is the age-old underside to reason: an antagonistic aspect that
reason relies on to define itself, but that also challenges rea-
son’s coherence. Taking as his guide the example of Descartes,
who raised the possibility of the philosopher’s madness in his
Meditations,Derrida suggests that every thinker, even (or,
rather, especially) at his most stringent and lucid, fears insan-
ity. “I philosophize only in terror,but in the confessedterror of
going mad” ( 62 ).
Foucault’s biographer James Miller hypothesizes that
Derrida’s remark was a chilling and vindictive one, since
Foucault’s fear of insanity and his repeated suicide attempts
were well known at the École Normale Supérieure (Passion
120 ). (The death-obsessed Foucault would later advocate “sui-
cide-festivals” and “suicide-orgies” designed to accelerate the
“limitless pleasure” of dying. Foucault seems to have thrown
himself into a dangerous orgiastic whirlwind during his final,
AIDS-afflicted years, when his visits to San Francisco bath-
houses became frenetic and compulsive [Passion 55 ].)
Derrida now gives his final verdict on Foucault. The lat-
ter, he asserts, fails to see that “reason has been divided against
itself since the dawn of its Greek origin” (Writing 40 ). Fou-
cault, says Derrida, translates the eternal and immutable ques-
tion of the logos and its other, the force that erodes reason
from within, into convenient historicizing, with the result that
he dodges the question’s profundity. Derrida’s attack on Fou-
cault faults his empiricist attachment to presence: to the idea
that madness is a historical phenomenon. In this respect, Fou-
cault resembles Husserl, with his supposed championing of
the voice that hears itself speak. He becomes an example of
attachment to the merely evident rather than the properly par-
adigmatic. In the course of the sixties Derrida also accuses
Lévi-Strauss, Saussure, and Rousseau of committing this fault.
68 Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology