Derrida and Foucault

Reframing the Boundaries: Thinking the Political

Series editors: Alison Assiter and Evert van der Zweerde

This series aims to mine the rich resources of philosophers in the “continental” tradition for their contributions to thinking the political. It fills a gap in the literature by suggesting that the work of a wider range of philosophers than those normally associated with this sphere of work can be of relevance to the political.

Titles in the Series

Kierkegaard and the Matter of Philosophy, Michael O’Neill Burns

Arendt, Levinas and a Politics of Relationality, Anya Topolski

The Risk of Freedom: Ethics, Phenomenology and Politics in Jan Patocka, Francesco Tava, translated by Jane Ledlie

Nietzsche’s Death of God and Italian Philosophy, Emilio Carlo Corriero, translated by Vanessa di Stefano

Lotman’s Cultural Semiotics and the Political, Andrey Makarychev and Alexandra Yatsyk

Derrida and Foucault: Philosophy, Politics and Polemics Paul Rekret

Axel Honneth: Reconceiving Social Philosophy, Dagmar Wilhelm (forthcoming)

Derrida and Foucault

Philosophy, Politics, and Polemics

Paul Rekret

London • New York

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ISBN: HB 978-1-7866-0343-2

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Names: Rekret, Paul, 1978–author.

Title: Derrida and Foucault : philosophy, politics, and polemics / Paul Rekret.

Description : Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017. | Series: Reframing the boundaries: thinking the political | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017028738 (print) | LCCN 2017035429 (ebook) | ISBN 9781786603456 (electronic) | ISBN 9781786603432 (cloth : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Derrida, Jacques. | Foucault, Michel, 1926–1984. | Political science—Philosophy.

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Preface

The majority of the following work was undertaken several years ago as research for a PhD dissertation in the field of political theory. If it seems worthwhile to publish it now, it is because the problem to which it responds—the self-referentiality of much of so-called continental political theory— continues to encompass certain regions of the academy. So much is confirmed by a cursory glance to the proceedings of any number of major conferences or the contents of journals friendly to social theory of a “continental” persuasion. The abiding theme that one cannot help but recognize is the sort of compare-and-contrast exercise whereby thinker X is shown to have a richer understanding of a given issue than thinker Y (e.g., Negri versus Laclau on democracy; Rancière versus Arendt on equality; Badiou versus Deleuze on agency). The gesture here is in most cases rather circular: where theory starts from an axiomatic ontological narrative, its objects along with the claims of its interlocutors, are reduced to that narrative’s terms in advance. The critic sets up a preferred theorist as frustratingly impervious to arguments that view the critique of metaphysics prevalent among post-1968 philosophers in terms of their changing social conditions. Such historical arguments are effortlessly refuted on grounds that simply reject the terms of historicity posited by the critic. It is indeed true that, as Fredric Jameson insists, we ought always to historicize, but it seems that to do so is, in these instances at least, insufficient.¹

Or, in any case, that is the argument this book develops with regard to the work of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. That is to say, it seeks to show that Derrida and Foucault’s theories turn back on their own terms such that, the conclusion upon which any theoretically uncompromising reading of their work should arrive, is that of the impasse to which their central claims lead. In the process of developing such an argument, this book nevertheless suffers a certain scholastic formalism, one whose central symptom is the extent to which it engages in ventriloquizing its subjects’ positions upon a range of issues. This is intended as a means of unpacking their theories’ limitations. But it also reflects the way in which the work remains in thrall to a mode of theoretical exposition that it nonetheless views as inadequate.

This search for a language and a set of concepts not reducible to the critique of metaphysics has its advantages however. At the very least, it offers readers approaching Derrida and Foucault an interpretation that outlines pervasive themes and concerns of their work and clearly shows how these perspectives inform their approach to a range of issues. Indeed, one reader of an early version of parts of this work protested that it did not seem to offer major new insights or elucidations into Derrida and Foucault’s work. Whether this is true or not (I leave this up to the reader), this is not its central aim. Rather, the book’s argument hinges upon its capacity to synthesize a vast array of works by two prolific writers down to a series of central claims which can be traced throughout their oeuvres, and to examine what these tell us about their theoretical enterprise. In the process the book seeks to have something to say not only to partisans of one or the other thinker but, more widely, to the field of “continental political thought.”

