But Derrida’s most telling choice in the sixties is his approval
of an empiricism of a different kind, which he endorses in
prophetic style: the traumatic encounters described in Freud
and Lévinas.
Derrida ends “Cogito and the History of Madness” with
a tepid compliment to his former professor: “What Michel
Foucault teaches us to think is that there are crises of reason in
strange complicity with what the world calls crises of mad-
ness” (Writing 63 ). This concluding gesture of approbation
does not disguise the largely unfriendly character of Derrida’s
appraisal of Foucault.
Derrida was rewarded by the École Normale for his re-
bellious inclinations, demonstrated by his bold assault on
Foucault. He was proving himself an innovator, willing to
spark controversy. And he chose the right person to attack:
Foucault’s relation to the École was fairly marginal. Althusser,
who ruled the intellectual roost at the École, was never criti-
cized by Derrida, despite the latter’s disapproval of Althusser’s
theories and his politics.
In October 1964 , Derrida, now thirty-four years old, was
appointed as a maître-assistant,or instructor, at the École,
where he had already been teaching for the past year. He was
recommended to his new post by Althusser and by Jean Hyp-
polite, the great Hegel scholar who had instructed many of
Derrida’s generation. Derrida was to stay at the École Normale
for the next twenty years, making it his base of operations and
his intellectual home (Negotiations 150 ).
The École Normale of the sixties was, in effect, governed
by Althusser, a devout Marxist. Althusser had a tragic end. In
1980 ,afflicted by dementia, he strangled his wife—and then
wrote a memoir,The Future Lasts Forever,in which he con-
fessed that he was an intellectual fraud and that he had actu-
Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology 69