87). This move is sealed in Descartes’s appeal to God in Meditation 3, but Derrida argues that it is already achieved as soon as Descartes introduces the notion of the natural light (CH 58–59/89–93). This provides a clear contrast with Levinas’s repeated association of Descartes’s thought of God with the same idea from Plato, which Derrida will interrogate a year later in “Violence and Metaphysics.” For Derrida, Descartes’s appeal to God is precisely the opposite of a move that would exceed the totality, since it is aimed at securing his system against the madness that the hyperbolic project entails (CH 58/90). I should also note in this regard that in the first publication of the “Cogito” essay in 1963 Derrida more strictly identifies philosophy with the hyperbolic movement. Shortly after the mention of Plato’s Good beyond being, Derrida writes: “I think, therefore, that in Descartes everything can be reduced to a determined historical reality except the hyperbolic or metaphysical project which is the philosophical moment of philosophy, the moment of thought itself and of transcendental liberty” (Revue de métaphysique et de morale 68, no. 4 [1963]: 489, my italics). The words I have here placed in italics are removed in the republication of the essay in Writing and Difference (CH 57/88). While still not identifying philosophy with the zero point itself, this could be taken to suggest that philosophy can lie outside of language, even for a moment. Related to this, Derrida’s additions of sentences referring to “economy” toward the end of the essay, which further underscore the sense of transition between the totality and its excess, are absent in the version published in 1963 (CH 61–62/95–96). It is also worth noting that by 1967 this privilege accorded to philosophy recedes in Derrida’s writings, as seen for example at the end of part 1 of Of Grammatology when Derrida speaks of a certain “incompetence of science which is also the incompetence of philosophy, the closure of the epistémè,” and advocates “thought” as a more appropriate term. Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 93. This suggests that even though it is applicable to the “Cogito” essay, Foucault is wrong in 1972 to extend this charge of privilege to Derrida’s work as a whole. The question of philosophy’s privilege will return later in Derrida’s work, precisely in the context of questions of education, with the founding of the Collège International de Philosophie in 1983. For discussions of this, see Derrida, “Privilege: Justificatory Title and Introductory Remarks,” in Who’s Afraid of Philosophy? Right to Philosophy 1,

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trans. Jan Plug (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 1–66, and François Châtelet, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Pierre Faye, and Dominique Lecourt, Le rapport bleu: Les sources historiques et théoriques du Collège international de philosophie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998). 13. It will be more than a decade after the “Cogito” essay was first delivered that Derrida starts publishing essays explicitly addressing questions of teaching and learning in philosophy. This large body of work provides a wealth of material related to the themes I have been exploring. In addition to “Privilege,” mentioned in the previous note, most directly relevant would be “Where a Teaching Body Begins and How It Ends,” in which Derrida places the teacher at the threshold between the philosophical institution and its outside, and “Vacant Chair: Censorship, Mastery, Magisteriality,” in Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, trans. Jan Plug and others (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 43–63, at the end of which Derrida provides a reading of Kant’s claim regarding the impossibility of learning philosophy. Another task extending my analysis would be to read Foucault’s replies along similar lines, relating them to his relationship to philosophy in 1972. For discussions of this, see the essays by Pierre Macherey and Colin Koopman in the present volume, as well as Didier Eribon, “La restauration de l’Édit de Nantes (Foucault et l’enseignement de la philosophie),” in Michel Foucault et ses contemporains (Paris: Fayard, 1994), and “Filigranes philosophiques: Entretien de Mathieu Potte-Bonville avec Daniel Defert,” in Cahiers de L’Herne: Michel Foucault, ed. Philippe Artières, Jean-François Bert, Frédéric Gros, and Judith Revel (Paris: L’Herne, 2011), 39–46. This analysis could be broadened further still by linking Foucault’s replies to the remarks he makes in several interviews in the early to mid-1970s on the university and pedagogy. See Foucault, “Conversation avec Michel Foucault,” Dits et écrits I, 1954–1975 (Paris: Quarto Gallimard, 2001), 1050– 1061 ; Foucault, “Par-delà le bien et le mal,” Dits et écrits I, 1954–1975 (Paris: Quarto Gallimard, 2001), 1091–1104 ; and Foucault, “Radioscopie de Michel Foucault,” Dits et écrits I, 1954–1975 (Paris: Quarto Gallimard, 2001), 1651–1670.

part

IV

Life, Death, Power N E W DE ATH P ENALTIES

9

Power and the “Drive for Mastery” DERRIDA’S FREUD AND THE DEBATE WITH FOUCAU LT



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years after the publication of “Cogito and the History of Madness,” Derrida returned to Foucault in a text intended to mark the thirtieth anniversary of Foucault’s Histoire de la folie. In “‘To Do Justice to Freud’” (“‘Être juste avec Freud’”), Derrida revisits some of the central questions in the contretemps around History of Madness and “Cogito and the History of Madness,” but he does so in the context of an engagement with Foucault that extends the debate in a new direction. The turn in the debate is announced straightaway in the title: at issue, now, will be the precise relation of Foucauldian genealogy—Foucault’s account of the history of madness and, in turn, of the history of sexuality—to psychoanalysis, and above all to Freud. The title, however, and Derrida’s fairly measured tone in the text, mask somewhat the deeper issues at stake in his reading of Foucault. The broad thrust of Derrida’s argument in “‘To Do Justice to Freud’” will be that Foucault’s published works evidence a fundamental ambivalence toward Freud. Sometimes Freud is credited with resisting the confinement of unreason and the modern construction of sexuality, and sometimes Freud appears as the most effective purveyor of the discourse through which power penetrates the subject. This ambivalence is, to a certain extent, unavoidable, Derrida suggests: it is “a structural duplicity that his work reflects from the thing itself, namely, from the event of psychoanalysis” ( JF 77/101). Yet, according to Derrida, Foucault never quite manages to “do justice to Freud,” as Foucault at one point claims to do in acknowledging Freud’s originality. Specifically, Derrida argues, Foucault overlooks the crucial topic of power and mastery in Freud, themes that

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speak directly to the concerns of Foucault’s thinking. At stake, it would seem, is something like an unacknowledged resistance on Foucault’s part to Freud and psychoanalysis, and Derrida’s criticism that Foucault does not adequately measure or analyze his relation to psychoanalysis would seem to be informed by the role of psychoanalysis as a crucial resource in Derrida’s thought across his entire oeuvre. Scholars such as Geoffrey Bennington and Michael Naas have gone some way in rectifying this perception, however. In particular, they draw attention to the ways in which Derrida’s analysis of the relation to Freud in Foucault allows him to reapproach the deeper issues concerning periodization and the fundamental conditions of possibility of Foucault’s own project broached in “Cogito and the History of Madness.”1 As Bennington and Naas have shown, Derrida analyzes the marked ambivalence in Foucault’s references to Freud in this later text precisely in order to pose, once again, serious questions about the very possibility of writing a history of madness or sexuality, questions that remain, to a certain extent, unthought in Foucault. Still, if this last installment in the Derrida/Foucault debate bears revisiting today, more than two decades on, I suggest that this is because it contains an unanalyzed element. At stake in this final encounter, I will argue, is not simply the place of Freud in Foucault and its attendant implications. At issue here, even more importantly, I will suggest, is a particular activation of Freud in Derrida.2 Ultimately, I seek to demonstrate, it is Derrida’s mobilization of Freud’s thinking on power or mastery that poses the most serious challenge to Foucault at this stage of the debate: specifically, the Freudian figure of a fundamental “instinct” or drive for power or mastery, what Freud called Bemächtigungstrieb. In short, following Derrida, I will argue that Freud’s thinking in this area shows Foucault’s notion of power to be deconstructible. My claim will be that the Freud Derrida strategically invokes near the close of “‘To Do Justice to Freud,’” the Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, fundamentally complicates the notion of power at the core of Foucault’s project in The History of Sexuality. While, from a certain perspective, Freud’s thinking on the question of power or mastery makes him an ally to Foucault, Beyond the Pleasure Principle in fact points to a notion of power Foucault does not and cannot think. While Derrida traces a certain ambivalence in Foucault around Freud, I analyze another ambivalence suggested by this reading: the Freud who seems to offer Foucault’s

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project key resources is also the one who undercuts one of Foucault’s most crucial concepts. Initially, Derrida argues in “‘To Do Justice to Freud’” that the imbrication of Foucault’s project in the historical processes it sets out to describe has the effect of putting into question Foucault’s ability to properly delimit the object of historical analysis, as when Foucault specifies his project in History of Madness as a study of the classical age.3 Or then again, when, in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, Foucault refers to a particular organization of bodies and techniques that he suggests ought to be rethought today, as if from a position external to it. On Derrida’s reading, the persistent ambiguity one finds in Foucault’s writing concerning Freud’s place in these historical processes is the symptom of an unacknowledged problem. As Derrida puts it, redeploying the word Foucault used to describe the object of study in The History of Sexuality, Foucault’s analysis “calls for the problematization of its own problematization. And this must itself also question itself, with the same archaeological and genealogical care” ( JF 115/143). It is precisely at this point that Derrida raises the speculative question: what might Foucault have made of the Freud who would seem to have the most to say about the concerns of Foucault’s project?4 The Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, for instance, explicitly addressed the relation between pleasure and power, the very question that occupies so much of Foucault’s attention in The History of Sexuality. What might Foucault have made of Freud’s references in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and elsewhere to an irreducible drive for power or mastery, Derrida asks: “Where would Foucault have situated this drive for mastery in his discourse on power or on irreducibly plural powers? How would he have read this drive, had he read it, in this extremely enigmatic text of Freud?” ( JF 117/145). Foucault’s own work leads one to pose this question, Derrida specifies. It is the question that Foucault’s work “carries within itself,” in Derrida’s words ( JF 115/143–144). The implication here is fairly clear. Had Foucault complicated his understanding of the Freudian project, had he pursued a closer analysis of Freud’s thought, he might have found the resources for his own project already in Freud. The speculative question raised here allows Derrida to rearticulate the problematic developed across the essay as a whole, the ultimately unresolvable question of the precise relation of Foucault’s project to “the age of psychoanalysis.” Here, as elsewhere, Foucault’s project is understood as irreducibly entangled with its

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object. Yet another underexplored line of inquiry is suggested by this reading. Following the thread of Derrida’s references to Freud in this later text, I will demonstrate, we begin to see that the thinking of power or mastery thus mobilized by deconstruction in fact challenges the concept of power central to Foucault’s project. The operations of power are, of course, a key theme in The History of Sexuality. Indeed, Foucault’s explicit aim there is to develop a new understanding of power that goes beyond the simple notion of domination from above, and to disclose its effects at the level of everything that became knowable and practicable around sexuality in the modern era.5 Power, in Foucault’s well-known formulation, is mobile and essentially dispersed. Its operations do not answer to any given subject; it is permanent and self-reproducing. It is immanent in even the most intimate relations (knowledge relationships and sexual relationships). Moreover, it depends on a multiplicity of points of resistance, which are not external to power but rather “present everywhere in the power network” (HS 95/126). The definition thus offered in the famous “Method” chapter in volume 1 undergirds the genealogical project Foucault undertakes in The History of Sexuality, the project of mapping how power takes charge of sexuality in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the operations of a certain “will to knowledge” around sexuality (HS 12/20) and in a whole array of varied “practices of the self.”6 In volume 1, this takes the form of analyzing what Foucault will see as an intimate relation between power and pleasure. He discloses the previously hidden intersection of these two terms, the penetration of pleasure, in its most intimate forms, by diverse mechanisms of power (HS 45/62). The relationship thus posited between these two terms orients the entire project of The History of Sexuality outlined in volume 1: Foucault’s project is launched by a rebuttal of “the repressive hypothesis” grounded in an analysis of the positive effects of the power that takes charge of sexuality. Thus, as Derrida underscores, “there is no need to oppose, as one so often and naively believes, power and pleasure” ( JF 111/138). Hence, in Part One of The History of Sexuality, when Foucault discusses the doubts he will oppose to the repressive hypothesis and begins to outline his approach— “the object, in short,” he writes, “is to define the regime of power-knowledge-pleasure that sustains the discourse on human sexuality in our part of the world”—he will characterize his project as an analysis of how power “penetrates and controls everyday pleasure—all this entailing effects that

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may be those of refusal and blockage, and invalidation, but also incitement and intensification” (HS 11/19–20). The object, in short, is to disclose what Foucault will call “the ‘polymorphous techniques of power’” (HS 11/19– 20). It is as if, to put it in psychoanalytic terms, the various mechanisms, institutions, and discursive formations that Foucault analyzes adhere to a kind of “power principle”: everywhere there is pleasure, there is the exercise of power. If, as Foucault seems to suggest, pleasure is not entirely reducible to power, it is nonetheless understood here as “penetrated” or “controlled” by mechanisms of power in the end. The nexus of these two terms in Foucault is most clearly visible in the famous passage on “spirals of pleasure and power” that Derrida invokes at the close of “‘To Do Justice to Freud.’” There, again, for Foucault, it is a matter of challenging and overturning the naive opposition between these terms. Discussing the medicalization of sexuality in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Foucault describes how the forms of power that took charge of sexuality in this period “wrapped the sexual body in its embrace,” such that there resulted “an increase in the effectiveness and an extension of the domain controlled; but also a sensualization of power and a gain of pleasure” (HS 44/61). It is at this point that Foucault speaks of certain mechanisms of knowledge that entail what he calls a “double impetus” of pleasure and power: The medical examination, the psychiatric investigation, the pedagogical report, and family controls may have the over-all and apparent objective of saying no to all wayward or unproductive sexualities, but the fact is that they function as mechanisms with a double impetus: pleasure and power. The pleasure that comes of exercising a power that questions, monitors, watches, spies, searches out, palpates, brings to light; and on the other hand, the pleasure that kindles at having to evade this power, flee from it, fool it, or travesty it. The power that lets itself be invaded by the pleasure it is pursuing; and opposite it, power asserting itself in the pleasure of showing off, scandalizing, or resisting. . . . These attractions, these evasions, these circular incitements have traced around bodies and sexes, not boundaries not to be crossed, but perpetual spirals of power and pleasure. (HS 45/62)7

For Foucault, the figure of the spiral is that of two terms that collude and come to reinforce one another. Bringing to a close the portion of the text

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on the circular relation between pleasure and power, he underscores that, in the period he is analyzing, these two terms are ultimately conjoined: This concatenation [Foucault is speaking of a process whereby “scattered sexualities” become reified], particularly since the nineteenth century, has been ensured and relayed by the countless economic interests which, with the help of medicine, psychiatry, prostitution, and pornography, have tapped into both this analytical multiplication of pleasure and this optimization of the power that controls it. Pleasure and power do not cancel or turn back against one another; they seek out, overlap, and reinforce one another. (HS 48/66–67)

At stake in the spiral of pleasure and power, then, is what Derrida will call “the principled unity of pleasure and power” ( JF 117/146): the mechanism by which they work in conjunction. And it is the axiomatic notion of the unity of pleasure and power that ultimately undergirds Foucault’s genealogy of bodies and practices in The History of Sexuality. Again, it is the task of the genealogist here to analyze historical zones of “problematization” and specific configurations of pleasure that operate, in the end, in accordance with power.8 To return to the issue of Foucault’s relation to Freud, we could say, following Derrida, that some of the most powerful resources for such a thinking of power are to be found already in Freud, and in particular, the Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Foucault seems not to have shown any interest in this text, as Derrida underscores. Yet before Freud introduces the hypothesis of something beyond the pursuit of pleasure in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (what he will ultimately theorize as a radically destructive death drive), his thinking in this text actually “problematizes, in its greatest radicality, the agency of power and mastery” ( JF 116/145). At issue here, as I have noted, is what Freud at times refers to as the drive for ascendancy or mastery, Bemächtigungstrieb. Stated simply, what Derrida invokes under the heading of the drive for mastery is what Freud seems to envision as an absolutely irreducible tendency in human beings toward the exercise of dominance or power. I say “seems to envision” insofar as the Bemächtigungstrieb remains an undertheorized term in Freud’s metapsychology across the entire body of his work.9 This area of Freud’s thinking is complex, but for the purposes of the present discussion, we can take Beyond the Pleasure

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Principle as our starting point. Initially, in an easily overlooked passage highlighted by Derrida in The Post Card, Freud speculates that there may be something like an original drive for mastery in human beings operating to some degree independently of the pleasure principle that had, to this point, been said to govern the psychic apparatus as a whole.10 The Bemächtigungstrieb would seem, then, to be the first instance in Beyond the Pleasure Principle of a tendency “beyond the pleasure principle.” Yet Freud never quite explains what he seems to have in mind with this term, and there are few references to such a drive in his writings published after 1920. As if leaving this hypothesis to one side, in his later “sociological” writings Freud more often sees the propensity to dominate as one form of an ineradicable tendency toward aggressivity and destruction associated with the so-called death drive. This purely “aggressive or destructive drive,” as Freud sometimes calls it, is a kind of outward manifestation of the radically destructive death drive, which otherwise is said to operate in absolute silence (SE 22:209). Unlike what Freud now begins to call Eros or the life drives, the death drive is said to lack any psychical representatives, through which excitation coming from the body takes on psychical form. Now, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud had already suggested that the death drive has a social dimension—understood there as a radical force of unbinding, it works to undo every unity, whether it be at the level of the individual organism or at the level of the social unit. In his writings on “civilization,” war, and violence, however, Freud develops this notion further. In these later works, the tendency toward aggressivity and destructiveness, sometimes characterized as a drive toward cruelty and domination, ultimately originates in the process whereby the death drive, originally a drive toward self-destruction, is split, and a portion of its energy is turned outward toward external “objects.” This impure form of the death drive, as it were, is in the end the only perceptible form the death drive ever takes, Freud goes so far as to suggest. Regardless of whether it is conceived as a wholly independent tendency or as the outward manifestation of the destructive death drive, the concept of a drive for mastery or power in Freud ultimately opens onto a thinking of power as an absolutely ineradicable force operative not just in the psyche but in the relation between subjects and in the broader sociocultural field. If Freud attempts to think through the agency of power “in its greatest radicality,” as Derrida puts it in the passage just cited, this is because

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he theorizes it as a fundamentally irreducible, unshakable force that will never be dissolved. For Freud, there can be no question of eradicating or surmounting this tendency; it can only ever be a question of redirecting the drive to dominate by means of certain strategic interventions. And it is precisely to this extent, we could now say, that Freud could be said to contribute to a critical analysis of power such as Foucault’s. In other words, Freud would seem to offer here a radical thinking of power proximate to Foucault’s own, whereby there is no beyond of power. There is no beyond of power because it is absolutely permanent; there is only strategic resistance. Moreover, it would be possible to put the Freudian conception of power to work in analyzing the place of Freud himself in the exclusion of unreason, say, or in the construction of a particular form of discourse on sexuality in the modern era. At the same time, Freud, so attentive to the essentially malleable and dispersed character of unconscious drives and affects—their vicissitudes, in short—would seem to allow us to think with even more precision the very crossing of pleasure and power or mastery Foucault seeks to analyze in The History of Sexuality. The framework of the drives, and the notion of a drive for mastery operating to some degree independently of the pursuit of pleasure, would seem to allow us to further analyze and map the manner in which sexuality is penetrated by effects of power, the massive effort, as Foucault describes it, aimed at seeking out, making known, and taking charge of pleasure. Already in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud begins to theorize that some portion of the aggressive, destructive death drive can be redirected within the psychic apparatus, and to that extent can comingle with the sexual drives; it can be put, in his words, “in the service of the sexual function,” for instance in certain forms of sadism (SE 18:54). A bit later on, in “The Economic Problem of Masochism” (1924), Freud sees the vicissitudes of the death drive as the source of both sadism and what he begins to call “erotogenic masochism” (SE 19:163–164). From this point on, this is how Freud will understand both sadism and masochism. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), for instance, he will refer to sadism and masochism as “manifestations of the destructive instinct (directed outwards or inwards), strongly alloyed with erotism” (SE 21:120). Without even touching on the complexities involved in this area of Freud’s thinking, we begin to see that even if Foucault never takes it up, Freud goes some way in opening up the thought of how power penetrates sexuality.

