ANGELAKI

journa l of the the oretical humani tie s v olum e 5 numbe r 2 augus t 2000

ichel Foucault and Jacques Derrida are the two authors to whom we most frequently refer in order to characterize a certain orientation of contemporary thought usually called poststructuralist or postmodern. What do these two authors have in common? Following on the heels of Nietzsche and Heidegger, both have tried to rethink the irreducible historicity of thought and, in a more general way, the irreducible temporality of experience. This has led them to question radically the presuppositions that governed the unfolding of the two great contemporary branches of modern culture: the positivism of the Anglo-American tradition and the idealism of the Franco-German tradition. In the face of both traditions, Foucault and Derrida tried to show that neither empirical objectivity nor transcendental subjectivity can be postulated with a greater chance of success as far as language is concerned, since language is the limit and the horizon of all possible experience. Now, since the ideal and general code of langue is inseparable from the empirical and singular event of parole to use the already classical terms of Ferdinand de Saussure it is not language but rather languages that are given. There is no universal language, either given or acquired once and for all that guarantees men a certain representation of the real and a trustworthy communication among themselves. Rather, there is a constant diversification of idioms, an endless series of speech events or, to use a famous expression of Wittgenstein, an aleatory criss-crossing of distinct language games. This is to say that the meaning of such language games is condemned to an incessant dissemination, and to an infinite chain of interpretations, so that the intelligibility of a discourse, of a text, or of a mark whatsoever, cannot be either grounded on an objectively given world, on a presupposed transcendental consciousness, on a primary origin (anterior to, and independent from, the

antonio campillo FOUCAULT AND DERRIDA the history of a debate on histor y 1

very flow of discourse) or on an ultimate end (towards which this flow would be destined teleologically). We have here the irreducible historicity or temporality to which every language, every thinking and every experience are inevitably referred. Nevertheless, the differences between Foucault and Derrida begin when we try to determine the manner in which this historicity affects the authors texts and particularly the philosophical texts which are characterized by their vocation to universality and endurance, that is, by their claim to transcend all historical determinations. The differences begin when we try to determine the manner in which these texts have to be read, quoted, interpreted and appropriated. They begin when we try to determine whether this appropriation is an act of justice or of violence, whether it forms a part of legacy or of a conflict. The differences begin, therefore, when we try to

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/00/020113-23 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd and the Editors of Angelaki DOI: 10.1080/09697250020012232

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determine the response and the responsibility with which the reader must face, with his own writing and with his own authorial name, the writing and the name of other authors. Finally, the differences begin with the very problem of the difference between texts and authors as a moral problem. Given all this, the intellectual differences between Foucault and Derrida are in no way separable from their different moral responses, towards others or towards the discourse and the name of others; in particular, they are not separable from their mutual, personal differences, from their encounters and separations, from the way in which each one of them tried to respond to the words and the name of the other. These differences initiated a debate between them, the path of which we are going to reconstruct in what follows. This is a dramatic and strange debate, interspersed with long silences a debate that has been kept alive during more than thirty years. Its last episode occurred long after the death of Foucault, as a commemoration of the beginning of the debate and as Derridas tribute to his interlocutor (both adversary and friend) who had already disappeared. This is not a mere dispute between two discourses, but rather a litigation involving two proper names (about another discourse and another proper name that of Descartes). dream or error [ ]. In the economy of doubt, there is a fundamental disequilibrium between madness, on the one hand, and dream or error, on the other. The situation of madness is sui generis in relation to truth and in relation to the one who seeks it. Dreams and illusions are overcome in the structure of truth; but madness is left excluded by the subject that doubts. Sensible error and the illusion of dreams can be overcome, because they affect what is talked about the object of thought but madness will in no way be overcome, because it affects the one who speaks the thinking subject. It is excluded, therefore, through a stroke of force, through a violent decision which, is a rupture between reason and madness and at the same time an exclusion of madness because I who think cannot be mad. Foucault thinks of this decision as an event, as a big historical novelty one that Montaigne still recognized that every thought will be cloaked in unreason. A dividing line has been drawn that would soon render impossible the experience so familiar during the Renaissance of an unreasonable reason and of a reasonable unreason. Between Montaigne and Descartes an event took place, something that had to do with the advent of one ratio the ratio precisely of modern rationalism. But this event, this advent of the one ratio does not concern only the history of philosophy or of ideas in general. As soon as Foucault established a structural correlation between the exclusion of madness, carried out in the Cartesian text, and the great confinement of the madmen, carried out by all European societies during the seventeenth century, the event was bound to be of interest also to the history of an entire society, the history of an entire age the age of modern science and politics. Once the confinement started, it went through two big phases: the classical age (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), during which madness is thought of, above all, as a moral disorder, as unreason, for the sake of which the madmen, along with other moral deviants and asocial types (beggars, perverts, blasphemers, libertines), will be confined and punished in general hospitals; and a second phase, the

I
In 1961, Foucault published the first of his great works The History of Madness in the Classical Age.2 He dedicated the first chapter Stultiferia Navis to the tragic experience of madness during the Renaissance; the second chapter told of the madmens Great Confinement that started in the seventeenth century. In the beginning of this chapter, and in only a few paragraphs, Foucault commented on the first book of Descartes Metaphysical Meditations, where Descartes speaks about the errors of the senses and about dream and madness, as so many obstacles to be overcome on the road of the doubt. According to Foucault, these obstacles are not of the same kind: Descartes did not escape the dangers of madness the way he escaped those of

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modern period (which starts at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century), during which madness is considered as a mental illness, for the sake of which the madmen are going to be separately incarcerated in psychiatric asylums, and subjected to constant observation and therapy in the hands of the new medico-psychiatric personages. Foucault would not admit that there is progress here; he rather thinks that there is occultation: under the mask of medical science, madness is still excluded and punished. Now, the madmen themselves a whole series of madmen of genius that have left us with a work that cannot easily be classified begun to question the rupture between reason and madness in the last century: Hlderlin, Nietzsche, Roussel, Artaud et al. It is precisely the work of these madmen of genius that opened the door to a new epoch of thought, and to a new experience of language: beginning with them, the wall separating reason and unreason collapsed, and among its ruins there arose the beginning of a linkage between madness and literature, the I of delirium and the I of the I write, the scream and the song. Thus, the Cartesian Cogito was challenged and the cycle opened by classical reason to include the confinement over which that reason was founded was now closed. According to Foucault, this new space made his own labor of writing possible, along with his own archaeology of knowledge and confinement, of reason and madness. Later on, Foucault will go on to inscribe his own name and his own discourse on this hereditary line of the family of these rebel madmen, in the historical and discursive domains opened by them. As for Freud, Foucault maintained in this book (and in general in all his historical studies) one manifest ambiguity: sometimes, he welcomed him as an heir of Nietzsche, and sometimes he condemned him as an heir of the medico-psychiatrists. Michel Foucault was present in it (having been invited by Derrida himself by means of a letter in which the latters enthusiasm as well as his disagreement were already anticipated).3 Derrida went on to confess his admiration, not only for the book, but even more so for the teaching of Foucault, of whom he considered himself an admiring and grateful disciple. Nevertheless, he proposed to engage in dialogue with the master and moreover to break the glass, or better the mirror, the reflection and the infinite speculation [of the disciple] on the master. Concretely, he went on to challenge Foucaults interpretation of the first book of the Cartesian Meditations. According to Derrida, the reading of Descartes and the Cartesian Cogito proposed to us engages in its problematic the totality of this History of Madness (CHM 32). In the sequence, Derrida tried to show:
l

That, on the road to the Cartesian doubt, the example of the dream is much more decisive and much more radical than the example of madness, when it comes to question the totality of the ideas of sensible origin. That the theme of madness is not treated properly at the moment of doubt (where it appears only rhetorically as a possible objection or accusation of a reader to the writer an objection to which the writer will answer, precisely, with the example of the dream). It is treated properly only later on, in the Evil Genius hypothesis, when the question bears also on the ideas of intelligible origin. But in this case the Cogito is not affirmed through the exclusion or the confinement of madness, but rather through the opposition between a determinate reason and a determinate madness now that the act of the Cogito is valid even if I am mad, even if the Evil Genius deceives me completely. That Descartes, at the moment of the Cogito, accedes to the zero point of thought, that is, to the point beyond the entire contradiction between reason and madness, beyond, therefore, the total configuration of reason that is historically determined. Therefore, this hyperbolic point of the doubt cannot be

II
On 4th March 1963, at the Collge Philosophique, Jacques Derrida gave a lecture entitled Cogito and the History of Madness;

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reduced, and confined inside a historical structure or totality (that, Derrida says, would be violence itself) whose peculiar historicity is an always already renewed opening an opening of the logos that exceeds every discursive determination.
l