Note

1.Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982.

Acknowledgments

Parts of chapter 2 and 5 were first published as “The Impasse of Post-Metaphysical Political Theory: On Derrida and Foucault,” Telos 161 (Winter 2012), pp. 79–98. Parts of chapters 2, 3, and 4 were published as “The Aporia and the Problem” in Vernon Cisney et al. (Eds.), Between Derrida and Foucault, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. I am grateful for their permission to reproduce parts of those texts here.

The research for this book was mostly undertaken through a period of personal and intellectual isolation, but it was nonetheless done in the occasional company of a few good friends. Indeed, Ljuba Castelli, John Grant, Clayton Chin and especially Simon Choat accompanied nearly its every step, and I am grateful for a certain unwavering esprit de corps they offered. I owe a debt of gratitude to Jeremy Jennings, Caroline Williams, Lasse Thomassen, and the School of Politics & International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London, more broadly, especially since a substantial portion of the research for this book was conducted under the auspices of a Queen Mary Graduate School Studentship. I would also like to thank Paul Patton, Alexandros Kioupkiolis, Jessica Mai Sims, Anja Kanngieser, Anna Feigenbaum William Connolly, Charles Devellennes, Mark Wenman, Gulshan Khan, Rodrigo Nunes, Nathan Widder, Clare Woodford, along with the series editors, Alison Assiter and Evert van der Zweerde, for their careful and thoughtful engagements at various points of the production of this work. I would like to mark a special debt of gratitude to Yung Kha, and I would also like to thank my good friend Jeff Webber who, in his unassuming way, encouraged me to finish this book. Finally, I would like this book to mark the memory of my dear Stanisława Czajkowska, who died while it was being written.

Introduction

Locating the Limits of Political Thought

It may seem rather a belated gesture to write a book investigating the political thought of the French philosophers Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault today. Indeed, in the marketplace of what’s known as continental social and political theory, these two thinkers seem to have been surpassed as crucial reference points to the extent that popular theoretical opinion has tended to move on to other, less grazed pastures. This is a field of study after all, based as much on the scrutiny of figures (from Martin Heidegger or Jean-Paul Sartre to Jacques Rancière or Alain Badiou) as it is on the study of problems. As such, interest in philosophers tends to come and go with the relative haste of a scholarly community in search of novel arguments and paper titles. So much is true of Derrida and Foucault who, while obviously still widely the subjects of study, no longer elicit debates in as frenzied a fashion as they did in the decades running from the 1970s to the 1990s or early 2000s.

However, the starting point for this investigation is that Derrida’s and Foucault’s central arguments and ideas have not been passed by in favor of others within the domain of “continental” political theory. Instead of scattering to the dustbin of the history of political thought, their arguments are all the more unapparent for having become conventional—a more or less accepted horizon of debate among social and political thinkers of a certain continental disposition. And the convention I have in mind here, to put it plainly, is marked by a broad rejection of the necessity of just about anything or, in a word, an affirmation of contingency. This involves a peculiar conception of contingency, one that demands to be problematized further, especially where constructing an emancipatory conception of politics and ethics is one’s ambition.¹ These are concepts that demand to be put in question, and we shall do so again and again as this book proceeds.

For the time being, however, suffice it to say that if there is a fundamental claim that delineates the theoretical tradition in question here, it rests with a broad conception of an irreducible contingency to all forms of social order. This might be a relatively crude formulation that consolidates a range of theoretical positions, but it nevertheless implies as still dominant a rejection of any attempt to provide a ground or foundation to the political. Accordingly, to affix the qualifier “post” to notions of foundation or essence in this instance signals a claim that that no account of the political is reducible to foundationalism nor to anti-foundationalism.² Foundationalism is rejected on the basis of an argument derived from Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger in particular (as we will see in chapter 1), whereby no principle grounding or ordering social relations can transcend those relations themselves. Thought has no access to an Archimedean position beyond the terrain of its articulation.