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More importantly, however, if we follow this line of inquiry further, taking seriously everything Freud said concerning the themes of power and pleasure, the axiomatic concept of power itself is to a certain extent destabilized or “problematized.” For in the Freudian theory of the drives, the unity of the agency of power or mastery is itself fundamentally and originarily compromised. In order to see this, we need to return to the concept of the drive for mastery in Freud and its relation to the figure of the death drive. Firstly, for Freud, the drive for power or mastery is always inscribed in what he sees as an absolutely fundamental dualism: on the one side, there are the life drives (which include the self-preservative drives alongside the sexual drives, operating in accordance with the pleasure principle), and, on the other, there is the radically destructive death drive, in which the cruel tendency toward mastery originates. There is no simple unity of pleasure and power here—pleasure will never be entirely “controlled” by power—insofar as these two terms are situated in an absolutely irreducible, complex tension. As Freud theorizes it, sometimes pleasure is overtaken by power, and sometimes, according to a whole other principle of operation, the pursuit of pleasure runs counter to and opposes the tendency toward power and mastery. Strictly speaking, then, power could no longer serve as the singular, foundational term for a critical analysis of the history of sexuality. The Freudian notion of a drive for mastery situated within an irresolvable dualism is a thinking of power that fundamentally complicates the Foucauldian project—precisely insofar as, on this view, there is no “principled unity of pleasure and power.” Derrida invokes this fracturing or splitting in the relation between pleasure and power at the close of “‘To Do Justice to Freud.’” Having raised the speculative question of what Foucault might have made of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he begins, respectfully but fairly clearly, to formulate a new critique of Foucault. Trying “to imagine the principle” of Foucault’s reply in his absence, Derrida formulates it this way: “it would perhaps be something like this: what one must stop believing in is principality or principleness, in the problematic of the principle, in the principled unity of pleasure and power, or of some drive that is thought to be more originary than the other. The theme of the spiral would be that of a drive duality (power/pleasure) that is without principle” ( JF 117/146). The thought of this “drive duality,” then, the thought of power as inscribed in the irreducible tension of a fundamental dualism, we could now say, would

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ultimately complicate, “problematize,” or put into question Foucault’s conception of power. And it is precisely this discordance in the relation between pleasure and power that is at stake in the figure of “perpetual spirals” of pleasure and power, even if Foucault himself does not think it in these terms. The image of a perpetual spiral, after all, would seem to suggest a complex interweaving or crossing of terms irreducible to a simple unity. Yet, if the agency of power or mastery is to be understood as fundamentally compromised, as I have suggested, the deepest reason for this lies in the way Freud conceptualizes the drive for mastery itself. More specifically, in the way the drive for mastery is understood as a form of the so-called death drive. Derrida himself invokes the figure of the death drive somewhat cryptically at the very close of “‘To Do Justice to Freud,’” in his discussion of the duality of the drives. Putting significant pressure on the term “power,” Derrida writes, “Is not what Freud was looking for, under the names ‘death drive’ and ‘repetition compulsion,’ that which, coming ‘before’ the principle (of pleasure or reality), would remain forever heterogeneous to the principle of principle?” ( JF 117–118/146). Derrida identifies this term “heterogeneous to the principle of principle” with the figure of the spiral and, from there, reformulates the question: “Is not the duality in question, this spiraled duality, what Freud tried to oppose to all monisms by speaking of a dual drive and of a death drive, of a death drive that was no doubt not alien to the drive for mastery?” ( JF 118/146). What Derrida begins to suggest here, I submit, is that if we follow Freud, the agency of power or mastery can never serve as a foundational term, not just because it is inscribed in a fundamental dualism, but because this agency can never be gathered into the unity of a principle or concept. It always remains, to some degree, “heterogeneous” to this structure. A drive for mastery that is also a death drive is internally fractured or divided from the very start. In the perspective opened up by Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the agency of power or mastery is internally compromised to the extent that it is understood as coterminous with what ultimately undoes the exercise of power: the death drive. This is, in the end, what Freud’s conception of the drive for mastery suggests when we follow it as far as it will go. For if, within the fundamental duality of the life and death drives—or, if one likes, the drives of pleasure and power—every drive for power or mastery is, at bottom, also a death drive—a particular manifestation of something radically destructive—then the drive for power ultimately aims at what puts an end

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to the exercise of mastery or power. Even if we conceive of it as a deflection of the death drive operative in the social field, the drive for mastery pursues not control within a given social configuration, however subtle and dispersed in its effects, but rather the absolute dissolution of every social configuration, the only site within which it makes sense to speak of the exercise of power. As such, a drive for power that is also a death drive necessarily undermines or turns back on itself. The agency of mastery or power, here, has to be understood as, to some degree, divided against itself, internally compromised. On this view, power or mastery actually disrupts and undoes itself. And it is this notion of power, we could say, following Derrida, that Foucault remains blind to in his dealings with Freud. In the final lines of “‘To Do Justice to Freud,’” Derrida attempts once again to imagine Foucault’s response. “I can’t quite do it,” he writes, “but in this place where no one can answer for him . . . I would venture to wager that, in a sentence that I will not construct for him, he would have associated and yet also dissociated, he would have sent them packing back to back, mastery and death, that is the same—death and the master, death as the master” ( JF 118/146). At this point, we begin to see more clearly the stakes of Derrida’s mobilization of Freud in the later engagement with Foucault. Without necessarily subscribing to Freud’s theory of the drives or to his conception of the subject—everything Derrida said about Freud before and after “‘To Do Justice to Freud’” makes clear that he never simply adopts Freud’s terms or concepts—Derrida underscores the manner in which Freud opens up a logic whereby power undermines itself and, precisely to this extent, can never be gathered together in the unity of a principle or concept. This thinking of power—whereby the agency of power or mastery contains within itself what would undo it, in accordance with what Derrida would begin to call a kind of “auto-immune process”—would fundamentally complicate or compromise the problematization Foucault seeks to carry out.11 In question is not just Foucault’s ability to delimit the “age” from which he writes from the one he analyzes. Rather, the question concerns the very terms in which Foucault’s project in The History of Sexuality articulates itself. Once the axiomatic concept of power is put into question, the very project the genealogist undertakes is destabilized. Even if power is irreducibly dispersed, there must be a unity of the concept in order for a genealogy of power relations to get underway in the first place. To put it another way, if Foucault were to listen more carefully to Freud, if he were really to try to do justice to

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what is most radical in Freud, he could not avoid the situation in which the genealogist’s procedure of problematization itself is put into question, “such that the very idea of a gathering of problematization or procedure [dispositif], to say nothing any longer of age, episteme, paradigm, or epoch, would make for so many problematic names, just as problematic as the very idea of problematization” ( JF 117/145–146). Following the thread of Derrida’s activation of Freud in “‘To Do Justice,’” the full scope of the Derridean critique of Foucault comes into view. Even if Derrida never subscribes to all of Freud’s concepts and metapsychology, more is at issue than Foucault’s relationship to Freud. Derrida’s rearticulation of psychoanalysis allows him to interrogate or problematize—indeed, we could say “deconstruct”—the concept of power at the very heart of Foucault’s project in The History of Sexuality. To do justice to this critique, however, is to understand Derrida as doing more than simply disabling the Foucauldian project, leaving it to one side and abandoning it. Rather, he submits it to a privileged scrutiny, rigorously and explicitly problematizing the conceptual terms and axiomatic logic presupposed by Foucault’s important work. Derrida called for this problematization in Foucault’s work in “Cogito and the History of Madness” and does so again here. For Derrida, from the very beginning, it was a matter of calling for an explicit reflection on the conditions of possibility of Foucault’s own project, a procedure Foucault himself never carried out. Rather than undoing Foucault’s project in its entirety, this procedure allows the urgent, absolutely necessary, and critical analysis of power, of institutions, of sedimented concepts and discourses Foucault undertakes—just as urgent today as ever—to live on, so to speak, even if this means that this analysis must undergo transformation and rearticulation. This problematization is performed once we see that the Foucauldian concept of power can be deconstructed; it remains blind to an alternate conception of power that it never manages to think. In this way, we are offered the beginnings of an alternate framework for thinking power. Above all, once the agency of power or mastery is understood to be fundamentally compromised, one sees how there might be a minimal opening in a given historical regime or episteme—a minimal “dislocation,” to use Derrida’s word in “Cogito and the History of Madness”—in which a critique such as Foucault’s finds its condition of possibility. Foucault, recall, consistently struggles to specify the historical process of liberation in which

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his own project would necessarily have to ground itself. A kind of symptom of this inability is seen in the continual oscillations of his relation to Freud, or to “the age of psychoanalysis.” Sometimes Freud has initiated the process of liberation in which Foucault finds his footing. Sometimes Freud is on the side of everything Foucault critiques, and this footing remains obscure. Adopting the alternate perspective, one can see how the critique of power gets underway in the first place, insofar as, on this view, a dislocation internal to power opens the way to deconstructive-genealogical critique. Such a critique can locate those conceptual and discursive sites where this internal divide operates, showing how particular forms of power are in fact predicated on its disavowal. Crucially, it provides an account of its own condition of possibility. The task, as we have seen, is to analyze and critique not just the mechanisms of power operative in the social field, but also to think, explicitly and as rigorously as possible, the possibility of this critique itself. Derrida tried to mobilize, in his own analyses of sovereign power, just such a thinking of power as fundamentally and originarily compromised. Not coincidentally, these were developed after this later engagement with Foucault. Indeed, we might even see much of Derrida’s later work on inherited political concepts and formations in this light. In these later works, it is clear that sovereignty and mastery are opened up to deconstructive critique by their own autoimmunity. That makes available to the genealogist the resources to bring forward their internal contradictions and blind spots. Returning to the idiom I have used throughout this essay, from the perspective of what Derrida at times called deconstructive genealogy, any power principle at work in the social field, in institutions, discourses, and forms of knowledge, is, at best, problematic. This is because power, to some degree, undoes and undermines itself, forming the very condition of possibility of its deconstructibility. To reiterate, the point of the deconstructive move I have tracked is not to disable Foucauldian genealogy. Rather, it is to rearticulate it, recognizing the continued importance of Foucault’s monumental work. Derrida consistently affirms this in the text under consideration here and elsewhere. Reformulating it in this way might even be the most powerful way of relaunching the Foucauldian project, giving it new resources, new life, as it were. A Foucauldian genealogical analysis of power relations transformed and reformulated by deconstruction is called for. Or, one could say, a process of deconstruction that passes through psychoanalysis.

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Somewhat paradoxically, submitting Foucault’s thought to critique in this manner—opening it up to the question it seems to “carry within itself ”— here represents one of the best ways of paying tribute to it. It would be, to use the phrase Derrida borrows from Foucault (who himself used it describe how the actually quite bad “good genius Freud” relaunched the injunction to study sex and transform it into discourse [HS 159/210]), one way of giving Foucault’s thought “a new impetus.”

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1. Michael Naas, Taking on the Tradition: Jacques Derrida and the Legacies of Deconstruction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 56–75. Geoffrey Bennington, Not Half No End: Militantly Melancholy Essays in Memory of Jacques Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 100–110. 2. While Bennington and Naas have shed some helpful light on the broader questions at play in Derrida’s reading of Foucault in “‘To Do Justice,’” the deconstructive work performed by Derrida’s mobilization of Freud in this text—especially the Freudian theory of the drives—has not yet been addressed. It is this underexplored dimension of Derrida’s thinking that I seek to analyze in what follows. 3. As Derrida puts it, citing and reformatting a key passage from “Cogito and the History of Madness,” if Foucault’s book is capable of being written, “we must assume that a certain liberation of madness has gotten underway, that psychiatry has opened itself up, however minimally [and, in the end, I would be tempted simply to replace psychiatry by psychoanalysis . . . ], and that the concept of madness as unreason, if it ever had a unity, has been dislocated. And that a project such as Foucault’s can find its historical origin and passageway in the opening produced by this dislocation” ( JF 73/96, brackets in the original). The original passage can be found in CH 38/61. 4. As Derrida notes explicitly in the text, the final section of “‘To Do Justice to Freud’” draws on an earlier, unpublished presentation delivered in 1985. We can now say that this final section in large part reproduces that presentation. An archival transcript of the presentation, which Derrida titled “Beyond the Power Principle,” was published in 2014. See Jacques Derrida, “Au-delà du principe de pouvoir,” Rue Descartes 82 (2014): 4–13. 5. In the chapter on method in Part Four of The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, Foucault articulates the aim of his analysis most succinctly: “The objective is to analyze a certain form of knowledge regarding sex, not in terms of repression or law, but in terms of power” (HS 92/121). 6. Michael Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: Volume 2 of “The History of Sexuality,” trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 13; originally published as Michel Foucault, L’usage des plaisirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 19. 7. Two pages later, Foucault returns to this figure of the spiral. Arguing against the view that bourgeois society in the nineteenth century was simply repressive, Foucault con-

power and the “drive for mastery”

8. 9.

10.

11.

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tends that rather than erecting barriers to nonnormative forms of sexuality, bourgeois society “[pursued] them according to lines of indefinite penetration.” It did not simply exclude sexuality, but rather “included it in the body as a mode of specification of individuals. It did not seek to avoid it; it attracted its varieties by means of spirals in which pleasure and power reinforced one another” (HS 47/65). See Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 11/17. For a detailed discussion of the translation of this term and its genesis in Freud, see J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1973), 217–218. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London, Hogarth Press, 1953–1974), 18:16–17. Citations will be given parenthetically using the abbreviation “SE” followed by the volume and the page number. See also Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 325–327 and 403–405. Jacques Derrida, “Preface,” in Resistances of Psychoanalysis, trans. Peggy Kamuf, PascaleAnne Brault, and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), viii; originally published as Jacques Derrida, “Preface,” in Résistances de la psychanalyse (Paris: Galilée, 1996), 9.

10

“This Death Which Is Not One” RE PRODUCTIVE B IOPOLITIC S AND THE WO MA N AS E XCE PT I O N IN T HE DEATH P ENALTY , VOLU M E 1



p en elo p e d e u tsc h e r

The communist authorities in the now extinct Czechoslovakia detained [Derrida] on the charge of drug trafficking. . . . One of the philosophers who was most active in the protest, gathering up signatures and going to the radio stations, was Michel Foucault. After his return, on 1st January 1981, Derrida phoned him to thank him. From then on, and until the death of Foucault on 25th June 1984, the two met on various occasions. a n t o n i o c a m p i l l o , “Foucault and Derrida: The History of a Debate”

I am trying . . . to imagine the principle of the reply . . . I am still trying to imagine Foucault’s response. j a c q u e s d e r r i d a , “‘To Do Justice to Freud’”

was “always a telephone.” It was just one of the technologies promising to annul distance, while calling into question the immediacy it promised and the distance it promised to annul.1 Yet, as Eric Prenowitz writes, the telephone held a more peculiar interest: from “Plato’s Pharmacy,” through Derrida’s many reflections on teletechnologies (generalized in Echographies), to the ongoing dialogues with Hélène Cixous2 that were also repeated openings to sexual difference. Consistent with those openings, the telephone becomes, at one point in his The Death Penalty, Volume 1, an umbilical cord. Here is Derrida describing teletechnology as vital or mortal in a scene from Clint Eastwood’s True Crime:3

t o r e c a l l — i n d e r r i da’s w o r k t h e r e

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The phone call from the governor . . . interrupts the execution in process, saves the innocent condemned one . . . with all the suspense that you can imagine of the cinematic exploitation, which shows all the operations, all the moments [tous les temps] of the progression of the fluid, the phone call at the last second, for there is always a telephone today that links, like an umbilical cord of life or death, the place of execution to the executive power of the sovereign, here that of the governor who can grant a pardon or interrupt the execution up to the last instant. (DEP1 49/84)

Here we briefly confront an analogical umbilical cord which is not one, in a film representation of an execution, which turns out not to be one, linking a figure associated with sovereign power (here, an American governor) with a place of execution. These are characteristically Derridean concerns, and characteristically Derridean terms for approaching these concerns. Foucault seems far from this scene. Moreover, the deconstruction of teletechnology is just one of the means through which Derrida puts pressure on the Foucauldian identification of modern, biopolitical formations of death, and death penalties, as more private, as more discrete. He puts pressure on Foucault’s distinction between different organizations of visibility in the modes of punishment belonging to different forms of power: the more and less public, or publicized or witnessed, spectacular or cinematic (DEP1 42–43/75–76). Derrida’s work also described the many senses in which sovereign power is “not one” include its phantasmatic aspects. As Brown has written, he has shown that sovereign claims are also “predicated, dependent, internally divided, vulnerable, not sovereign at all.”4 The Death Penalty, Volume 1 depicts sovereign decisions over life and death that are self-divided by aspiration and phantasy. They aspire to theological likeness, to a phantasmatic power to determine the exact moment of another’s decease, and claim authority over life and death. But even the death penalty’s death remains deconstructible, suspended between the termination of heart, breath, or brain activity (DEP1 241–242/327–328), taking place only, to use his formulation, as a “death [which] is not one” (DEP1 241/327).5 And, like its analogical umbilical cord and its teletechnology, to think in this way about the phantasmatic and deconstructive aspects of the death penalty’s execution seems to carry us far from a Foucauldian register.

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But in fact, the first year of the death penalty seminar was one of the contexts for Derrida to return to his long-standing dialogue with Foucault, commonly considered a dialogue which was not one. bi op ow e r and d e c o ns tru c ti o n

Derrida had brilliantly analyzed Foucault’s relation to Freud as a fort-da pendulum in “‘To Do Justice’” ( JF 78/101), and one wants to repeat the formula to characterize his own relationship to Foucault: most obviously his oscillations between acerbic and laudatory remarks, distancing himself from interpretations he deemed unfair, only to reiterate them. In the first volume of his The Beast and the Sovereign seminar, he would quote, somewhat misleadingly, The History of Sexuality’s reference to the death penalty, amid his wary references to Foucauldian epistemes, ages, epochs, and ruptures (BS 331–333/441–442): “Supposing that . . . some decline of the death penalty is principally to be explained by the new advent (which Foucault dates to the end of the classical age) . . . we have to wonder what politico-juridical consequence should be drawn, and whether we should regret this decline of the death penalty” (BS 332/441).6 But in the first year of the death penalty seminar Derrida had turned back to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. He speaks to the need to cite it at length (as he does), warmly calling for a rereading of the work “in its entirety” (DEP1 42/74). The reference is restricted to one session, but the possibility for an exchange between Foucault and Derrida on the death penalty appears (particularly when compared to the “monarchy of sex,” history, madness, reason, Descartes, epistemes, and thresholds) more promising. How can we see this possibility extending beyond Derrida’s actual mention of Foucault’s 1975 work? When France abolished capital punishment in 1981, Foucault had taken this to be the occasion, not for simple celebration, but for maintaining a critical interrogation of the entire penal system of which it had been part. Emphasizing the continuity between systems of incarceration and the death penalty, he commented in Libération: “that one could be glad that the most ancient form of punishment was dying out in France, but that this did not warrant excessive enthusiasm.”7 The narratives of progress with which abolition has often been associated should not become the pretext for overlooking that continuity. This reminder is consistent with his having long

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seen in the advent of putatively progressive understandings of crime and madness as matters of science and health, the broader possibilities for extensive networks of discipline, normalization, gridding, and self-surveillance. In The Death Penalty, Volume 1, Derrida returns to sovereign power as a power over life and death, the power to take life or let live (DEP1 24/51). But that foremost connotation of Foucault’s account of sovereign power is reconfigured by Derrida from the outset as a question permeated by the phantasmatic components that fissure sovereign aspirations (while not weakening their capacity for destruction). While for Foucault sovereignty is dominated by the symbolic and by spectacle, it is not directly analyzed as riven by the “impossibility” of its theological pretention. Foucault’s sovereign power might come to be deemed inefficient, yet its mode of power isn’t theorized in terms of its constitutive lack—or not directly. A contrasting reference to how sovereign power “presents itself, represents itself ” is the beginning of Derrida’s divergent analysis: “a sovereign political power, which thereby signals its sovereignty, its sovereign right over souls and bodies, and which in truth defines its sovereignty by this right and by this power: over the life and death of subjects. This is how the essence of sovereign power, as political but first of all theologico-political power, presents itself, represents itself as the right to decree and to execute a death penalty. Or to pardon arbitrarily, sovereignly” (DEP1 22/49). Their analyses take different routes, yet there is a greater proximity in their analytic goals. In particular, Foucault and Derrida can agree (and emphasize) that forms of abolitionism are also capable of reiterating a death penalty’s logic. Derrida’s support for its abolition was, like that of Foucault, never in question. Yet he too preferred to think about a broader field to which the death penalty belonged, and from which the justifications for its abolition were likely to distract us. One word for this broader field was the “anesthetized” death penalty (DEP1 48–49/82–83, 73/114, 277/374). Opposition to capital punishment, or to the forms deemed most inhuman, might combine with the terms in which the right is assumed to send armies to war, to colonize peoples and lands, to wage forms of civil war, or to promote less cruel and more compassionate forms of the death penalty. Foucault’s analytic gesture is just as characteristic, as he links abolition, and claims to more enlightened modes of punishment, with the interconnecting techniques of biopolitics. What for Foucault becomes the interconnection, or assemblage, of a dispersed mode of power (for example, linking

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bodies through the forms of knowledge and subjectivation associated with the progress of the human sciences) could offer resources to Derrida for the theorization of the death penalty’s generalized “anesthetization.” These analytic gestures are not to be confused with each other. But in the midst of their divergence about how to theorize subjects, sovereigns, and teletechnologies, Foucault and Derrida are similarly cautious about the particular forms of aspiration to progress and enlightenment with which abolitionism has been associated. The points where they communicate allow us to scrutinize together the conditions (Foucault) and the conditionality (Derrida) enfolded within abolitionism. According to both, abolitionist arguments could share the presuppositions of, and participate in, more general8 and interconnected variants of what they resisted. For a brief moment, we see them almost touching, as they converge to cite Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments. Derrida points out that Beccaria’s argument for abolition, though foregrounded as more enlightened and less cruel (“One must choose the means . . . the least cruel on the body of the criminal”), amounted to an argument for lifelong imprisonments, to “leave the most lasting impression on the minds of the people.” Deeming it akin to slavery, Beccaria might have named incarceration less cruel, but he also favored it as a “representation more terrifying than death.” Catching each other for just this moment, Foucault and Derrida make the same point, to similar ends, citing the same passage (DEP1 94/142).9 For his part, Derrida will then take a route through the conditional forms of abolitionism. As he writes, Beccaria, “the first great thinker of abolitionist law, was in favor of the abolition of this capital punishment except in exceptional cases” (DEP1 68/107). Challenging capital punishment as archaic, brutal, or ineffective can substitute for unconditional abolitionism and do so in ways allowing for its continuation by other means. The suspension of the death penalty in the United States following the 1974 Furman v. Georgia ruling that it was cruel and unusual punishment violating the Eighth Amendment, for example, could allow its later reinstatement in 1977 following revision of its legal procedures. Moreover, no nation repudiating the death penalty will entirely repudiate the right to kill in the right to wage war. Abolitionism is often defended in the name of a more civilized approach to punishment. But Derrida argues that these conditions similarly open the door to anesthetized versions of death penalties (and he recalls that the guillotine was introduced as a humanitarian invention

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(DEP1 193/269). Capital punishment has been named barbaric and primitive in typical variants of abolitionist arguments, as seen in Victor Hugo’s argument that it undermined the principles of French progress: “At the present time, the death penalty is already outside Paris . . . to leave Paris is to leave civilization. The infamous machine will leave France . . . Let it go seek hospitality elsewhere, from some barbaric people, not from Turkey, which is becoming civilized, not from the savages, who will not want it; but let it descend a few more steps on the ladder of civilization” (DEP1 207/285, citing Hugo’s Ecrits sur la peine de mort).”10 But those depictions of less civilized peoples over whom France could claim superiority were mobilized in the military campaigns associated with colonialism, and so, indirectly, with a number of forms of death penalty.11 For his part, Foucault had argued that powers of death, and death penalties, were the counterpart of biopolitical tactics (HS 137/180). Derrida would query the suggestion that for a power concerned with administering and optimizing life, capital punishment might seem “a limit, a scandal and a contradiction” (HS 138/181) provoking its decline, or a decline of its most symbolic and spectacular versions (BS 332/440–441).12 But in fact, in the passage cited by Derrida, Foucault had repudiated this interpretation in advance. Death penalties, like war and bloodshed, are perfectly consistent with biopolitical strategies when they take shape as a means of safeguarding society or of ensuring its well-being, as “security”-oriented, “vital” executions (HS 137–138/180–182). One might integrate in this vein also the role of colonialist strategies (mentioned in the fifth and eleventh lectures of Society Must Be Defended) in the coalescing of biopolitical formations. Via a quite different analytic route, Foucault is also able to argue that the abolition of the death penalty might share the logic of its continuation (HS 138/181), or the modes of colonialism, bloodshed, massacre, war. In Foucault’s case these were linked by their common claims to health, humanity, or growth. This is not to say that the phenomenon of generalized anesthetization encompassing “humane” death penalties (on Derrida’s analysis) is the same as the phenomenon by which biopolitical logics interconnect with what Foucault describes as the broader, more diffused strategies of death proliferating in the name of collective well-being. To the contrary, rather than simply comparing Foucault and Derrida, such proximities allow us to ask how we might think productively with their different resources. For all the attention given over the years to their debate,

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the confrontation between matters of life and death in their work has not been widely pursued. t h e exce p ti o n o f wo m e n

I turn, then, to one of The Death Penalty, Volume 1’s most characteristic Derridean themes, perhaps the most foreign to Foucault. This is Derrida’s interrogation of the sexual difference he astutely identifies in the rhetorics and formations of abolitionism. According to a formulation proposed in the first session, “a woman will come to remind us of one of the sexual differences in this truth of the death penalty” (DEP1 4/27). Among the traditional anesthetizations of the death penalty, Derrida includes instances of the long-standing aversion to executing pregnant women, women guilty of infanticide (DEP1 183/257), mothers, and, by an extension we should not take for granted, women. He explores feminine genderings of the guillotine (DEP1 215/295), and of forms of tender empathy contiguous with opposition to its use (DEP1 62/99). This brings us back to Victor Hugo. Notwithstanding his famously unconditional opposition to capital punishment, it is arguable that the phenomenon Derrida calls anesthetization manifests in this case also. In an 1874 letter to newspapers protesting an imminent execution by military firing squad, Hugo deviates in his rhetoric from his near consistent decrial of capital punishment, declaring: “Shooting a man, that’s understandable. Man to man these things are done. It is in the order of things, not in the natural order but in the social order” (DEP1 184/257–258). The context is his claim that the execution of women is, by contrast, especially horrible. Hugo means to use its extreme abhorrence as a persuasive emblem that all capital punishment is abhorrent. Yet the sexual difference is also distracting— Hugo deviates into an inconsistent suggestion that executing men (here, in military contexts) might, comparatively speaking, be less outside the natural order of things. Derrida turns to a more tortured version of the phenomenon by discussing article 6 of the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, adopted in 1966.13 This declares all humans to have an inherent right to life. Claiming that nobody should be deprived of life “arbitrarily” seems to allow that nonarbitrary capital punishment is marginally more acceptable. The article, whose intent is abolitionist, ends with

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the disclaimer that its own content shall not be used to “delay or prevent the abolition of capital punishment.” This seems to recognize that its content could, indeed, be so used. Recognizing that many nations have not abolished the death penalty, the covenant proposes some further basic conditions for the executions it thereby does not fully repudiate. Sentences of death should be excluded for those under eighteen; moreover, they “shall not be carried out on pregnant women” (DEP1 135/194). When Hugo and then the covenant (one century later) demarcate the maternal principle, they establish the death penalty’s greater acceptability otherwise. Perhaps only to a small degree. If so, this would be an anesthetized death penalty, somehow more tolerable when avoiding the extremes deemed most inhumane (arbitrary process and application; the execution of minors, women, or pregnant women).

