The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon
.pdf594 / Paul Patton
See Also
Difference
Governmentality
Power
Friedrich Nietzsche
Suggested Reading
Davidson, Arnold, ed. 1997. Foucault and His Interlocutors. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Defert, Daniel, and Jacques Donzelot. 1976. “La charnière des prisons,” Magazine littéraire
112/113:33–35.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Foucault, trans. Seán Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2004. Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Michael
Taormina. New York: Semiotext(e).
2007. Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, rev. ed., trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina. New York: Semiotext(e).
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
1994. What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press.
Dosse, François. 2010. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, trans. Deborah Glassman. New York: Columbia University Press.
Eribon, Didier. 1991. Michel Foucault, trans. Betsy Wing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Glucksmann, André. 1975. La Cuisinière et le mangeur d’hommes. Paris: Seuil.
Grace, Wendy. 2009. “Faux Amis: Foucault and Deleuze on Sexuality and Desire,” Critical Inquiry 36, no.1: 52–75.
Guattari, Félix, ed. 1973. Trois Milliards de Pervers: Grand Encyclopédie des Homosexualités. Paris: Recherches, Mars.
Lévy, Bernard-Henri. 1977. La barbarie à visage humaine. Paris: Grasset. Macey, David. 1993. The Lives of Michel Foucault. New York: Vintage.
Miller, James. 1993. The Passion of Michel Foucault. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Nail, Thomas, Nicolae Morar, and Daniel Smith, eds. 2013. Between Deleuze and Foucault. London: Continuum.
Patton, Paul. 2010. “Foucault and Normative Political Philosophy,” in Foucault and Philosophy, ed. Timothy O’Leary and Christopher Falzon. London: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 204–221.
101
JACQUES DERRIDA (1930–2004)
In the English-speaking academy, the proper names Derrida and Foucault are often uttered together, emblematic of a kind of thinking that passes under the various names of postmodernism, poststructuralism, continental philosophy, French theory, and simply Theory. But despite this reception, in each thinker’s oeuvre the work of the other is minimally present, both in speciic invocation and in a more generalized engagement. Foucault and Derrida were not major inluences on or interlocutors for one another, at least not as is avowed in their writings and certainly not when compared to their relations with others. However, their one explicit debate reveals certain important features of their thinking, particularly concerning
their attitudes toward the institution of philosophy.
Some basic facts of their relationship are well known. They irst met at the École Normale Supérieure, where Foucault was teaching psychology when Derrida enrolled as a student in 1952. Derrida would later remark on his teacher’s eloquence, authority, and brilliance in speaking. Foucault published his irst major work, Madness and Unreason: History of Madness in the Classical Age, in 1961, and in 1963 Derrida presented a complex and to a large degree critical reading of this work in “Cogito and the History of Madness.” By all accounts Foucault, who was in the audience when Derrida irst delivered the paper, reacted well and supported its publication in Revue de métaphysique et de morale. He also gave high praise to Derrida’s other publications of the 1960s, including Writing and Difference, in which the “Cogito” essay reappeared, and in 1967 Derrida joined him on the editorial board of Critique. The next public event in their relationship was the publication of Foucault’s “Reply to Derrida” in February 1972 in the Japanese journal Paideia (as part of an issue devoted to Foucault and literature, in which Derrida’s essay also appeared). But more significant was Foucault’s reworking of this text into “My Body, This Paper, This Fire,” published later in 1972 as an appendix to the second edition of Madness and Unreason (now titled simply History of Madness in the Classical Age, and without the original
595
596 / Samir Haddad
Preface on which Derrida in part relied to advance his argument). Particularly in its second iteration, this response was extremely critical both of Derrida’s essay and of his work in general. The most damning lines from this response also appeared in Le Monde on June 14, 1973 under the title “Selon Michel Foucault ‘Une petite pédagogie’,” in a double-page dossier devoted to Derrida’s writings (Naas 2003, 198). It is not known exactly why Foucault’s attitude changed so dramatically. Derrida himself traced it to a disagreement in late 1967 over the publication in Critique of an essay by Gérard Granel, which gave Derrida high praise and claimed that the Cogito essay exposed a fatal law not only in Madness and Unreason but in Foucault’s archaeological method as a whole (Granel 1967, 897). Whatever the reason, after “My Body” was published the two did not speak for another ten years, until 1982, when Foucault protested Derrida’s arrest in Prague. They maintained friendly relations until Foucault’s death in 1984, and in 1991 Derrida gave the paper “‘To Do Justice to Freud’: The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis” at a conference marking the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Madness and Unreason. Finally, in his late seminars Derrida briely discussed some of Foucault’s work, focusing on
Discipline and Punish and volume one of The History of Sexuality. In The Beast and the Sovereign, volume I (2001–2002), Derrida discusses Foucault’s understanding of biopolitics while critiquing Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (Derrida 2009, 324–333). In his 1999–2000 seminar on the death penalty, Derrida questions Foucault’s opposition between the visible and the invisible in Discipline and Punish (Derrida 2012). This second point is raised briely in For What Tomorrow, amid Derrida’s relections on his relation to Foucault and other thinkers he engaged critically in his early work (Derrida and Roudinesco 2004, 12). It may well be that Derrida discusses Foucault’s work in other seminars still to be published.
