Who Was Jacques Derrida?: An Intellectual Biography

(Greg DeLong) #1

describes himself as a disciple with an “unhappy conscious-
ness.” When he starts to write against his “master” Foucault, he
notes, he “finds himself already challenged by the master’s
voice within him” ( 31 ). Despite this elaborate preliminary
footwork, Derrida proves bold enough. His chapter on Fou-
cault clearly rejects the “master.”
In his relentless critique, Derrida makes the case that
Foucault engages in crude, ineffective historicizing. In fact,
Derrida asserts, the position of madness is similar in the an-
cient, medieval, and modern worlds, not different as Foucault
claims. Derrida argues that nothing changed in respect to
madness with the Cartesian revolution in philosophy. Socrates
and Descartes share a wish to exile insanity, “the other of rea-
son,” from philosophical thought: from the logos ( 40 ).
Derrida stakes out his terrain, announcing that he will be
a thinker of Western metaphysics as a whole, not a student of
epochs like Foucault. Foucault called the global revolutions
that occur every few centuries changes of episteme (epistemes
being, in the Foucauldian vocabulary, regimes of information
and knowledge that govern how one thinks and acts). For Der-
rida, all of European intellectual history is one long episteme.
Derrida, then, opposes Foucault’s historicizing bent. He
makes another point against Foucault as well. Foucault, Der-
rida charges, acts as if he knows what madness means, as if it
could be defined by reason (incarnated by Foucault himself,
the synoptic thinker). Yet his polemical aim is to liberate mad-
ness from the domination of reason. This is a basic contradic-
tion, one that Foucault seems unaware of, writes Derrida.
Derrida takes issue with Foucault’s assertion that there is
something outside reason called madness. In fact, Derrida
claims, madness is internal to reason, present within it from
the beginning. Foucault, he argues, should admit that madness


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