This prompts my first question: how is it that women come to be available to figure among the humane exceptions to the death penalty’s application? Foucault’s work does not promote such an interrogation, for he lacks Derrida’s interest in the formations of sexual difference manifesting in this sexing of the death penalty as it intertwines with concurrent principles of progress and humanitarianism. To be sure, Foucault’s work considered a number of overlaps between death and sex. But he was rarely alert to differentiations effected by sexual difference. The possibility that the execution of women might appear more abhorrent than that of men (like the possibility that the biopolitical could produce different principles of formation of the “life” of men and women) would have required Foucault’s more systematic delineation of different implications for men and women at many turns in his analyses. And, as has certainly not gone unnoticed,14 this was a possibility, and an analytic perspective, to which Foucault was largely indifferent. By contrast, Derrida’s preoccupation with sexual difference permeated much of his work. This being practically Derrida’s métier, he astutely identifies the question of sexual difference before the death penalty, embedded in remarks from Victor Hugo and elsewhere. This question, he remarks, is sufficiently abyssal as to hold one’s attention for years to come (DEP1 183/257). What could be considered as Foucault and Derrida’s point of brief proximity— their common interest in the participation of abolitionism in dispersed or general variants of the principles to which it is also opposed—thus

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reconsolidates, from a number of perspectives (including the attention, or otherwise, to sexual difference), as a strong divergence. bi op ow e r and th e avai lab i li ty o f wo m e n a s “l ife ”

To return to my question: what analytic conditions might promote a diagnosis of women’s availability to figure as the humane exception to the death penalty’s application? It might seem that these resources are available from Derrida’s work and not from that of Foucault. But I am proposing a different argument. In interrogating a sexing of the anesthetized death penalty, Derrida confronted a phenomenon for which he, too, lacked the resources. By contrast, and unpredictably, this phenomenon is well suited to a productive thinking of Foucault with Derrida. A possibility of analysis uniquely arises in the space between their work, in the productivity of their points of mutual attraction and repulsion. Just as Foucault lacked the resources to more fully address the question, so too did Derrida. Yet his very fascination with Victor Hugo’s arguments is calling to the missing resources, and this also becomes apparent in Politics of Friendship, where Derrida had earlier discussed Hugo’s expansionist and colonialist vision of Paris as the embryo of Europe, the world, and the future.15 Interconnected imagery manifests in Hugo’s opposition to the death penalty (DEP1 262/354–355). Hugo deems abolitionism a movement toward the future associated with the (spatial and temporal) progress of civilization and with a proliferating (and colonizing) French people. He characterizes the latter in terms of an organic process, a seed’s development, a fetus. Derrida points out that Hugo attributes this lifelike “progress” of civilization (in a teleological overlap of its humanitarianism, and its colonialist expansion) with a “right to life” (DEP1 188/262), as if progress has its own life, and its own life claims on those who would impede it. This is one kind of rhetorical support Hugo gave to abolitionism. Another, more obviously, is the right to life of humans, the principle invoked by Hugo of the inviolability of human life (DEP1 100–101/149–150). The gendering manifests most clearly in the third support, although in fact it infuses the whole. When Hugo describes the execution of a woman as particularly abhorrent, he argues that it starkly brings into view the barbarism, the retarded state, of the civilization tolerating both it and any death penalty. Serving to divide peoples into high and low (DEP1 121/176),

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the death penalty overlaps with the special status of women attributed with a biopolitical vitality. Women become figures not just of a people’s progressive moral conscience, but also of its procreation, its life: both “literal” and “figural.” One wants to say they are deemed “literally” reproductively vital to France, to its expansion, to colonialism, to the future of Europe. This would be a coincidence of the dissemination of reproductive life, the life of populations, national futures, and qualities of compassion, associated with the embryo of peoples. Where the principles of abolitionism overlap with those of death penalties, we thus also find the gendering of biopolitical principles of life. When civilization is seen as retarded by the death penalty, an emblem for this retardation can be found in the execution of women. Women are associated with a reproductive life that is concurrently “literal” and “analogical.” They represent collective well-being and growth, the very principle of life and expansion for the future, of France, Europe, colonialism. As an analogical principle, it is as if all women are potentially pregnant with France’s future. Literally and metaphorically, they embody its embryonic status, enfolding the principle of its growth into Europe, the world, the progress of civilization itself. It is as if women, in general, offer umbilical cords connecting France’s individual, collective, colonial, present, and future life, countering the corresponding threat of decline. All these senses of life, and their collective and expansionist futures, are already enfolded in the corporeal space of a woman made principle of life, in Hugo’s protest: “A frightening question is posed. A woman named . . .—What does the name matter?—A woman is condemned to death . . .” (DEP1 183–184/257–258).16 So to return to an interrogation of the resources available in Derrida’s analysis, I asked: what makes the woman available as the relevant principle of life in such polemics? Once we assume his insight that the phenomenon of “sexual difference before the death penalty” is peculiar and specific, what kind of analysis would further explain this? If there are aspects of this question for which Derrida, in turn, is ill adapted, my argument is that, surprisingly, and despite his near total occlusion of sexual difference, Foucault offered a perspective Derrida could not. Two blind spots surely stood in the way of Derrida discussing this possibility. It required, first, attention to Foucauldian biopower. It required, second, approaching the latter by means of an interrogation of sexual difference in Foucault’s work. Derrida omitted both in his responses to Foucault.

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There were Foucauldian resources he admired, and others to which he was more averse. Foucault’s analysis of genealogical biopolitics belongs to the latter (BS 332–333/438–441). Derrida’s concurrent (and inconclusive) interest in the sexual difference at work in death penalties suggests this may have been a missed opportunity. Moreover, Derrida had characteristically interrogated the problematic status of sexual difference in a great many philosophers, writers, and contexts. Yet he did not direct that particular kind of interrogation to Foucault. What might such an address have produced?

Between 1973 and 1978 Foucault intermittently considered the curious temporalities and compressed corporealities that biopoliticized populations and the “responsibilization” of reproduction (HS 105/138) and their aims, risks, securities, spaces, and logics became. He had little to say about women and mothers specifically, but not nothing. There were exactly the small fragments an attentive, critical reading could have amplified. Relevant material hovers in remarks in The History of Sexuality about procreation having become responsibilization of couples with regard to the social body as a whole (“responsabilisation des couples à l’égard du corps social tout entier” [HS 105/138]), the responsibilities women owed the health of their children (HS 146–147/193), the countering “endangering” variant of hysterical and nervous mothers (HS 104/137, 146–147/193), and the making of reproduction as overlapping threshold of conduct and social life, of individual duties and action toward collective futures and nations. This overlapping is seen in Foucault’s reference to mothers assuming a “biologico-moral responsibility” (HS 104/137) for staving off the corresponding specter of individual, collective, national, and futural deaths and decline.17 Theorizing individual bodies as enveloping at once an individual’s life and death and the flourishing (or otherwise) of peoples and populations, Foucault refers to the maternal body’s “organic communication [communication organique] with the social body [corps social] (whose regulated fecundity [fécondité réglée] it was supposed to ensure” (HS 104/137). In “‘To Do Justice,’” Derrida imagined the further readings Foucault might have undertaken of the blurring of the dual principles of life and death in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. He returned not only to History of Madness but to a number of other texts, including The History of Sexuality. He mentions the latter’s concluding “denunciation” (as Derrida

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puts it) of the “austere monarchy of sex” ( JF 117/145). But for Derrida to return to these pages was also to inhabit a discussion in which Foucault had evoked another formation of death in life: that “biologico-moral responsibility” with which women, as biopoliticized mothers, coalesced as enfolding the life or death of children, populations, social bodies, and their futures. It was one of the rare moments in which Foucault considered the sexual differentiation of the biopolitical dispositifs he analyzed. Later, in The Death Penalty, Volume 1, Derrida would recall Discipline and Punish, without returning to The History of Sexuality. But wasn’t it the latter work that could account best for the status of some of the women enfolded in The Death Penalty, Volume 1’s concerns? These were the women Hugo invokes as concurrently individual and collective principles of life, and “the question of the mother, the woman, and sexual difference in the face of the death penalty” (DEP1 183/257). Why was executing a woman especially egregious? Because, as the principle of life of a biopoliticized maternity, she also constituted the alternative possibility of death of those same futures. Spatially and temporally, literally and analogically, the multiplicity of the lives she enfolded was matched by the multiplicity of possible deaths or forestallings of life. Remember that the interest in women’s maternity as principle of national growth has often been matched by the specter of women’s childlessness, abortions, induced stillbirths, mortal wet-nursing, poor reproduction, or poor child upbringing all associated with the possibility of national decline. From the point that women constitutes a life principle permitting the flourishing or “safeguarding [salut]” of society (HS 147/193), she constitutes the concurrent possibility of a jeopardized society if her conduct or role seems to thwart these putative conduits of life. In Hugo’s case, in fact, women’s association with life and future provided him with a formula for women’s rights. For, in his words, “who says ‘woman,’ says ‘child’—that is, the future.”18 To execute a woman was similarly to threaten the principle (and life principle) of that future. This could form the basis for an argument that women should be exempt from death penalties. Yet, in just such terms, women’s maternity as principle of national growth has been matched by the sometimes violent problematization of women’s childlessness, career making, feminism, their status as “voyoute,”19 by polemics against the specter of covert sabotage of their reproductive possibilities. Women’s reproductive conduct has sometimes

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been considered to threaten the very principle in whose name Hugo would have defended their lives. di s s emi n ate d analo gy and d i s p er se d b io po l it ic s

In mentioning that women are associated with a reproductive life that is concurrently “literal” and “analogical,” I referred to the phenomenon Derrida had partly explored in Politics of Friendship in his discussion of Hugo’s account of the “profound ovaries of a fertilized progress”20 of France as a fraternal continent. Derrida argues that fraternity cannot be decidably “literal” nor mere analogy. It may be figurative, but the association with fraternity also amounted to a literal political exclusion of women. There is a parallel sense in which maternity also takes on its own concurrently pseudoliteral and pseudofigurative status. After the outbreak of the French revolution, a plethora of arguments emerged for the exclusion of women from political rights based on their invaluable contribution to the nation as mothers. Dispersed as matter and image, ideal and real, present and future, constraint given the language of freedom, these are maternities which are not “one,” in a fraternity which is not “one,” because, when it comes to fraternity, maternity, and analogy most generally, we’ve always been dealing with analogies which are not one. For Derrida the problem of analogy, of pseudoliterality and pseudofigure, and the deconstructibility of the opposition literal/figure remind us that life, biology, reproduction, and genealogy are always the matter of difference and différance. There are no natural mothers, or brothers; rather “a genealogical tie will never be simply real; its supposed reality never gives itself in any intuition, it is always posed, constructed, induced, it always implies a symbolic effect of discourse.”21 Could it be helpful to think this problem with Foucault? For Foucault, reproductive space enfolded a number of multiplicities of bodies, masses, and micropowers (families, institutions, and norms, with gridded, comparative, inclusive, tracked aggregates of bodies and bodies that have become organic masses, the governed, predictive, and securitized entities named populations) in the communication of body and social body. Derrida noted the essentially dispersed character of Foucauldian power ( JF 116/144). This dispersion can be seen in the intersections and dehiscences of discipline, the biopolitical, security, the pastoral, and persisting forms of sovereignty. All stimulate bodies with differently multiple and elastic characters, in both

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spatial and temporal senses. They enfold individual and population promises and threats—of degeneracy, of fears and defenses against multiple forms of death in life. So it has been possible for reproduction—from conduct to birthrate—also to be metaphorically and literally associated with colonial expansion. Its forms and conduits have offered both promise and harm to the future hopes of nations. Considered by Derrida, these are claims profiting from a concurrent, and very elaborate literal, pseudoliteral, and analogical status that has become undecidable. Pursued by Foucault, forms of life emerge as objects of and relay points of power. Both the modes and the techniques of power are multiple and polyvalent, and are often in the process of decline or transformation as much as that of emergence. So Hugo is able to conclude that the true birth of expansionist-colonialist futures is ensured by women’s reproductivity in all senses. The literal cancels itself as already figurative, and the analogical cancels itself as not “merely” analogical. Matter, flesh, and figure have already taken shape, in a disseminating relation of the “meaning” and “matter” of life—what Foucault would have identified as the contingent formations of life. Life is never stable or self-present, but the difference between figure and literal become indistinguishable.22 The reproductive is, of course, not only a metaphor. Its meaning intertwines with the way in which it takes shape materially: how it is conducted, what forms of birth and upbringing take place, under what norms, laws, and conditions. As part of what Hugo considered to be a true birth, women’s future also came to overlap with progress in the sense of a progressive “birth of the future,” which similarly collapses the literal and the metaphorical. This collapse meant that women were entitled to political rights (to be like brothers) precisely because they were not like brothers: because they had the capacity (the “burden”) for the collective future Hugo understood them to share, in the form of bearing and raising children. Women’s role was therefore unique. They symbolized the future, and reproductively they ensured the future. Of course, it was considered important to Hugo’s future, and to the radiating nation (in other words, “true” birth was, of course, also a figure), that women bore children. But “true” births in this sense were, for all that, no less figurative. It cannot be said that reproduction is women’s “literal” contribution, nor can we refer to its “material” results, as if these categories could be easily distinguished from their analogical or symbolic role. For the children women bear have already taken shape as concurrent

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flesh and figurative, nationalist, futurist meaning, as has women’s maternity. The conditions for this are also articulated by Foucault in his account of biopower. To this problem of “true birth” (the birth of collective futures), whose understanding included formations of reproduction of the type described here, Derrida and Foucault offer different resources, certainly. These can be seen as mutually transformative resources. I’ve asked what makes the woman available for this concurrently “analogical” and “real” role. My argument is that it is as they are biopoliticized that women become analogized figures, and that the reverse also holds. In other words, they are available for the relevant analogical role because they have been biopoliticized, and they are available for the relevant biopolitical role only because they have already been analogized. The biological space of bearing and raising children is also a reworking of the time and spaces of their bodies and of their reproductive life, so that, in reproducing, they can be seen as bearing the political space of the future. Women come to be the children of the future when they take shape as the mothers of the future—enfolding the possible spaces of the future. My suggestion is that this problem arises surprisingly clearly not in the work of either Foucault or Derrida, but in the confrontation of their resources. This comes as a felicitous surprise, given that sexual difference surely constituted the limit point of Foucault’s capacities, just as the biopolitical seems to have occupied the same status for Derrida. fou ca u ld i an and d e rri d e an re s e rv e s

In “‘To Do Justice,’” Derrida offered a resonant image. He imagined questions he would have liked to ask Foucault, and tried to imagine Foucault’s response ( JF 118/146). He proposed that we might return to Foucault’s work “by means of a question that it carries within itself, that it keeps in reserve in its unlimited potential . . . in suspense, holding its breath” ( JF 115/144). Affirming this means of thinking of Foucault’s reserves, I’d add to it by thinking not just of Foucauldian reserves, nor just of those of Derrida, but of something more specific: those emerging productively from the interstices between them. These reserves, and their respective promise, should change somewhat in the imagined encounter between them. Foucault and Derrida should look different, modulated on certain points, once

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the question of how they might have called each other is thought through in various ways. And in this peculiar category, one could bring into proximity those occasions when Foucault converted the historical duties of the mother as sustainer of life to a population-inflected responsibilization of “couples” and “parents” while, at the other end of a line, Derrida considers “the woman, the mother, sexual difference,” in the capacity of being and giving the “true” birth of the nation, and as standing before death penalties. Later Derrida could manage little better than sharp remarks about those engaging the biopolitical (BS 317/421, 323/430, 326/433, 332/441), not developing its relevance for his own point of interest.23 This gives us an apt place from which to speculate about a possible intersection of questions in suspension for both. The umbilical cord mentioned by Derrida (linking an execution to a sovereign who can deliver life and death) and that other umbilical cord (which allegorically allowed a woman to become the emblem of the death penalty’s abhorrence, its impediment to the progress of life, and its expansionist, biopolitical future) reconstitute as two cords holding together the reserves of Derrida and Foucault. Also this allows us to expand the range of possible methodologies arising from the conjunction of Foucault and Derrida. Beyond the terms on which they engaged each other and indirectly continued to respond to each other, there are, of course, certain points of communication, as when we see them as differently negotiating the demands and possibilities of genealogy, or phenomenology, or humanism, or the ends of man. One can reconstruct their numerous points of divergence—on archives, thresholds, their different formulations of the possibility and impossibility of history. Or one might undertake a project concurrently informed by Foucauldian and Derridean analytics. There are a number of ways this project could be pursued. It need not be deconstructive—despite the availability of deconstructive readings of Foucault. Nor is it obligatory to return Derrida to a more Foucauldian understanding of an archive, an apparatus, or to an archaeological understanding of the very emergence of deconstruction—though that project is certainly available. One could add it to the characterizations of styles and formations of knowledge in The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Order of Things. One might aim to mobilize principles from the work of both, but Derrida concludes “‘To Do Justice’” with a reminder of reasons to also resist the

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derivation of principles from Foucault’s work—and that principle would hold for his own ( JF 117–118/145–146). I have suggested a further possibility: to be guided concurrently by their analyses while allowing these also to be informed—and changed—by what was elided in each. Just one suggestion for what emerges from this more curious, and indirect, form of mutual impact is the analogical-literal-material configurations of the biopolitics of maternity and the death penalties of sexual difference. n ot e s

Warm thanks to Samir Haddad, Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky, Martin Hägglund, Colin Koopman, Kelly Oliver, Robert Trumbull, and colleagues at the Duke University Feminist Theory Workshop (2014), the Ruhr-Universität Bochum Colloquium for Media Studies (2013), and the 2014 meeting of the Derrida Today Conference at Fordham University for very helpful suggestions and comments on this paper. The Antonio Campillo epigraph is from “Foucault and Derrida: The History of a Debate,” trans. Constantin Boundas, Angelaki 3. no. 2 (2000): 113–135, 124. 1. Prenowitz cites Derrida’s comments on the “genius” of the telephone in this respect. See Eric Prenowitz, “Crossing Lines: Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous on the Phone,” Discourse 30, nos. 1–2 (2008): 123–156, 147, and see Derrida, H. C. for Life, That Is to Say . . ., trans. Laurent Milesi and Stefan Herbrechter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). 2. From his H. C. for Life, That Is To Say . . ., “one gets the feeling,” Prenowitz remarks, “Derrida spent a lifetime thinking and speaking on Hélène Cixous’s telephone.” Prenowitz, “Crossing Lines,” 147. 3. Warner Brothers, 1999. 4. Wendy Brown, “Sovereign Hesitations,” in Derrida and the Time of the Political, ed. Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 114–134, 114. 5. But, as Brown and Derrida highlight, to emphasize the phantasmatic or deconstructible aspects of sovereignty’s aspirations is not to describe them as any less deadly. 6. The interrogation is developed more subtly, and at length, in “‘To Do Justice.’” 7. “La plus vieille peine du monde est en train de mourir en France. Il faut se réjouir; il n’est pas nécessaire, pour autant, d’être dans l’admiration.” Foucault, “Contre les peines de substitution,” Libération 108 (1981): 5, reprinted in Dits et écrits, 1980–1988 (volume 4 of four volumes), ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 1994): 205–206, 206. See also Foucault, “Le dossier ‘peine de mort’: Ils ont écrit contre,” Les nouvelles littéraires 59, no. 2783 (1981): 15, reprinted in Foucault, Dits et écrits, 1980–1988, 168. These comments are cited in the editorial notes to the first lecture in Foucault, The Punitive Society: Lectures at the Collège de France 1972–1973, trans. Graham Burchell, ed. Bernard E. Harcourt (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 20, where it is also noted

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that Foucault had first emphasized this continuity in comments published on capital punishment in 1972. Foucault uses the term generalization in the chapter “Generalized Punishment” in Discipline and Punish, and in On the Punitive Society, in linking the hospital, psychiatry, psychopathology, criminology, and sociology, new variants on surveillance and their related form of knowledge, as a generalized version of the prison’s form. He discusses the strategy to transform the incarcerated, the related stimulation of “interior” character, and the emergence of character as an explanatory categories, along with biography and the “case” as new explanatory reference points. See Foucault, The Punitive Society: Lectures at the Collège de France 1972–1973, trans. Graham Burchell, ed. Bernard E. Harcourt (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). See also Campillo, “Foucault and Derrida,” for discussion of Foucault as indirectly referring to Derrida and “generalization” in “What Is an Author?” There, Foucault had referred to the contemporary status of writing: “as currently employed, [it tries] with great effort, to imagine the general conditions of each text, the condition of both the space with which it is dispersed and the time in which it unfolds,” 118, citation from Foucault, “What Is An Author?,” in Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 1997), 208. See also Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), 93. In fact, Hugo ironizes, “let it go to Spain or Russia.” Victor Hugo, Ecrits sur la peine de mort (Arles: Actes Sud, 1979), 37, cited in DEP1 207/285. The passage in the Ecrits sur la peine de mort is reproduced from Hugo’s preface to his 1829 novel Last Day of a Condemned Man. Though not cited by Derrida’s translator, an English edition of Last Day of a Condemned Man is available, translated by Arabella Ward (Mineola: Dover, 2009); for Hugo’s comments, see xxxiii. Victor Hugo’s opposition to war, and his abolitionism, are expressed in terms that also secure a passionate colonialist rhetoric. While agreeing that there has been an acceleration of abolitionism since World War II, Derrida stresses the expansion of capital punishment in the United States (DEP1 41/73). Drafted between 1947 and 1954—see the editors’ clarificatory note concerning this Covenant and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) (DEP1 134/193). In “Sexual Inversions,” in Foucault and the Critique of Institutions, ed. John Caputo and Mark Yount (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), Judith Butler invokes the sexual difference of Irigaray’s This Sex Which Is Not One to clarify one of the perspectives absent from Foucault’s work, asking of Foucault, “Is it true that ‘sex’ as a historical category can be understood apart from the sexes or a notion of sexual difference?” (83–84). Given the intermittent role of sexual difference in the Death Penalty seminar, one could imagine a further point of intersection with Luce Irigaray’s This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), to which Derrida had earlier referred in On Touching—JeanLuc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 348.