The debate thus begins with Foucault’s History of Madness. Even though Derrida will make claims about its whole, two sections of this book are particularly relevant to the exchange to come. The irst is the Preface, where Foucault outlines his aims and articulates the dificulties he faces in achieving them. The book follows a basic historical sequence: from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, where madness plays a role in society as a link to supernatural truth, to the classical age, inaugurated through madness’s exclusion and ending with madness emerging as mental illness conined in psychological discourse. Foucault maintains that we remain in this last stage, where reason has silenced the dialogue it once had with madness, and he describes his work not as a strict history but as “the archaeology of that silence” (EHM, xxviii). The paradoxical nature of this project is immediately apparent. How can one speak of an excluded silence produced by reason without participating in the very process of exclusion? And how does one access a thing such as madness if it truly has been silenced? Foucault acknowledges these tensions, without claiming to resolve them. He also oscillates between intimating that madness has no reality
Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) / 597
outside the discourse of reason and speaking of it as if it does, however inaccessible it remains today.
The second relevant section of the History of Madness is the opening of Chapter 2, “The Great Coninement.” Here Foucault gives a brief reading of Descartes’ First Meditation and argues that madness receives special treatment in the method of doubt (EHM, 44–47). Foucault claims that Descartes entertains the possibility of sense errors and dreaming, including them in his method of doubt and so in the experience of thinking. By contrast, Descartes excludes madness as relevant to his method, rigorously separating it from thought as such. “One cannot suppose that one is mad, even in thought, for madness is precisely a condition of impossibility for thought ... madness is simply excluded by the doubting subject, in the same manner that it will soon be excluded that he is not thinking or that he does not exist.” Descartes’ treatment of madness is thus of a piece with the great coninement, in which the mad were locked up en masse along with other undesirables, excluded from all commerce with society at large. “Madness has been banished. While man can still go mad, thought, as the sovereign exercise carried out by a subject seeking the truth, can no longer be devoid of reason.” With Descartes, madness falls silent in the face of reason.
The next text in the debate is Derrida’s “Cogito and the History of Madness.” This essay begins with a short introduction, in which Derrida relects on having been a student of Foucault, inding himself “already challenged by the master’s voice within him” before he even speaks. But this relation of power is simultaneously contested, since Derrida claims that the master within “is also challenged by the disciple that he himself is” (Derrida 1978, 31–32). Although brief – one paragraph – these remarks raise the themes of mastery and pedagogy, destabilizing an understanding of the active schoolmaster as sovereign over the passive student. Cast as a site of contestation and struggle, the teacher–student relation will remain in play in the remainder of the debate.
Derrida then proceeds by outlining as well as questioning Foucault’s project in general terms. Derrida’s understanding of the History of Madness is here guided by its Preface, from which he quotes extensively, and focuses on two main themes. The irst concerns Foucault’s thesis that reason has silenced madness and the description of his project as an archaeology of this silence. Derrida questions Foucault’s ability to speak from a position outside the order of a generalized reason, since language itself is located in this order. He thus suggests that Foucault cannot avoid complicity with reason’s silencing of madness. Although noting that Foucault himself raises such questions, Derrida nonetheless claims that he does so “in too lateral and implicit a fashion” and does not “acknowledge their quality of being prerequisite methodological or philosophical considerations” (Derrida 1978, 35, 38). The second theme analyzed is that of the search for the common root that precedes the division
598 / Samir Haddad
between reason and madness, a project that Derrida claims is opened but “left in the shadows” by Foucault (Derrida 1978, 39). Here Derrida questions Foucault’s view that this division takes place in the classical age and involves an external differentiation between reason and its other. Instead, Derrida proposes that the classical event is a secondary phenomenon, derivative of divisions internal to reason more generally understood that can be traced back to the Greeks. Similarly, Derrida pursues the implications of Foucault’s association of the division between reason and madness with the origin of history. Taking this seriously, Derrida argues, also undermines the privilege of the classical age. Derrida thus proposes that the relations between reason, madness, and history must be different from what Foucault suggests. The possibilities of both madness and history do not arise only in the classical age but are explained by a broader understanding of reason and its relation to its others.