That, finally, Foucault himself would not have been able to narrate as an event (and hence to problematize in a critical way) the exclusion of madness or the confinement and the silence to which it has been subjected by classical reason, if its problematization did not repeat, in a certain way, the radicalness of the Cartesian Cogito; that is, if he did not lean, thanks to his historical account, on this zero point itself, on this abysmal and transhistorical depth from which thought will try to think the totality that escapes it. And this, no matter how much this thought would always fall back again in it, no matter how much it would not be capable of being said, without betraying itself, without lapsing to a historically determined discursive configuration; this is what happened to Descartes, once he started on the road of the regress to certainty, that is, to the classical reason that has excluded and imprisoned the madmen. That the case of Descartes could not but exemplify the paradoxical status of philosophical discourse, finite and infinite, historical and transhistorical, reasonable and delirious. According to Derrida, the separation of reason from madness cannot, in the last analysis, be considered as a historical event. In the first place, because the separation between reason and madness, between language and silence, is the very condition of historicity and discourse, so that there cannot be a historical account of this separation which does not already presuppose it; neither a history of reason nor a history of madness is possible, except as a history of the successive forms of the relation and distribution of diverse figures of reason and madness. In the second place, because there is no reason which is not already traversed by madness, nor madness which is not already traversed by reason; so that pure reason and pure unreason are equally impos-

sible. It is not possible, therefore, to question reason from the standpoint of madness, from the standpoint of an absolute exterior; it is only possible to question reason from its own interior, having recourse to stratagem and strategy. The only thing left possible is to question a historically finite and determinate figure of reason, but the questioning has to be made from the proper instance of reason that is, from an instance, which is by itself, transhistorical, infinite, indeterminate and in a certain way, mad. On the other hand, to speak of the separation between reason and madness as a historical event will force us to presuppose an origin before the fall, that is a unitary logos anterior to the event of separation (such will be the case of the Greek logos), susceptible of being restored and re-established through the reconciliation of the divided and the inclusion of the excluded. This, said Derrida, is the old mythological and metaphysical image of reason, from which Foucault did not succeed in freeing himself in his History of Madness and to which he seems to be drawn in the very preface of this book (a preface which, by the way, Foucault omitted in the second edition.) Why did he omit it, since, at the same time, in an appendix to its second edition, he claimed to have refuted the criticism of his old disciple? Isnt the act itself of omitting the preface, in order to play down the arguments of this critique, a form of accepting it?4 But let us not get ahead of ourselves; let us instead proceed one step at a time.

III
Foucault did not engage Derrida after the 1963 lecture, nor did he engage him after the first publication of its text. Both maintained good relations and, in fact, during the 1960s, they participated together on the editorial board of the Critique of which Derrida would become a member in 1967. Foucault went on to reaffirm his ideas in various books and articles published during the decade. He did it, for example, in an essay published in 1964 under the title La folie, labsence doeuvre (soon after [in 1972] republished as the first appendix to the second

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edition of his History of Madness).5 In fact, the relation between madness and writing occupied a central place in his many studies published during the 1960s, beginning with his grand archaeological investigations on the birth of the human sciences and the institution of confinement (History of Madness, The Birth of the Clinic and The Order of Things) and extending into his short essays of literary criticism (above all, Raymond Roussel, and the essays published in the Critique). In both cases, Foucault tried to problematize the very boundary between knowledge and non-knowledge, reason and unreason, truth and fiction. In 1965, in an essay on Artaud, under the title, Le Parole souffl,6 Derrida, once more, challenged Foucaults point of view, trying to show that the alleged destructive or transgressive movement of delirious writing, to the extent that it claims to erase or annul the separation between writing and existence, between language and life, cannot but be re-inscribed in the metaphysical tradition of what it thought to have left behind, even if it is taken to its most extreme consequences. So that madness and metaphysics would be the two faces of the same logic and of the same delirium, consisting in negating or suppressing the literary as such, that is, the non-presence of sense in the actually given discourse its incessant deferral or dissemination.7 Throughout the 1970s, Foucault himself will abandon his transgressive conception of literature.8 According to the Foucault of The History of Sexuality, the first volume of which appeared in 1976, it is no longer possible to imagine an absolute exteriority with respect to the social order, a totally free experience, completely mad, that is, an experience in its wild state. No longer is there an inside and an outside which can be clearly differentiated, a pure order and a pure chaos, but only a multiplicity of powers and resistances whose battle lines never stop being displaced and reversed. For this reason, neither is there a language that would be intrinsically linked to power nor another language that belongs by right to the domain of resistance; rather, what is given is a tactical polyvalence of discourses. Well then, isnt this what Derrida said in his 1963 lecture, when he affirmed that reason cannot be questioned from the point of view of madness, from the point of view of an absolute exteriority, but rather that it can only be questioned, from the interior, by means of a recourse to stratagem and strategy? And, in a more general way, does not the tactical polyvalence of discourses resemble the difference that Derrida had discussed in 1968?

IV
In 1967, Derrida published Writing and Difference, a collection of essays in which he brought anew the text of the 1963 lecture. Foucault, it seems, did not welcome this edition happily, even though he sent Derrida a very friendly letter, expressing his gratitude for having been sent the volume. About the same time, the review Critique received an essay of Gerard Grannel in which there was praise for Derrida and critique for Foucault. The latter asked his colleague and friend to intervene to the board of the journal in order for the essay not to be published. Derrida, believed that he should not intervene one way or another and the journal decided to publish.9 From then on, the friendship between the two cooled off.10 A short time afterwards, Foucault started to discuss publicly the ideas of Derrida, and the first opportunity was a seminar held on 22nd February 1969 in the Socit Franaise de Philosophie, under the title What is an Author?11 Nevertheless, in this first public discussion, Foucault did not reply to the critique that Derrida had advanced in 1963, but he took instead into consideration other, later texts of his former disciple in which the latter was developing his own grammatological thought.12 Specifically, Foucault seems to have alluded to the text of a seminar that Derrida led at the Socit Franaise de Philosophie on 27th January 1968, one year before Foucault came to the same place and referred, without quoting it, to the same text. This is at least my suspicion.13 In view of the question What Is an Author? Foucaults argument is twofold. On the one hand, he tries to question the privileges that came to be granted to the figure of the author in the history of ideas, literature, philosophy, sciences and,

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finally, of writing. But, on the other hand, it is not enough to take the minutes of this death of the author. We have to locate the empty space left by this death the space marked by the name of the author. We have to question what is in an authors name and what functions does it carry inside the text. And this is precisely what Foucault proposes: to analyze the author-function, in relation to written discourses.14 Before beginning the analysis, Foucault takes a moment to denounce two notions that looked destined to be done with, once and for all, along with the privileges of the author, but which nevertheless did survive in a more or less open way. First, the notion of the work. Faced with the claims of various formalist critics and structuralist historians, busying themselves with the analysis of the internal form only or of the structure of the work (whether philosophical or literary) and dispensing with every genetic or biographical explication, Foucault asks what is a work, what gives it its organic unity, what allows it to group under a common heading a heterogeneous series of texts. The response is very simple: the proper name of its author. In the second place, the other notion that inherits and preserves the privileges of the author, the very moment that it appears to reject them, is the notion of writing. Foucault does not name Derrida but the allusion to his grammatological theory is unequivocal. The notion of writing, said Foucault, should allow not only to dispense with the reference to the author, but also to assign status to his new absence. In fact, the notion of writing, as currently employed, is concerned with neither the act of writing nor the indication be it a symptom or sign of a meaning that someone might have wanted to express. [On the contrary, the actual reflection] tri[es], with great effort, to imagine the general condition of each text, the condition of both the space in which it is dispersed and the time in which it unfolds (WIA 208). In my opinion, Foucault alludes here, very eloquently by the way, to the neologism (or neographism) of differance by means of which Derrida had wanted to generalize (and eo ipso to deconstruct) the classical concept of writing. Foucault alludes positively to the Derridean notion of writing, although, at the same time, fails to mention its author. Perhaps, it is because, as Beckett said, it is not important who speaks; or, perhaps, because it is much more important than Foucault was willing to recognize; or finally, because praise was immediately followed by criticism. Foucault asked himself whether this notion of writing seems to transpose the empirical characteristics of the author into a transcendental anonymity (WIA 208). On the one hand, the marks of the empirical author are being rubbed off; but, on the other, the two parallel and conflicting ways of characterizing him (critique and religion which assign respectively to the human creator, the philosophical or literary text and to the divine creator, the sacred text) still put him into play in order to characterize now the text itself.
Giving writing a primal status seems to be a way of retranslating, in transcendental terms, both the theological affirmation of its sacred character and the critical affirmation of its creative character. To admit that writing is, because of the very history that it made possible, subject to the test of oblivion and repression, seems to represent, in transcendental terms, the religious principle of the hidden meaning (which requires interpretation) and the critical principle of implicit significations, silent determinations, and obscured contents (which give rise to commentary). To imagine writing as absence seems to be a simple repetition, in transcendental terms, of both the religious principle of the works survival, its perpetuation beyond the authors death, and its enigmatic excess in relation to him. This usage of the notion of writing runs the risk of maintaining the authors privileges under the protection of the a priori. (WIA 20809)

This is risking to attribute a transcendental status to the notion of writing and this would constitute, in the eyes of Foucault, the decisive objection. Actually, his criticism of Derrida ended up with this question: (isnt there) an important dividing line between those who believe that they can still locate todays discontinuities [ruptures] in the historico-transcendental tradition of the nineteenth century and those who try to free themselves once and for all from that tradition [?] (WIA 209).