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15. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), 264–265. 16. Citing Hugo’s letter to newspapers, July 28, 1872, Ecrits sur la peine de mort, 261. 17. Also see Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2004), 248, for Foucault’s discussion of the mother invited by Rozier to shadow her children’s bodies like a marsupial to deter the mortal dangers of masturbation, and Foucault’s discussion of the medicalization of the family in “The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 166–182, 179. Foucault points out that when the family, children, and child-rearing become principles of health, descent is no longer (or not only) organized around the conjugal axis, but around the parent-child axis, now oriented toward survival and the optimization of the child’s health. Breastfeeding (which had become a matter of maternal responsibility in the face of wet-nursing as an alternative—widely deemed unhealthy or dangerous) is considered not only to ensure the individual life of the child but also to be a maternal responsibility toward the population’s collective life and future. But in these commentaries, Foucault tends to occlude the specificity of the mother in favor of a discussion of parental responsibility. Similarly, “Politics of Health” favors a discussion of the family and of “parents” despite Foucault’s mention of some treatises that more specifically concern mothers as threshold of health and survival of a child’s future, adult life, and the collective life of the population and its future. 18. This was Hugo’s affirmative response to an American group of feminists, the Society for the Improvement of the Condition of Women, who had written to ask him for an expression of support, New York Times, April 18, 1875. 19. Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Michael Naas and Pascale-Anne Brault (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 67. 20. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 265, citing Victor Hugo (“l’ovaire profond du progrès fécondé,” 5), in Victor Hugo, “Introduction,” in Paris guide par les principaux écrivains et artistes de la France, vol. 1 (Paris: Libraire Internationale, 1867). 21. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 92–93. 22. On the status of fraternity as analogical, see Penelope Deutscher, “Fraternal Politics and Maternal Auto-Immunity: Derrida, Feminism, and Ethnocentrism,” in A Companion to Derrida, ed. Zeynep Direk and Len Lawlor (West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 362–377. 23. This despite his comment in The Beast and the Sovereign about the respective discussions of biopower by Foucault and Agamben, “If I emphasize them so much, it’s because these discourses are highly interesting, first of all; they go to the heart of what matters to us in this seminar: sovereign power, life and death, animality, etc.” (BS 331/440).

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V

Foucault’s and Derrida’s Last Seminars

11

From Reprisal to Reprise 

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Quand on veut répondre à quelqu’un, si on répond bien, juste à la question posée, ça n’a aucun intérêt. j ac q u e s d e r r i da

case for all who think with, and through, both Derrida and Foucault, rereading the initial exchange in their quarrel provokes a mixture of emotions for me. Pleasure at the familiarity as they show off what have since become signature moves, hilarity and occasional bafflement at the degree to which they manage to be inaudible to one another, admiration for their brilliance tinged with a certain regret when caustic wit seems to veer into exaggerated aggression, and a lingering sense that this exchange does more to explain why it should be difficult to follow both of them than it does to clarify how we might do so. The quarrel is good spectator sport, a peculiar fencing match in which each has drawn his sharpest weapons (recognizing a serious opponent) but then engages a hologram, a projection of the other. Since we can see both sides and see that each fails to see the other, it turns into classical comedy driven by misunderstandings to which the audience is made privy in ways that each character is not. And so the exchange is comical despite the fact that these texts are never quite readable as tongue in cheek even as both of those involved must have been aware of a certain irony: two brilliant normaliens engaging in the emblematic exercise of the institution that brought them together, the quintessentially French exercise of producing a “leçon” (on Descartes’s Meditations no

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less!), each defending his own claim to being not “just a philosopher” in the school tradition. The pain is also palpable, both in Foucault’s response and in Derrida’s subsequent silence. Thus Derrida’s initial “communication” did not mark the beginning of the sort of exchange that is generally considered a “productive debate” between Foucault and his ex-student. It led instead to injured silences, each feeling that his work was, in an important sense, ignored by, or inaudible to, the other. They had reason to expect loyal opposition from one another and instead had to endure what they could only suffer as violent refusal. Discussion seemed impossible. What are we to make of that, especially in relation to their respective projects? Their projects are related: the enduring impact of these two thinkers, well beyond the Ecole Normale or problems of Latin translations of Descartes, has much to do with their work having become canonical references for a wide range of scholarship and practices that take the injury of being inaudible as a paradigmatic form of violence that demands intellectual, practical, ethical, and political attention. Looking back at this now, there is some irony in the scene in which Derrida and Foucault reduce one another to silence as they each begin producing the work that has taught us precisely that being silenced can be a violence of existential proportions, even when it does not happen through physical execution. Both the book that provoked the discussion and the essay that responded to it enjoin us to be attentive to banished voices. They seek out and acknowledge every voice in the texts, or contexts, that they examine and they consider the ways in which the text, or context, serves a particular distribution of legitimate or audible speech. Their respective answers to the traditional question of philosophical analysis “what are the presuppositions of this argument/text?” each included, in what was not yet a tradition, an analysis of the presuppositions about what counts as (relevant) speech; they each made “who can speak?” one of the pertinent questions in the analysis of epistemological frameworks. Although it would be several years until Foucault’s most famous analysis of a “silence” which speaks volumes, indeed speaks incessantly, inventively, and with anxious intensity,1 History of Madness was already working against any simple definition of silence as the absence of speech. Derrida too, for instance in his introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, was already working against the powers of simple dichotomies such as speech/silence.2 In brief, both thinkers were already well attuned to the complexities of

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silence, both had attended to problems of marginalization, and both had connected those questions. Today it is an obvious move for those striving for political clout to argue that they are being silenced or ignored by those in power or the public debate. It has become an obvious strategy to claim political representation, a turn in court, or a place at the negotiating table, by underscoring that to be denied voice is an injury, indeed a violence that should be collectively condemned. A certain equivalence between “democracy” and “being against the silencing” has become enough of a cliché for them to be invoked almost interchangeably. People of very different political persuasions appeal, more or less explicitly, to the supposed equivalence of the two terms. This allows for the justification, in the name of democracy, of a whole range of initiatives from very local collections of testimony about everyday life, through the constitution of international tribunals, to military invasions by superpowers. Furthermore, we regularly encounter the idea that “silencing” comes in many guises: killing or banishing, but also refusing the vocabulary in which an event is described, the frame of reference from which a story makes sense, or the terms in which a demand is formulated. The idea that even the epistemological frameworks of democratic institutions must be subject to critical scrutiny for the ways in which they effect exclusions from the very debate they purport to institute and defend is broadly available, including to many who would have no use for the language in which I have just described it. Clearly there are many sources of the epistemic and political shifts that have contributed to this idea becoming “obvious.” But among those whose work made analyses from this perspective possible and productive, urgent and prevalent, surely Derrida’s and Foucault’s names must figure prominently. Half a century ago they drew attention both to complex mechanisms of banishment and to the injuries that marginalization produces. Moreover, Derrida and Foucault also provided now canonical references for (reading) methods adapted to the “mad hope” of training one’s ear to the inaudible and giving voice to the voiceless. Both authors operated by reworking traditional epistemological investigations in a post-Nietzschean vein, extending their modalities of reading to discern the presuppositions of philosophical treatises, not just in other writings, but also in so many other forms of documents, gestures, or institutions. Derrida and Foucault showed the philosophical question about the presuppositions of an argument or a

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proposition to be related to the investigation of the effective marginalization of types of experience or forms of subjectivity. They read, and listened for, what sustains a certain “subject,” a subject assured of maintaining its privilege as long as that privilege is at least partially imperceptible. They listened to the silences and blanks carefully. If this is why they are such important thinkers, then of course there is particular pathos in their apparent, sometimes even apparently willful, recalcitrance to one another’s words. It raises the question of what it means to consider that today one can think with both of them. At the very least, the violence of their exchanges seems hardly auspicious for the prospects of productive exchange, let alone of ongoing collaboration. Unless. Unless, perhaps, their failure to have a proper debate (or to reach an agreement as to what their disagreement was) portends of a mode of collaboration, or possible co-elaboration, quite distinct from that of a “band of brothers”;3 perhaps it is precisely for that reason that the double reference to Foucault and Derrida can continue to be so helpful for ongoing struggles against domination and injustice.

As one way into the general question as to how we can think with both of them, I turn to what I take to be an interesting instance of Derrida sounding like Foucault. At the risk of advancing a reading that might have raised Derrida’s hackles as much as he raised Foucault’s, I want to draw attention to two places in Derrida’s later work where I hear something like Derrida “playing Foucault” or perhaps being played by Foucault, in any case some thinking that is both very “Derrida” and, I submit, very “Foucault.” I am referring to two places where I see a delayed reaction to, or reactivation of, the debate. The reactivation is not a belated answer to Foucault’s answer. Or if it is, it is one that might not have been audible as such to either of them. Nevertheless, the parallels are striking enough to suggest adding both Derrida’s posthumous book The Animal That Therefore I Am and the death penalty seminars to the archive of the “debate.”4 These are not places where Derrida is explicitly returning to the discussion. Indeed, these works come well after Derrida claimed that the debate with Foucault was already archived ( JF 71/94). Yet, as both Derrida and Foucault have helped us understand, reading always requires a (new) choice of archive. Reading this debate today might require sources not available to the participants, either at the time or later. By making a case for considering Derrida’s late seminars

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as part of his response to Foucault, I hope to contribute to constituting the appropriate archive fifty years on. To give a thumbnail sketch of the sense in which one can perceive, in the seminars, a delayed response to the engagement with Foucault decades earlier, let me offer a conclusion one might draw from them. It is a conclusion in the form of a story. As I read them, The Animal That Therefore I Am and the death penalty seminar, beyond all the other things they each do, both tell a story that runs something like this: “Someone started an insidious violence, one it is very difficult not to become complicitous with—and the villain is Descartes.” That is, of course, the silhouette of the story Derrida discerned in History of Madness. Indeed, Foucault’s accusations to the contrary notwithstanding, Derrida does not contest Foucault’s partial reading of the Meditations simply to mark points in an erudition joust. He does so to argue that what he considers a tendentious reading sustains a particular “plot” in Foucault’s book. Derrida highlights that Foucault’s book both follows a story line and is constructed to denounce the insidious violence perpetuated by contemporary discourses and institutions; both of those plots turn around the idea that contemporary violence begins with the radical banishment of madness that begins with Descartes. That such an account of Foucault’s book is a bit of a caricature Derrida would not have denied. His point was that it is a possible caricature, that Foucault himself puts it forward, and that one of the strengths of Foucault’s analysis is to have brought out that simple story. I would contend that a parallel account can be given of the work in two of Derrida’s posthumous publications: one of the strengths of Derrida’s analyses of the “animal question” and the death penalty is to have brought out a very similar narrative. Considered from this perspective, the almost eerie sense of Derrida repeating Foucault’s project is accentuated by the fact that the impetus, and the tactics, of all of these projects might also be described in similar terms. They all discern the violent exclusions embedded in, and perpetuated by, contemporary institutions. Both Foucault and Derrida are intent on challenging exclusions that they find abhorrent. They both try to undermine the very possibility of these forms of violence by showing the necessity of interrupting what parades as debate but, from their perspective, is in fact a monologue in a language that makes it impossible for other voices to be heard.5 And they both develop particular modalities of writing to take on the theoretical and ethical difficulties of championing the excluded without reenacting domination;

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helping banished voices to resonate without speaking for them requires working with, as well as against, language. Let me turn then to these two works of Derrida’s in which Descartes is not only a crucial reference but also, I suggest, a pivot.6 Indeed, although Derrida does not highlight a dramatic scene in which Descartes effects the Urbanishment in a few lines, the economy of his seminar nonetheless does implicitly mark “Descartes” as a pivot between what I would call “way back when” and “the beginning of now.” In saying that, I am making a double claim about a possible reading of these two bodies of work. First, I am claiming that in them Derrida identifies specific modalities of violence that characterize our “today” and marks their beginning, insisting on an origin in a historically-theoretically identifiable moment. Second, I am claiming that that moment turns out, in both cases, to bear the name “Descartes.” In suggesting that The Animal That Therefore I Am and the death penalty seminars tell the same story, I am obviously taking a somewhat peculiar, and reductive, point of view. In neither case does Derrida work through the myriad of sources he uses in anything like a chronological fashion. Nor do either of these books present themselves as making a single overarching argument. Rather the analysis progresses in a nonlinear order; transitions are sometimes guided by thematic connections, sometimes by a word or a term, sometimes explained, sometimes not. What will seem haphazard to any reader unaccustomed to Derrida’s method does, after a while, cohere, but it also is haphazard in the best of senses: taking the risk of starting where one can, with what is at hand, without determining a plan ahead of time, is facing the dangers of one’s own contingency.7 Derrida’s writing always involves that gesture and would defend its theoretical consistency. The works to which I am referring are no different, and it might thus seem slightly perverse to “reduce” Derrida’s long, wide-ranging, and structurally complex analyses to a story that can be told in a sentence or two. Nevertheless, without minimizing the specifically Derridean modality of these works, I would insist that attending to the simple narrative that one can extract from them also reveals something about their projects: when Derrida turns his attention to the killing of animals and people, he is effectively elaborating his answers to the question Foucault claimed had become the philosophical question since Kant, namely, “What is distinctive about the present?”8 The fact that Derrida’s analyses can be construed as providing answers to that rather Foucauldian question points to a first observation:

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in these two projects Derrida ends up doing what Foucault usually does, namely emphasizing (the grounds of ) discontinuity. Often Derrida’s suspicion of claims about “origins” pushes him to look for ways in which what might at first look like a novelty is, from another perspective, a new version of an old struggle. In fact, his contention in the “Cogito” essay that the Cartesian exclusion of madness was only one among many iterations of a gesture repeated throughout the history of philosophy is precisely a move of this sort. It unleashed Foucault’s fury in part precisely insofar as Derrida could be taken, not only to be refusing to see in Descartes the moment when there is a radical paradigm shift, but, more importantly, to be contesting the very idea of such a singular pivotal moment. And indeed, from the beginning, so to speak, it is pretty much par for the course that as soon as anyone makes a claim about an origin, Derrida will find a way to detect an origin before that origin. It is Foucault we recognize by his knack for organizing vast amounts of material in such a way as to present a narrative structured by ruptures, highlighting where inventions occur. Yet when it comes to the two issues that these late seminars engage (the exploitation of animals and the death penalty), Derrida is uncharacteristically insistent on a very specific time frame as that of prime relevance for his purposes. Without ignoring a longer history, Derrida insists in both of these works on a beginning, on a crucial moment of origin of his object of concern. In The Animal That Therefore I Am, a specific historical time is explicitly cited as the locus of Derrida’s concern: although he begins with Genesis as he considers the man-animal relation and its hierarchical nature, the domination Derrida is really compelled to investigate is the one that, he says, has been operating “for roughly two centuries.”9 On his own account, his investigation is an attempt to understand the sources of the “unheard-of violence [violence inouïe]” of contemporary practices in the exploitation of animals. As he unravels the way in which philosophical discourses aid and abet, by justifying and denying, the almost infinite violence our societies perpetrate, it becomes clear that, given the codependence of practices and discourses he posits, the “roughly two centuries” is a time frame in two ways. It refers to a period in which the multiplication and intensification of practices of exploitation produces something that must count as different from “people have always eaten animals” and, correlatively, to the period in which the discourse(s) sustaining these practices have sedimented. In a word, although Derrida, as always, can bring out the ways in which apparently

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different discourses operate with recurring formal structures, and although he is here, as always, good at showing how discourses that seem to break with prior models in fact recycle them, he also makes it clear that it is a historically identifiable mode of thinking about the specificity of the human (and about the rights that are its correlate) that makes the particular modality of contemporary violence both possible and, in some sense, inevitable. Derrida does not claim that what sustains the violence he seeks to counter is invented by a single author, or in a particular text, let alone at a single instant (indeed thinking in terms of “instants” is precisely the Cartesian model he is interrogating). I would contend that he does nevertheless suggest that the conditions of possibility for that violence come together in a “moment,”10 one that began a couple of centuries ago and is also called today. In other words, although many of Derrida’s analyses indicate that violence against animals has always already begun at least since Genesis, and although his readings show “the same kind of thing” going on in texts from very different times, places, and genres, the overall economy of The Animal That Therefore I Am does nevertheless distinguish a (historical) specificity of our time, a historically specific form of violence. Industrial-scale exploitation is a particular iteration of the domination man has exercised over animals. More precisely, what has led to the contemporary situation is a series of iterations, a series of different versions of thought and practices structured by the incomparable worth of man that Kant named dignity.11 Thus, the particular problem Derrida is tackling is, in an important sense, located in historical terms as beginning a couple of centuries ago. At least it is as precisely locatable there as it can be by any analysis that insists on a critical appraisal of historical chronology that questions the status and privilege of dates. The two-year seminar on the death penalty likewise leaves us thinking that the problem as we know it began toward the end of the eighteenth century. If anything it is even more surprising to find such a specific time frame here: we all know that the death penalty qualifies as a practice that goes all the way back to the beginning of western metaphysics. But although Derrida does acknowledge that, and does dutifully summon Socrates early on in the seminar, it comes to seem that he acknowledges the long back story of capital punishment only the better to distinguish the death penalty he is interested in. Derrida’s project openly avows abolitionist sympathies and is driven by the need to find a language through which to be a philosopher opposed to the death penalty today. That requires a specific focus.