This sets the stage for the most famous section of Derrida’s essay, his contestation of Foucault’s reading of Descartes. This proceeds in two phases. First, Derrida argues that Descartes does not treat madness differently from sense errors and dreaming. Rather, he claims that all three are equally excluded from truth, since all leave untouched the realm of the intelligible. The possibility of madness is one step among others in the method of doubt, and Derrida maintains that the only reason it is passed over in favor of dreaming is because it is not common or universal enough. It is thus not convincing to the “nonphilosopher,” who Derrida claims Descartes gives voice to at this moment in the text, and so “is not a useful or happy example pedagogically” (Derrida 1978, 51). Further, Derrida argues that madness returns to thought in the hypothesis of the evil genius, for the global doubt this introduces, of both sensory and intelligible truth, is a hyperbolization of insanity. This places the possibility of madness irmly inside the realm of thought.
Second, Derrida raises the stakes further by arguing that the cogito itself is not the paradigm of reason deined in the absence of madness, as Foucault would have it, but “it is valid even if I am mad.... Whether I am mad or not, Cogito, sum. Madness is therefore, in every sense of the word, only one case of thought (within thought)” (Derrida 1978, 55–56, Derrida’s italics). This, for Derrida, is the cogito’s “mad audacity,” a madness that goes beyond even that of the evil genius. And Derrida labels it the philosophical moment par excellence, linking it to Plato’s “Good beyond being.” The cogito thus answers to the project of uncovering the common root of the division between madness and reason, one not located solely in the classical age. However, in a further twist, Derrida suggests that this moment of madness is not found in the cogito as it is written in Descartes’ text. To relect on it or retain it, to communicate it in language, is already to reduce this moment to a kind of rational order. It is thus not a root that lies in historical time. But neither is it located outside of time altogether, as eternal or timeless, a “philosophia perennis.” Rather, Derrida argues that “the historicity proper to philosophy is located and constituted in the transition, the dialogue between hyperbole and the inite structure, between that
Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) / 599
which exceeds the totality and the closed totality, in the difference between history and historicity” (Derrida 1978, 60). Between the inite and beyond, the cogito thus provides the basis for an understanding of the relations between reason, madness, and history different from that offered by Foucault.
The nature of Derrida’s critique is thus complex in its structure. In its broadest expression, Derrida agrees with Foucault’s claim that Descartes has interned madness. But he has displaced both the madness in question and the site of its internment. At issue is not the ordinary madness that Foucault claims is conined in the First Meditation. Rather, it is the hyperbolic madness of philosophy as such, and it is in the Second Meditation that it is cast outside, an exclusion reinforced in Descartes’ later appeal to the natural light and to God. It is for this reason that Derrida claims that Foucault risks “a violence of a totalitarian and historicist style” (Derrida 1978, 57), for he follows Descartes in denying the madness inherent in philosophical reason. Not that this risk could be avoided, for Derrida also asserts that the excessive moment of hyperbole is compromised as soon as one speaks. Derrida suggests that the value of Foucault’s work is to help us appreciate this point, praise that is of course not without a sting.
It is a sting that Foucault’s “My Body, This Paper, This Fire” returns to its sender with a redoubled force. This essay contains two main lines of argument. First, Foucault provides a detailed critique of Derrida’s alternative interpretation of Descartes’ First Meditation. Opposing him on several key points, Foucault argues that Derrida misses important differences at work in Descartes’ text, neglecting “literal differences between words ... thematic differences of images ... textual differences in the arrangement and the opposition of the paragraphs” (EHM, 562). Further, Foucault charges that underlying Derrida’s misreading is a fundamental failure to understand the nature of the meditation as a genre. A meditation operates, Foucault argues, in two registers at once, as the deduction of systematic truths and as an exercise to be performed. While Derrida has focused on the irst, he appears oblivious to the second and so fails to appreciate those moments of the text aiming more to achieve a change in the meditating subject – to bring about a series of extratextual events – than to communicate any truth. Foucault then offers a reading of the First Meditation informed by this distinction, one only slightly longer than that offered in the History of Madness, conirming his original hypothesis that madness is excluded by Descartes.
Second, Foucault argues that this misreading of Descartes is indicative of Derrida’s tendency to reify the sovereign position of philosophy as master of all domains, something Foucault himself rejects. Foucault does not advance this point by analyzing Derrida’s praise of philosophy in his interpretation of the cogito in the Second Meditation – this aspect of Derrida’s reading he barely mentions. Instead, he focuses on Derrida’s claim that the rejection of madness in the First Meditation is made by the hypothetical nonphilosopher supposedly invoked by Descartes.