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In fact, for Foucault, the alternative which confronts contemporary philosophy (and to which Foucault did refer more specifically during that same year of 1969 in his introduction to the Archaeology of Knowledge) consists in adopting one of these two perspectives: either the point of view of a transcendental subject (for which history would not be but the movement of its self-constitution and the account of its selfconsciousness) or the point of view of an archaeological history (which would disregard the alleged identity of the subject in different and irreducible forms of experience, that is, which would negate all claims to universality and transcendental necessity of the a priori conditions of experience and would return them to a contingent historical diversity). The first road would still be dominated by the long shadow of Hegel, while the second would be illuminated by writers like Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. Well then, isnt Derrida a lot closer to the latter rather than to the former? Isnt his notion of writing referring to a historical pluralism rather than to a transcendental universalism? Or, perhaps, wouldnt the peculiar position of Derrida consist precisely in being situated at the limit, at the border, on the dividing lines which separate the two roads? Isnt this the risk that Foucault avoids and Derrida accepts? But what is the risk exactly? What is the difference between the historical pluralism of Foucault and that of Derrida? Perhaps, they meet each other, precisely, in the mode of confronting the difference, the plurality and the alterity of the other. Before facing the question, let us move on with the chronicle of the debate. Foucault, at last, replied to the criticisms that Derrida formulated in 1963.15 He made it clear in his new preface that he tr(ies) to challenge a notable critique of Derrida. Foucault sent Derrida a copy of his book and, in the dedication, he did apologize for answering him so late. Why so much delay in the reply? Why return to this distant critique after such a long time? According to Daniel Defert, the reply was written during Foucaults staying in Japan. The suggestion for writing it came from colleagues at Tokyo University that had invited him to give some lectures. As for the motive of writing it at that moment, it was no other than the spread of the Derridean thought in the Universities of the United States: deconstruction had begun to rival archaeology.16 The disciple was being transformed to a master, to another master and Foucault did not seem prepared to allow the discourse of his old friend to spread at the expense of his own. As far as he was concerned, the relation between the two discourses and even more so, between the two proper names did not seem capable to be thought as a friendly and peaceful dialogue, but rather as a conflict of two interpretations, as a relation of forces in conflict. Nine years had already gone by. These were intense and decisive years, during which Derrida elaborated his grammatology and Foucault, his archaeology (which was elaborated again according to the genealogical perspective of Nietzsche, in an important essay of 1971, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History). It was, then, in a sense, another Foucault who replied to Derrida, and another Derrida to whom Foucault replied. It is inevitable to speculate (no matter how nearly impossible it is to determine) on what each of them owed to the other in this becoming other of each one. Nevertheless, this other Foucault claimed to be still the same as before; at least, he claimed to continue to endorse the text of long ago in re-appropriating it, he would defend it against another who himself was transformed (against a reader who was already another writer, against a disciple who was already another master, but who, nevertheless, in re-editing his texts, he also seemed to continue being the same). Foucault aspires to maintain the text

V
The next episode of this debate took place three years later. In 1972, the second edition of The History of Madness appeared. Foucault omitted the preface of the previous edition and in its place he published a new and much shorter one in order to denounce the very institution of the preface as the first act that will prevent the institution of the monarchy of the author. Moreover, he added to the book two appendices that had been published earlier as separate essays. I already mentioned one of them. In the other,

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under his paternal tutelage under the monarchy of the author that he himself had denounced in his new preface. However, the language he uses is new: the notions that he puts into play were not present in his earlier book. Above all, the notion of the discursive event is new; it was coined by Foucault in the inaugural lecture that he gave to the Collge de France in 1970, under the title, The Order of Discourse.17 Foucaults reply did not echo the general objections that Derrida had raised against the historical relation between reason and madness; it limited itself to the debate of the exegesis of the first book of the Cartesian Metaphysical Meditations and to the re-affirmation of the difference of the treatment that dream and madness receive in this text. Foucaults main argument consisted in showing, one more time, that the dream hypothesis affects only the matter of the meditation, that is, the object and value of knowledge, and the truth of our most immediate sensory impressions (my body, this paper, this fire of which Descartes speaks) whereas the madness hypothesis affects the epistemological or medical characterization (insanus) and, above all, the social or juridical qualification (amens or demens) of the meditating subject. Foucault thinks that this disequilibrium between madness and dream is marked in Descartes text by a whole series of literary differences between the two paragraphs which are about the two hypotheses, and he is surprised that a reader as attentive as Derrida passes them over in silence. Foucault underlines, above all, what he calls discursive differences. Thus, to the signifying organization of the text (to which, according to him, the Derridean notion of writing and his own textual reading of the Cogito belong) Foucault opposes the recognition of the Cartesian meditation as a specific discursive practice, comprising a series of events which are nothing but the modifications of the subject by the very exercise of discourse. As we can see, Foucault has left behind the structuralist terminology to which he used to appeal in the 1960s and, instead, he is putting into play a pragmatic conception of discourse (of all discourse, whether oral or written). Any discourse, whatever it be, is constituted by a set of utterances which are produced each in its place and time, as so many discursive events (BPF 19). According to this new perspective, the Cartesian writing (and generally all writing) must be analyzed as practice, as an event, that is, as an act (or series of acts) of enunciation (or of inscription) the analysis of which would permit to determine, not only the sense of the utterance (or of the text), but also and above all the relation between the value of this utterance and the position of the subjects which utter it or receive it. There is now an effort to determine the position that the subjects maintain in relation to discourse, and also the position that, by means of discourse, the subjects maintain among themselves. It is this double position that Foucault wishes to establish very clearly in the Cartesian meditation, that is, that the claim to secure for the subject of discourse the right to enunciate an absolute truth did require the exclusion of the madmen as subjects of rights from all meaningful discourse. According to Foucault, we must pay attention to the very title of the meditation in order to analyze the discursive events which take place in it. In a demonstration, the utterances constitute events linked among themselves by means of formal rules, wherein the subject of discourse remains fixed and neutralized, being not affected by the demonstration. In a meditation, on the other hand, each discursive event entails a modification in the subject of discourse, a change of position or state. Descartes discourse, says Foucault, is a hybrid discourse, a demonstrative meditation, that is,
a set of discursive events which constitute at once groups of utterances linked one to another by formal rules of deduction, and series of modification of the enunciating subject which follow continuously one from another (so that) the utterances which are formally linked, modify the subject as they develop. (BPF 19)

One cannot read the Cartesian text without paying attention to this specific discursive practice. Foucault repeats the quoted passage of Descartes, this time in order to show the inter-

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section of the demonstrative and the ascetic plots, between system and exercise. Descartes begins with a systematic proposition: every truth received by the senses must be put to doubt. The examples of madness and the dream are not invoked, as Derrida believes, in order to generalize the doubt of every sensible knowledge, since this generalization has already been made; nor should it be thought, as Derrida claims, that these examples are mentioned by Descartes in order to reply to the objection of an imagined reader, more or less uncouth and nave. The resistance is generated from the very subject of discourse; there are sensible things about which we cannot rationally doubt. Why can we not? It is the impossibility of this subjects really effecting such a generalised doubt in the exercise which modifies him. Above all, it is not possible to pursue the doubt reasonably, by wanting to carry through this qualification rational which I brought into play at the very beginning of the meditations, presenting myself as a sufficiently mature mind, being free of cares and passions, being assured of a peaceful retreat.
The importance of the words being able to doubt completely in the fact that they mark the point of interaction of the two discursive forms that of the system and that of the exercise: at the level of ascetic discursivity, one cannot yet doubt rationally. It is thus this level which will control the following development, and what is involved in it is not the extent of doubtful things, but the status of the doubting subject, the qualificative elaboration which allows him to be at once all-doubting yet rational. (BPF 20) doubt by the subject who is currently meditating. Clearly, it is not certain things which in themselves (by their nature, their universality, their intelligibility) resist doubt but rather that which characterizes the actuality of the meditating subject (the place of his meditation, the gesture he is in the process of making, the sensations which strike him). If he really doubted all this system of actuality, would he still be rational? (BPF 21)

In order to break this resistance, Descartes has recourse to two examples which permit to put in doubt the system of my actuality: madness and dream. What is the difference between the two? Why is the dream preferable to madness? Why is madness a strong enough example that permits the subject to doubt, although, at the same time, it completely disqualifies it from being a meditating subject? The two qualifications doubting subject and meditating subject, are not in this case simultaneously possible:
That madness is posited as disqualificatory in any search for truth, that is not rational to call it up to carry out necessary doubt, that one cannot feign it even for a moment, that this impossibility is immediately obvious in the assignation of the term demens: this is indeed the decisive point at which Descartes parts company with all those for whom madness can be in one way or another the bringer or revealer of truth. (BPF 21)

The resistance comes from the subject of discourse and, because of it, the sensible things which cannot be rationally doubted are those vivid and near that concern the very act of enunciation, the singular event of inscription of the text, the entire system of actuality that characterizes this moment of my meditation (my body, this paper, this fire).
It is of the first importance that Descartes does not here involve the certainty that one may have in general of ones own body but rather everything which, at this precise instant of meditation, resists in fact the carrying out of