It is noteworthy that such a paradigm also spurns a totally relativist or anti-foundational political theory on the premise that, as Derrida has perhaps shown most of all, to claim to have totally exceeded foundational moves is itself a foundational or essential move. Anti-foundationalism implies the capacity to totally circumscribe, master, and exceed a foundational “inside” and, thus, such a turn is said to repeat the metaphysical move it is meant to escape. Post-foundationalism, in short, is usually considered not to usher in a nihilistic celebration of a total absence of order or normative principles, but instead to affirm that any ordering principle or ground is contingent, partial, and ever mutable. At work here is a broad and nebulous conception of contingency emanating from Nietzsche and Heidegger, and it continues to remain central, to one extent or another, to a broad range of contemporary continental thinkers: from Jean-Luc Nancy, Giorgio Agamben, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to more recent iterations in the work of Judith Butler, Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, William Connolly, and Jane Bennett.

In any case, the peculiar “post-foundational” assertion of the contingency of any order of social relations at issue here further involves a rearticulation of the Western tradition’s conception of philosophy’s relation to politics. This is a position that seeks to put in question the constitutive principles that have governed political thought and it entails a view of Western political philosophy as inaugurated by a demand, originating with Plato’s The Republic, for the polis to reflect the order of ideas.³ Political theory has thus tended to be marked, on this view, by a denial of the contingent nature of the political. This is a philosophical gesture that Hannah Arendt refers to as the displacement of the political by an “external force which transcends the political realm.”⁴ For Arendt, philosophy’s positing of principles that might govern or legislate the political reflects the former’s desire to master and escape the unpredictability and contingency of human action.⁵

Implicitly building on Arendt’s claim, Jacques Rancière coins the handy slogan of “archipolitics” for the Western tradition’s relation to the political as a “paradox” to be resolved by the philosopher, whose role is to determine the “harmonious essence of a just or good society.”⁶ Philosophy engages in politics, Rancière argues, only in terms of its desire to “achieve politics by eliminating politics,” that is, by governing its contingency through a transcendent ground.⁷

Their substantive differences with Rancière notwithstanding, Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe too are exemplary of a critique of political philosophy, which, in their terms, is defined by a “retreat of the political.”⁸ A withdrawal or retreat of the political, conceived in this case as sheer human multiplicity, has been effected, they argue, by the metaphysical tradition’s positing of an “essential … co-belonging of the philosophical and the political.”⁹ The philosophical and the political have functioned, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe claim, as mutual limits insofar as the latter is related to as the object of philosophy, a relation defined by philosophy’s “total domination of the political” constituted in its desire to empirically realize itself.¹⁰ The political withdraws or retreats insofar as it is never thought in itself, but always displaced, effaced, and dominated by philosophy’s desire to order and master it. In the case of Derrida and Foucault, the concept of sovereignty has held a privileged place for both in their engagements with the tradition of Western philosophy. As we will see in chapter 5, conceived as a claim to power whose grounds reason discovers, sovereignty is confronted by both thinkers as a crucial site of the reduction of politics to principles of order. But this book will also insist that these themes pervade Derrida’s and Foucault’s work, a point to which we shall return momentarily.

At this juncture, it’s essential to point out that consonant with the critique of philosophy’s attempts to ground or order the political is a widely shared critical assessment by the theorists I have in mind here of the aspiration to transform political philosophy into a political science. Grounded in various economic or behaviorist principles and competing methods for pursuing its task, politics becomes conceived as the competition over the distribution and management of power, interests, and resources. The sum of these practices is in turn named “political system’ and becomes the object of a science of politics. This desire for objectivity is extended to the beliefs, ideals, and values that animate political activities usually through idealized and abstract accounts of political agents.¹¹ Consequently, from this perspective the political is narrowly confined by an epistemological discipline to an institutional ensemble along with what Arditi and Valentine call its “day-to-day administrative rivalries.”¹² Political science, driven by what Claude Lefort says is a “desire to objectivity,” sees politics as existing only if it can be measured as behavior, procedure, the distribution of resources or people.¹³ Accordingly, Lefort claims, political science fails to account for the fact that the scientist and his/her objects are constituted within a sociopolitical and historical context that invests the object with meaning, or, in other words, that his/her practice is itself political, inseparable from the sociopolitical horizon in which it is constituted.