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Derrida will insist that to take on the death penalty, as it exists today, requires paying close attention to the details of the historically specific configuration of institutions, theories, and mechanisms that produce the apparent divergence between a United States committed to it and a Europe that understands itself as opposed to it. I would argue that, over the course of the lectures, “death penalty” came to stand not for all forms of capital punishment, nor for all executions, but in a uniquely privileged way for “the death penalty since the guillotine,” the effect of the guillotine, or, better, the correlate of the guillotine. What Derrida studies, because it is what he must understand in order to find a way to break its hold, is mechanized capital punishment that promises instantaneous death to guarantee the dignity of all individuals in a progressive, egalitarian, humanitarian spirit. In a most interesting way, the machine here is neither a metaphor nor a metonymy for the death penalty. The guillotine is what we are talking about, and it is both physical object and concept, practice and “personnage,” machine and mission. In the language Derrida develops, “guillotine” takes on a specific meaning that does, and does not, correspond to what the term means before the work of the seminar. By the end, it makes sense to consider that “guillotine,” in Derrida’s idiom, denotes the electric chair or lethal injections but not those earlier Italian scaffolds with sliding blades designed to cut off heads. “The guillotine is invented by Guillotin”—over the course of Derrida’s seminar this simple statement of historical fact comes to resonate as a weighty philosophical proposition. Similarly Derrida’s work, and the language he invents in his commentary of a whole range of discourses around the guillotine, makes the “fact” that the guillotine is inextricably part of the French Revolution, indeed perhaps what connects most evidently Revolution and Terror, into a diagnosis of today’s political traps. Although the first time Derrida cites the fact that the guillotine was promoted in the name of humanitarian ideals we may laugh at the irony, as we reach later parts of the seminar that has ceased to be funny. This is because it has become clear that it is no accident and that raises some uncomfortable questions. As Derrida tells the story of the guillotine, as he traces out a consensus on what is expected, or hoped, from the installation of the Guillotine at the center of (the) capital, a consensus that spans the political spectrum and is shared by abolitionists and antiabolitionists, we realize how very difficult it may be to dissociate humanitarian concerns, commitment to dignity, or even egalitarian aspirations from the guillotine. Over the course of the

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seminar it becomes clearer and clearer that, as Derrida understands it, we are still living in the age of the Guillotine. Indeed, mobilizing the peculiar empirical-transcendental status he creates for “death penalty,” Derrida can assert that there is no reason to think that it will end, even as the number of states abolishing the death penalty increases. Hence his apparently provocative claim that the death penalty will survive its abolition (DEP1 283/380). However, although Derrida does contend that, in that sense, the death penalty will go on indefinitely, it should be noted that this does not commit him to saying that the death penalty never began. While it is easy for readers familiar with Derrida’s work to slip into “always already” mode, it is particularly important not to presume that Derrida refuses to identify specific periods and make historical arguments—albeit “historical” in a Derridean sense. Granted, he does not claim to mark a “beginning” of the phenomena he is confronting in these works in the terms of historical time as we tend to think of it: he does not mark a discrete instant situated in a specific position along a time line as the origin of unheard-of violence toward animals or the death penalty. Nonetheless, the very project in each case both supposes, and must identify, an origin of sorts. Indeed, in the same way that the very project of History of Madness did, The Animal That Therefore I Am and the death penalty seminar seek to identify the moment when “today” begins and, or because, the fact of such a beginning makes sense of their hopes for an end—not an end to violence and exclusion generally but only to certain forms of them. Inventing a radically abolitionist language is only a possible, and necessary, project because, however much our language and concepts are saturated with the guillotine, the reality of a “before” pleads for the possibility of an “after.” Thus, Derrida’s projects in each case involve revealing the entrenched ideas that underwrite a certain violence and contesting them via an idiom that aims, if not to escape, then at least to thematize the historical specificity it shares, and refuses simply to share, with those ideas. Both this manner of proceeding and the explicit references that surface on occasion to a time frame of a few centuries allow me to make my first claim, namely that in these two posthumous publications Derrida is particularly intent on marking that “today” began at a certain moment. But I might seem to have forgotten my second claim. What happened to Descartes? Was that not a little more than two centuries ago? Since the case is easier to make for The Animal That Therefore I Am, whose very title proclaims the centrality of the

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Cartesian reference, I will here instead turn to the case to be made for Descartes being pivotal in Derrida’s analysis of the death penalty. If we are looking for a single philosopher on whom Derrida pegs the guillotine, Kant is the more obvious choice. He is a central figure from the start because, as Derrida emphasizes, he is the one who makes the death penalty the keystone of all (criminal) law in a system based on (promoting) the dignity of the individual. Kant is the most rigorous defender of the death penalty. Indeed, on Derrida’s reading, Kant is such a strong defender of the death penalty that his conceptual legacy provides the conditions for it to survive even a universal abolition: it is precisely their dependence on Kantian axioms and concepts that renders existing abolitionist discourses problematic for Derrida. The (Kantian) alliance between abolitionists and antiabolitionists Derrida detects turns into the ultimate target of the seminar.12 The monologue parading as a debate is what Derrida seeks to interrupt; it is the monologue of Kantian reason in the broad sense, including not only philosophical discourse since Kant but also institutions and practices that rely on its fundamental axioms and concepts. One can thus quite easily extract from Derrida’s work an argument that “Kant” is where the death penalty “begins.” And yet Derrida also provides the material to push the story a little further. “Kant” is only the end of the beginning; the beginning of the beginning lies a little further back in time. For when Derrida pushes toward the ultimate philosophical conditions of possibility of the guillotine, Descartes appears. As Derrida identifies the perspective that reveals that the guillotine is the first figure of today’s lethal injections because it is the first figure of “the end of cruelty,” Derrida explicitly, and self-consciously, calls Descartes to account. Adopting a judicial scene, which in itself returns us to one of the major bones of contention with Foucault, Derrida calls “Descartes and Cartesian cogito” to the stand in his courtroom (DEP1 225/307). The pages on Descartes may be few, but the terms of the indictment are clear: without a philosophical account of time as a series of discrete instants, without the framework of the radical separation of body and soul “which leaves the essence of the thinking substance  .  .  . inaccessible to any corporal accident” (DEP1 225/307), the guillotine as a machine to end cruelty, the guillotine as painkiller, would have been inconceivable.13 In this sense then, pulling the strings of Guillotin’s invention we find the Descartes who sliced the doubting head from the body, and one moment from the next.

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That last proposition might seem to elide all complexity and reduce Descartes to the propositions one might find ascribed to him in a high school textbook. But this is precisely why I see here more than a passing resemblance to the old debate. There Derrida pointed out that the overarching logic of Foucault’s History of Madness hinged on a rather simplified version of Descartes, one that has to stay some distance from the text in order to bring out the importance of the Cartesian cogito as the moment when radical exclusion began. Granted, then, “Descartes” is a simplified reference; it nonetheless carries considerable weight and responsibility. And if that is the case, does not the story that one can discern in Derrida’s text sound familiar? Does one not hear (Foucault’s version) of Derrida’s account of Foucault’s story emerging from and sustaining these Derridean writings? If one hears it as a return of the story Foucault heard Derrida mocking as simplistic, one might be tempted to consider that Derrida is caught in later years repeating a story whose inadequacy he had demonstrated decades earlier. But that ear would be caught in a spiral of fear or desire for mockery. If one listens instead with an ear attentive to the force of the projects, the transformation of this narrative is as striking as its assimilation. No longer loudly proclaimed as in Foucault’s exemplary demonstration, the structuring story is murmured in its Derridean iteration. However one describes the voice, whichever the filiation, there is in Derrida’s posthumous books a repetition of something like the story in Foucault’s book Derrida highlighted half a century ago. Like History of Madness, The Animal That Therefore I Am and the death penalty seminars each propose a philosophical analysis of a contemporary form of violence, examining its history in order to identify the transcendental-historical conditions of emergence. All three produce a version of the same narrative according to which the specific form of contemporary violence really began a few centuries ago, with Descartes (and/or, for Derrida, a Cartesian iteration, namely Kant). The suppression of the animal and the death penalty are forms of violence that, on Derrida’s reading, have both a long history and a shorter history, a broad sense and the narrower sense. In his analysis of the conditions of possibility of the narrower sense, Derrida shows Descartes to be the pivot in the epistemological shift that makes the technologies of contemporary violence possible. Insofar as he makes this argument, Derrida seems very close indeed to Foucault in these late works.14 The fact that, in all these works, the story is traced not only to philosophical writings

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but to machines and practices, indeed to the reciprocal relation between these, accentuates the peculiar feeling that Derrida’s investigations in these two projects can be understood in a decidedly Foucauldian perspective. It seems at the very least that, although Derrida might have shuddered at the thought, these late works of his are yet another “postface” to the debate.

Observing that in his late works Derrida reprises the story “Descartes as a pivot” that he identified in History of Madness is not to suggest that we take this as the sign of a late meeting of minds, sensibilities, or methods, let alone as a sign of reconciliation beyond the grave. It should not tempt us toward the conclusion that the debate is to be forgotten as a mere personal quarrel. Certainly, Derrida and Foucault’s exchanges were also intensely personal and, as it becomes an object for historians of ideas, the archive turns up more and more evidence of complicated and emotionally charged elements of their debate.15 Yet the force of their clash should not be reduced to a quarrel of personalities that we, as the historians we can be half a century later, would simply rise above or forget, pointing to resonances between their work as so many signs of compatibility. On the contrary, we should attend to the fact that their spectacular fight not only does not give way to a reconciliation, it cannot even be resolved into a proper debate in which they would share a scene and take symmetrically opposite positions. We can, however, note that this “not managing” to have a debate is also perhaps “managing not” to have one, managing together to contest the protocol of a staged exchange at every turn. Considered in that perspective, what I described in the beginning as the irony of their quarrel over Descartes should not be dismissed as accessory comedy: it may rather be what we should hold on to as we think through these two bodies of work. Rather than read the silences and silencing in their exchanges as ironic given their active objections to the violence of silencing, we should be mindful that silence is not always the lot of a victim; it can also be the sharpest of weapons.16 The silences, the blanks, the seemingly willful misconstruals, the ascerbic barbs, and all the other unseemly aspects of the dialogue between Derrida and Foucault are a reminder: the battles against exclusion in which they are engaged do not portend of any horizon of peaceful universal inclusiveness. Yet surely we should have learned better from both of them than to simply regret this. The resistance to one another manifest in their

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texts does sometimes veer to violence, but it is also the mark of an active resistance that marks a discussion in which they do respond to each other although, or perhaps because, they do not exactly, or simply, answer each other’s questions. Thus, to return to my initial question about the possibility of thinking with both of them, I would say that the peculiar parallel I have outlined does not make it seem any easier. If anything, it accentuates the sense that to try to read both Derrida and Foucault “together” is in its own way a mad project. Attempting to delineate, and occupy, a single space of language that can hold both these works seems possible only at the cost of considerable suppression; success in reconstructing a debate may be a failure to listen to the exchange. However, the difficulty of hearing them both at the same time, can, in this case, also be precisely why we need them both in order to carry on the projects they each described in their own idiom. In this perspective, the “madness” of the project of thinking through Derrida and Foucault is not an objection.17 Rather it is to be noted and considered, allowed to function as a reminder of the difficulties and dangers of construing shared spaces of speech. In this time of consensus as to the desirability of giving voice to those who have been silenced, we need to keep in mind the difficulty: there is a danger that its success would be its failure and so perhaps these “failures” are also a mode of success, not in establishing a comfortable dialogue, but in speaking to one another while remaining faithful to different idioms. Today the injunction to attend to the ways in which political institutions and practices exclude certain voices has become commonplace, but the volume of lip service is as much a threat to the audibility of that project as the rarity of its articulation might once have been. Returning to Derrida and Foucault we might then be encouraged to think that, although consolidating “the debate” as an object of study is both inevitable with the passing of a time and useful, the limits and dangers of that exercise point toward the necessity of another reading exercise. To understand Derrida-Foucault’s combined legacy, including their legacy of not combining easily, we should also attend to the complicated ways in which their projects and texts speak both past, and through, each other. While these two corpuses do not easily communicate, and we would be ill advised to overlook their differences, they are not impermeable to one another.

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I will end with a “postface,” merely to suggest another place from which to observe the uneasy relation between these two thinkers. Here I choose an instance of Foucault, perhaps unwittingly, reprising Derrida rather than vice versa. Les mots et les choses, published in 1966, ends with what has since become one of Foucault’s most famous proclamations: “If some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility—without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises—were to cause [the arrangements of knowledge] to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”18 The sense that there are peculiar exchanges between the two corpuses is rendered acute by more than the fact that these lines resonate with a prophetic tone that resembles one more often adopted by Derrida. Most striking is the image now associated with Foucault: it bears more than a passing resemblance to the one Derrida invokes in the less often remembered lines at the beginning of an essay that slightly predates the “Cogito” essay: If it recedes one day, leaving behind its works and signs on the shores of our civilization, the structuralist invasion might become a question for the historian of ideas, or even an object. But the historian would be deceived if he came to this pass: by the very act of considering the structuralist invasion as an object he would forget its meaning and would forget that what is at stake, first of all, is an adventure of vision, a conversion of the way of putting questions to any object posed before us.19

Thus begins “Force and Signification” (which would become the opening essay in Writing and Difference but was first published three years before Foucault’s book). The parallels are unmistakable both in the tone conveyed by the same grammatical forms (more poignantly in the French original), and in the image of a trace on the beach between the waves as a way to think about the historian’s object. It is difficult not to hear Foucault’s ending as a reprise of Derrida’s beginning. Whereas in Derrida’s late seminars we find an echo of what appeared to be the Foucauldian strategy for making sense of history, that is, identifying fateful decisions, in this early work we find Foucault describing the importance of his own work using a Derridean motif that insists on the iterative character of events as it describes

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historical moments. That these images of history circulate between them does not, of course, imply that Foucault and Derrida agreed, or even agreed to disagree. It rather attests that there is some other relation between these corpuses—perhaps unwittingly, or even à leurs corps défendant—which does not fit in the “debate” framework. As, half a century on, we sift through Derrida’s and Foucault’s work, we must observe how they responded by answering, or forbearing to answer, each other’s questions. But we might also attend to the fact that between them circulate both a motif of recurring waves and a plot involving villainous decisive interventions. In a sense, their debate was always about the possibility and necessity of each of these ways of characterizing history. The peculiar moments when the unexpected voice of the other resonates in their work encourage us to think about how their disjointed adventure continues as these voices interfere with one another. It might also encourage us to think about modalities of productive contention beyond “debate.” Perhaps it is precisely because they neither agree (even in the mode of agreeing to disagree) nor remain impervious to one another that it is so interesting to think with both Derrida and Foucault. Reductive versions of the project of giving voice to the voiceless today too frequently rely exclusively on participation in debate as the marker of democracy, selfconsciously claiming room for new voices. However important that may be, I have tried to suggest how lending a certain ear to the Foucault-Derrida exchange provides an example of a different way of considering what it might mean for a dominant discourse to be receptive to the murmurings of the marginalized.

n ot e s

1. See the famous beginning of The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. 2. See, for instance, the long footnote in which many of the themes of the “Cogito” essay are evoked: the origin or unitary ground from which a diffraction of sense becomes possible, the nature and challenges of critical method, the relation between the juridical and language, but also an equivalence between vulnerability and vocation to silence. Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry”: An Introduction, trans. John P. Leavey Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), 69n66. 3. One wonders what might have happened had Foucault been able to hear Derrida’s reading as an invitation to proceed together, as brothers so to speak, in taking on the father Descartes. For his analysis of the importance of the “band of brothers” model

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4. 5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

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for western political thought, see Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997). Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), and The Death Penalty, Volume 1. Foucault shows how countless “debates” are in an important sense a monologue. Insofar as they take place within a space from which unreason has been banished, they are a monologue of one (particular) reason. Derrida is intent on showing the quasi-inaudibility of the language of those who “have seen themselves seen by an animal” in one case, or, in the other, of those who would hear “because the beach was red” as a possible answer to the question “Why did you kill?” He shows that the debate between supporters of the death penalty and abolitionists is, from the perspective he is making possible by his readings of the archive, a monologue in a voice that knows only the language structured by the concepts and axioms that make the death penalty empirically possible and transcendentally necessary. Similarly, he argues that debates about animal rights are really collective monologues in the language that makes possible the worst violence. To use the term Derrida made such use of in “‘To Do Justice’” ( JF 78–106/101–133). Although haphazard has negative connotations, especially when applied to philosophical investigations, I take that as a sign of the power of the Kantian legacy. Perhaps one has already taken on more than one realizes if one perpetuates the prejudice against what Kant dismissed as rhapsodic, as opposed to systematic, thinking. According to its etymology, haphazard indicates taking the risk of the accidental. That is a risk Derrida takes when he begins unpacking a problem, as he often does, with words that catch his attention. The particular starting point is thus contingent and personal. However, insofar as language is also in some sense a vehicle for the sedimented layers of history, it is a risk worth taking: working with a word is one way of retrieving the multiple epistemes through which it has come to us. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 32–50. For references to the “two centuries” time frame, see Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 24, 25, 26, 27. “Moment” can be heard as term that does, and does not, refer to a moment in time in the classical sense. This is the sense Derrida tries to give the term in “Force and Signification” when he speaks of what are “not only moments in history” but also “stances.” Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 2. I provided a much longer account of this reading of Derrida’s book in “Dignity—a Threat to Human Rights?” (unpublished lecture). As Derrida put it in one of the asides he improvised during the seminar, “the impossible task of this seminar is this: to break this alliance, this symmetry between abolitionism and anti-abolitionism where finally each of them needs the other” (DEP1 259n25/350n). Derrida insists on the fact that the guillotine was conceived as a “painkiller” but also makes explicit that “these two themes—instantaneity and anesthesia . . . are indissociable” (DEP1 225/308).

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14. I should add that this proximity to Foucauld is only from the point of view of the parallel I am drawing. From a slightly different perspective, one can also make the case that Derrida is at the same time deeply resistant, not to say slightly phobic, to considering the death penalty through the lens of Foucauldian biopolitics. 15. Benoît Peeters’s biography notably makes available personal correspondence that gives some indication of the levels of ambivalence and complexity their relation sustained. Foucault’s letters to Derrida right after the “Cogito” lecture attest to a series of positive responses in which Foucault expresses gratitude, admiration, and a friendship cemented by a sense of shared perspectives. Foucault thanks Derrida for his “enormous and marvelous attention,” says he is impressed by the “rectitude” of his analysis, and expresses deep gratitude for the fact that “tu as montré, royalement, le droit chemin.” Later he writes: “Seuls les aveugles trouverons ta critique severe.” While today some of the propositions made in the idiom of friendship can be read as warnings of the line of attack Foucault would take, it is hard to imagine that this would have been perceptible without the benefit of hindsight. It is, however, quite easy to imagine why Foucault’s inscription in the copy of the second edition of History of Madness that he sends to Derrida could be taken to be adding injury to insult: in it he asks to be forgiven for “cette trop lente et partielle réponse.” Benoît Peeters, Derrida (Paris: Flammarion, 2010), 167, 178, 299. 16. “Le silence est ma plus sublime, ma plus pacifique mais ma plus indéniable déclaration de guerre ou de mépris.” Derrida, “Le survivant, le sursis, le sursaut,” La quinzaine littéraire 882, August 1–31, 2004. 17. It is no more an objection than was Derrida’s qualification of Foucault’s project as mad. Both are of course reprises of Nietzsche’s “the falseness of a judgment is not for us necessarily an objection.” Beyond Good and Evil, book 1, chapter 4. 18. “Si ces dispositions venaient à disparaître comme elles sont apparues, si par quelque événement dont nous pouvons tout au plus pressentir la possibilité, mais dont nous ne connaissons pour l’instant encore ni la forme ni la promesse, elles basculaient, comme le fit au tournant du XVIIIe siècle le sol de la pensée classique,—alors on peut bien parier que l’homme s’effacerait, comme à la limite de la mer un visage de sable.” Foucault, Les mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 398. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1970), 387. 19. “Si elle se retirait un jour, abandonnant ses œuvres et ses signes sur les plages de notre civilisation, l’invasion structuraliste deviendrait une question pour l’historien des idées. Peutêtre même un objet. Mais l’historien se tromperait s’il en venait là: par le geste même où il la considérerait comme un objet, il en oublierait le sens, et qu’il s’agit d’abord d’une aventure du regard, d’une conversion dans la manière de questionner devant tout objet.” L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 9; Writing and Difference, 1. Note that this essay was first published in June–July 1963.

12

The Truth About Parrhēsia PH ILOSOP HY , RHETORIC , AND POLITI CS I N L AT E F O U CAU LT



geof f r e y b e nni ng to n

Sans doute l’acte premier de la philosophie est-il pour nous—et pour longtemps—la lecture: la tienne justement se donne avec évidence pour un tel acte. C’est pourquoi elle a cette royale honnêteté. m i c h e l f o u c a u lt

well-trodden “debate” around the “Cogito” essay itself, which has arguably been a dialogue de sourds—in which historically inclined readers are impressed by the historical nature of Foucault’s reply to Derrida and his parting jibe at Derrida’s supposedly “historically well-determined little pedagogy,” and philosophically inclined readers are more impressed by Foucault’s failure to respond to Derrida’s more general questions except by means of invective1—in this essay I will try to approach some of these questions more obliquely via Foucault’s attempts in his last lecture courses to reformulate the relationships between philosophy, rhetoric, truth, and politics.2 It can plausibly be argued that Heidegger is never very far below the surface of these questions and concerns: as we shall see, the immer schon or “always already” structure, as taken up and radicalized by Derrida,3 will reappear regularly as a problem for Foucault’s readings. Although in some rather bad-tempered comments in The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1, Derrida suggests that Foucault “practically never talks about Heidegger” (BS 323/430) or, a little later, that he “as always makes not the slightest allusion to Heidegger” (BS 324/431), in fact, at the end of his life when these r at h e r t h a n r e h e a r s e t h e n o w

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courses were being given, Foucault rather surprisingly described Heidegger as his “philosophe essentiel,” and more generally aligned himself with Heidegger in a common concern with truth, that question of truth showing up saliently for Foucault around the concept of parrhēsia, which I will take as my guiding thread in this essay.4 These references to Heidegger will help me formulate the problem I want to pursue. To put it bluntly, I want to argue that Foucault’s appeal to the notion of parrhēsia, some of the detail of which we shall be following, brings him to a surprisingly Platonic position on the relation of philosophy, politics, and rhetoric. Heidegger, by contrast, whatever his real importance for Foucault’s thinking, and taking (at least in the 1920s) an apparently more Aristotelian stance on these questions, opens some difficult issues for the Foucauldian position, and, even as he too tends to close off the dimensions I shall be associating with rhetoric, asks some uncomfortable questions of anyone trying to think about philosophy, history, and politics today. My broader suggestion (to be pursued elsewhere) will be that these questions have been resolved dogmatically or at least moralistically by most explicitly political philosophers (be it Rawls or Rancière, Leo Strauss or Hardt and Negri, Rorty or Badiou) and that it is necessary to reformulate the whole relationship of politics and philosophy if one wishes to escape that dogmatism and moralism, and that Derrida’s later work on democracy and sovereignty provides some help with that reformulation.

Some such reformulation is what Foucault indeed seems to be attempting, in the many fascinating attempts in his late work (essentially the 1,200 or so pages of his Collège de France courses from 1982 to his death in 1984; from The Hermeneutics of the Subject in 1982, through The Government of Self and Others in 1983, ending with The Courage of Truth in 1984) to isolate and define the value of parrhēsia, open speech, free speech, even “fearless speech” as an unauthorized translation of some of this material has it, with a suitably stirring and seductive cover image of Foucault haranguing a crowd through a bullhorn.5 Foucault is keenly aware that his appeal to this term engages a whole problematic debate with the tradition of rhetoric. He returns many times, complementing and sometimes contradicting his earlier formulations, to the attempt to clarify the terms of that debate, and to arrive at a successful characterization of this apparently rather marginal term.