Derrida, according to Foucault, was not able to recognize this intersection of system and exercise, of demonstration and meditation, by means of which (or for the sake of which) madness is excluded as a dis-qualification of the meditating subject: by imagining that other nave objecting voice behind Descartes writing, Derrida has fudged all the texts differences. And, with that, he erased the radical difference between madness and dream. In acting this way, Derrida is continuing the Cartesian exclusion. Now, why did Derrida continue Descartes by distorting his text? Why did he repeat the exclusion of madness, by excluding that there is such an exclusion in the discourse of the Cogito? It is because it would reveal a historical determination of the philosophical discourse that Derrida opposes. Here, in very few lines, Foucault alludes

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to this trans-historical conception of philosophy that Derrida defended in his 1963 lecture:
For Descartes the meditating subject had to exclude madness by qualifying himself as not mad. And this exclusion is in its turn no doubt too dangerous for Derrida: no longer for the disqualification with which it threatens the philosophising subject, but for the qualification with which it would mark philosophical discourse; it would indeed determine it as other than the discourse of madness; it would establish between them a relationship of exteriority; it would send philosophical discourse across to the other side, into the pure presumption of not being mad. Separation, exteriority, a determination from which the philosophers discourse must indeed be saved if it is to be a project for exceeding every finite and determinate totality: this Cartesian exclusion must then be excluded because it is determining. (BPF 24)

tualization of sense, not only leaves outside of the analysis the historical contexts of the inscription of discourse and especially the regimes of specific powers in which one finds inscribed every discursive practice but also, in so doing, puts into play a very old discursive practice, a political regime of discourse which is as old as philosophy itself: the pedagogical practice of the commentary.18 This critique of Derrida with which the text concludes is developed quite extensively by Foucault in the Japanese journal, Paideia.19

VI
Derrida did not answer Foucaults violent reply. The personal and intellectual relation between the two will be interrupted for the next nine years. But the Foucauldian notion of the discursive event had already been problematized by Derrida in an important lecture given in 1971 and published in 1972, Form, Event, Context.20 In this text, Derrida does not argue directly against Foucault, but rather against Austin; however, Foucault had recognized himself indebted to the pragmatist theory of speech acts, in the seminar, What is an Author? It follows that Derridas critique of the notion of speech acts and of its presuppositions can be taken as an answer to the reproach of textualism that Foucault raised during that seminar and that he will repeat in the 1972 appendix on Descartes. Derridas argument was this: the signification of a discursive act, whether oral or written (and in general of a gesture, a trace, a mark whatsoever), cannot be determined once and for all, nor can be referred to the wanting to say, to the conscious intentionality, living or actual, of its author (of the one who utters or writes it, or the one who sustains it or subscribes to it with his own name and signature); nor can it be referred to the singular historical context, to the linguistic or non-linguistic scenario of its enunciation or inscription. And this, because there inheres in every enunciation or inscription (beginning with the enunciation of the name or the inscription of the signature) the possibility of being repeated, reinscribed, reactualized, by the same author or

Regarding the passage of the Evil Genius, Foucault does not seem to entertain seriously the hypothesis of madness, but rather the opposite;
since in madness I believe that an illusory purple covers my nudity and my poverty, whilst the hypothesis of the evil genius permits me not to believe that my body and hands exist [. ]. If the evil genius takes on the powers of madness, this is only after the exercise meditation has excluded the risk of being mad. (BPF 26)

Foucault quotes the text of Descartes in order to show that faced with the cunny trickster, the meditating
subject behaves not like madman in a panic at universal error, but as a no less cunning adversary, always alert, constantly rational, and remaining in the position of master with respect to his fiction. (BPF 26)

In a long and detailed reply of which I have only mentioned the essential arguments, Foucault is launching here a very bold accusation against Derrida, against his way of reading philosophical texts and, from a more general point of view, against his conception of the historicity of writing. Foucaults objection is twofold: the method of deconstruction as a method of reading, in insisting on the dissemination and the decontex-

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by others, in many different contexts of speech and writing. It follows that there is no primary or originary actuality (either on the side of the author or on the side of the context) to which the ultimate sense of a discourse could be referred, and in virtue of which sense could be definitely determined, confined or closed. All sense will inevitably be found open, deferred, disseminated and indeterminate. The transhistorical dimension that, in 1963, Derrida attributed to the Cartesian discourse and, in general, to philosophical discourse, is now taken to be a characteristic of all discourse, all writing, every mark and sign. This grammatological thesis appears to be irreconcilable with the archaeological and genealogical claims of Foucault, and in particular with his notion of the discursive event. But we must not make a hasty judgment. In a colloquium held with a group of historians and published in 1980, Foucault described his genealogical investigations as a labor of eventualization. Where others presume to encounter a historical constant or an anthropological necessity, he tries to show a singularity a unique and aleatory event. But this singular event, in turn, has to be analyzed as [ ] a polygon or, rather, a polyhedron of intelligibility, the number of whose faces is not given in advance and can never properly be taken as finite. One has to proceed by a progressive, and necessarily incomplete saturation.21 Already in 1964, during the seventh Royaumont Colloquium dedicated to Nietzshe, Foucault gave a famous lecture (under the title, Nietzsche, Freud, Marx)22 where he spoke about interpretation as an infinite task. This infinite character of interpretation carried, for Foucault, a double implication. In the first place, there is nothing absolutely primary to interpret, for after all everything is already interpretation, each sign is in itself not the thing that offers itself to interpretation but an interpretation of other signs; on the basis of this, Foucault went on to deduce that interpretation is as much a relationship of violence as of elucidation [. ]; it can only seize, and violently, an already-present interpretation, which it must overthrow, upset, shatter with the blows of a hammer. In the second place, interpretation finds itself with the obligation to interpret itself to infinity. This means that there is always a question about the who of the interpretation, and about a movement which is not linear but circular; and from this again Foucault deduced that interpretation, in questioning the position itself of the interpreting subject, obliges the latter to move in the intermediate region of madness and pure language (NFM 275, 277, 278). These same ideas about the infinite character of interpretation, about the violence which it exercises on others and about the sacrifice which it requires with respect to oneself will be repeated by Foucault, seven years later, a propos of Nietzsche, in another equally important text (Nietzsche, Genealogy, History): If interpretation is the violent or superstitious appropriation of a system of rules, which in itself has no essential meaning, in order to impose a direction, to bend it to a new will, to force its participation in a different game, and to subject it to secondary rules, then the development of humanity is a series of interpretations. The role of genealogy is to record its history. (NGH 86)23 This violence inherent in all interpretations (including the genealogical interpretation) makes impossible to understand the other, to be recognized in it, to be reconciled with it. But it renders equally impossible that we recognize, or reconcile with, ourselves, in a secure self-identity. This is precisely the problem of violence (in the appropriation of the others discourse) which seems to mark the difference between the historical pluralisms of Foucault and Derrida. But we should not hurry to reach conclusions, we should not commit the violence of concluding, because the history of this debate has not yet come to an end (and this time we cannot and we must not present it as concluded).

VII
In December 1980, Derrida went to Prague, having been invited by a group of dissidents to take part in a clandestine seminar. The communist authorities of the now extinct Czechoslovakia detained him on the charge of drug trafficking. In France, the news provoked a great commotion, the intellectuals expressed their indignation and

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the President himself of the Republic, Franois Mitterand, demanded from the Czechoslovak government the liberation of the philosopher. 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 in order to thank him. From then on, and until the death of Foucault on 25th June 1984, the two met on various occasions. After Foucaults death, Derrida occupied himself with him, on two different occasions, in the context of tributes paid to the late philosopher. In April 1986, Thomas Bishop organized a homage to Foucault at the University of New York, and Derrida participated with one unpublished lecture, entitled Beyond the Principle of Power. In it, he tried to problematize the concept of power, and especially the spiral power/pleasure with which Foucault himself had been occupied in the first volume of his History of Sexuality. In the analysis of this spiral, Foucault questioned the repressive hypothesis and the ensuing proposal for sexual liberation (so much fashionable in the Freudo-Marxism of the 1960s); instead, he showed that the apparatus of sexuality was a recent historical construction, a strategy made up of multiple knowledges and powers, being the result of an entire biopolitics initiated in the eighteenth century and developed in the nineteenth. In the last pages of the volume, Foucault stated that the Freudian psychoanalysis has only pushed this apparatus to an extreme, as it reactivated, with admirable efficacy, some of the practices most characteristic of the pastoral power of Christianity, in particular confession and spiritual care. But for Derrida, this diagnostic is valid neither for the entire work of Freud nor for the entire psychoanalysis after Freud. It does not apply, for example, to the analyses that Lacan made of the compulsion of repetition. It does not apply either to the analyses made by Freud himself in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where Freud spoke of a space beyond sex, and even of a drive to power and domination to which neither the death drive nor the urge to survive would be foreign. A certain Freud and a certain psychoanalysis did question the monarchy of sex, long before Foucault did it, choosing instead a dualism of drives and a dualism of principles that would exclude any unique principle, any monism, any monarchy, being that of pleasure or power, sex or death. It will be, therefore, necessary, according to Derrida, to complicate (that is to say, to blend but also to enrich) Foucaults philosophical presuppositions and historical diagnoses. In the first place, it should be possible to establish a certain proximity, a certain contemporaneity between the Foucauldean power/pleasure spiral and the Freudian duality of erotic drive/death drive; in this case, a specific dimension of psychoanalysis must remain situated, not on the side of the apparatus of sexuality the history of which Foucault described but on the site which permits Foucault himself to delimit the apparatus, to describe and to problematize it. In the second place and as a consequence of the first, the possibility of establishing a clear and distinct line between the one and the other site will have to be questioned in a more general and more radical way; that is, we will have to question the line between the inside and the outside of the historical analysis, between objectdiscourse and subject-discourse, between the age of what is talked about and the age from which it is talked about. In a later text, written on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of The History of Madness, Derrida repeated these claims. The text had as its title an expression that Foucault himself had used in his work To Do Justice To Freud.24 On the occasion of an invitation given to him to participate in a commemoration that would also be a reflection, in one of these tributes where thought is plied to fidelity and fidelity honed by thought, Derrida stressed categorically: I did not hesitate for a moment. Not only for the intense and multiple repercussions that this great book exercised deep down inside (him), but also for the sake of the friendship and the admiration that linked him with his author.
After 1972, what came to obscure this friendship, without, however, affecting my admira-