If the broad claim articulated by the thinkers discussed here is that political philosophy and political science tend to displace or disavow the political by reducing it to the terms of another field, be it metaphysics, science, or economics, then the widely shared aim of the Nietzschean and Heideggerian tradition of post-foundational political thought in question here is to seek to think the political in itself, that is to say, as the autonomy of the contingency of human being, and not to ground or order it through the principles of some other field. The sheer fact that human being is communal, the patent plurality of an indeterminate and contingent social relationality, becomes the object of thought. The aim in other words is to think the social “bond” without ground, to relate determinate social order to the indeterminate contingency of an “unbond” from which they emerge.

It is imperative to note at this point that this rejection of either the tradition of political philosophy or the scientific desire said to displace the political by seeking to master it alters the aims of political thought and the terrain it seeks to elucidate. The locus of thought shifts to the different ways social orders have been derived and the ways in which they might be disturbed. Accordingly, the unities and identities that were previously central to political analysis lose their privileged place. Conceptions of the good society, the subject, man, or consciousness functioning as the grounds of intersubjectivity are supplanted by a primacy of the “inter” itself, that is to say, of the contingent status of the “bond” or community anterior to its determination, reduction, or restriction through the constitution of hierarchies, obligations, and orders.

PHILOSOPHY: THE LIMITS OF CRITIQUE

To assert that Derrida and Foucault—through a lineage we will trace back to Nietzsche and Heidegger—hold a conception of contingency since becoming conventional, though not undisputed, is still not to explain why a study of their work is called for. This demands a further assertion: that the limits of the concept of contingency at stake here have not been wholly confronted, nor has the theoretical impasse that results from their brand of post-foundational political thought. This is of course not to say that critical engagement with Derrida’s and Foucault’s work has not taken place, but that critical encounters with their work have set out from a reasoning external to Derrida’s and Foucault’s own. As such, from the Derridean or Foucauldian perspective elucidated here, these critical interlocutors have mobilized their arguments by transcending contingency to make some foundational element necessary.

For instance, one long-running claim locates in this lineage of post-foundational thought, and in Derrida and Foucault in particular, a “normative deficit” whereby philosophy is said to present itself as a critical intervention without offering a sufficient normative basis for the struggle it explicitly supports.¹⁴ In the absence of a positive set of principles from which political orders or regimes might be condemned, the philosopher is said to sit in a contradictory position; one that critically assesses a given social order without presenting a sufficient basis for doing so. This is said to mark the argument as cryptic at best and meaningless, worst. While we will address such claims more fully in chapter 3, it’s nonetheless expedient to point out that the notion of a normative deficit asks that, at least when it comes to some basic collective principles, we posit some necessity. It rejects, in other words, the basic coordinates of the post-foundational position. We will later see that Derrida and Foucault do posit an ethical orientation within the terms of their philosophies, but at this point it’s nevertheless clear that given the basic conceptual terms from which they set out, the argument insinuating a normative deficit makes little sense.

Another group of critics have posed a periodizing argument that views post-foundational political theories as reflecting the politico-economic processes from which they emerge.¹⁵ If a political theory’s categories might be said to merely reflect the status quo, then it does nothing more than reiterate, in misrecognized form, accepted political concepts and practices. Valorizations of contingency and difference, one might argue, do no more than manifest the “new spirit of capitalism’s” valorization of mobility, flexibility, and precarity.¹⁶ Such a claim might be powerful and convincing on its own terms, but it once again involves hinging Derrida and Foucault’s philosophies to some reasoning external to their own, in this case the history of capitalism. On the post-foundational view assessed in this book, history, capital, or class simply becomes yet another foundational frame for the analysis, one that merely evacuates contingency once again.¹⁷

A further series of interlocutors have looked to the effects rather than the historical conditions of post-foundational political thought to argue that a political theory anchored in revealing the contingency of any social order is inherently limited insofar as it forfeits the possibility of any collective political subject. Post-foundationalism, the argument goes, usually entails amputating the horizon of emancipatory politics since it maintains a subaltern or minority status for the subject and so its focus upon “localized persecutions” evacuates the possibility of meaningful change in the face of global capitalism.¹⁸ This is a claim to which we will return in chapter 5 in order to problematize the very critique of universalism at the core of such a notion. But suffice it to say that from the perspective of the post-foundationalist philosopher, such an argument implicitly grounds its model of the collective subject on some eschatological vision of history or through some positivist essence of a “true” humanity to be liberated insofar as it entails positing some uniform basis of subjectivity.

