Foucault/Derrida Fifty Years Later: The Futures of Genealogy, Deconstruction, and Politics

INTRODUCTION

▶    OLIVIA CUSTER, PENELOPE DEUTSCHER, AND SAMIR HADDAD

THERE WAS NO DEBATE. There never was a moment when Derrida and Foucault were sitting opposite each other, on display for an audience, arguing back and forth, controlled by a mediator or provoked by a journalist. There can be no images, no transcript. Of course, the history of philosophy is full of debates whose reality and vitality does not depend on an empirical encounter of the sort Foucault had with Chomsky: writers and readers frequently proceed by staging two authors as figures to stake out opposing positions. But the strange quarrel explored in these essays is not quite of that sort either.

On first approximation, the debate with which we are concerned takes place through three texts: Foucault’s book History of Madness, Derrida’s Cogito and the History of Madness (first given as a lecture which Foucault attended), and My Body, This Paper, This Fire, a text Foucault wrote as an explicit response to Derrida’s essay. We can also include a fourth text: ‘To Do Justice to Freud,’ which Derrida qualified as a postface to the old, archived debate. But this simple sequence belies the complexity of identifying the relevant texts and even their sequence. It passes over, for instance, the decade between Derrida’s challenge in 1963 and Foucault’s response in 1972, a decade in which their respective oeuvres were taking shape in part as competing alternatives for addressing the problems over which they had clashed. It ignores the peculiar histories of the publications, which were truncated and modified in various editions and translations.¹ It does not take into account the many other texts that the essays in this collection will show to be part of the debate as we understand it today.

Despite some artifice in saying it is now fifty years later than an encounter that did not take place at a precise date, there are good reasons for marking this time. Rereading Derrida’s Cogito essay in 2013 first prompted the discussions that led to this collection. Reflecting on the fact that the first round of the exchange between Derrida and Foucault was half a century old provoked a number of questions about its relation to contemporary work in a range of disciplines. It also quickly became apparent that this is a particularly rich moment to explore the Derrida-Foucault debate. Interest in it was galvanized by the appearance, finally in 2006, of the first complete English translation of History of Madness (including both versions of Foucault’s response), which brought this work to the Anglophone world, as if for the first time. A little later, in France, the fiftieth anniversary of its first publication revived critical attention to Foucault’s seminal book.² Furthermore, Foucault and Derrida scholars are now contending with the trove of new sources that have become public in recent years. The coming to light of archival material, including letters and testimonies, most recently in Benoît Peeters’s biography Derrida,³ gives us new resources to consider the history of the two thinkers’ relation. Finally, the publication of Foucault’s Collège de France courses (completed in 2015) and the first volumes of Derrida’s seminars have given access to swaths of research previously unavailable. These posthumous publications show how the debate continued even as Foucault and Derrida were moving far from the topics of the 1960s, toward their late work that has fueled recent discussions, notably around questions of sovereignty, governmentality, biopolitics, animality, the death penalty, and neoliberalism. With these newly published materials, and with the passing of time, the Derrida-Foucault debate is becoming a new object of study for today’s thinkers.

The contributors to this collection range across generations. They work in fields as diverse as critical theory, literary criticism, human rights, queer theory, pragmatism, and psychoanalysis, but they have in common a relation to philosophy as a primary reference. They also have in common the fact that they have engaged in lengthy and close readings of both Foucault and Derrida. Here all explore, rather than elide, the difficulty of fitting together Derrida’s and Foucault’s respective projects and propositions. Collectively they clarify how, and why, the legacy of this encounter is inscribed in today’s debates.

•    •    •

These essays can be organized in a number of ways and may be read in a variety of orders. Collectively they undertake a double project: on the one hand, they make accessible both the core texts and the central problems of the debate; on the other, they propose differing ways to understand the impetus it gives to future research.

In their essays, Lynne Huffer, Thomas Khurana, Pierre Macherey, Judith Revel, Samir Haddad, and Robert Trumbull in particular offer careful and expert reappraisals of the core texts. Macherey returns us to the extraordinary organizing gestures of 1961’s History of Madness. He suggests that Foucault took his bearings from Nietzsche as he devised an alternative form of writing history that could undermine the dominating positivist account of madness as a disorder with immutable traits. Analyzing not just philosophical, scientific, and literary discourses about reason or madness, but also laws and institutions, the distributions of bodies, spaces, and conducts, Foucault demonstrated the multiple ways in which reason is secured through the exclusion and containment of madness. His provocative conclusions and his novel method depended on one another: the more than 600 pages of detail through which History of Madness allowed the contingency of reason and madness to emerge was exactly the sort of explosive gesture required to unsettle reason’s apparatus of containment and self-assurance. The consequences of that gesture would be at the heart of the debate that Macherey reconstructs with an ear for the way it echoed a division at the heart of the French academy at the time.

Macherey sets out Foucault’s reasons for taking Descartes as an exemplary witness of the current of thought that justified the expulsion of madness out of the unified field intended for reason alone, provoking its reclusion. He shows us how Derrida in a sense turned Foucault’s own argument against him. Not without malice, as Macherey puts it, Derrida proposes that Foucault had himself underwritten a Cartesian representation of reason exempt from all madness when he credited Descartes’s Meditations with containing madness as decisively as did the stone walls of the General Hospital. With precise sympathy, Macherey details the alternative accounts of the separation between reason and unreason that emerge: Foucault’s account of reason’s inclusion of a necessary expulsion of madness on the one hand, Derrida’s account of reason whose hyperbolic hubris is its inhabitation by madness on the other. The peculiar rejection-assimilation of madness detected by Derrida functions according to what he will later come to call the logic of the pharmakon. Thus, although Derrida and Foucault may seem very close in their recognition that reason has defined itself against, and protected itself from, madness, Macherey situates the rift: the hyperbolic gesture that fascinates Derrida is in no way comparable to the historical gesture of confinement evoked by Foucault.

In her essay, Lynne Huffer exhorts us to read History of Madness, arguing that in a real sense this remains to be done. She echoes Foucault’s lament that the general principles guiding Derrida’s influential critique of the work meant that there had been no point for Derrida in arguing with the 650 pages…no point analyzing the historical material (RP 576/1150), the confinement of a few tens of thousands of people, or the setting up of an extra-judiciary State police, no point in attending to that which occupies the essential part, if not the totality of [Foucault’s] book: the analysis of an event (RP 577/1151). Huffer argues that Derrida’s influential objections caused us to lose sight of the work’s extraordinary innovation. She returns us to Foucault’s entrancing archive in all its passion and detail. In the space of Huffer’s essay, we want nothing more than to abide with the records of the sodomites, and the lists of lugubrious prisons. We are at the same time reminded that to draw from these something like a history of madness, Foucault had to develop a very particular way of listening to the mumbling of the world. In a careful demonstration that working with the dust and words of the archive requires a specific reading practice, Huffer helps us rediscover the impact of a project that would be no less remarkable if published today. She also offers us an important lesson: if we read this early text with too much hindsight we risk missing the force of Foucault’s gesture.

Samir Haddad proposes an analogous lesson about Derrida’s response to Foucault. He shows how one of Foucault’s most notorious quips—the accusation that Derrida’s method is a petty pedagogy—can lead to important insights about the relation between philosophy and teaching. Through a close reading of the Cogito essay, Haddad identifies both a classical model of pedagogy, to which Foucault’s objections apply, and an implicit model (teased out of what Derrida says about philosophy) that sets up a pedagogical scene quite different from the one Foucault accuses Derrida of perpetuating. He remobilizes Foucault’s accusation so that it points anew both to what is most innovative in Derrida’s analysis, and to the latter’s challenge to a sovereign philosophy, a sovereign reason, and to those charged with its pedagogical authority. Drawing attention to the fact that, for Derrida, the attempt to say the hyperbole of sovereignty is itself a linguistic practice, Haddad argues that this has consequences for philosophy that necessarily recast the pedagogical scene.

Robert Trumbull leads us through Derrida’s return to Foucault in 1991. At that time, Derrida had decided not to return to what had been debated close to thirty years ago (JF 71/94). Yet, as Trumbull shows, we find the earlier Cogito argument adjusted, but reconfirmed, in ‘To Do Justice to Freud.’ Moreover, its implications for the entire trajectory of Foucault’s work (from Birth of the Clinic and The Order of Things through the volumes published as The History of Sexuality, including his late ethics) could now be elaborated by Derrida. This allows us to update the debate, with a new sense of how it can be negotiated through Foucault’s subsequent work on episteme, psychoanalysis, the monarchy of sex, life, death and power.

Such returns to the primary texts remind us of their complexity. However, one of the important points made by the collection as a whole is that a plethora of other texts do not just illuminate the debate but rather belong to it—if we understand debate in a wide sense. A number of essays show how Derrida’s late seminars continue a dialogue begun decades earlier (see Naas in particular), while others reveal that the debate lives on in mutations of Foucault’s work, sometimes in deletions as much as in inclusions (see Huffer and Revel in particular).

Thus, working with an extended archive, the contributors move us toward contemporary choices for critical practice. To outline the choices Foucault and Derrida have made possible, this volume offers a range of options for understanding the central problems that arise from their debate (variously formulated as the relation between the transcendental and the empirical, immanence or transcendence, or deconstruction versus genealogy). In particular, it provides several vocabularies with which to describe Derrida’s and Foucault’s respective prescriptions for a practice of critique that would avoid both precritical naiveté and the political and ethical stances of any critical philosophy that refuses to acknowledge (its own) contingency.

In canonical philosophical terms, both Foucault and Derrida negotiated the challenge by developing transcendental methods that contend with the fact that the transcendental cannot be free of the empirical. This problem is central to this volume and is tackled in several ways. Some essays provide detailed technical descriptions of the ways in which Foucault and Derrida revise the classical mode of transcendental analysis. Khurana, for instance, offers a possible organizing scheme for describing Derrida’s transformation of the transcendental. Acknowledging that Derrida’s Cogito essay can be seen as radicalizing the transcendental project, Khurana argues that this radicalization occurs in distinct ways. Derrida engaged in ultratranscendental inquiries that showed how transcendental conditions are irreducibly related to the empirical. But his work also comprises quasi-transcendental inquiries that show how conditions of possibility are also conditions of impossibility. Carefully tracking where in the essay these two gestures operate, Khurana shows that, although it is tempting to think of Derrida as radicalizing the transcendental, that image (with its implicit reference to moving to ever greater depth) cannot adequately render the complications Derrida is introducing. On this more precise account of Derrida’s analyses, the latter enable and at the same time disable determinate shapes of reason in such a way as to elucidate the very form of historicity with which Foucault must be engaged. Without erasing the differences in their respective critical methodologies, Khurana thus argues that there is more proximity than is generally perceived in the Foucauldian and Derridean revisions of the transcendental.

In one of the direct challenges these essays present to one another, Amy Allen takes a different position on the relation between the two methods. She insists on the divergence as she offers an equally detailed look at Foucault’s and Derrida’s solutions to the shared aim of critiquing reason. She provides an alternative to analyzing the way they handle the irreducibly empirical element of the transcendental by turning to the vocabulary of transcendence and immanence. The convergence she underlines between Derrida’s and Habermas’s objections to Foucault may be considered noteworthy (these otherwise quite different thinkers are held to have both objected to a performative contradiction in Foucault’s History of Madness project). Allen argues that Derrida (and Habermas) fundamentally missed the point of what Foucault was attempting, namely an immanent critique of reason. This is the Foucauldian answer to the charge of performative contradiction: aware of the danger, Foucault develops an immanent critique of the historical a priori in order to embed the fundamental ambivalence between the indispensability of our form of rationality and its intrinsic dangers into his own methodology. According to Allen, the analyses of Foucault pursued by Habermas and Derrida prove unable to tolerate the decisive distinction Foucault makes between reason and forms of rationality. There is, for Foucault, no reason as such. The contingency of forms of rationality allows an articulation of the possibility of change that was the very aim of the project: to describe contingency was to describe the possibility of transformation. Thus immanent critique could be associated with a possibility of freedom.

Colin Koopman and Huffer similarly side with Foucault, making unambiguous cases for the practice of Foucauldian genealogy. Koopman makes the additional argument that one must choose between genealogy and deconstruction. He characterizes the methodological difference as follows: deconstruction shows "that our most necessary limits are also contingent, whereas genealogy shows how that which is contingent has come to be taken as necessary. Radically critiquing the most general principles presupposed in one’s practice is a different type of analytic exercise. Koopman further contends that it redirects us away from what the Foucauldian patient labor" reveals. Some readers will use Koopman’s argument to claim that genealogy, rather than deconstruction, should be counted as the most radical gesture.

A contrario, drawing on newly published seminars by Foucault and Derrida, Michael Naas’s and Geoffrey Bennington’s essays focus on concerns we should have with Foucault’s methodology. In very different ways, they show that the methodological questions are also political questions. Naas highlights how Derrida’s dispute with Foucault was always an argument about the proper of man insofar as Derrida’s understanding of the relation between madness and reason is necessary to attend to a subjectivity [that] cannot become a rights-bearing subject. Bennington is concerned to show how apparently subtle or technical philosophical problems translate into high stakes and urgent political summons.

Working with the second year of The Death Penalty, Naas shows that, when Derrida turns to the problems of decision and calculability in relation to the sovereign decision over life and death, he is revisiting the objection he made in the Cogito essay to Foucault’s reduction of the hyperbolic project. In a careful reconstruction, showing how each of these texts allows us better to read the other, Naas leads us to understand the connections between the decision of the sovereign and the decision that would ground reason. Recasting the madness of reason as the madness of the death penalty illuminates both, and makes palpable their lurking violence. Naas argues that this violence allows the leap, by association, from eliding the origin of meaning and nonmeaning to which the Cogito essay objects, to the ignoring or overlooking the groundlessness of reason that Derrida cautions against, after parsing Heidegger. In fact, the leap is an authorized move in a jeu de l’oie, the game that, Naas suggests, is the best image for describing the Derridean procedure for writing history. Naas thus manages to relay not only Derrida’s contention that that which grounds cannot be grounded but also Derrida’s mixture of provocation and good sense.

Bennington does not shy away from provocation. He not only throws down a gauntlet with his essay but also makes popular provocation its theme. Starting with the famous image of Foucault with a bullhorn, Bennington wonders how it came to seem so apt. Is it just enthusiastic readers, as Bennington wryly puts it, who are in danger of turning Foucault’s careful analyses of parrhēsia into material sanctioning the philosopher as a figure entitled to tell the truth to the people? From Foucault’s Collège de France courses (The Hermeneutics of the Subject, The Government of Self and Others, and The Courage of Truth) Bennington draws a subtle and sustained argument that Foucault’s "discursive description of the way ancient philosophy (at least as exemplified by Plato) sets up the relations between philosophy, politics, and rhetoric shades into an identificatory affirmation on Foucault’s part." Having shown that this slippage occurs, Bennington explains why, arguing that Foucault does not have the means to resist it, because, unlike Derrida, he does not have a theory of reading. Choosing not to face the need for a theory of reading is, on Bennington’s analysis, choosing to forgo fighting the dogmatism and moralism lurking in politics and political philosophy.

But must we choose between Foucault and Derrida? While some contributors commit to the affirmative answer, others plead for different responses. Some contend that the very difficulty of fitting Foucault and Derrida together is instructive in considering the two bodies of work, while others offer positive examples of how their propositions might be combined.

In the first category, Revel and Olivia Custer thematize the peculiar relation between Derrida and Foucault and explore what it indicates about the content of their work and the directions open to future uses of it. For Revel, the usual ways of describing a relation between two thinkers—in terms of positions, or generations, or moments of thought—are inadequate to account for the tenuous, polemical, and subterranean [yet] essential relation between Foucault and Derrida. She demonstrates that while the effects on Foucault of Derrida’s criticism do not take the form one might expect, they are nonetheless considerable. As she puts it, although Foucault responds with silence and then implicit adjustments, there are signs that, from the mid-1960s, Derrida’s objections ‘rework’ all of [Foucault’s] work and give it its stamp, starting in the mid-1960s.

Suggesting that the move from early archeology to genealogy is a major shift that is itself a response to the Derridean critique, Revel shows the link with Foucault’s development of a history of the present. She argues that while genealogy was a way out of a bad alternative between the history of philosophy and the philosophy of history, Foucault finds his best relation to history only when he gives up on the kind of history Derrida claimed was problematic. Thus she traces an intriguing parallel between Foucault’s evolving relation to history and his handling of Derrida’s objections. According to Revel, precisely when it seemed not even to be on Foucault’s agenda, Derrida’s essay was operating in a subterranean manner to guide him to his solution. In other words, Foucault’s ostensible dismissal of Derrida’s criticism is only the visible face of the relation: its underside is the long-lasting impact on Foucault’s complicated relation to history and philosophy.

Surprising parallels to these suggestions emerge in another essay that considers silhouettes and delayed responses. Tracking the inverse hypothesis to that proposed by Revel, Custer identifies a Foucault effect in Derrida’s work. Rather than seeing the quarrel as determining Derrida’s development over decades, she situates it as having a delayed effect that becomes apparent in an unusual feature of two of Derrida’s posthumous works. Detecting the silhouette of Foucault’s story about Descartes in The Animal That Therefore I Am and the death penalty seminars, she shows how this plays a pivotal role in Derrida’s analysis insofar as it is crucial for understanding the very stakes of his project. This odd reprise of the gesture that Derrida had questioned decades earlier is a sign that the particular modalities of the Derrida-Foucault exchange do not fit the mold of a classical debate. Custer suggests that is precisely why the peculiar relation between Derrida’s and Foucault’s oeuvres might also be taken as a new model for collaboration consonant with the lessons they both offer as to the political effects of privileging certain forms of verbal or written exchange.

Among those who argue against choosing sides, Trumbull and Penelope Deutscher both propose new methodologies that combine Derrida’s and Foucault’s analyses. Trumbull does so by calling on the insights of psychoanalysis. He begins by reconstructing the way in which Derrida uses Freud to argue that Foucauldian power reveals itself to be an at best, problematic principle. Foucault is famous for developing a concept of power that is multiple, is capillary, and functions according to an economy in which subjectivation is always to be understood in both senses of the word. Freud’s theory of drives provides valuable help: the essentially malleable and dispersed character of unconscious drives provides a good model for thinking the manner in which sexuality is penetrated by effects of power, the massive effort, as Foucault describes it, aimed at seeking out, making known, and taking charge of pleasure. But Freud is a complex figure who, while offering key resources to Foucault, also undercuts one of Foucault’s most crucial concepts. Through a careful reading of the death drive, Trumbull contends that "Beyond the Pleasure Principle in fact points to a notion of power Foucault does not and cannot think." Thus Trumbull elegantly echoes Derrida’s charge in Resistances while insisting that to do so is not to disable genealogy, but rather one way of giving Foucault’s thought new impetus. Joining Bennington and Naas in calling for analysis capable of subjecting itself to critique of its own axiomatic principles, Trumbull names and speaks for the possibility of (accessing a term briefly used by Derrida) deconstructive genealogy.

Deutscher offers an alternative approach to such a possible integration. Where Trumbull argues for a concurrent pursuit of the forms of critique both philosophers did in fact defend, Deutscher instead asks us to consider questions they both omitted, and those they each found least palatable in the other. In doing so, she amplifies and redoubles Derrida’s identification of suspended potential carried within Foucault’s text. She also argues for combining that with an exploration of similarly suspended capacities in Derrida’s work. In this way, an analytic working space forms from the points most averted by each in the other’s projects. Deutscher pursues this proposal by conjoining the occlusions of Foucault’s History of Sexuality and of Derrida’s The Death Penalty, Volume 1. Given that sexual difference and biopolitics are, respectively, Foucault’s and Derrida’s blind spots, this methodology would argue that interrogating the aversions of both gives rise to appropriately surprising results: a new conceptualization of reproductive biopolitics.

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Foucault and Derrida were both convinced that existing conceptual frameworks and methodologies must be retooled, and new versions invented. Both chose to do this with experiments in language, each with a delicate and powerful plume. They are allies from one perspective, and competitors from another. This ambivalence explains both their mutual admiration and the determination of each to defend the specificity, and necessity, of his work.

