238 Derrida 1963–1983
It had all started in Japan, a few months earlier, when the editor
of the review Paideia, Mikitaka Nakano, had submitted to Foucault
the outlines of a special issue to be devoted to him. One of the
authors was planning to write a text on ‘Foucault’s discourse and
Derrida’s writing’, taking this opportunity to translate ‘Cogito and
the history of madness’. But Foucault’s annoyance at Derrida’s
article had increased in proportion with the latter’s fame; he sug-
gested that his Japanese correspondent add an unpublished piece
by himself, the ‘Reply to Derrida’ that he had been mulling over for
some time.
In this text, which was for him something of a warm-up, Foucault
acknowledged that Derrida’s analysis was ‘undoubtedly remarkable
for its philosophical depth and the meticulousness of his reading’.
Insisting that he had no intention of replying point by point, but
rather of adding ‘a few remarks’, Foucault began by shifting the
debate onto the ground of principles. This was a cunning move: he
was out to make deconstruction seem akin to the most traditional
and indeed the most normative French philosophy. Philosophy à la
Derrida, claimed Foucault, set itself up as the ‘law’ of all discourse.
One failed to live up to it – strange faults that are ‘like a blend of
Christian sin and Freudian slip’. ‘The smallest “snag” will suffi ce
for the whole apparatus to be laid bare.’ In Foucault’s eyes, this
conception of philosophy leads it to situate itself ‘on the far side
and the near side of any event’. ‘Not only can nothing happen to it,
but everything that can happen is already anticipated or enveloped
by it.’^21
At the time he wrote the History of Madness, Foucault thought
that he himself had not freed himself suffi ciently from the postulates
of philosophical teaching, since he had been ‘unable to resist placing
at the head of one chapter, and therefore in quite a privileged place,
the analysis of a text by Descartes. This was no doubt the most
expendable part of my book, and I willingly admit that I should
have omitted it, had I been more consistent in my casual indiff erence
towards philosophy.’ But Foucault did not turn away from direct
confrontation: after these preliminaries, he turned to the celebrated
pages in Descartes and attempted to dismantle Derrida’s analysis.
Things might have gone no further, remaining at a distance, in a
limited-circulation publication. One can imagine Japanese readers
feeling a bit lost when faced by this minute comparison of the
Latin and French versions of a short passage in the Metaphysical
Meditations. But Foucault was out to draw blood: he took the
opportunity of the republication of the History of Madness by
Gallimard to add two appendices. In the second, under the poetic
title ‘My body, this paper, this fi re’, he resumed and expanded his
argument against Derrida. Compared with the article in Paideia,
the tone has become noticeably harsher. Foucault conducts his