The most enduring criticisms of Derrida and Foucault have thus been mobilized in terms of a reasoning that simply makes little sense within their own post-foundational terms and, as such, are relatively easily refuted. The critic is viewed as essentialist while the post-foundational philosopher is confirmed in his or her views: the absence of normative foundations for critique only confirms the ceaseless possibility of critique, the rejection of a historical logic contextualizing theory only reinforces the finitude of thought, while the rebuff of anti-capitalist revolution only assures the irreducible possibility of revolt. In short, where the conceptual architecture of a political theory is centered upon the sort of conception of contingency in view here there’s an inherent debility to its critique. This is the dilemma from which this book proceeds.

POLITICS: THE LIMITS OF CONTINGENCY

In assessing the nearly lifelong debate between Derrida and Foucault, this book charts a different critical path in order to think the limits to their contributions to political thought. Instead of confronting these theorists with some missing normative foundation, subject, or historical horizon, it locates a fundamental paradox or tension internal to them. In doing so, rather than impose reasons upon their work, it exposes their own logic to its limits.

To begin with, while Derrida and Foucault, for all their differences (and not unlike a host of other thinkers such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Giorgio Agamben, Ernesto Laclau, and William Connolly), have brought political thought to the question of its foundations, they have also put in question the possibility of severing theory from the political conditions within which it arises. For if political theory rejects laying claim to secure grounds, such a rethinking of politics cannot be separated from the terrain in which it is articulated. In other words, if an account of the political in terms of the contingency of social relations that constitute it is to be coherent, it must entail the affirmation of the situatedness or particularity of any such account. To claim otherwise is to reproduce the foundational move of assuming a transcendent position beyond social relations from which the latter can be described. Thus, an irreducible opacity haunts every post-foundational political thought; every account has perspectival and situated status that cannot be circumvented. As such, a paradox emerges: how are we to think the differences and divergences between political ontologies which provide an account of the nature of social relations while simultaneously affirming the finite and political status of that very account?

Engagements in recent political theory with this deep paradox and its implications have thus far only been incomplete at best. Stephen K. White, whose work represents one of the more well-known attempts to define a post-foundational political paradigm, is instructive of the limits of such attempts hitherto. White has proposed, in defense of widespread accusations of the thoroughgoing relativism of post-foundationalism, that contemporary continental political theory should be conceived in terms of what he calls echoing a concept coined by Gianno Vattimo, “weak ontology.”¹⁹ White argues that to describe ontology as “weak” denotes two indispensable elements that post-foundational accounts of the political share. First, in the absence of transcendent grounds, there is, as William Connolly has also argued, an “essential contestability” to political concepts and theorems.²⁰ White maintains this does not mean we should or could jettison conceptual apparatuses and frameworks altogether and, I would add that to do so, as we will see, would be to return to the errors of empiricism and positivism.²¹ Secondly, “weak ontologies” are consequently not “anti-foundationalist” as their less rigorous critics and supporters alike often affirm, yet nor do they qualify their own theories or accounts as “incontestable” as a traditional foundational account would.²² In other words, weak ontologies are said not to amount what Jean-Francois Lyotard has infamously called “meta-narratives,” totalizing accounts of the world.²³ But given their inescapably theoretical status they necessarily form “generalizations” insofar as they stand for different political ontologies. As White puts it, “[w]hat sort of engagement there will be between one small narrative and another only takes shape within the conception, however implicit, of a ‘grand’ or at least grander narrative.”²⁴ Thus, White’s imposition of the qualifier “weak” to post-foundational political ontologies denotes both the now-commonplace affirmation of the absence of any final normative ground for political theory, while affirming that there is nevertheless implicit in all theory a “grounding” and, thus, at least a partially totalizing move.

