Derrida’s most significant encounters in the sixties, then,
are with Freud, Nietzsche, and Lévinas. With all three figures,
Derrida finds a path beyond the argument over metaphysical
assertion and skepticism that occupies him in the case of
Husserl. He juxtaposes to Freud and Lévinas the words of the
Hebrew Bible, emphasizing the Jewish commitments of these
two thinkers. Nietzsche is an equally prophetic figure, but in a
different direction, pointing toward play and freedom rather
than obligation to the past—and therefore appropriate to the
student revolt of May 1968 , which Derrida considers in his lec-
ture “The Ends of Man.” Finally, the history of his time is the
empirical phenomenon that confronts Derrida most immedi-
ately at the end of the sixties. His response, a wary one, never-
theless testifies to his desire to link deconstruction to the his-
torical moment.
In March 1963 , Derrida, just thirty-two years old, delivered a
lecture on Michel Foucault at the Collège Philosophique in
Paris. Derrida’s talk, later reprinted as a chapter in Writing
and Difference,is not so much a commentary on as a cross-
examination of Foucault, Derrida’s former teacher at the École
Normale Supérieure. Foucault was himself present in the au-
dience at the Collège. As one reads through Derrida’s lecture,
one can almost feel his subject’s growing nervousness. Derrida
puts Foucault on the spot in a ceremonial, thoroughgoing way.
Here Derrida, wrestling with his precursor Foucault, sizes up
Foucault’s way of writing intellectual history—and finds it
wanting. He argues that Foucault misrecognizes madness, see-
ing it as an empirically evident, historical phenomenon. For
Derrida, madness actually resembles geometry in Husserl: an
ideal entity detached from history, and paired permanently
with philosophical reason. But madness is not Derrida’s key
Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology 65