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The seminars, unlike Foucault’s published books, which are usually rather tightly structured, give a different kind of access to a genuine ongoing process of research, essentially conducted via quite detailed explications de texte, with many hesitations, deferrals, repetitions and corrections, and make for a quite enthralling read. I’d like to follow just a few of the moments of Foucault’s ongoing attempts to work out his position around this term, first insofar as it enters into discursive formations he is describing, but secondly as it increasingly shades into a discursive position he is promoting and indeed occupying. In the earliest seminar in which parrhēsia begins to be thematized (The Hermeneutics of the Subject, given in 1981–1982), it means at first no more than open speech, speaking one’s mind, frankness, saying what one really thinks, saying what comes to mind, openly and directly, in sincere and plain speaking. As if by chance, this first appearance of the notion occurs immediately after a preliminary discussion of the relation between philosophy and rhetoric.6 My hypothesis is that this position of parrhēsia, on the border of philosophy and rhetoric (and thereby also, as we shall see, on the border of philosophy and politics) is what makes it so fascinating for Foucault, but also so difficult for him to deal with directly, simply, frankly, and openly. And indeed before coming back to parrhēsia as such, Foucault finds himself glossing Epictetus and Seneca and complicating his initial characterization of the clearly separated relationship between philosophy and rhetoric: “Philosophical discourse is not in fact wholly and entirely opposed to rhetorical discourse. Of course, philosophical discourse is meant to express the truth. But it cannot express it without ornament. Philosophical discourse should be listened to with all the active attention of someone who seeks the truth. But it also has effects that are due to its own materiality, as it were, to its own modeling, its own rhetoric” (HES 348/331; my emphasis). This minimal rhetoric, then, or rhetoric without rhetoric, turns out to be the real crux of this first approach to parrhēsia: when Foucault returns explicitly to it on March 3, 1982, it takes on “a very precise technical meaning [une signification technique fort precise]” (HES 366–367/349). And this “technical” signification brings it back toward the domain of rhetoric: What is involved in parrhēsia is that particular kind of rhetoric, or nonrhetorical rhetoric, which philosophical discourse must employ. . . . When we employ the logos, there is necessarily a lexis (a way of saying things) and

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the choice of particular words rather than others. Therefore, there can be no philosophical logos without this kind of body of language with its own qualities, its own figures [sa plastique propre], and its own necessary effects at the level of pathos. But if you are a philosopher, it is not the art or tekhne of rhetoric that is needed to control these elements. . . . It must not be a discourse of seduction. (HES 368/350)

This borderline position of parrhēsia has Foucault further clarifying the concept at the beginning of the following week’s session. Now he says that the master’s parrhēsia has two opponents against which it must struggle: flattery on the one hand (its “moral adversary”) and rhetoric on the other (its “technical adversary”). But these two opponents are not at all so easy to separate out in fact, in that the kind of “rhetoric without rhetoric” that we have just seen cannot simply be reduced (“rhetoric without rhetoric” is after all the more or less secret aspiration of rhetoric itself, which typically does not announce or signal itself as rhetoric, but as the truth itself: in a sense nothing is more rhetorical than the claim to be telling the plain truth). Here is Foucault’s awkward and perhaps even contradictory attempt to make these distinctions, after he has posited that parrhēsia qualifies the general orientation of master toward disciple as both a moral attitude and a technical procedure, and suggested that the adversarial relationship with flattery is relatively straightforward: flattery is simply the enemy of parrhēsia, whereas things are not so simple with the supposed “technical adversary,” rhetoric, which turns out to be not just an adversary but also in a certain sense a partner: This technical adversary is rhetoric, with which speaking freely actually has a much more complex relationship than it does with flattery. Flattery is the enemy.  .  .  . Speaking freely must free itself from rhetoric, but not only or solely so as to expel or exclude it [as is the case with flattery, then], but rather, by being free from its rules, to be able to use it within strict, always tactically defined limits, where it is really necessary. So, there is opposition to and a battle and struggle against flattery. And, with regard to rhetoric there is freedom, a setting free. You notice, moreover, that flattery is the moral adversary of speaking freely, while rhetoric is, if you like, its adversary or ambiguous partner, but its technical partner. What’s more, these two adversaries, flat-

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tery and rhetoric, are profoundly connected to each other since the moral basis of rhetoric is always flattery in fact, and the privileged instrument of flattery is of course the technique, and possibly the tricks of rhetoric. (HES 373/357)

So rhetoric is an ambiguous opponent of parrhēsia because of its link to flattery, but an ambiguous partner of parrhēsia because parrhēsia cannot in fact be practiced without some possible recourse to rhetorical technique. This recourse is characterized by Foucault as “tactical,” in an attempt to capture a difference between a wholehearted acceptance (which would inevitably compromise parrhēsia with its true enemy, namely flattery), and a merely occasional, expedient use of rhetoric when judged necessary. Rhetoric can be locally parrhēsia’s partner for “technical” purposes, but insofar as rhetoric is globally a tekhnè, which parrhēsia is supposedly not, then it is fundamentally its opponent. This apparently satisfying characterization has, however, the complicated effect that parrhēsia now has a relation to rhetoric that is in a sense even more indirect and guileful than rhetoric itself: in the interests of straightforwardly telling the truth, parrhēsia entertains a less than entirely straightforward relation with that non-truth-telling (because flattering) discourse called rhetoric. We might summarize Foucault’s claims by saying that there is a kind of general quasi-rhetorical dimension to parrhēsia just because it is a discursive practice and therefore is obliged to have recourse to logos and lexis, but that it is opposed to rhetoric in a more restrictive sense in that its point is not to seduce its listener by the exercise of flattery (i.e., telling that listener essentially what she wants to hear), even though parrhēsia might have a merely tactical recourse to rhetoric on occasion, for a particular and local purpose, for example that of having an unpalatable truth accepted. In the following year’s course, The Government of Self and Others, Foucault returns at length to this problem in a number of more explicitly political contexts, and to do so retreats historically from the Hellenistic and Roman focus of The Hermeneutics of the Subject to the very origins of Athenian democracy in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. The historical significance of this move seems important but is not elucidated by Foucault in anything like philosophical terms. The situation now is a little different from that of the relation of master to disciple that was the focus of the previous year’s discussion, in that the emphasis will be initially on the exercise of parrhēsia

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in contexts in which the political government of others is taking precedence over the prepolitical government or management of self. Whereas so far the question of parrhēsia has engaged with the relation between philosophy and rhetoric, it will increasingly become that whole problem, such that philosophy as a whole for Foucault just is or should be the exercise of parrhēsia, at least insofar as it has a relation to politics, and thereby again, perhaps, to rhetoric. This leads Foucault to propose, and increasingly rely on, a distinction between a “good” and a “bad” parrhēsia (see, for example, GSO 166– 168/153–155, where “bad” parrhēsia is something that can apparently befall democracy), without ever pursuing the (immer schon) question of what parrhēsia “itself ” must be prior to that axiological distinction. What Foucault draws from these analyses as to the relation between philosophy and politics is that philosophy must speak truth to power, but not thereby claim to tell power what to do. The point of philosophy is not to dictate a content to politics, but to impinge on politics, from a position of relative (and truculent) exteriority, in an essentially truth-telling way. Plato himself counseling Dionysius is not the only model of this: in a very different way, says Foucault, the cynics (who are discussed at some length in the 1984 course The Courage of Truth) also exemplify this position. This is still a struggle to formulate, but Foucault attempts it as follows, and now explicitly begins to suggest the continuing contemporary validity of this relative position of philosophy and politics: Philosophical discourse in its truth, in the game it necessarily plays with politics in order to find its truth, does not have to plan what political action should be. It does not tell the truth of political action, it does not tell the truth for political action, it tells the truth in relation to political action, in relation to the practice of politics, in relation to the political personage. And this is what I call a recurrent, permanent, and fundamental feature of the relationship of philosophy to politics. It seems to me that this is already very noticeable at the time we are concerned with, and that it remains true and always risks not being true throughout the history of the relations between philosophy and politics. (GSO 288/265–266)7

And, having repeated that the point is not to have philosophers tell politicians what to do exactly (so even the philosophical theory of sovereignty,

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the philosophy of fundamental rights, or philosophy seen as social criticism are in no way supposed to tell the politicians directly how to govern or what decisions to take), he goes on, now bridging the gap between Plato and us: For a philosophy to put itself to the test of its reality, it is as indispensable now as in Plato’s time that it be able to tell the truth in relation to [political] action. . . . It is essential for all philosophy to be able to tell the truth in relation to politics, it is important for all political practice to be in a permanent relationship with this truth-telling, but it being understood that the truth-telling of philosophy does not coincide with what a political rationality can and must be. Philosophical truth-telling is not political rationality, but it is essential for a political rationality to be in a certain relationship, which remains to be determined, with philosophical truth-telling, just as it is important for a philosophical truth-telling to test its reality in relation to a political practice. . . . Philosophy and politics must exist in a relation, in a correlation; they must never coincide. (GSO 288–289/266–267)

On the one hand, this still leaves the exact nature of the relation to be determined, and on the other, it has left hanging the problem introduced into the whole argument by substituting the concept of véridiction, of dire-vrai for that of vérité. Philosophy, on this description, is not exactly or simply telling truth to power, not only in the sense that it does not exactly tell power what to do, provide it with an approved philosophical content (and Foucault is admirably clear about the fact that this misconception is a malheur that has muddied the waters of the philosophy-politics relation), but in that what it is telling power may not in fact be exactly the truth at all, but is at least supposed to be what the philosopher believes to be the truth. What is in play is a véridiction, an act of truth-telling that nothing guarantees actually tells the truth. On Foucault’s account (as already in Quintilian, referred to at GSO 53–54/53–54 but left relatively unanalyzed) there is, as it were, nowhere else to go to prove or disprove the truth of what the philosopher tells the politician, in that the virtue of the relation, what constitutes it as the épreuve du réel for philosophy, is that the philosopher states something as the truth (though not as a doctrine the politician should adopt), whether or not it is in fact the truth. This leaves us with a number of problems that Foucault addresses in the last two sessions of the Government of Self and Others course.

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These sessions finally take up the long-deferred promise of discussing how rhetoric and philosophy line up in Plato. Foucault is quite clear that there is a good deal at stake here, both with respect to the general relationship of philosophy and rhetoric, and with respect to Foucault’s oeuvre as he retrospectively understands it: Before beginning to talk about “philosophy and rhetoric” I would like to emphasize [the following]. Certainly there are some technical questions in [this problem of ] “philosophy and rhetoric,” and we will come across them, but it seems to me also—anyway, this is what I would like to show you— that they are not just two techniques or two ways of speaking confronting each other, [but] truly two modes of being of discourse which claim to tell the truth and which claim to implement the truth in the form of persuasion in the souls of others. It is a question of the mode of being of discourse which claims to tell the truth, and you know full well that if I dwell on this question of the mode of being of discourse which tells the truth it is because basically this has always been the question that I wanted to raise. (GSO 309/285)

And that question is none other than that of the “ontology” of discourses that claim to speak the truth. This would be, no less, the crux of Foucault’s whole enterprise from the start, insofar as it is to be distinguished from a history of ideologies (GSO 309/285) or a history of knowledge (GSO 310/286). This is a complex thought, which takes off from this idea of an “ontology” of discourses, that is, the question of their mode of being, but includes the considerable complication that ontology in general be analyzed as “fiction.” These discourses of truth deserve to be analyzed differently than according to the measure and from the point of view of a history of ideologies which would ask them why they speak falsely, failing to telling [sic] the truth. I think a history of the ontologies of true discourse or of discourses of truth, a history of the ontologies of veridiction would be a history in which one would pose at least three questions. First: What is the mode of being peculiar to this or that discourse, as distinct from others, when it introduces a certain specific game of truth into reality? Second question: What is the mode of being that this discourse of veridiction confers on the real-

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ity it talks about, through the game of truth it practices? Third question: What is the mode of being that this discourse of veridiction imposes on the subject who employs it, such that this subject can play this specific game of truth properly? An ontological history of discourses of truth, a history of ontologies of veridiction would therefore have to pose these three questions to any discourse which claims to be a discourse of truth and to assert its truth as a norm. This implies that every discourse, and particularly every discourse of truth, every veridiction, be considered essentially as a practice. Second, it implies that all truth be understood in terms of a game of veridiction. And it implies that every ontology, lastly, be analyzed as a fiction [emphasis added]. Which means again: the history of thought must always be the history of singular inventions. Or again: if we want to distinguish the history of thought from a history of knowledge undertaken in terms of an index of truth, and if we want to distinguish it from a history of ideologies undertaken by reference to a criterion of reality, then this history of thought—this anyway is what I would like to do—should be conceived of as a history of ontologies which would refer to a principle of freedom in which freedom [liberté] is not defined as a right to be, but as a capacity to do [capacité de faire]. (GSO 309–310/285–286; translation modified)

I want to say that this claim about ontology as fiction ought to 1. make Foucault less able to accept and endorse the claim of philosophy over rhetoric; 2. make him ask more explicitly the question of the “fiction” and rhetoric of his own discourse; and 3. recast the analysis more generally beyond the grasp of the concept of “ontology,” and indeed that of truth. Even if we do not pursue this third point explicitly into Heidegger, “fiction,” “liberté,” and “capacité de faire” here should be putting us back toward the side of rhetoric, but of a generalized rhetoric no longer described from the side of a philosophy that has already arrogated to itself the privilege of truthtelling and predetermined rhetoric as, for example, in the merely technical and opportunistic exercise of flattery. Foucault himself, however, does not go down this route: in analyzing Plato’s Apology, Phaedrus, and Gorgias in the final sessions of the 1983 course, he in fact ends up fundamentally accepting and apparently identifying with the Platonic position,8 and implicitly at least claiming to occupy the position of the (true because truth-telling) philosopher as opposed to

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the (analogically Derridean) rhetor. Let me jump directly to a passage that seems to bring matters to a head from our point of view: This relationship of philosophy to rhetoric is very different from its relationship to politics. It is no longer a relationship of asserted exteriority and sustained correlation. It is a relationship of strict contradiction, of constant polemic, of exclusion. Where there is philosophy, there should be a relationship to politics. But where there is philosophy, there can be no rhetoric. Philosophy is defined in the Phaedrus as an alternative and opposition to rhetoric. If the politician is, in a way, an other in relation to the philosopher, he is an other to whom the philosopher speaks, and he is an other [with whom] the philosopher tests the very reality of his philosophical practice. The rhetor, on the other hand, is an other in relation to the philosopher in the sense that where there is the philosopher, the rhetor must be driven out. The two cannot co-exist; their relationship is one of exclusion. It is only by breaking with rhetoric that philosophical discourse, in the very act of expelling it [emphasis added], can constitute itself and affirm itself as a constant and permanent relationship to truth. You remember that we saw this in the Phaedrus when what appeared in the expulsion and disqualification of rhetoric was not at all the eulogy of a logocentrism that would make speech the form peculiar to philosophy, but the affirmation of the constant connection of philosophical discourse—no matter whether in written or oral form—to the truth, in the double form of the dialectic and pedagogy. So philosophy can exist only by sacrificing rhetoric. But, in this sacrifice philosophy demonstrates, asserts, and constitutes its permanent connection to the truth.9 (GSO 352/324)

This affirmative characterization of ancient philosophy essentially on the basis of Plato is then carried over into a description of modern, postCartesian philosophy too, after the long hiatus of Christianity. As opposed to the standard academic presentation of modern philosophy, whereby philosophy proposes systems of truth with respect to given domains of objects and in the end Being itself, it too can supposedly better be described in the parrhēsiastical terms Foucault has now developed essentially from Plato, as a “free questioning of men’s conduct by a truth-telling which accepts the risk of danger to itself ” (GSO 346/318). Indeed, “is it not as parrēsia to be continually taken up again that philosophy continually recommences?”

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(GSO 349/321).10 And just this would underlie Foucault’s famous reading of Kant’s What Is Enlightenment? (first presented at the beginning of GSO) as picking up again on the issues that in ancient philosophy were those of parrhēsia (GSO 350/322). Such a view of the history of philosophy would then be neither that of a forgetting (no explicit mention here of Heidegger, who is presumably who Foucault has in mind) nor of a progressive development of rationality, but as a series of recurrent, nonidentical episodes of veridiction: “The history of philosophy, in short, as movement of parrēsia, as redistribution of parrēsia, as varied game of truth-telling, philosophy envisaged thus in what could be called its allocutionary force” (GSO 350/322): What is modern philosophy if we read it as a history of veridiction in its parresiastic form? It is a practice that tests its reality in its relationship to politics. It is a practice which finds its function of truth in the criticism of illusion, deception, trickery, and flattery. And finally it is a practice which finds the object of its exercise in the transformation of the subject by himself and by the other. Philosophy as exteriority with regard to a politics which constitutes its test of reality, philosophy as critique of a domain of illusion which challenges it to constitute itself as true discourse, and philosophy as ascesis, that is to say, as constitution of the subject by himself, seem to me to constitute the mode of being of modern philosophy, or maybe [peut-être] that which, in the mode of being of modern philosophy, takes up the mode of being of ancient philosophy. (GSO 353–354/326)

It is no accident that this passage (slightly doctored and notably without its final “peut-être” clause) should have been chosen to figure on the back cover of the French edition of this course. Nor that the editors, in their description of the course as whole, should simply buy into the slippage we have noted, whereby a discursive description of the way ancient philosophy (at least as exemplified by Plato) sets up the relations between philosophy, politics, and rhetoric shades into an identificatory affirmation on Foucault’s part: “In these lectures Foucault constructs a figure of the philosopher in which he recognized himself and with this rereading of Greek thinkers he assures his own placement in philosophical modernity, problematizes his own function, and defines his mode of thinking and being” (GSO back cover/jacket flap).

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I want to say that this position buys a certain legitimacy and even heroism for the philosopher (so that the title Fearless Speech and that famous image of Foucault addressing the crowd through a bullhorn—but indeed also many other memorable images from the Foucault iconography that would deserve analysis in their own right—can seem entirely appropriate and extremely seductive), but at a definite price. The quick way of putting this is that Foucault ends up affirming Platonism and thus “confirm[ing] metaphysics in its fundamental operation.”11 I believe that this position is philosophically difficult to sustain and politically extremely problematical, and that the image of the solitary philosopher courageously telling truth to power is part of the problem rather than its solution. Moreover, Foucault’s own earlier metadescription of his enterprise in which ontologies of truth need to be analyzed as fictions should disallow this type of identification with just one of those “fictions” (what he famously calls in the introduction to The Use of Pleasure “games of truth”).12 Here, Foucault’s analysis of a particular configuration, a particular “ontology of veridiction,” namely Plato’s, means placing that configuration at enough of an analytical distance to treat it as a “fiction”: but that setup is then complicated and indeed compromised when the analyzing discourse (Foucault’s own) adopts that particular “fiction” as its own “truth.” It is this fudging of the enunciative position, which happens throughout Foucault’s work,13 that allows him to make bold historical claims without ever explicitly clarifying his own ability to make those claims, and this means that he is able, as it were, to emerge above the fray as exemplarily (but by his own lights contradictorily) telling the truth about truth as a metahistorical meta-parrhesiast, an embodiment of the Truth itself; and this allows him to become the object, on the part of his enthusiastic readers, of uncritical identifications and heroic representations that cannot fail, however, to become moralistic, just because the claim to truth attracting the identification is tendentially absolute and self-validating. This fudging of the enunciative position (which Derrida analyses at length with respect to the particular example of Freud in “‘To Do Justice to Freud,’” but which is generalizable), whereby Foucault has to borrow his resources from his object without explaining how he does so, goes along with a parallel fudging of the question of reading. Foucault has no theory of reading and cannot have one within the terms of his discourse. This absence shows up symptomatically in his complete lack of interest in what was being read during, for

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example, the “classical age,” but more importantly in the incoherence of the theory of anything like an episteme (and retooling episteme as dispositif and archaeology as genealogy changes nothing here): for without an account of the transcendental historicity from which we began, Foucault may well be able to account in principle for everything within the “age” in question, within its “archive,”14 but cannot account for how he is able to gain access to that archive and formulate its “historical a priori,” because he is, ex hypothesi, radically separated from the conditions of intelligibility he is nonetheless claiming to decipher. This is indeed a “metahistorical” question that cannot be dealt with by calling it “transhistorical and perennial.” And this is precisely Derrida’s still unanswered point at the end of the “Cogito” essay, when he writes: By separating, within the Cogito, on the one hand hyperbole (which I maintain cannot be enclosed in a factual historical structure, for it is the project of exceeding every finite and determinate totality), and, on the other hand, that in Descartes’s philosophy (or just as much in the philosophy that supports the Augustinian Cogito or the Husserlian Cogito) does belong to a factual historical structure, I am not proposing to separate in every philosophy the wheat from the chaff in the name of some philosophia perennis. Indeed, exactly the contrary. The point is to account for the very historicity of philosophy. (CH 60/93–94; translation modified)

One way of pursuing this, as I have all too briefly tried to do here, is to put some pressure on the distinction between philosophy and rhetoric: for Foucault’s discursive analyses (whereby, remember, he is driven to describe ontologies of truth as fictions) are in fact themselves closer to rhetoric than they are to philosophy in its traditional guise, at least as those terms are distributed here in an essentially Platonic way, and so the brave claims to courage and freedom are in fact unfailingly short-circuited in their own performance. Failure to grapple with the “always-already” dimension from which we began, one of the effects of which is to disallow any simple opposition of philosophy and rhetoric, preprograms all these problems and leaves Foucault with no nondogmatic way of solving them. One might, of course, choose simply to ignore these questions. Historians necessarily do so, simply by virtue of the disciplinary constraints that

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are theirs. Philosophers too always might suggest, following the example of a Rorty, that this type of question arises only if we insist on asking Kantianstyle transcendental questions that we would do better to ignore as we look forward cheerfully to a kind of euthanasia of philosophy as it merges with the social sciences more generally. But this abdication of a responsibility to pursue problems as far as they can go (a responsibility that is nothing other than a response to the “mad project of exceeding any finite totality” that Derrida identifies at the end of the “Cogito” essay) will not for all that go away, for it is carried by the rhythms of history, time and language, immer schon, as the call of reading itself.

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The epigraph is from a Foucault letter to Jacques Derrida, January 27, 1963, quoted in Benoît Peeters, Derrida (Paris: Flammarion, 2010), 164. Just over a month later, Derrida gave the lecture “Cogito et histoire de la folie.” See Foucault’s subsequent letters quoted in Peeters, 167 and 168, for his initially very positive reaction. 1. See already the pertinent discussion of the difficult relation between historical and philosophical claims in Foucault by Vincent Descombes in Le même et l’autre: Quarante-cinq ans de philosophie française (1933–1978) (Paris: Minuit, 1979), 137–138, translated as Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, by Lorna Scott-Fox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 115–117. 2. This essay is a shortened version of a much longer discussion in my Scatter 1: The Politics of Politics in Foucault, Heidegger, and Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). 3. See some early remarks (1964–1965) on this question in Derrida, Heidegger: La question de l’être et l’histoire (Paris: Galilée, 2013), 77. 4. See Foucault, Dits et écrits, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 2:1522 (no. 354), and 2:1599 (no. 362), and remarks in HES 189/182, and Deleuze’s striking misreading of the first of these passages in Foucault (Paris: Minuit, 1986), 120–121. Derrida makes some more measured comments about Deleuze’s and Foucault’s relation to Heidegger in Derrida, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, La conférence de Heidelberg (1988), ed. Mireille Calle-Gruber (Paris: Lignes-IMEC, 2014), 76–77. 5. Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (Semiotext(e), 2001), comprises six lectures given in English by Foucault at Berkeley in 1983. Although the volume claims that the text was “reviewed by the author,” it is described as “unauthorized” by Frédéric Gros (GSO 386/358). 6. “Rhetoric is the inventory and analysis of the means by which one can act on others by means of discourse. Philosophy is the set of principles and practices available to one, or which one makes available to others, for taking proper care of oneself or of others” (HES 135–136/131).