White’s claims have their echoes in the by-now well-known neologism of “correlationism” proposed by Quentin Meillassoux in After Finitude where, in reference to the move, ubiquitous in post-Kantian philosophy, where “what is” always correlates to “what is thought.”²⁵ Meillassoux’s argument implies in part that social constructions function as a priori “media of givenness” and so convey an idealism wherein nothing can be said to exist apart from its relation to thought. Some socially constructed “structural invariant” is inevitably posited as conditional of thought.²⁶

Accordingly, both White’s and Meillassoux’s arguments resonate with my own account of post-foundational political thought. Yet my claim is that the implications of this formulation must be pressed further, in the direction of an essential paradox and, ultimately, its limit: post-foundational political ontologies affirm their own contingency yet simultaneously, necessarily efface that contingency insofar as they are couched in the productions of “grander” narratives. As we will see, Derrida may affirm the contingency of any particular deconstruction and Foucault may affirm his genealogies as particular exercises of power. But insofar as these accounts of the contingency and finitude of their own philosophies still rely upon a presumption of what “is”, they are irreducible to the grounding move of articulating a “grander” narrative.

Therefore, I will argue that if Derrida and Foucault have sought to think the contingency of all foundations or universal grounds, what has generally gone undertheorized is the way in which their work itself excludes contingency in ways not immediately evident once post-foundational premises are accepted. If, as White argues, principles and concepts are both irreducible and yet the result of particular conditions of existence, then I argue that “weak” ontological accounts are more totalizing and necessary than they affirm. In short, what Connolly conceives as the “essential contestability” of political concepts that results from the impossibility of deriving a neutral language or metalangue to describe political phenomena can be extended to the essential contestability of political ontologies themselves and, in this exposure to their own limits, one ultimately disables the theory’s claim to necessity.²⁷

POLEMICS: AT THE LIMITS OF DERRIDA AND FOUCAULT

It is in terms of this gesture of exposure, of confronting their theoretical enterprises with their limits, that I situate my analysis of the work of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. For it is in their polemic, amounting to competing articulations of contingency, that post-foundational theories are most exposed. Typically either corralled together as harbingers of post-modernism, prophets of nihilism, young conservatives, privileged pillars of la pensée soixante huit, or, conversely, condemned to the partisan demand to take sides and so the condemnation of one through theoretical strategies indebted to the other, rarely is an extensive dialogue between them undertaken.

This book seeks to do just that, to trace the exchange of theoretical positions that takes place between these two thinkers, an exchange that is explicit in the polemic that emerges out of Derrida’s reading of Foucault’s first book, The History of Madness, and, except for an essay of Derrida’s and occasional veiled references on the part of both, is largely implicit in all their work. In tracing the moments where their works converge but also, perhaps more significantly, where they deviate—the moments where the possibility of dialogue between them ultimately breaks down, we attain not only a more nuanced view of their respective oeuvres but can also begin to draw out implications that extend beyond them to assess philosophy’s relation to the political.

As it proceeds through its investigation, this book hinges on a series of hypotheses. First, it interprets both Derrida and Foucault as working in the tradition of genealogy inaugurated by Nietzsche. This implies that their method is broadly a genealogical one and which in turn entails a particular sort of ethico-political orientation to their work. As a method, genealogy involves a view of social relations as inherently violent. If no natural order or ground of the political exists for thought to recover, then every order, the genealogist seeks to show, cannot but be unnatural and violent. Such a notion of “violence” might be jarring for students of Foucault since the word has a narrower meaning, especially in his later works. We might be better served referring to “struggle,” “forces,” or, of course, “power.” Sometimes, however, shifts in vocabulary are unavoidable when bringing disparate theoretical lexicons into dialogue. Moreover, the concept of violence at stake here signals the ethico-political horizon of Derrida and Foucault’s work. Genealogical method is premised upon the ethical affirmation that theory too is inherently violent, for if there is no final order or ultimate truth then theoretical propositions about the world are violently reductive in some way. A genealogical theory, as articulated by Nietzsche and appropriated by Derrida and Foucault, affirms that thought cannot take up an Archimedean position transcendent to social relations and, accordingly, is always partial. This genealogical commitment, we will see, underlies the tensions both in their work and in the polemic between them.

