I have been thinking about the Foucault-Derrida debate on Madness and Reason for my presentation of it next Wednesday. Here is a small selection from my initial thoughts:
I would suggest that the question of madness which was the (fictional/pseudo) origin of the debate we have just entered has been displaced. In the process of a history of philosophy we cannot go back before the question of madness any more than Foucault could go back before a question of reason in Descartes. Reason, like modernity itself, has so multiplied that we seek in this debate some clarity that we can never revive. But it is the act of searching for it that sustains us as an academic enterprise. We are so invested in this debate (as a michrochosm of our lives) that we repeat it again in a new way. It is for this reason I think we must look especially beyond the purported object of debate (madness, reason), and pay special attention to the act of critique itself, for it is here that I feel the debate sustains itself in the history of the present, our present. I do not mean this in a purely methodological sense (what is at stake is not the value of archeology versus deconstruction, as if they were ever mutually exclusive). What is at stake, for us, for today, is the act of critique and the potential for critique to create
3 comments:
I haven't read the debate you are reporting on, so I can't comment on accuracy. But I will say that your last sentence is quite lovely.
Consider Derrida's method of critiquing Foucault, which is that Foucault cannot portray madness with language because language presupposes reason, and reason is the opposite of madness. And because of this reason cannot portray madness, so Foucault failed to do what he said he did.
This of course rests on the assumption that reason is the opposite of madness, and Derrida has a special critique of opposites. He says it is false to privilege one binary opposite over the other - black/white, inside/outside, etc. Instead, we have "play" of privilege between the opposites.
So why in this case does he privilege madness over reason, if only to attack Foucault?
Thanks for the insightful comment. Derrida of course reduces everything to language pretty much (I don't mean that dismissively, his works are brilliant), but I think it's more a conflict here between method. Since Foucault derives madness from reason, not language per se. So it's not that he poses that it is not really the opposite, but that the distinction lies on a different register altogether.
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