Severed Ties 1972–1973 239
argument on two fronts: he is out to destroy Derrida’s position and
to best him on his own ground. Foucault embarks on a methodical
confrontation of Descartes’s text and Derrida’s commentary on it.
The irony is unremitting, and the desire to wound obvious. Foucault
mimics the philologists and Latinists, without avoiding the ‘scribble’
mentioned to Bernard Pautrat. He is attempting to gain the advan-
tage on every front at once, showing that he understands better
than Derrida the letter of Descartes’s text, even though this is not
his main objective. In short, having left his original enthusiasm far
behind, he gives a thorough going-over to an essay that he deems to
be a failure, as he might have done at Normale Sup at the start of the
1950s.
The last two pages are scathing, and through the attack on
‘Cogito and the history of madness’ are aimed at Derrida’s whole
methodology:
It might well be asked how an author as meticulous as Derrida,
and one so attentive to texts, managed not only to allow so
many omissions, but also to operate so many displacements,
interventions and substitutions. But perhaps we should do that
while remembering that Derrida is recalling an old tradition in
his reading. He is well aware of this, of course, and this faith-
fulness seems, quite rightly, to comfort him. He is reluctant, in
any case, to think that classical commentators missed, through
inattentiveness, the importance and singularity of the passage
on madness and dreaming.^22On one fact at least, Foucault claims he agrees with the author he
is trying to crush. It was not out of inattention or casualness that
the classical interpreters had smoothed over the diffi culties of this
passage in the Metaphysical Meditations, it was ‘systematic’:
It is part of a system, a system of which Derrida is today the
most decisive representative, in its waning light: a reduction of
discursive practices to texual traces; the elision of events that
are produced there, leaving only marks for a reading [.. .].
I would not say that it is a metaphysics, metaphysics itself,
or its closure, that is hiding behind this ‘textualisation’ of dis-
cursive practices. I would go much further: I would say that it
is a historically well-determined little pedagogy, which mani-
fests itself here in a very visible manner. A pedagogy which
teaches the student that there is nothing outside the text, but
that in it, in its interstices, in its blanks and silences, the reserve
of the origin reigns; that it is never necessary to look beyond
it, but that here, not in the words, of course, but in words as
crossings-out, in their lattice, what is said is ‘the meaning of