Second, it is argued that the secondary literature has almost unanimously erred in understanding the stakes of the debate between Derrida and Foucault. Usually read as competing interpretations of some phenomena, in fact it takes the form of two competing “grander narratives,” each of which claims priority over the other. Polemics between them ultimately take place over the priority of a grander narrative insofar as each makes a claim for the precedence of his theory over the other’s. There then follows the attendant claim that the interlocutor, having disavowed the “true” grander narrative, has thus sought to violently transcend it and, thus, has reintroduced some element of necessity by the back door. If each appropriates the genealogical theme of the essentially situated or perspectival character of theory, insofar as this situatedness is inscribed within the terms or logic of a grander narrative that the interlocutor rejects, each thus views the other as having failed to situate it adequately.

Third, viewed in this light, the debate between Derrida and Foucault exposes the limitations of their respective theories. That is, the debate reveals their theoretical incommensurability and, in doing so, presents a profound challenge to “post-foundational” political thought and the conception of contingency underlying it. By incommensurability I do not mean that there is an impossibility of comparison or dialogue of any kind between radically different vocabularies or paradigms. Dialogue between Derrida and Foucault is indeed possible and, as much of this book will demonstrate, these two thinkers are frequently involved in closely parallel theoretical projects. Instead, the concept of incommensurability developed in this book arises from the claim that Derrida and Foucault produce grander narratives for which there is no standard or criterion by which we might adjudicate between them.

While we may evaluate the internal coherence of Derrida and Foucault’s grander narratives, I will show in the following chapters that because each thinker’s arguments against the other are grounded in an implicit claim to have derived the anterior conditions for the other’s discourse, then ultimately the terms of validity are always internal to one or another grander narrative. Each makes, in other words, a claim to the necessity of their conceptual architecture and, in doing so, exposes the limit of his own notion of contingency. What the debate thus amounts to is an endless game of one-upmanship between two grander narratives, each claiming priority over the other.

Other well-known attempts to theorize polemics only confirm these claims. Among the more familiar of such endeavors to theorize polemic, Jean-Francois Lyotard’s concept of differend refers to conflicts without evaluative criteria that would be applicable across arguments. But such a concept merely articulates yet another, this time Lyotardian grander narrative with its own basic ontological axioms, ethical, and political postulations.²⁸ The inherent limitation of Lyotard’s concept is evidenced by Jacques Rancière’s own formulation of polemics as “disagreement,” and which he explicitly opposes to Lyotard’s in defining it as a situation where “one of the interlocutors at once understands and does not understand what the other is saying.”²⁹ Rancière thus locates his difference to Lyotard in political terms. For Lyotard politics is located in every (inherently violent) decision over the linking or translating of language games or “phrases,” while ethics would involve “bearing witness” to and avowing inherent incommensurability.³⁰ Rancière agrees that conflict occurs at the intersection of two heterogeneous logics, but, crucially, he diverges from Lyotard in claiming there is a fundamental equality underlying any disagreement. Because any order and hierarchy presumes and requires a basic shared understanding of orders and rules, it must implicitly presume the fundamental equality that it explicitly denies.³¹ So while for Lyotard a differend is always violently decided and reduced by what he calls a “wrong,” for Rancière a “wrong” refers to the distortion by any order of the equality anterior to any conditional of any inequality.³² Polemics thus occur at the intersection of “equality and its absence together.”³³

Both Lyotard and Rancière seek to theorize polemics occurring without referent, standard, or criteria outside of or not subject to polemics. Moreover, both claim that philosophy or “theory” does not exceed the polemical. Yet their very differences point to the moment wherein the situatedness of their accounts emerges, for there is an irreducible incommensurability that takes place between Lyotard’s account of polemics in terms of the heterogeneity of language games and Rancière’s own axiomatic affirmation of a fundamental equality as the “ground” of the polemical. Accordingly, while Rancière assents to Lyotard’s notion that all “translation” marks a violent betrayal of the incommensurable, he argues that Lyotard’s formulation of this violence functions as an alibi for inaction. That is, Lyotard’s “wrong” functions as yet another “ethics of alterity,” which produces an “experience of impotence” whereby “any process of emancipation is perceived as the disastrous attempt to deny the disaster that enslaves the mind to otherness.”³⁴ As such, if we are to follow Lyotard the only possibility we are left with is an avowal of our finitude in speaking the unnameable.³⁵