600 / Samir Haddad
According to Foucault, Derrida claims this because to acknowledge philosophy’s exclusion of madness would be to accept philosophy’s limits. Better to relegate the rejection to a prephilosophical naivete and maintain philosophy’s power to dominate its others. But more broadly, and more cutting, Foucault extends this diagnosis to Derrida’s writings as a whole. He asserts that such a move involves “a reduction of discursive practices to textual traces; the elision of events that are produced there, leaving only marks for a reading,” and that behind this strategy is “a historically welldetermined little pedagogy, which manifests itself here in a very visible manner. A pedagogy which teaches the student there is nothing outside the text ... a pedagogy that inversely gives to the voice of the masters that unlimited sovereignty that allows it indeinitely to re-say the text” (EHM, 573). With these words, Foucault grants Derrida the status of a master while mercilessly attacking the value of this position.
Relecting on the signiicance of this debate, one is struck by the sharp difference that emerges in these two thinkers’ attitudes toward philosophy. Although Derrida argues that the afirmative madness of the cogito is lost as soon as Descartes writes, he nonetheless emphasizes this moment’s necessity as philosophy’s driving force, and the necessity that we pursue this in our own thought in turn. Foucault, by contrast, belittles Derrida’s praise of philosophy, conining both disciple and discipline to a past better left behind. (This difference is brought out more clearly in the irst version of Foucault’s response, “Reply to Derrida.” There Foucault opens with general remarks concerning Derrida’s relation to philosophy as it is taught in France, remarks still critical but less biting than those closing “My Body,” and is also explicit about his own attempt to break free of this institutional framework [EHM, 575–578]). This difference relects their institutional positions at the time of writing. “Cogito and the History of Madness” was Derrida’s irst public presentation in Paris and his third publication. No longer a student but not yet a master, the young assistant at the Sorbonne seems to be knocking on philosophy’s door, asking for admittance. It is thus no surprise that Derrida afirms philosophy so strongly in supporting Descartes against Foucault’s reading, even as he asserts himself as an independent force with which to reckon. The author of “My Body, This Paper, This Fire” was in a markedly difference space. Recently elected to the Collège de France, Foucault had turned his back on the traditional academy and seems to relish the opportunity to slam the door on philosophy one more time. Of course, for neither thinker are these texts the last word on the matter – this particular praise of philosophy quickly disappears from Derrida’s writings, and Foucault could be said to return to the discipline in much of his late work. Nonetheless, the texts of this exchange remain signiicant events in the trajectories of philosophical engagement followed by both Derrida and Foucault.
As mentioned earlier, although “My Body” was the last text in the exchange to be read by both thinkers, it is not the last text relevant to the debate as a whole. In “‘To Do Justice to Freud’” Derrida examines the position of Freud in the History of
Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) / 601
Madness (Derrida 1998). He argues that in this work Freud occupies an ambivalent position, and he extends his analysis briely to other works of Foucault, primarily The Order of Things and volume one of The History of Sexuality. Relevant to the earlier debate, Derrida also underlines certain other passages of the History of Madness where the evil genius makes an appearance, and claims that these support his original critique. Any comprehensive engagement with Derrida and Foucault would thus need to incorporate this essay’s claims. Equally if not more signiicant is the posthumous publication of the two thinkers’ seminars, and not just because, as I have already indicated, Derrida discusses other texts of Foucault’s in this venue. Containing a wealth of material, these works make possible further exploration of their debate (immediately calling for further investigation is the theme of sovereignty) as well as opening up many new topics of research.
Samir Haddad
See Also
Madness
René Descartes
Suggested Reading
Boyne, Roy. 1990. Foucault and Derrida: The Other Side of Reason. London: Unwin Hyman. Derrida, Jacques. 1978. “Cogito and the History of Madness,” in Writing and Difference, trans.
Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 31–63.
1998. ‘“To Do Justice to Freud’: The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis,” trans. Michael Naas and Pascale-Anne Brault, in Jacques Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp.70–118.
2009. The Beast and the Sovereign, volume 1, trans. G. Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
2012. Séminare: La peine de mort, volume 1 (1999–2000). Paris: Galilée.
Derrida, Jacques, and Elizabeth Roudinesco. 2004. For What Tomorrow ... A Dialogue, trans. J. Fort. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Granel, Gerard. 1967. “Jacques Derrida et la rature de l’origine,” Critique 246:887–905. Naas, Michael. 2003. “Derrida’s Watch/Foucault’s Pendulum: A Final Impetus to the Cogito
Debate,” in Taking on the Tradition: Jacques Derrida and the Legacies of Deconstruction. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 57–75.