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tion, was not, in fact, alien to this book, and to a certain debate that ensued or at least to its distant, delayed, and indirect, effects. (JF 57)

The drama, adds Derrida, arose out of a certain postface, and even out of a sort of postscript added by Foucault to a postface in 1972. Nevertheless, Derrida rejected the invitation to return to the discussion and did it for numerous reasons that he briefly lists: because the other has departed, because of the excessive character of the issue (texts of Descartes, Foucault, and Derrida himself were interlinked) and of all those, in France and elsewhere, who later came to act as arbiters; because the subject has become too distant from (him), and perhaps because of the drama just alluded to (Derrida) no longer wished to return to it. For all these reasons, Derrida thought that the debate is archived, so that those who would wish it can analyze as much as they want and decide for themselves. Derrida himself, however, a little later, will question the notion of the archive, so central to the archaeological thinking of Foucault; he will question precisely the possibility for an archive to be given for closed, delimited and constituted. In fact, after affirming that the debate is archived, he recognized that there is no privileged witness for such a situation, that there cannot be a testimony of madness, since every testimony tries to offer reasons and to objectify. The question then arises: Does it have an object? Is there an object? Is there a possible third that might provide a reason without objectifying or even identifying, that is to say, without examining (arraisonner)? (JF 58) All these questions obviously affect the status and even the possibility of the chronicle which we are now elaborating the chronicle of a debate which seemed to be filed away and which nevertheless deals, precisely, with the possibility or the impossibility of something like an archive that is definitely closed. Didnt perhaps the text of Derrida itself reopen the archive of the debate on the archive? In line with the questions that I raised, Derrida recognized that it is absurd, obsessive and impossible to give in to a sort of fetishistic denial and to think that (he) can protect (himself) from any

contact with the place or meaning of this discussion. So that, effectively, to speak again about The History of Madness, was allowing, not a return to the old discussion about the Cartesian Cogito, but a return to the schema or specter of an analogous problematic. He is not going to speak of Descartes but of Freud, not of what is named in the beginning of The History of Madness but rather of what is named at its end, and this will perhaps be once again in order to pose a question that will resemble the one that imposed itself upon me thirty years ago, namely, that of the very possibility of madness. The question will be, in the end, just about the same, though it will be posed from another border, and it still imposes itself upon me as the first tribute owed such a book. (JF 59) And, in effect, Derrida quoted his lecture of 1963, in order to take up again the issue that he had put forward, that is the issue of the today, the issue of the space from which Foucault found it possible to write The History of Madness. According to Derrida, such work was possible on that occasion because a certain liberation of madness has gotten under way, because psychiatry has opened itself up, however minimally (although now, almost thirty years later, he would prefer to substitute psychiatry for psychoanalysis, in order to translate today the question of yesterday, of the today of yesterday [. ] transporting it in this way into the today of today. And Derrida will end up saying in the 1963 fragment that he himself quotes that if Foucault, more than anyone else, is attentive and sensitive to this kind of questions, it nevertheless appears that he does not acknowledge their quality of being prerequisite methodological or philosophical considerations. To what kind of questions was Derrida referring? First of all, there is an entire series of questions that refer to the relation between Foucault and Freud. Derrida asked questions about the relation of contemporaneity between The History of Madness and the opening realized by psychoanalysis or more exactly by psychoanalyses. He also thought that the question of today should

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have led him, already in 1963, not in the direction of Descartes, but rather in the direction of Freud. So, if he now returns to the question, he does it in order to correct an oversight, and to confront more directly a problematic that (he) had left in a preliminary stage, as a general, programmatic frame, in the introduction to (his) lecture of 1963. It is true that Descartes occupies a strategic place in the work of Foucault. It is also true that Descartes was the object of special attention in the Lacanian psychoanalysis in the beginning of the 1970s, to the point that Lacan used to say that it was impossible to do better than Descartes. Now, however, the question will be raised in a different way:
It is no longer a question of the age described by a History of Madness [. ] It is a question today of the age to which the book itself belongs, the age from out of which it takes place, the age that provides it its situation; it is a question of the age that is describing rather than the age that is described. (JF 62)

At this point, Derridas thesis is that Foucault held an ambiguous and ambivalent attitude about Freud and psychoanalysis not only in The History of Madness (but even before, in Mental Illness and Psychology) and afterwards, in all the other histories (of medicine, the human sciences, and sexuality) written later on; but, at the same time, Derrida recognizes that this ambiguity could indeed be on the side of psychoanalysis in which case, the apparent inconsistency of Foucault would be justly motivated; Derrida, therefore, insists on speaking of various psychoanalyses and even of various Freuds. This plurality and ambiguity permit us to understand why it is so difficult for Foucault to do justice to Freud; why in intending to do him justice, he both absolves him and condemns him, placing him alternatively now on this and then on that scale, like a pendulum. It is because he places him sometimes on the side of described history and sometimes on the side of descriptive history; because he places him as much in the object-state of the one who is talked about as much as in the subject-state from which he is spoken; as much on the side of the reason that has been separated from madness as on the side of madness that still carries on a dialogue with

reason as much on the side of the others as on the side of us (the us in which we find Hlderlin, Nietzsche, Van Gogh, Nerval, Artaud, Roussel, the whole family, says Derrida, of the grand witnesses of madness, [ ] who are also great judges, our judges, those who judge us. In Derridas opinion, Foucault does not seem to have been conscious of this ambiguity; at least, he does not explicitly reflect on it, although it fully affects the presuppositions of his own discourse. At any rate, Derrida believes that Foucault leans towards condemning psychoanalysis without appeal: Foucault regularly attempts to objectify psychoanalysis and to reduce it to that of which it speaks rather than to that from out of which it speaks (JF 62). Concerning this ambiguity, Derrida went on to analyze in details the grand chiasm to which Foucault was committed, even though, at the same time, he recognized not having been able to give Foucault the proper attention, in his first lecture of 1963. The question of the Cartesian Cogito reappears in the chiasm, along with the question of the exclusion of madness and of the role of the Evil Genius. In the final pages of the first part of The History of Madness, Foucault paired up Freud and Nietzsche, in order to set them up against the Cartesian rationalism of the seventeenth century, against the rationalism that excluded madness. Nevertheless, Foucault himself added:
But this does not mean that classical man was, in his experience of the truth, more distanced from unreason than we ourselves might be. It is true that the cogito is the absolute beginning, but one must not forget that the evil genius is anterior to it. And the evil genius is not the symbol in which are summed up and systematized all the dangers of such psychological events as dream images and sensory errors. Between God and man, the evil genius has an absolute meaning: he is in all his rigor the possibility of unreason and the totality of its powers. He is more than the refraction of human finitude; well beyond man, he signals the danger that could prevent man once and for all from gaining access to the truth: he is the main obstacle, not of such a spirit but of such reason. And it is not because the truth that gets illuminated in the cogito ends up

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entirely masking the shadow of the evil genius that one ought to forget its perpetually threatening power: this danger will hover over Descartes reflections right up until the establishment of the existence and truth of the external world. (JF 71)