This volume continues the debate in that spirit. The contributors have mobilized resources from both Foucault and Derrida to propose new formulations of the problems at the heart of the debate. Their essays manifest a commitment to understanding the specificities of the two authors in order to analyze how, and why, those specificities produce tensions and incompatibilities. Notwithstanding the many shared interests and insights of Derrida and Foucault, the contributors repudiate the blurring of Foucault and Derrida in monikers such as postmodernism, poststructuralism, French Theory, or "la pensée 68." Instead, they negotiate with precision the philosophers’ differences, tensions, mutations, mimicries, returns, and resuscitations to reinvigorate their différend and its ongoing potential.

It is no accident that, in collectively taking stock of Derrida and Foucault’s contentious exchange, this volume neither produces, nor promotes, unanimity. There are clear sympathies and argued defenses for very different positions, and yet the arguments articulated by these essays do not resolve into a neat set of alternatives. None of the contributors are interested in stylized warfare. Collectively, we pursue a debate that is no less polemical for being less stylized. We trace out the contours of a complicated discussion in which the boundary lines between positions are less than stable, interlocutors are partially phantasmatic, and propositions sometimes develop lives of their own.

NOTES

1.    Foucault’s book was originally published in 1961 under the title Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique. In 1964 it was republished in French in severely abridged form, with the original 674 pages reduced to 311. This abridged version did not contain the original’s preface nor the three pages on Descartes (the sections of the text on which Derrida’s essay focused). In 1965 Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason appeared. This was an English translation of the 1964 volume, with some material from the 1961 volume added, but the original preface and the pages on Descartes were still missing. In late 1972 Foucault’s original book was republished under the title Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, but with a new, very short preface replacing the old one, and Mon corps, ce papier, ce feu as one of its two appendices. The complete text was published as a cheaper paperback by Gallimard in 1976, without the appendices. This edition is the one most commonly found in bookstores today. The original preface and Mon corps were republished in volumes I and II respectively of Dits et écrits in 1994. A first version of Mon corps was published in translation alongside Derrida’s essay in the Japanese journal Paideia, in an issue devoted to Foucault and literature in February 1972. This translation was titled Derrida e no kaino (Response to Derrida) and was later printed in French in Dits et écrits, II. An English translation of the original text from 1961, with the 1972 preface and both replies, was published in 2006 under the title History of Madness.

Derrida delivered Cogito et l’histoire de la folie at the Collège Philosophique in March 1963. His essay was published at the end of that year in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale (vol. 68, no. 4, October–December). Six footnotes to this essay were published in the January–March 1964 edition of this journal, with the editors explaining that Derrida had submitted them after the previous issue had gone to the printer. This essay was reprinted in 1967’s L’écriture et la différence, with some changes made to the text. The book was translated into English in 1980.

Derrida’s ‘Être juste avec Freud’: L’histoire de la folie à l’âge de la psychanalyse was first delivered at a conference in Paris marking the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of History of Madness in November 1991. It was published in the edited collection Penser la folie: Essais sur Michel Foucault in 1992 and republished, with some changes, in Derrida’s 1996 book Résistances: De la psychanalyse. This volume appeared in English translation in 1998.

2.    See Philippe Artières, Jean-François Bert, Philippe Chevallier, Frédéric Gros, Luca Paltrinieri, Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, and Judith Revel, eds., Histoire de la folie: Cinquante ans de réception 1961–2011 (Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen / IMEC, 2011); Daniele Lorenzini and Arianna Sforzini, eds., Un demi-siècle d’histoire de la folie (Paris: Kimé, 2013); and Philippe Artières and Jean-François Bert, Un succès philosophique: L’Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique de Michel Foucault (Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen / IMEC, 2011).

3.    Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography (Malden: Polity, 2013). Archival material relevant to the debate is also contained in Philippe Artières, Jean-François Bert, Frédéric Gros, and Judith Revel, eds., Cahiers de L’Herne: Michel Foucault (Paris: L’Herne, 2011).

PART  |   1

Openings

1

The Foucault-Derrida Debate on the Argument Concerning Madness and Dreams

▶    PIERRE MACHEREY

TRANSLATED BY JENNIFER CAZENAVE, OLIVIA CUSTER, AND SAMIR HADDAD

THE STARTING POINT FOR THE discussion between Foucault and Derrida was the 1961 publication of Foucault’s first major work, History of Madness. This began a trajectory that, over the course of the next twenty years, contributed considerably to transforming