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7. This “remains true and always risks not being true” is a passing remark that in fact makes my point for me. Compare with Derrida’s point in “‘To Do Justice to Freud,’” on Foucault’s return, later in the madness book, to the figure of the Evil Genius as a “perpetual threat”: “One can imagine the effects that the category of “perpetual threat” (Foucault’s terms) can have on the indices of presence, positive reference-points, determinations of signs or statements, in short, the whole criteriology and symptomatology that can give assurance to a historical knowledge concerning a figure, an episteme, an age, an epoch, a paradigm, once all these determinations are threatened, and perpetually so, perpetually disturbed by a haunting” ( JF 87–88/111–112; translation modified). 8. It would be interesting to compare these readings with those offered by Heidegger in courses from the 1920s that were still unpublished when Foucault delivered his lectures: see for example the 1924–1925 course Plato’s Sophist, where in a passage discussing the Phaedrus, Heidegger says, “What Socrates here demands as a condition of the possibility of genuine self-expression is also a condition of the possibility of perfect deception and misrepresentation.” Martin Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1997), 225. 9. See too the summary in Le courage de la vérité: “Le rhéteur est, ou en tout cas peut parfaitement être une menteur efficace qui contraint les autres. Le parrésiaste, au contraire, sera le diseur courageux d’une vérité où il risque lui-même et sa relation avec l’autre.” Le gouvernement de soi et des autres: Tome 2, Le courage de la vérité—Cours au Collège de France (1983–1984) (Paris: Seuil Gallimard, 2008), 14–15, translated by Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2012), 13. 10. Cf. also Foucault, Courage de la vérité, 66–67/62–63: “Philosophical discourse, from Greece to the present,” and “the existence of philosophical discourse, from Greece to the present” (translation modified), and the immediately following (essentially tabular) classification of four philosophical attitudes based on their conception of the relation between truth, politics, and ethics, culminating in “l’attitude parrèsiastique” (68/64). I take it that this is what Frédéric Gros is referring to at the end of his “Course Context” for GSO as “une determination méta-historique de l’activité philosophique” (GSO 388/361), where we might speculate that what we might call the quasi-transcendental character of the prefix “meta-” in the adjective “méta-historique” leads the translator to resort to the awkward hendiadys “trans-historical, perennial,” in which the problems of the always already, of transcendental historicity, are simply being obfuscated. 11. CH 40/65. 12. Foucault, L’usage des plaisirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 13–15, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 6–8. 13. See already in “Cogito and the History of Madness,” where Derrida asks, “Who perceives, who enunciates the difficulty? . . . We have the right to ask on what, as a last recourse, he supported this language without recourse or support: who enunciates the non-recourse? Who wrote and who is to hear, in what language and from what historical situation of the logos, who wrote and who is to hear this history of madness?” (CH 37–38/61; translation modified).

220

geoffrey bennington

14. So, as Derrida says in “‘To Do Justice to Freud,’” “Foucault . . . is almost always right” ( JF 85/109). A different way of approaching all of these issues would be to confront the now prevalent neo-Foucauldian notion of the archive with the immer schon “archive trouble” that Derrida identifies in Mal d’archive. It should be noted in passing that Foucault’s explicit notion of the archive in The Archaeology of Knowledge is in fact more complex and interesting that the “soft” historicist use that is often made of it in contemporary scholarship.

contributors

is Liberal Arts Research Professor of Philosophy and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Allen’s research interests are in twentieth-century Continental philosophy, with a particular emphasis on the intersection of critical social theory, poststructuralism, and feminist theory. She has published widely on the topics of power, subjectivity, agency, and autonomy in the work of Foucault, Habermas, Butler, and Arendt, including three books: The Power of Feminist Theory: Domination, Resistance, Solidarity (Westview, 1999), The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory (Columbia University Press, 2008), and The End of Progress: Decolonizing The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (Columbia University Press, 2016). Her current research project focuses on the relationship between power and reason in the critical theory tradition. Allen is coeditor in chief (with Andrew Arato and Andreas Kalyvas) of the journal Constellations, series editor of the Columbia University Press series New Directions in Critical Theory, and executive codirector of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. g e o f f r e y b e n n i n g t o n is Asa G. Candler Professor of Modern French Thought at Emory University (DPhil. in French, Oxford University, 1984). His publications include Sententiousness and the Novel (Cambridge University Press, 1985), Lyotard: Writing the Event (Columbia University Press, 1988), Dudding: Des noms de Rousseau (Galilée, 1991), Jacques Derrida (with Jacques Derrida; University of Chicago Press, 1991), Legislations: The Politics of Deconstruction (Verso, 1995), Interrupting Derrida (Routledge, 2000), Frontières kantiennes (Galilée, 2000), Géographie et autres lectures (Hermann, 2011), Not Half No End (Edinburgh University Press, 2011), Scatter 1: The Politics of Foucault, Heidegger, and Derrida (Fordham University Press, 2016) and a number of e-books, including Frontiers (Kant, Hegel, Frege, Wittgenstein) (2003), Other Analyses: Reading Philosophy (2005), Open Book / Livre ouvert (2005), Deconstruction Is Not What You Think (2005), and amy allen

222

contributors

Late Lyotard (2005). He is the translator of works by Derrida, Lyotard, and other French thinkers, and his essays have appeared in journals such as Diacritics, Le contretemps, French Studies, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Oxford Literary Review, Paragraph, Parallax, Poétique, and Ratio. He is a member of the French editorial team preparing Jacques Derrida’s seminars (about forty volumes) for publication (Editions Galilée) and is general editor (with Peggy Kamuf ) of the English translation of those seminars (Chicago University Press). o l i v i a c u s t e r completed her doctorate at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, under the supervision of Jacques Derrida. She has held positions at the American University in Paris, the Collège International de Philosophie, Bard College, and the University of California Berkeley. She is the author of L’exemple de Kant (Bibliothèque Philosophique de Louvain, 2012). Other publications include chapters or articles published in The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Kant after Derrida (Clinamen, 2003), Derrida: Critical Assessments (Routledge, 2002), and Critique. p e n e lo p e d e u t s c h e r is Joan and Sarepta Harrison Professor at Northwestern University and codirector of its Critical Theory Cluster. She is the author of four books in the areas of twentieth-century French philosophy and gender studies: Yielding Gender: Feminism, Deconstruction and the History of Philosophy (Routledge, 1997), A Politics of Impossible Difference (Cornell, 2002), The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir (Cambridge, 2008), and How to Read Derrida (Norton, 2006). She is also the author of Foucault’s Children: A Critique of Reproductive Reason, and coeditor (with Cristina Lafont) of Critical Theory in Critical Times (both Columbia University Press, 2017). She has published a number of articles on Foucault, reproduction, and biopolitics in journals such as Theory, Culture and Society, differences, Critical Horizons, Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Angelaki. s a m i r h a d da d is associate professor of philosophy at Fordham University. He is the author of Derrida and the Inheritance of Democracy (Indiana University Press, 2013) and has published chapters in a number of edited collections, including A Companion to Derrida (Blackwell, 2014), The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and History of Continental Philosophy, vol. 6, Poststructuralism and Critical Theory’s Second Generation (University of Chicago Press, 2010), and articles in journals such as Theory & Event, Diacritics, and International Journal of Philosophical Studies. ly n n e h u f f e r is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. Her fields of study include feminist theory; queer theory; gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender studies; modern French

contributors

223

and francophone literature; literary theory; and ethics. She is the author of four books: Are the Lips a Grave? (Columbia University Press, 2013); Mad for Foucault (Columbia University Press, 2010); Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures (Stanford University Press, 1998); and Another Colette (University of Michigan Press, 1992). She is currently working on two book projects: a memoir, Sleeping Sickness and Other Queer Histories; and a series of reflections on the ethics of living in the Anthropocene. She is also the coeditor of philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism. t h o m a s k h u r a n a is visiting professor of philosophy at the Goethe University Frankfurt. He received his PhD from the University of Potsdam with a doctoral dissertation on the temporality of meaning, published as Sinn und Gedächtnis: Die Zeitlichkeit des Sinns und die Figuren ihrer Reflexion (Fink, 2007). He was scientific coordinator of the doctoral program Lebensformen + Lebenswissen and assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Potsdam, Heuss Lecturer at the New School for Social Research, and Feodor Lynen Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago. His latest book is Das Leben der Freiheit: Form und Wirklichkeit der Autonomie (Suhrkamp) Coedited projects include Paradoxien der Autonomie (August, 2011), The Freedom of Life: Hegelian Perspectives (August, 2013), and a special issue, “Philosophies of Life,” of Constellations (2011), which included his essay “Force and Form.” Other articles in English include “Paradoxes of Autonomy: On the Dialectics of Freedom and Normativity,” in Symposium (2013). colin koopman is associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. He is the author of Pragmatism as Transition (Columbia University Press, 2009) and Genealogy as Critique (Indiana University Press, 2013). His articles have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Constellations, Philosophy & Social Criticism, Metaphilosophy, Review of  Metaphysics, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Contemporary Pragmatism, Foucault Studies, and Diacritics (forthcoming). His editorial projects include a special issue of History of the Human Sciences on interdisciplinary uses of Foucault, a special issue of Foucault Studies on Foucault and pragmatism, and a coedited volume on Rorty and cultural critical philosophy published by Bloomsbury. p i e r r e m ac h e r e y is professor of philosophy at the University of Lille Nord de France. His publications include the 1965 coauthored volume Lire le Capital (with Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, Jacques Ranciere, and Roger Establet; Presses Universitaires de France), Avec Spinoza: Etudes sur la doctrine et l’histoire du spinozisme (Presses Universitaires de France, 1992), Introduction à l’Ethique de Spinoza (Presses Universitaires de France, 1994–1998), Comte:

2 24

contributors

La philosophie et les sciences (Presses Universitaires de France, 1989), Histoires de dinosaure: Faire de la philosophie, 1965–1997 (Presses Universitaires de France, 1999), De Canguilhem à Foucault: La force des norms (La Fabrique, 2009), and Proust entre littérature et philosophie (Editions Amsterdam, 2013). In English, translations of his work have appeared as The Object of Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1995), In a Materialist Way: Selected Essays (Verso, 1998), A Theory of Literary Production (Routledge, 2006), and Hegel or Spinoza (University of Minnesota Press, 2011). m i c h a e l n a a s is professor of philosophy at DePaul University. He teaches and conducts research in the areas of ancient Greek philosophy and contemporary French philosophy. He is the author of Turning: From Persuasion to Philosophy (Humanities Press, 1994), Taking on the Tradition: Jacques Derrida and the Legacies of Deconstruction (Stanford University Press, 2003), Derrida From Now On (Fordham University Press, 2008), and Miracle and Machine: Jacques Derrida and the Two Sources of Religion, Science, and the Media (Fordham University Press, 2012). He is currently completing a book on Derrida’s final seminars, The Beast and the Sovereign. He has translated numerous books by Derrida and is the coeditor of Derrida’s The Work of Mourning (University of Chicago Press, 2000) and Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde (Galilée, 2004). He is also coeditor of Oxford Literary Review. j u d i t h r e v e l is professor of contemporary philosophy at the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense. Her numerous works on Foucault include Michel Foucault: Expériences de la pensée (Bordas, 2005), Foucault, une pensée du discontinu (Fayard/Mille et une nuits, 2010), Dictionnaire Foucault (Ellipses, 2009), Foucault avec Merleau-Ponty Ontologiepolitique, présentisme et histoire (Vrin, 2015), and the forthcoming work Une controverse philosophique: Foucault, Derrida et “l’affaire Descartes.” She is also the author of Qui a peur de la banlieue? (Bayard Jeunesse, 2008) and of a number of essays that have appeared in English translation. She coedited Michel Foucault, la littérature et les arts: Actes du colloque de Cerisy with Philippe Artières, Frédéric Gros, and Françoise Gaillard (Kimé, 2001). She is a member of the Sophiapol lab and of the bureau scientifique of the Centre Michel Foucault. r o b e rt t r u m b u l l is a lecturer in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington, Bothell. He received his PhD from the History of Consciousness program (with a specialization in philosophy) at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2012. His work has appeared in Derrida Today and Philosophy Today.”

index

Abgrund, 45 abolitionism, death penalty, 57–58, 168–70; gendering of biopolitical principles of life, 174–75 Adorno, Theodor, 118n4, 119n9 Allen, Amy, 73, 77–78n5 Alquié, Ferdinand, 16, 18 “always already” structure, 196, 205, 210, 217 anesthetization, 169–72 The Animal That Therefore I Am (Derrida), xix, 190–98; historical specificity, 193–94, 198 anthropological paradigm, 94, 102nn41, 42 apperception, 85–86 archaeology, xix, 64–67, 72, 103n45; object of, 127; of silence, 23, 27, 82, 89, 107–8, 128 The Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault), 129, 181; historical a priori, 16, 26, 93–94 archives, 24–26, 30–31; of confinement, 29, 31–32; events leave traces in, 30, 36n9; Foucault as archival thinker, 30–34; of madness, 24–25; primary sources, 31–32; “text itself of,” 25, 31, 33, 34–35; as voice of captors, 31, 33 Austin, J. L., 8, 18 author function, 71 autoimmunity, 161, 163 Baudrillard, Jean, 63 Beccaria, Cesare, 170 Being, forgetting of, 12, 215 being-toward-death, 43

Bemächtigungstrieb (drive for mastery), 156–57 Bennington, Geoffrey, 60n4, 152 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud), xx, 152, 153, 156–60, 176 biopolitics, xx, 167: anesthetized death penalty and, 169–72; availability of women as “life,” 174–76; deconstruction and, 168–72; dispersed, 178–80; gendering of, 174–75. Breton, André, 18 Brown, Wendy, 167 calculability, xvii, 40, 42–45, 58; incalculable/noncalculable, 42–43, 44; madness and, 46–47 Campillo, Antonio, 166 Canguilhem, Georges, 20 capital punishment, 169–70, 195. See also death penalty Char, René, 30, 36n13 Chomsky, Noam, xi Cixous, Hélène, 166 classical age, 127–28, 217; rejection of madness, 3–4, 7, 10, 12, 90–91, 95–96, 103–4n50 cogitationes, 90 cogito: enabling function, 86–87, 90; hyperbolic, 9–12, 41, 45, 53–57, 83, 90– 92, 140; madness of, 29, 49–50, 140–41; origin of reason and, 50, 140–41; quasitranscendental inquiry and, 89–92; regimes of enunciation and, 17–18; selfgrasping of thought, 7, 17; valid even if mad, 11, 29–30, 35, 98n8, 140

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“Cogito and the History of Madness” (Derrida), xi–xii, xiv–xviii, 7–11, 21, 217; ahistoricity of philosophy, 126–27; assimilation of madness, 10–11; The Death Penalty and, 41–42, 44, 46–47; doubt and reason, 5, 9–11, 48–49; hyperbolic in, 9–12, 41, 45, 53–57; hyperbolic point (point de départ), 47– 50, 54–56, 58–59, 141; methodological critique of Foucault, 106–9; nonreading of Foucault encouraged by, 22–23, 28– 29; opening, 44, 60n4, 137; pedagogy in, 134–48; radicalization, 83–86, 90; sections, 65; teacher-student relation, 137–40, 143–45; transcendental question, xvi, 82–84, 89, 92, 96; versions, xxiiin1, 146n7, 147n11 colonialism, 171, 174–75, 179 commentary engine, 71 Conant, James, 85 conduct of conducts, 73 confession, 58 confinement: act of, 25–26, 30–33; as an act of ethical exclusion, 32–33; archives of, 29, 31–32; Great Confinement, 27, 32, 82, 96; madness and, 6, 11, 27 constative enunciation, 17–18 contingency, xvii, 77 The Courage of Truth (Foucault), xviii, 206, 210, 219nn9, 10 critique, 48, 65, 72, 82, 95, 102–3n45; as work of philosophy, 74–75. See also transcendental question cryptonormativity, 112 cynics, 210 death drive, xx, 156–61; social dimension, 157 death penalty, xvii–xviii, xix, 166–67, 190; abolitionism, 57–58, 168–70, 174–75; anesthetized, 169–72; biopolitical formations, 167–70; calculability, xvii, 40, 42–43; common claims with progress, 171; continuation by other means, 170–71; decision, xvii, 42–43, 55–57; dignity, concept of, 194, 195, 197;

index

disseminated analogy and dispersed biopolitics, 178–80; foundation for, 42; France abolishes, 168; game, theme of, 38–42, 46, 47–48; guillotine, 170–71, 195–97, 203n13; as history of insurances, 43–44; “humane,” 171, 197; hyperbolic moment, 41, 45, 46; as incalculable madness, 46–47; jeu de l’oie analogy, xviii, 38–39, 44; Kant’s theory, 46–47, 57, 197, 198, 203n7; lifelong imprisonments as alternative, 170; military contexts, 172; moment of death, 42, 55–56, 167; origin of, 191–98; phantasmatic and deconstructive aspects, 167, 169; as proper of man, 38–39; talionic law, 40, 42, 44, 45; theologico-political, 40, 41, 43, 169; transcendence and, 49, 57; United Nations stance, 172–73; United States, 170, 183n12, 195; visibility, 167; women as exceptions, 172–84 The Death Penalty (Derrida), 38–60; Volume 1, xvii, xx, 166–67, 169, 190–98; Volume 2, 38–40, 39, 42–47, 52, 55, 59n2; structural coherence of, 39 decision, 48; death penalty and, xvii, 42–43, 55–57; hyperbolic point, 51, 54, 58–59; sovereign, 41, 43, 45–46, 50, 169. See also Descartes, René deconstruction, 8, 52, 59, 64–65, 76, 103n46; of power, 162–63; of teletechnology, 166–67; unconditional rationalism, 114–15 Deleuze, Gilles, 63 democracy, 189, 202, 210 democracy to come, 114–15 Derrida (Peeters), xii, 204n15 Derrida, Jacques, works: The Animal That Therefore I Am, xix, 190–98; The Beast and the Sovereign, 168, 181, 184n23, 205; death penalty seminar, 167, 190–98; Echographies, 166; “Force and Signification,” 201; “The Force of Law,” 41, 46, 114; Of Grammatology, 59, 71, 88, 98n11, 134–35, 147n12; Margins of Philosophy, 74; “Psychoanalysis Searches

index

the Statés of Its Soul,” 58; Politics of Friendship, 174, 178; The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, 157, 165n10; Resistances, xx; Rogues, 41, 46, 114; Speech and Phenomena, 88, 89; “The Ends of Man,” 99n14; “Tympan,” 73–75; For What Tomorrow . . . (with Roudinesco), 40, 43, 57; Writing and Difference, 7, 201. See also “Cogito and the History of Madness” (Derrida); The Death Penalty (Derrida); “‘To Do Justice to Freud’” Der Satz vom Grund (Heidegger), 52 Descartes, René, xiii; certainty, 5–6, 9–11, 16, 33, 91; decision to exclude madness, 6–8, 19, 47, 65, 73, 82, 90, 98n8, 103n49, 103–4n50; feigns voice of nonphilosopher, 135, 139; gap between saying and doing, 7–8; pedagogical moment, 139; pivotal in death penalty analysis, 191–93, 196–98; skepticism, 85–86. See also cogito; hyperbolic point (point de départ); Metaphysical Meditations (Descartes) Deschauffours, Etienne Benjamin, 33, 34 deviance, disciplinary production of, 23, 24 dialectics, 51, 66–68, 142 Dictionnaire philosophique (Voltaire), 33 Diderot, Denis, 23, 34 différance, 31, 58, 59, 86–87, 98n12, 178 dignity, 38, 194, 195, 197 Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 34, 168, 177 discontinuity, 36n11, 127, 193 discourse: analytics of, 71–72; ontology of, 212–13 discursive events, 16, 18 dislocation, 162–63, 164n3 dispositifs, 177, 217 doubt, 29, 65, 90, 91; excluded from madness, 14–16, 19; reason and, 5, 9–11, 48–49 dreams: adapted to meditation, 18–19; in Derrida’s analysis, 9, 139, 140; in Foucault’s analysis, 4–6; as hyperbolical exasperation of madness, 9–10; reason and, 9, 14–15, 19

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drive for mastery, xx, 152–63: Bemächtigungstrieb, 156–57; compromised, 159, 160–61, 162. See also death drive; power Duc of Luynes, 4, 14 Eastwood, Clint, 166–67 Ecrits sur la peine de mort (Hugo), 171 effects of critique, 125, 129–32 Eighth Amendment, 170 empirical, xv–xvi, 81, 86–89, 92–94, 102n42, 196 Enlightenment, 116 enunciation, regimes of, 16–20 enunciative position, 215–16, 219n13 epekeina tes ousias (Good beyond Being), 51, 142 episteme, 130, 217 epistemological frameworks, 188–89 epochs, 51–52, 93, 127–28 evil genius, 10–11, 19, 47, 91, 103n49, 140, 219n7 exclusion: confinement as an act of ethical, 32–33; juridical, 15–16, 24, 29–31, 35, 36n8; of madness, 6–8, 19, 47, 65, 73, 82, 90, 98n8, 103n49, 103–4n50; practical experience of, 29–30 Farge, Arlette, 130 Files (Vismann), 75–76 flattery, 208–9, 213 Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Foucault), xxiiin1, 21. See also History of Madness (Foucault) forgetting of Being, 12, 215 For What Tomorrow . . . (Derrida and Roudinesco), 40, 43, 57 Foucault, Michel, works: The Archaeology of Knowledge, 16, 26, 93–94, 129, 181; Birth of the Clinic, xv; Collège de France seminars, xii, xviii, 68, 71, 74, 131, 206–7; The Courage of Truth, xviii, 206, 210, 219nn9, 10; Le désordre des familles, 130; Discipline and Punish, 34, 168, 177; “The Discourse on Language,” 16; The Government of Self