Derrida underlined two of Foucaults sentences: on the one hand, that one must not forget that the evil genius is anterior to the (Cogito), and, therefore, that the Cogito is not an absolute beginning, as Foucault had maintained in his chapter on the Great Confinement and repeated in this passage; and on the other hand, that one (must not) forget its perpetually threatening power, one must not forget that the threat persists even after going through the certainty of the Cogito, so that this going through does not exclude, nor could it exclude, the possibility of madness, contrary to what Foucault himself had affirmed in the quoted chapter and contrary to what he will repeat in the 1972 postface. The conclusion that Derrida draws out of this chiasm is twofold: in the first place, Foucault himself is saying in this passage what Derrida would be saying a little later on, in his 1963 lecture: that the Cogito does not exclude the possibility of madness, and that the possibility is contemplated by Descartes himself, in the figure of the Evil Genius, as a perpetual threat. This could have, as a result, indeed this should have, spared us a long and dramatic debate. But it is too late now. In the second place, what Foucault recognizes here is that what is called contemporary had already begun in the classical age with the Evil Genius, which clearly, to my eyes at least, cannot leave intact the historical categories of reference and the personal identity of something like the classical age (for example) (JF 70). This second conclusion brings us back from Descartes to Freud, from one extreme to the other of the historical categorization that Foucault elaborated, but only in order to acknowledge, once more, the ambiguous position of Freud with respect to this categorization given Foucaults repeated attempts to situate it on both sides of the alleged historical boundaries that would separate the classical from the contemporary age, the others from us. So that this apparent movement of progress is, in

fact, a movement of return, of recurrence, compulsive repetition, perpetual obsession, madness, as if the Evil Genius would not stop threatening reasonable historical categorizations, the demarcation of ages, states or epistemes, the ubiquity of proper names, the categorical exclusions and inclusions, the lines of demarcation between the others and us and, in the final analysis, condemning and absolving judgments (for instance, those a propos of Descartes and Freud). In fact, the figure of the Evil Genius is evoked by Foucault many times sometimes in order to be identified with the eternal threat of unreason (as in the Introduction to the third part of The History of Madness, or a propos of Diderots work, Rameaus Nephew) and sometimes, on the contrary, in order to be identified with the psychoanalyst as a medico-thaumaturgue who aspires to cast out unreason and the sick (as in the last pages of The Birth of the Asylum where Freud features as the heir of Tuke and Pinel). Many years later, in the last pages of the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault will talk about the good and the evil genius of Freud (although, as Derrida reminds us, Freud himself had already presented himself as the devils advocate in Beyond the Pleasure Principle), at the very point where he questions the pansexualist temptation of his earlier psychoanalytic essays. The Evil Genius, therefore, returns obsessively in Foucaults discourse, and whenever it does, it appears as much on the good side (unreason) as on the bad (medical reason) and, therefore, it appears to destabilize, not only the boundaries between ages but also the boundaries between reason and madness, and in general, all boundaries, every oppositional logic between an outside and an inside, between absence and presence, between evil and good or between others and us. Derrida speaks about a recurring function of the Evil Genius and he relates it to what, in 1963, he had called the hyperbolic point of reason precisely, that is, the point which is historical or transhistorical. And with this, we enter the second large group of methodological or philosophical questions with which Derrida wishes to confront Foucault in relation to today. In fact, there are the same

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questions, except that they are taken to their broadest dimensions of generality and radicalness, that is, to their quasi-transcendental dimension. Derrida thinks that Freuds ambivalent position and the perpetual menace of the Evil Genius should have led Foucault to problematize some of his presuppositions about history, the historicity of thought and experience, and the possibility of establishing clear and definite boundaries between ages especially between past and present between absences and presences, enemies and friends, the guilty and the innocent or between others and us. If the dialogue with unreason was possible for Montaigne, if it was not totally absent from Descartes, if it returns in Rameaus Nephew, if all that, according to Foucault himself, announces Freud and Nietzsche, then the very concept of announcing, Derrida concludes, calls for another logic, it disrupts, in any case, the axiomatics of a history that places too much trust in the opposition between absence and presence, outside and inside, inclusion and exclusion (JF 72). It is obvious that the entire archaeological and genealogical thinking of Foucault, precisely in order to escape the risk of being transformed to a transcendental philosophy, has been bent to reconstruct the historical or epochal conditions of our own experience, of our own historical a priori. As Foucault said, in his Archaeology of Knowledge, the thing is to introduce difference in the apparent continuity of our own past, of our own historical identity. As he said much later on, in his famous seminars on Kant, the thing is to respond to the question who are we?; provided that this we does not refer to humans in general, but only to those of us who feel contemporary, to those who feel affected by the same historical conditions of experience. What Foucault wants is not to consolidate or to stabilize this epochal identity as a finally conquered terra firma, as a reliable and insuperable limit, but rather the entire opposite: what he wants is to destabilize it, fragment, clear up, and make it once again problematic, in order to show its singularity and its historical contingency. Foucault did not claim to have saved anything like the objectivity of historical knowledge; on the contrary, as he indicated in the essay, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, he tried to put into question and to carry to the limit of the sacrifice the very figure of the subject of knowledge. Well then, what was Derrida saying about the subject of knowledge and this epochal we, of which Foucault had spoken so often?
But this we never stops dividing, and the places of its signature are displaced in being divided up. A certain untimeliness always disturbs the contemporary who reassures him or herself in a we. This we, our we, is not its own contemporary. The selfidentity of its age, or of any age, appears as divided, and thus problematic, problematizable [ ] as the age of madness or an age of psychoanalysis as well as, in fact, all the historical or archaeological categories that promise us the determinable stability of a configurable whole. [ ] Such disturbances make the historians work rather difficult, even and especially the work of the most original and refined among them. This self-difference, this difference to self ( soi) and not simply with self, makes life hard if not impossible for historical science. But inversely, would there be any history, would anything ever happen, without the principle of disturbance? Would there ever be any event without this disturbance of the principality? (JF 89)25

As we can see, it is not easy to determine whether Derrida is saying anything radically different or clearly distinct from what Foucault had said in the texts to which I just referred. But we will come back to this point in a little while. What is certain is that Derrida himself hastened to make it clear that he, in no way, tries to defend the purity of psychoanalysis against the historical diagnoses of Foucault, nor that, in any way he tries to question the interest, the necessity and the legitimation of the grand histories undertaken by Foucault (from The History of Madness to The History of Sexuality). His purpose rather, in raising all the questions that we have summarized here, was to seek and this would be, in sum, a sort of modest contribution to complicate somewhat an axiomatic and, on the basis of this perhaps, certain discursive or conceptual procedures, particularly regarding the way in which this axiomatic is inscribed in its

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age, in the historical field that serves as a point of departure, and in its reference to psychoanalysis. (JF, 92) From this complex and long debate, I would like to underline the arguments that I consider to be decisive. Derrida claimed that the sense of the Cartesian text (and, therefore, its value, its range, its historical persistence) is neither exhausted nor determined by the relation to its age, that is, by a determinate historical form of rationality and a determinate form of opposition between reason and madness. But in order to support this claim, he took recourse to two different not to say contradictory arguments: on the one hand, he affirmed that the exclusion of madness, as practiced by Descartes on the road to doubt, is in reality a transhistorical or transcendental exclusion present in all meaningful discourse, in every discourse (we could add) with a proper name (including the discourse of Foucault himself). On the other hand, Derrida tried to show that, in the Cartesian text, not only madness is not excluded, but rather that it is included under the form of the Evil Genius, as one possibility inherent in the discourse of reason in its transhistorical point of the hyperbolic doubt; that is to say, as a possibility that would turn improper every proper name, snatching up and expropriating the ownership of discourse. Derrida tried to reconcile these two arguments, assigning to logos a double face, finite and infinite, determinate and indeterminate, historical and transhistorical. Logos would always be historically singularized, but never suitably determined by the name of the author, the date or the place. With respect to this line of division, drawn by Foucault between transcendental and historical perspectives, it is obvious that Derrida situated himself at the very limit between the two, since he did not defend the transcendental unity of reason independently of its discursivity and, therefore, of its historicity; but nor did he accept the diversity of ages or incommensurable languages that cannot be translated to each other as a historical diversity of rationalities. The fact that every logos is historically inscribed does not mean that it cannot be re-inscribed in other historical contexts, since every inscription, precisely because it is historical, it is already, from the start, a re-inscription. In other words, we cannot suppose a primary, originary and ahistorical inscription; but, for the same reason, we cannot suppose either a context-limit for inscription, a primary or final context, a suspension or epoch of history, a closed or a-once-andfor-all determinate age that would be perfectly capable of being separated and differentiated from all others. Nevertheless, this is precisely what Foucault aspired to achieve: to determine epochal differences, to make historical discontinuities appear to oppose to the alleged unity of one subject or one reason the temporal dispersion of subjectivities and the irreducible multiplicity of rationalities, in order to show their singularity and contingency, their lack of universality and necessity. Foucault is suspicious of all historical continuity, because he believes to have discovered in it the Hegelian astuteness of reason, the totalizing and totalitarian movement of dialectics, that is, the claim to re-establish definitively the necessity of our reason and the unity of our subject, the teleology of one spirit that reunites and reappropriates itself, recovers and is reconciled with itself, through and even thanks to its apparent temporal dispersion. Faced with this teleology, Foucault tried to reconstruct the epochal, the singular, and the contingent of experience and thought, especially of the experience and thought which determine our present, our identity our we and which, through his archaeological and genealogical reconstruction, will come to be questioned, problematized, and subjected to doubt and to the epoch. Now, in order to practice this doubt or epoch, shouldnt we try to leave our own epoch, our own epochal determination and to elaborate an untimely thought? Shouldnt we try to reach a transhistorical or quasi-transcendental point of view? And hasnt this been the gesture of Descartes himself and, in general, the characteristic gesture of philosophical thought? Isnt this the risk, and the madness in which philosophy has been permanently handed over, the hyperbolic point by means of which present and past, we and the others communicate? This is the question that Derrida asks Foucault. Foucault, however, never stopped speaking of the