102
RENÉ DESCAR TES (1596–1650)
Foucault’s engagement with Descartes is articulated in multiple statements and interpretations, most of which are brief but evocative, scattered across many different projects spanning the course of many years. Given this, it should not be surprising that the interpretation of Descartes’ thought that emerges in Foucault’s writings appears fragmentary and ambivalent. Yet, despite this, there is a remarkable continuity in Foucault’s relation to Descartes. On more than one occasion, Foucault insisted that “we must not forget that Descartes wrote ‘meditations’ – and that meditations are a practice of the self” (EEW1, 278; see also EHM, 562, and ECF-HOS, 358, for example). This injunction ties together the central themes that deine Foucault’s encounter with the work of Descartes. First, this line makes obvious reference to Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy. Foucault returned to this text, and in particular to the First Meditation, time and again in his writing, research, and lectures. Although this is not the only work of Descartes that Foucault thought or wrote about, it is clearly the one that held the most interest for his own project. Second, this injunction draws our attention to the meditational character of Descartes’ text. What interests Foucault is not primarily the logical structure of Descartes’ arguments but rather the style and function of the discursive practices of which the Meditations are composed. In other words, Foucault’s aim is to examine what the text does, how it functions or happens as a series of events, not to evaluate its logical validity or truth value. Third, Foucault identiies the function of this text as a “practice of the self.” The Meditations employ a set of procedures and techniques aimed at the transformation of the self or subject who is meditating. In other words, the Meditations have what Foucault calls an “ascetic” dimension. They are part of an askesis – a labor or exercise that one performs in order to change oneself. Finally, Foucault suggests here and elsewhere that the meditational or functional character of the Meditations is something that we tend to forget. This forgetting, as Foucault sees it, is constitutive of the contemporary academic discipline of philosophy. Foucault’s
602
René Descartes (1596–1650) / 603
work reminds us of this aspect of the Meditations and in so doing makes us aware of our historical situation in relation to Descartes’ text. Foucault’s study of Descartes attempts to explain how and why it is that we tend not to focus on the meditational quality of the text, to reanimate the text’s meditative dimension, and to show how Descartes’ work is in fact part of a historical process that has constituted the kinds of practices that deine us today.
In History of Madness and The Order of Things, Foucault sees Descartes’ work primarily as a sign or example of a larger, and largely unconscious, historical event taking place. While each text presents us with an original insight into the historicity of Descartes’ thought, it was the brief but controversial passage from History of Madness that garnered the special critical attention that eventually led Foucault to develop his understanding of Descartes’ thought. For this reason, we will set aside the import of his remarks in The Order of Things and focus on his comments in History of Madness.
In History of Madness, Foucault charts a dramatic shift in the experience or perception of unreason, madness, and the mad that takes place around the time of Descartes (see EHM, part I, chaps. 1, 2). In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Foucault argues, there was no absolute distinction between unreason and reason, between madness and sanity. For example, skeptical philosophers such as Montaigne insisted that the most seemingly rational, sane, lucid-thinking person could in fact be mad at the very moment of their greatest lucidity. No clear borders marked out a space of rational thought over and against a space of derangement. But a new experience of madness comes to replace this one. Foucault points to Descartes’ First Meditation as a “sign” of this new experience. Descartes takes up the skeptical method of doubt – he seeks to set aside all opinions for which he can ind a reason to doubt. As part of the method, Descartes wonders whether it is possible to doubt his immediate actuality. But he hesitates because only a madman would doubt this, and Descartes can be sure that he is not mad. According to Foucault, this passage demonstrates a new perception of madness. Descartes seems to presuppose and to safely assume that if one is thinking rationally – that is, methodically, logically – then one is not and cannot be mad. Madness and reason are cleanly distinguished from one another and there is no overlap. The skepticism of Montaigne, in which reason is always potentially madness, is not thinkable for Descartes.
Shortly after the publication of History of Madness, Jacques Derrida offered a deconstructive reading of the book. Derrida singled out Foucault’s interpretation of Descartes and claimed that “the sense of Foucault’s entire project can be pinpointed in these few allusive and somewhat enigmatic pages” (Derrida 1978, 32). Derrida argued that Foucault had fundamentally misunderstood the meaning of Descartes’ text, which far from excluding madness from reason in fact radicalizes it as part of his project of methodical and hyperbolic doubt. Furthermore, according to Derrida, this misreading is symptomatic of Foucault’s lawed historicism. Foucault posits a historical point of rupture where reason separates itself from madness. This implies – and