Foucault/Derrida Exchange Continued

The reading for this week was Foucault's reply to Derrida, “My Body, This Paper, This Fire.” We begin by revisiting the basics of Derrida's critique, framed as a few key questions: Can one do a history of madness, using the discourse of reason? How can one hope to speak for madness? We also returned to some lingering questions from our discussion of Derrida's piece: What would it mean for Foucault if Derrida were right? What are the motivations or stakes for Derrida? Is his concern largely philosophical, political, historical? We answered tentatively that the stakes of Derrida's critique are primarily philosophical.


We then raised a general question about Foucault's response. Derrida accuses Foucault of misreading Descartes, and, through this, of a broader mistake in attempting a historical philosophy of madness. We notice that Foucault's piece focuses on the interpretation of Descartes, and wonder if, in doing this, he misses the second, broader point. In addressing this question, we ask if there is for Foucault a connection between the two aspects. We then point to a question Foucault poses near the end of the essay where he seems to address Derrida's larger point: “Could there be anything anterior or exterior to philosophical discourse?” (pg. 395). For him, the answer is yes. And the job of archeology/genealogy is to “get at the discursive determination” of such discourse.


The discussion keeps returning to the possibility that Foucault may have missed the force of Derrida's critique, and we make various attempts at formulating the latter's point in a succinct way. This was one attempt: We cannot speak about the “other” of philosophical discourse except by means of philosophical discourse. It would seem as though Foucault takes himself to be outside of the discourse of philosophy/reason—“pointing at things,” as we put it. For Derrida, there is no “getting outside” of such discourse. We venture this as one interpretation of Derrida's quotable “there is nothing outside of the text.”


Trying to understand what Foucault might say to all of this, we invoke the system/exercise distinction (i.e., “systematics” and “ascetics”) made by Foucault. He thinks that Derrida reads Descartes on the level of “system”—the reduction of discursive practices to textual traces is reading the Meditations as a set of propositions. Foucault sees Derrida as perpetuating a traditional, ahistorical model of philosophy. At this point, we hone in on what might be the key sticking point of the debate: the status of philosophical discourse. How can we keep doing this thing called philosophy, after it has been “historicized”? This seems to be more of a question for Foucault than it is for Derrida.


The group concludes with two questions, one concerning the debate between Foucault and Derrida and one concerning the trajectory of the former's work;

1. Is there an impasse between Foucault and Derrida on the question of textual analysis? With the rest of his work in mind, Derrida seems intent on “unreading,” while Foucault accuses him of a “misreading.”
   
2. Are Derrida's critique and the subsequent response instrumental in Foucault's shift from analyzing discourse to analyzing practices?