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sacrifice of the subject of knowledge (not only as the risk, but also as the hope and promise) of the philosophical adventure.26 At any rate, it is clear that Derrida does not defend a teleological continuity between ages, but rather that he defends the relation of the inevitable deferral, reinscription or translation between them. He defends it precisely because he believes that this is the only way to think as Foucault himself claimed about singularity, contingency and the historicity, inherent in every reason and every subject, in every discourse and in every proper name. Foucaults reply to Derrida could be formulated as follows: if we affirm that the relation between reason and madness is a transhistorical relation, endlessly re-elaborated and re-inscribed, how can we recognize the singularity of each inscription, of each historically given relation, unless we underline their differential characterization in relation to other inscriptions? And, in order to underline such differences, how can we not reconstruct the historico-linguistic context of those inscriptions and re-inscriptions? As long as no context whatsoever could be definitely closed or saturated, as long as the intelligibility of a discursive event cannot be determined exhaustively, as long as interpretation is an infinite task, how can we move from the philosophical or the quasi-transcendental analysis of history (understood as infinite difference of singular marks) to the historiographical or quasi-empirical analysis of the movement of difference, without intending to reconstruct, to the limit of the possible, the singularity of each mark and of its own context of inscription? We could then attempt an approximation, a dialogue or a reconciliation between Derrida and Foucault;27 we could attempt to soften the distance that separates them, pacify the conflict which opposes them; we could, lastly, attempt to heal the wound and close the debate, hastily concluding that the difference between them is no more than a difference of style or accent, a merely methodological difference. Both views coincide in the claim that philosophical thought ought to think radically the historicity of experience, beginning with the experience of thinking itself. But Derrida believes it necessary to do this by means of a quasi-transcendental analysis of the general or regular conditions of historicity, whereas Foucault believes it necessary to do it by means of a quasi-empirical analysis of the particular or singular conditions of it. This is why Derrida tends to accentuate the longitudinal movement of persistence, deferral, re-inscription, and endless translation between the different historical configurations of thought, through his preferred reading of texts philosophical and/or literary. Foucault, on the other hand, tends more towards indicating the transversal movement of rupture, discontinuity, incommensurability and incommunicability between ages, epistemes, discourses, and does it by means of reading juridical and scientific texts, directly related to institutional practices of controlling and governing individuals. Grammatology as much as genealogy are ontologies of the historicity of the mark, and the mark is conceived at the same time as sign and as force, but also as a singular event, as serial or regular element of a differential system of signs and forces. What happens is that grammatology tends to accentuate the mark/sign in its movement of persistence, whereas genealogy tends to accentuate the mark/force in its movement of rupture. But behind this mere difference of emphasis between the two historiographic perspectives or methodologies, it is possible to recognize one deeper philosophical difference, that is, a moral difference, a different way of responding to the difference and to the alterity of the other. Whereas Derrida would consider a certain relation to welcoming, hospitality and alliance to be irreducible, Foucault would consider as irreducible a certain relation to violence, hostility and force. For Derrida, one cannot appropriate the other, the discourse and the name of the other, without expropriating oneself (from ones own self), without welcoming the other in the same, without bringing about that the one becomes, in a certain way, the other; without bringing about that ones own discourse and ones own name are no longer ones own; without striking up, with the other names and the other discourses, a certain chain and a certain community that would be always open, always infinite, always indeterminate. If one can never be a

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unique subject, it is because s/he is originarily unfolded, pluralized, engaged with the others and with himself or herself as an other. For Foucault, on the other hand, one cannot appropriate the other, the discourse and the name of the other, without committing violence, without subjecting oneself to it, without imposing ones own discourse and ones own name; but this same violence cannot stop being committed against ones own self, since the plurality of forces in conflict is always open, infinite, indeterminate, never ceasing to modify the boundary between the inside and the outside, between the other and the own: if one can never be a unique subject, it is because s/he is originarily unfolded, pluralized, faced by the other and even by himself as another. This different moral philosophy is already present in the early works of Derrida and Foucault, but it has become more explicit in the later writings of both, because in these later writings, morality (the morality inherent in historicity and the historicity inherent in morality) has become the dominant motive of reflection. Derridas moral philosophy is forged in the dialogue held with Levinas thought, and in general with the Judeo-Christian tradition (beginning with an important essay of 196428 and reaching his later texts on the relation between law and justice,29 and on the ethics of the gift).30 As for Foucault, his moral philosophy is closely linked to his reading of Nietzsche and in general to his intention to retrieve the GrecoRoman thought, in open opposition to the hegemony of the Judeo-Christian tradition. His last studies, therefore, of the Greco-Roman ethics wish to retrieve the ethics of self-government, understood as an ethics without the law, as an invention of the self and as an aesthetics of existence.31 But we should not be in a hurry: it is not that Derrida leans toward the Christian ethics of charity and Foucault, toward the Greek ethics of freedom. Rather, we should say that Foucault tends to establish a clear contraposition between the two, while Derrida, one more time, tends to move towards the dividing line that separates them; he tends to maintain the undecidability between the Greek and Jewish sides of the Western tradition; this is what distinguishes him, not only from the paganism of Foucault but also from the Judaism of Levinas. In a 1977 interview, Foucault expressed the thought that the decisive conflict in the history of the West is the one that confronts the model of language (already elaborated by Plato and, later on, reworked by Christianity), to the model of war (defended by the Sophists and retrieved by Nietzsche): I believe ones point of reference should not be to the great model of language (langue) and signs, but to that of war and battle. The history which bears and determines us has the form of a war rather than that of a language: relations of power, not relations of meaning. History has no meaning, though this is not to say that it is absurd or incoherent. On the contrary, it is intelligible and should be susceptible of analysis down to the smallest detail but this is in accordance with the intelligibility of struggles, of strategies and tactics (TP 114).32 If the model of language permits us to think of the communicability of sense, the continuity of memory, a peaceful dialogue and a reconciliation between individuals and ages, the model of war puts into questions all presuppositions, and in their place it introduces an endless struggle of forces, a discontinuity that separates us from others, and fragments our proper being. It is possible to think that Derrida adopted the model of language and Foucault, the model of war. It is possible to think that Derrida was inclined towards Judeo-Christian charity and Foucault towards pagan freedom. This is really what Foucault himself seems to object to Derrida. Derrida, however, seems to question the alternative itself between the two models; he tends to destabilize the security with which each one of them affirms itself against the other, and it is this security for which he seems to be reproaching Foucault. This is the risk that Derrida nurtures and Foucault avoids: the risk of going through the edge, through the hinge that opens and closes the door between the two models, maintaining at the same time the possibility and the uncertainty in the play between force and sense, violence and justice, the Greek and the Jew. This is the risk also that I run in this essay, as I went through the debate (litigation and/or

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dialogue?) between these two different discourses to which my own discourse owes a big debt: to reopen the archive, the history, the difference (war and/or alliance?) between two proper names which have become a part of my own name. Translated by Constantin V. Boundas
of Work in Foucault and His Interlocutors. Ed. Arnold I. Davidson (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997) 97ff. 6 Tel Quel 20 (Winter 1965); reprinted later on in Writing and Difference 16995. 7 Derrida, from the first page of his essay on Artaud, alludes to Foucault and to the problem of madness and work. Although he quotes only Foucaults essay on Hlderlin [The Fathers No in Essential Works of Foucault, 195484, vol. 2: Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology. Ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1928) 520], it is obvious that his criticism aims at the entire thought of Foucault, and, especially, at his claim to be inscribed in the family of the madmen. In a footnote to this essay, Derrida indicates that Artaud is the first to attempt to reassemble, on a martyrological tree, the vast family of madmen of genius. He does so in Van Gogh, le suicid de la socit (Paris: Gallimard,1990). 8 On this turn in Foucaults thinking, see my essay El autor, la ficcin, la verdad, Daimon, Revista de Filosofa 5 (1992) 2445; esp. n 11. 9 Jacques Derrida et la rature de lorigine, Critique 246 (1967). 10 All dates mentioned here concerning the break between Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault have been taken from the biography of Didier Eribon [Michel Foucault 19261984 (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1991) 14447]. Although Eribon does not say it explicitly, it is obvious that this version of the facts is provided by Derrida, since Foucault had already passed away. Later on, I had the occasion to confirm this, as I was listening to the account of Derrida himself, during his visit to Murcia in November 1990, on the invitation of Patricio Pealver. 11 Qu-est-ce-quun auteur? Session of Saturday, 22 February 1969, Bulletin de la Socit Franaise de Philosophie 63 (1969) 7395 (followed by a discussion, 96104). What is an Author? Essential Works of Foucault, 195484, vol. 2, 20522. 12 In 1967, La Voix et le phnomne: Introduction au problme du signe dans la phmomnologie de Husserl (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France) and De la grammatologie (Paris: Editions de Minuit) appear. To these two works, we must add a series of conferences and essays that Derrida presented, orally or in writing between 1965 and 1971; those were collected in 1972 in two important books, La