228

Foucault (continued) and Others, xviii, 206, 209–16; The Hermeneutics of the Subject, xviii, 17, 206–9, 218n6; Les Mots et les choses, 93, 201; “Lives of Infamous Men,” 21; “My Body, This Paper, This Fire,” xi, 13–20, 23, 29, 36n5, 69, 70–73, 132n2, 133–35, 144–45; “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 67, 68–69, 101n38; “The Order of Discourse,” 71; Pierre Rivière, 130, 131; Psychiatric Power, 72; “Reply to Derrida,” 69–70, 92, 97n1, 125–26, 135–36; Society Must Be Defended, 171; “Structuralist Philosophy Allows Us to Diagnose What ‘Today’ Is,” 130; The Use of Pleasure, 216; “What Is Enlightenment?,” 75, 102–3n45. See also archaeology; genealogy; History of Madness (Foucault); The History of Sexuality (Foucault) “Foucault and Derrida: The History of a Debate” (Campillo), 166 Frankfurt School, 63, 106, 115–16, 118, 118–19n4 fraternity, 178, 179 freedom, xvii, 75, 76–77, 95, 117 French Revolution, 34, 178, 195 French theory, 63–64, 77, 128, 136 Freud, Sigmund, xx, 168, 216; activation in Derrida, 152; Foucault’s ambivalence toward, 151–52; “sociological” writings, 157 —Works: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, xx, 152, 153, 156–60, 176; Civilization and Its Discontents, 158; “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” 158 Frow, John, 28 Fureur et mystère (Furor and Mystery) (Char), 30 Furman v. Georgia, 170 gaze, 3–4 genealogy, 22, 25, 64–65, 67, 130–31; in The History of Sexuality, 154; law studies, 75–76; metaphysics, renunciation of, 68, 70–73, 75, 103n45; of philosophers, 130; problematization, 153, 156, 161–62

index

General Hospital (Hôpital Général), xiii, 4, 13, 16, 31–32 Good beyond Being (epekeina tes ousias), 51, 142 Gordon, Colin, 22, 27, 29, 35 The Government of Self and Others (Foucault), xviii, 206, 209–16 grammatology, 8, 71 ground, xviii; founding of state, 45–46; of meaning and nonmeaning, 24, 52, 82– 83, 89–90, 99n15; of reason, 41, 45–46 Gueroult, Martial, 16 guillotine, 170–71, 195–97, 203n13 Habermas, Jürgen, xvi–xvii, 63, 105–6; critique of Foucault, 109–13; Derrida, convergence with, 105–7, 109–10, 113– 18; Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 106, 109–13 Hacking, Ian, 29, 30 Hägglund, Martin, 99n17 Hegel, G. W. F., 34, 66–67, 77–78n5, 137 Heidegger, Martin, 12, 84, 205–6, 213, 215, 219n8; Der Satz vom Grund, 52; Principle of Reason, 42, 43, 44, 47 The Hermeneutics of the Subject (Foucault), xviii, 17, 206–9, 218n6 Hintikka, Jaakko, 18 historical a priori, xvi, 16, 26, 101–2n39, 102n44, 217; immanent critique and, 111, 117; transcendental transformation and, 81, 93–94, 97n5, 102nn40, 42 historical ensemble, 31, 34 historical ontology, 111 historical structure, 12, 143, 147n8, 217; effects of critique and, 126, 130–31; epistemic terms, 25–26; hyperbolic project and, 49–50, 52–56, 92 historicity, 12, 50–52, 55–59, 109; Foucault’s defense, 125–26; history of, 50–52, 109, 119n8; of philosophy, 52, 92, 126–27, 143, 217; of reason, 109, 114; transcendental, 88, 92–95 history: confinement, act of, 25–26, 30–33; epochs, 51–52, 93, 127–28; exceeding, 41, 49–51, 55–59; of historicity, 50–52, 109, 119n8; of human sciences, 110–13,

index

130; of knowledge, 24–26, 28–29, 91–92; of “madness itself ,” 23–33, 36n4, 48, 53, 73, 107–8; margins, writing from, 25–27, 30; of meditation, 17; object of analysis, 153; opening to, 50–52, 54, 57; origin of, 12, 49–54, 58, 109; of philosophy, xi, xix, 51–52, 58, 64, 67–68, 130–31, 193, 215; philosophy as prerequisite for, 68–70, 73; philosophy opposed to, 125–26; possibility of, 50–51, 82, 104n51, 109; of present, xix, 129–31; of reason and unreason, 82–83; textualization and, 73 history of madness: inclusion, 56; jeu de l’oie in, 52–53; possibility of writing, 29, 48–52, 54, 57, 152; structuralist totalitarianism, 28, 55–56, 143 History of Madness (Foucault), xi–xii, 21–37; 1961 preface, 23–37; 1972 edition, 13, 36n5, 37n21, 129; 2006 English translation, xii, 22; “The Correctional World,” 32; Derrida’s methodological critique, 107–9; as Derrida’s point of departure, 23, 48; “dissension of logos” reading, 108–9; elisions, 22–23; “The Great Confinement,” 4, 23, 27, 32, 37n27, 56; Habermas’s critique, 109–13; as immanent critique of reason, 116–17; jeu de l’oie in, 52–53; madness excluded from reason, xiii, 4–7, 27–28, 65; nonreading of, 22–23, 28–29, 34–35; primary sources in Annexes, 31–32; as radical critique of reason, 106, 110, 112–13, 116; rationality, forms of, 115–16; reading today, 23–29; “romantic motif ,” 106, 110, 112–13, 117, 121n24; sexual take on, 23–24; as superficial regarding interiority, 69–70; thirtieth anniversary, xxiiin, 151; as totalitarian, 28, 35, 42, 54– 56, 143; transcendental question and, 80–83, 95–97. See also Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Foucault); Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (Foucault); “My Body, This Paper, This Fire” (Foucault); “Reply to Derrida” (Foucault)

229

The History of Sexuality (Foucault), xv, xx, 23–24, 34, 153, 168; operations of power in, 154–56; responsibilization of couples, 176–77, 181, 184n17; spiral of pleasure and power, 155–56, 159–60, 164–65n7 homosexual, modern liberation of, 34 Huffer, Lynne, 73, 77n5 Hugo, Victor, 171–75, 177–78, 183n10; “true birth,” 179–80 human sciences, 81, 169–70; history of, 110–13, 130 Husserl, Edmund, 88–89, 145, 188 hyperbole, xiv, xvii, 217; cogito and, 9–12, 41, 45, 53–57, 83, 90–92, 140; exasperation of madness, 9–12, 15, 18; reason and the death penalty, 41, 45, 46; reconstruction of rational order, 90–91; violence, relationship to, 54–55, 59 hyperbolic movement, 140–43, 147n11 hyperbolic point (point de départ, zero point), 47–52, 54–57, 140–41, 145, 147n11; decision and, 51, 54, 58–59; reconstruction of rational order, 90–91 Ich denke (I think), 85 ideality, 88 immanence, xv, xvi–xvii; in critique of reason, 106, 113–17; Derrida’s critique of Foucault, 107–9; Habermas’s critique of Foucault, 109–13; historical a priori and, 111, 117; of power, 154 Irigaray, Luce, 183n14 “Jacques Derrida: Le déconstructeur” (Le Monde), 133–34; jeu de l’oie, xviii, 38–39, 44, 57; in History of Madness, 52–53; opening moves, 50, 52 juridical exclusion, 15–16, 24, 29–31, 35, 36n8 Kant, Immanuel, 10, 38, 85–86, 194; death penalty theory, 46–47, 57, 197, 198, 203n7 —Works: Anthropology, 102n41; What Is Enlightenment?, 215 Khalfa, Jean, 22

230

Kierkegaard, Søren, 44, 50, 60n4 knowledge: formation of, 69; ground of, 24, 82–83; history of, 24–26, 28–29, 91–92; philosophy, relation with, 126, 135, 136 Koopman, Colin, 105, 118n3 language: philosophy and, 71–72, 141–43; of reason, 107–8, 110, 117 law: death penalty and, 40, 42, 44–45, 53, 57; limits and, 75–76 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 43 Levinas, Emmanuel, 147n10 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 75 lexis, 207–9 Libération, 168 life, 56, 89, 101n33 life drives, 157, 159, 160 life insurance, 43–44 limits, 75–77, 82; of philosophy, 66, 73–75 logos: “dissension of logos” methodology, 27, 108–9; parrhēsia and, 207–9 Louis XIV, 32 Lyotard, Jean-François, 63 Mad for Foucault (Huffer), 23 madness: archival force of, 24–25; calculability and, 46–47; classical rejection of, 3–4, 7, 10, 12, 90–91, 95–96, 103–4n50; of cogito, 29, 49–50, 140–41; confinement, 6, 11, 27; as corporeally determined, 4, 5, 11; as danger to reason, 4–6, 9–11; Descartes’s decision to exclude, 6–8, 19, 47, 65, 73, 82, 98n8, 103n49, 103–4n50; doubt excluded from, 14–16, 19; evil genius, 10–11, 19, 47, 91, 103n49, 140, 219n7; excluded from reason, xiii, 4–7, 16, 19, 27–28, 65; exclusion not necessary, 140; hyperbolic exasperation of, 9–12, 15, 18; juridical exclusion, 15–16, 24, 29–31, 35, 36n8; “madness itself ,” 23–33, 36n4, 48, 53, 73, 107–8; as non-thought, 4–7, 19; philosophy, quarrel with, 65–66; of reason, xvii–xviii, 12, 20, 48–49, 52–53; romantic conception of refuted,

index

22, 24, 30, 35, 121n24; sexuality linked with, 24, 32–33; silence/silencing of, 23–24, 27, 53–54, 56, 82, 188; singularity of, 14; sovereign decision as, 50; total derangement, 10–11, 47; validity of cogito, 11, 29–30, 35, 98n8, 140; writing history of, 23. See also unreason Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (Foucault), xxi–xxii(n1), 22–25. See also History of Madness (Foucault) marginalization, 188–90 margins, 25–27, 30 Marxism and Literary History (Frow), 28 materialization, of exclusion, 3–4, 30, 35 maternity, pseudoliteral, 178, 179 McNay, Lois, 27, 29 meaning and nonmeaning, xviii, 49, 55–56, 127; common root of, 24, 52, 82–83, 89–90, 99n15 media technologies, 75–76 meditation: as mode of discourse, 16–19; as pedagogy, 135 Megill, Alan, 28–29 Metaphysical Meditations (Descartes), xiii, 4–17, 47, 48, 64; meditation as mode of discourse, 16–19; as pedagogical project, 135; violence started by, 191 metaphysics, 120n12, 216; critique of Foucault as, 27–28, 35, 42, 67, 109, 143; genealogy renounces, 68, 70–73, 75, 103n45; history of, 114; pedagogy and, 72–73; philosophy as, 64–66; romanticism, 106, 109, 113, 117, 121n24; textualization and, 71–72. See also philosophy methodologies, xvii, xix–xx, 80; conjunction of Foucault and Derrida, 169–70, 180–81; deconstructive, 65; “dissension of logos,” 27, 108–9; Foucauldian paradoxes, 111–13, 116–17; Hegelian, 66–67; substitutions, 111–12; textualism, 71–72, 133 modernity, 64, 82; historical consciousness of, 110–11; Weberian understanding of, 105

index

Le Monde, 133–34, 145n1 “My Body, This Paper, This Fire” (Foucault), 23, 29, 36n5, 69, 70–73, 132n2; charge of petty pedagogy and, 133–35, 144–45; madness and dream debate, 13–20 Naas, Michael, 152 naïveté, 8, 69, 88, 94, 102n41, 126, 136 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xiii, 3, 13, 130 “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (Foucault), 67, 68–69, 101n38 normative transcendence, 114–15 normative validity, 111–14 Of Grammatology (Derrida), 59, 71, 88, 98n11, 134–35, 147n12 On Crimes and Punishments (Beccaria), 170 ontology, 111, 129; of truth/s, 212–13, 216–17 oppositions/binaries, 58 The Order of Things (Foucault), xv, 101n37, 104n52, 131n1, 181 origin: of death penalty, 191–98; etiological question, 67; of history, 12, 49–54, 58, 109; “more originary,” 83–84, 92, 98n12, 126, 136, 159; of reason, 58, 140–41; repetition of, 136–37 original presence, 27–28, 84, 89–90, 109 Origin of Geometry (Husserl), 88, 145, 188 Paideia, 135 parrhēsia, xviii, 206; flattery as enemy of, 208–9; “good” and “bad,” 210; logos and, 207–8; politics, relation with, 209–10; quasi-rhetorical dimension, 209. See also truth/s Pascal, Blaise, 7–8 pedagogy, xiv: conformity to tradition, 138–40, 144; master-slave dialectic, 137; metaphysics and, 72–73; petty, Foucault’s charge of, 133–37, 144–45, 145n1; teacher-student relation, 137–40, 143–45, 146nn3, 4, 5, 6, 148n13; textualization, 71–73, 133 Peeters, Benoît, xii, 204n15 penal system, 43, 168–70

231

Pensées (Pascal), 7–8 perception, 85–86 performative contradiction, xvi–xvii, 105–9, 112–13, 116–17, 120n12 performative enunciation, 17–18 Petites-Maisons, 32, 34 Phaedrus (Plato), 214 pharmakon, xiv, 10–11 phenomenology, transcendental, 89, 90, 93 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 34, 67 Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Habermas), 106, 109–13 philosophy: archives vs., 30–31; assault on standard assumptions of, 63; as avoidable, 68; critique as work of, 74–75; as discursive determination, 65; everything anticipated or enveloped by, 126; exclusions exterior to discourse, 73; historicity of, 52, 92, 126–27, 143, 217; history, opposition to, 125–26; history of, xi, xix, 51–52, 58, 64, 67–68, 130–31, 193, 215; history opposed to, 125–26; hyperbolic movement, 140–43, 147n11; knowledge, relation with, 126, 135, 136; language and, 71–72, 142–43; limits of, 66, 73–75; as metaphysics, 64–66; as obligatory prerequisite, 64, 68–70, 72– 74; pedagogy and, xiv, 71–73; politics, relation to, 210–11, 215; quarrel with madness, 65–66; residue of, 64–65; rhetoric, relation to, 207–8, 212–17; textualization, 71–74; three postulates, 69; transhistorical dimension, 11–12; as universal criticism, 128, 136; violence, relationship to, 58. See also metaphysics; possibility, conditions for Plato, 210–11, 212, 213–14; The Republic, 11–12 Platonic stance, 206, 210–16 pleasure, 154–56; Bemächtigungstrieb, 156–57; death drive, xx, 156–61; drive duality, 159–60; life drives, 157, 159, 160; spiral with power, 155–56, 159–60, 164–65n7 Politics of Friendship (Derrida), 174, 178 poor, confinement of, 32

index

232

positivism, 3, 20, 97n3, 104n50, 126; “happy,” 81, 93 possibility, 104n50; of history itself, 50–51, 82, 104n51, 109; Kantian view, 85–86; of unreason, 103n49, 104n50; of writing history of madness, 29, 48–52, 54, 57, 152 possibility, conditions for, 69–70, 80–84, 100nn23, 25, 104nn50, 51; complicating, 92–93; conditions of impossibility, 87, 90; form of conditioning, 85; power, critique of, 162–63; radicalization of understanding, 84–86; violence, 194 poststructuralism, 63–64, 106, 118 power, 72–73; death drive, xx, 156–61; deconstruction of, 162–63; destabilized, 161; dispersed character of, 178–80; drive duality, 159–61; escape, theme of, 111–12; in Freud, 151–52; Habermas’s critique of Foucault, 111–13; immanence of, 154; as irreducible, 153, 156, 157–58; philosophy tells truth to, 210–11; pleasure, relation with, 154–55; problematization of, 159–60; rationalization and, 115; spiral with pleasure, 155–56, 159–60, 164–65n7 Prenowitz, Eric, 166 present, history of, xix, 129–31 presentism, 112, 113 Principle of Reason (Heidegger), 42, 43, 44, 47 problematization, 153, 156, 159, 161–62 progressive claims, 168–71, 174 proper of man, xvii; death penalty as, 38– 39; game comparison, 38–41, 44, 46 psychoanalysis, xx, 3, 98n7, 151–52, 155 Quintilian, 211 Rameau’s Nephew (Diderot), 23, 34 ratio, 7, 24–25 rationality: contamination by madness, 10– 11; development of classical, 3–4; order of, 90–91; philosophy, relation with, 126; political, 211; reason distinguished

from, xvi–xvii, 115–16, 118–19n4; unconditional rationalism, 114–15 reading, xiv, xviii, 8–9, 216–17 reason: calculability, 40–41, 42–45; critique, project of, 105–6; death penalty and, 40–43, 45, 46; division reason/unreason, 127–30; doubt within, 5, 9–11, 48–49; dreams and, 9, 14–15, 19; ground of, 41, 45–46; history of, 82–83; historicity of, 109, 114; immanent critique of, xvi, 106, 113–17; language of, 107–8, 110, 117; madness as danger to, 4–6, 9–11; madness excluded from, xiii, 4–7, 16, 19, 27–28, 65; madness of, xvii–xviii, 12, 20, 29–30, 48–49, 52–53; opposition to as within space of, 66; origin of, 58, 140–41; principle of, 40–41, 43, 44, 58; radical critique of, 106, 110, 112–13, 116; rationality, distinguished from, xvi–xvii, 115–16, 118–19n4; totality of, 142–43; transcendence of, 106, 113–17; unconditionality within, 113–15; violence of, 30, 35; without reason, 45, 54. See also unreason Reik, Theodor, 58 relativism, 112–13 “Reply to Derrida” (Foucault), 69–70, 92, 97n1, 125–26, 135–36 repressive hypothesis, 34, 154 reproduction, xx, 176; dispersed power and, 178–80; “true birth” (of collective futures), 179–81 The Republic (Plato), 11–12 reserves of Derrida and Foucault, 180–81 rhetoric, 206–8; philosophy, relation to, 207–8, 212–17; as technical adversary, 207–9; veridiction, 211–15 Ricoeur, Paul, 145 Rivière, Pierre, 131 Rogues (Derrida), 41, 46, 114 Rorty, Richard, 63 Roudinesco, Elisabeth, 40 sadism and masochism, 158 Said, Edward, 145–46n2 Searle, John, 8, 18

index

233

Setton, Dirk, 98–99n13 sexuality, 23–24, 154–55; madness linked with, 24, 32–33; put into discourse, 24, 34 silence, 51; archaeology of, 23, 27, 82, 89, 107–8, 128; juridical violence, 24, 29; of madness, 23–24, 27, 53–54, 56, 82, 188; silencing, as violence, 188–89, 191–92, 199–200, 202 skepticism, 85–87, 100n27 Socrates, 51, 142, 194 sodomy, 33, 34 Sollers, Philippe, 133 sovereign decision, 41, 43, 45–46, 50, 169 sovereignty: deconstructive critique, 163; hypersovereignty, 58; of philosophers, 135, 137; power of execution, 167, 169; in teacher-student relation, 143, 144–45, 146n4; theologico-political, 40, 41, 43, 169; umbilical cord trope, 166–67, 181 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 29 state, founding of, 45–46 structuralism, 129, 131–32n1; totalitarianism, 28, 55–56, 143 “Structuralist Philosophy Allows Us to Diagnose What ‘Today’ Is” (Foucault), 130 structure, 127; finite, 39, 52, 92, 99n17, 142–43, 217–18; historical, 12, 25–26, 49–50, 52–56, 92, 126, 130–31, 143, 147n8, 217 subject, xvii, xx, 44, 190; practical experience of exclusion, 29–30; of truths, 6, 16–18 success and failure, 87–88, 93 “Suzerain” (“Lord”) (Char), 30

thought: inside and outside orders of, 4, 6, 18–19, 20, 59; self-grasping of, 7, 17 Tieferlegung (descending the level), 83–84, 92 “‘To Do Justice to Freud’” (Derrida), xi, 23, 216, 220n14; power and drive to mastery, 151–55, 159–63; women and death penalty, 166, 168, 176, 181–82 totalitarianism, 120n12; of historicizing approach, 35, 54–56, 126–27; structuralist, 28, 55–56, 143 totality of reason, 142–43 trace, 59, 72 transcendence, xv, xvi, 105–21; death penalty and, 49, 57; normative, 114–15; of reason, 106, 113–15, 113–17 transcendental, the, 98n6: empirical and, xv–xvi, 81, 86–89, 92–94, 102n42, 196; historicization of, 88, 93–95; violence toward, 57 transcendental question, xv–xvi, 80–104; context-dependent, 89; descending the level, 83–84, 92; material interventions, 95; quasi-transcendental inquiry, 89–92, 98–99n13, 99n17; success and failure of possibility, 87–88, 93; ultratranscendental inquiry, 84, 88–89, 98–99n13, 99n17; understanding transformation of, 83–89; unreason and, 82–83, 89–91, 95–97 True Crime (movie), 166–67 truth/s, 5–6, 85, 207–8; of cognitions, 85; dire-vrai vs. vérité, 211; ontology of, 212–13, 216–17; politics and, 210–11; speaking, 210–16; subject of, 6, 16–18; veridiction, 211–13. See also parrhēsia

talionic law, 40, 42, 44, 45, 47 telephone, 166–67 teletechnologies, 166–67 temporality, 197, 203n10; imposed on materiality, 26–27; moment of death, 42, 55–56, 167 text: pedagogy and, 135–37; as physical object, 134–35 textualization, 71–74, 133 theologico-political, 40, 41, 43, 169

ultratranscendental inquiry, 84, 88–89, 100n22; quasi-transcendental inquiry and, 89–92, 98–99n13, 99n17 umbilical cord: linking execution to sovereign, 166–67, 181; women as, 175, 181 unconditionality, 113–15 United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, article 6, 172–73

2 34

United States, death penalty, 170, 183n12, 195 unity, original, 27–28, 84, 89–90, 109 universality, 4, 9, 10, 102–3n45 unreason, xiii, 4–7, 19, 34, 36n8, 47–49; as absence of work, 91; division reason/ unreason, 127–30; freedom and, 117; as Other, 4, 9; possibility of, 103n49, 103– 4n50; in transcendental inquiry, 82–83, 89–91, 95–97. See also madness; reason unthought, 7, 19, 152 validity: of cogito, 11, 29–30, 35, 98n8, 140; normative, 111–14 veridiction, 211–16 violence, xvii–xviii; against animals, 193– 94; Descartes as pivot, 191–93, 196–98; hyperbole, relationship to, 54–55, 59; juridical, 24, 29–31, 35; philosophy’s relationship to, 57–58; of reason, 30, 35; silencing as, 188–89, 191–92, 199–200,

index

202; sovereign decision, 45–46; “totalitarian and historicist style,” 35, 54–56 Vismann, Cornelia, 75–76 Voltaire, 33 war, right to wage, 170 What Is Enlightenment? (Kant), 215 “What Is Enlightenment?” (Foucault), 75, 102–3n45 women, death penalty and, 166, 168; availability of as “life,” 174–76; “biologico-moral responsibility,” 176–77, 181, 184n17; as death penalty exceptions, 172–74; execution of as death of future, 177; literal and analogical reproduction, 175–80; national health and, 177–79 zero point. See hyperbolic point (point de départ, zero point)