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