notes
1 This essay was originally published in Spanish under the title, Foucault y Derrida: Historia de un Debate Sobre la Historia, Daimon, Revista de Filosofa 11 (1995) 5982. It is translated by permission of the editorial board of the review and of its author. 2 Folie et draison: histoire de la folie lge classique (Paris: Plon, 1961). There has been an abbreviated version of this work in the collection 10/18 (Paris: Union Gnrale dEditions, 1964) which went through several printings. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason is the translation of the abbreviated version, with some additional material from the original edition. 3 The text was published for the first time in Revue de Mtaphysique et de Moral 3/4 (1964). See Jacques Derrida, Cogito and the History of Madness, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978) 3163. As for the letter of invitation, see Michel Foucault, Dits et crits (19541984), 4 vols. Ed. Daniel Defert, Franois Ewald and Jacques Lagrange (Paris: Gallimard, 1994) vol. 1, 25. The Chronology was established by Defert, Foucaults companion from 1963 until the latters death. 4 Also, we must mention that The History of Madness was re-edited, in an abbreviated form in 1964, and the abbreviated version omitted the passage on Descartes. In 1972, the complete version was re-edited but it substituted a new preface for the original one and included as an appendix the answer to Derrida. The omitted preface (pp. ixi of the first French edition) can be found now in Michel Foucault, Dits et crits (19541984) vol. 1, 167ff. 5 La folie, labsence doeuvre, La Table Ronde 196 (May 1964). [Reprinted as an appendix to the 1972 edition of Histoire de la folie 57582.] Trans. Peter Stastny and Deniz Sengel. Madness, the Absence

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dissmination (Paris: Editions du Seuil) and Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Editions de Minuit). 13 Diffrance in Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserls Theory of Signs. Ed. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1967). The French original was published in the Bulletin de la Socit Franaise de Philosophie (JulySeptember 1968) and in Thorie densemble (Paris: Editions du Seuil 1968); in this latter volume, Foucaults essay, Distance, aspect, origin was also published; the essay was on the writers clustering around the review, Critique. 14 On the investigation of the figure of the author, see my essay, El autor, la ficcin, la verdad. 15 My Body, This Paper, This Fire, trans. Geoff Bennington. Histoire de la folie The Oxford Literary Review 4.1 (Autumn, 1979) 928. The first version of this text was published under the title, Michel Foucault e no Kaino (Rponse Derrida) in a special issue that the Japanese journal Paideia (no. 11 [Michel Foucault] 1 February 1972, 13147) dedicated to Foucault (Derridas text was also published here). The text of this first version can now be found in Michel Foucault, Dits et crits 195484, vol. 2, 28195. 16 This is, roughly, the version given by the biographer David Macey in The Lives of Michel Foucault (London: Vintage, 1993) 238 17 Discourse on Language, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper and Row, 1972). For an analysis of this text, see my Como no hablar de Michel Foucault? in Textos de Filosofa. Ed. Xabier Palacios (Bilbao: Universidad del Pais Vasco, 1990) 55773. 18 Here are Foucaults own words: Perhaps we should ask how it is that an author as meticulous as Derrida, and as attentive to texts, could have been guilty of so many omissions, but could also operate so many displacements, interversions and substitutions? But perhaps we should ask this to the extent that in his reading Derrida is doing no more than revive an old old tradition. He is, moreover, aware of this; and this conformity seems, justifiably, to comfort him. He shies in any case from thinking that the classical interpreters have missed through lack of attention the singularity of the passage on madness and dreaming. On one fact at least I am in agreement: it is not as an effect of their lack of attention that before Derrida and in like manner the classical interpreters erased this passage from Descartes. It is by system. A system of which Derrida is the most decisive modern representative, in its final glory: the reduction of discursive practices to textual traces; the elision of the events produced therein and the retention only of marks for a reading; the invention of voices behind texts to avoid having to analyse the modes of implication of the subject in discourse; the assigning of the originary as said and unsaid in the text to avoid replacing the discursive practices in the field of transformations where they are carried out. I will not say that it is a metaphysics, metaphysics itself or its closure which is hiding in this textualisation of discursive practices. Ill go much further than that: I shall say that what can be seen here so visibly is a historically well-determined little pedagogy. A pedagogy which teaches the pupil that there is nothing outside the text, but that in it, in its gaps, its blanks and its silences, there reigns the reserve of the origin; that it is therefore unnecessary to search elsewhere, but that here, not in the words, certainly, but in the words under erasure, in their grid, the sense of being is said. A pedagogy which gives conversely to the masters voice the limitless sovereignty which allows it to restate the text indefinitely. Histoire de la folie II, 37071. 19 In this other version, before beginning to analyze the Cartesian passage, Foucault talks about the way in which philosophy is taught in France and the presuppositions governing this teaching: 1. Philosophy as a universal, critical instance, with respect to which all particular, empirical knowledges are situated in relation to exteriority and interiority; 2. Philosophy as an ultimate moral instance, as a law (in a Christian or Freudian sense) which has nothing to account for but in front of which we all must confess our guilt and our faults, our sins (in the Christian sense) or our lapses (in the Freudian sense); 3. Philosophy as a self-referential reflection whose historicity consists in reduplicating itself, in an infinite commentary of its own texts, having excluded from itself all events as coming from the outside. Foucault believed that Derridas critique of his History of Madness (and, especially, of the three pages in which he proposed a new interpretation of the Cartesian passage on the Cogito) rested on these three presuppositions. Among living French philosophers, Foucault added, Derrida is the most profound and the most radical defender of

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these presuppositions. On the basis of these presuppositions, Foucault thinks: 1. That philosophy is neither historically nor logically a foundress of knowledge, except that there exist conditions and rules for the formation of knowledge to which philosophical discourse submits itself in every age, just as any other form of discourse with rational aspirations; 2. That the systematicity that links together forms of discourse, concepts, institutions and practices is neither of the order of a radical thought that is forgotten, covered up, and deviating from itself nor of the order of the Freudian unconscious, as if there existed an unconscious of knowledge that would have its own specific forms and rules; 3. Finally, that one must study and analyze the events that can be produced in the order of knowledge and cannot be reduced to either the general law of progress or to the repetition of an origin. 20 Communication made to the International Congress of the Philosophy Societies of French Language (Montreal, 1971), later published in Margins of Philosophy 30930. 21 The Impossible Prison in Foucault Live (Interviews, 196186). Ed. Sylvre Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989) 27586. 22 Nietzsche, Freud, Marx in Essential Works of Foucault, 195484, vol. 2: Aesthetics Method, and Epistemology. Ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1998) 26978. 23 Nietzsche, Genealogy, History in The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984) 76100. 24 To Do Justice to Freud: The History of Madness and the State of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Pascal-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Foucault and His Interlocutors. Ed. Arnold I. Davidson (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997) 5796. 25 Derrida underlined the word problematizable because he thought, as he will say much later, that the Foucauldean idea of problematization, to the extent that it alludes to unity and to the whole, is as problematic as the idea of an age or of an apparatus. 26 The last time, a little before he died, in a muchquoted passage of his Introduction to the second volume of The History of Sexuality: The Use of Pleasures. Trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1985) 12. 27 This is, for example, what Roy Boyne intends in his Foucault and Derrida: The Other Side of Reason (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990). 28 Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanual Levinas, Writing and Difference 79153. Derridas dialogue with Levinas has continued and produced one more essay, At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am. Trans. Ruben Berezdivin. Re-Reading Levinas, ed. Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991). 29 Du Droit la philosophie (Paris: Galile, 1990); La filosofa como institucion (Barcelona: Joan Grancia, 1984). 30 Donner le temps. 1. La fausse monnaie (Paris: Galile, 1991). Trans. P. Kamuf. Given Time: 1 Counterfeit Money (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992); The Gift of Death (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996). 31 Besides the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality, see The Subject and Power, Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982) 20826; see also On the Genealogy of Ethics, ibid. 22952. 32 Truth and Power in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings: 197277. Ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1972) 10933. On the model of war see my On War: The Space of Knowledge, Knowledge of Space, Reconstructing Foucault: Essays in the Wake of the 80s. Ed. Ricardo Miguel Alfonso and Silvia Caporale Bizzin (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1994) 27799.

abbreviations
BPF Foucault, Michel. My Body, This Paper, This Fire. Trans. Geoff Bennington. The Oxford Literary Review 4.1 (1971): 928. CHM Derrida, Jacques. Cogito and the History of Madness in Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. 3163. JF Derrida, Jacques. To Do Justice to Freud: The History of Madness and The State of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Pascal-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Foucault and His Interlocutors. Ed. Arnold I. Davidson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997. 5796. NFM Foucault, Michel. Nietzsche, Freud, Marx in Essential Works of Foucault, 195484, vol. 2:

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Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology. Ed. James D. Faubion. New York: The New Press, 1997. 26978. NGH Foucault, Michel. Nietzsche, Genealogy, History in The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon,1984. 76100. TP Foucault, Michel. Truth and Power in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 197277. Ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon,1980. 10933. WIA Foucault, Michel. What Is an Author? in Essential Works of Foucault,195484, vol. 2: Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology 20522.

Antonio Campillo Departamento de Filosofa Universidad de Murcia 30001 Murcia Spain E-mail: campillo@fcu.um.es