Contra Lyotard, Rancière argues that politics must proceed from a principle of equality that contests the constituted stratifications maintained by the social order, or what he simply calls “police.” But conversely, one might claim in defense of Lyotard that heterogeneity precedes any conception of equality. That the fundamental equality that for Rancière is anterior to and conditional of disagreement itself might be said to presuppose that a cultural or social differend has already been effaced.³⁶ A certain heterogeneity (cultural, linguistic, etc.) would always be prior to any equality.

When a concept governing polemics is sought through either of these two thinkers, either Lyotard’s notion of heterogeneity or Rancière’s equality, what in fact emerges here is a fundamental incommensurability without resolution. If an ontology of polemics is to stand in for ontological contingency, then the very impossibility of such a gesture is plainly evident here. To articulate a conception of polemic is once again to one-up the interlocutor by positing an anterior plane of necessity. That is, these debates continue to hinge upon competing and exclusive claims of having articulated anterior ontological terms and, as such, the very articulation of contingency, contestability, and polemics are themselves articulated in incommensurable terms. The limits are exposed once again.

OUTLINE OF CHAPTERS

The claim that the polemic between Derrida and Foucault takes the form of two competing “grander” narratives shapes the sequence of our investigation. Typically, studies of these two thinkers take the form of more or less biographical narratives of developing intellectual trajectories. Our thematic analysis, beginning with questions of epistemology and method and moving to ethical and political questions, will not discount discontinuities or changes of perspective within Derrida or Foucault’s oeuvres, nor will it center upon them. Instead, in what follows we will locate a series of themes that pervade their work and bring them to bear on a series of concerns that they share. In doing so, we will offer a maximally charitable, yet rigorous, interpretation. For it is by presuming and defending the coherence of their work that we can most powerfully bring to light its limits.

Chapter 1 introduces many of the concepts and paradoxes by which we will proceed through an engagement with Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche is a figure central to the analysis because he inaugurates a conception of thought as situated through his genealogical method and takes violence to be originary in his ontology of will to power. These are both key genealogical themes that drive many of Derrida and Foucault’s theoretical insights. A consideration of the Nietzschean heritage in the work of Martin Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault will thus be central to our task, since it is from these that we can derive a notion of genealogy and also of the nature of post-foundational polemics. The invocation of the irreducibility of violence might be said to provoke a fundamental question governing the polemic between Derrida and Foucault: once one invokes the irreducibility of violence—of social order and of one’s own philosophy—on what basis is a philosophy, an ethics, and a politics to be derived?

The polemic between Derrida and Foucault over the status of Descartes’ Meditations, the focus of chapter 2, might be said to revolve around this very question. Each thinker accuses the other of obscuring both the true locus wherein Descartes’ rational subject is differentiated from an absolutely mad alterity and of veiling and renouncing the violence of his own account of that event and concordant objectification of madness. Ultimately, each thinker is accused by the other of failing to think thought’s “true” medium or terrain. That at stake in this dispute are two irreducible “grander” narratives is unmistakable once we demonstrate in the second part of this chapter that the arguments both Derrida and Foucault make against one another do not quite hold. How then are we to think and articulate the discrepancy between these two oeuvres?

In chapter 3 I suggest that it is ultimately a matter of the pursuit of two differing strategies for situating thought which marks the divergence between Derrida and Foucault. Profound ontological differences are here tied to methodological ones. Like Nietzsche and Heidegger, both seek to perform a sort of meta-questioning, one that shifts the site of philosophical interrogation from the desire to order and organize the empirical, to an analysis of the conditions that make orders or hierarchies possible. The Derridean formulation of “aporia” and the Foucauldian formulation of “problematization” are two competing modes through which these conditions are located and interrogated. Yet if we affirm that Derrida and Foucault posit two modes of questioning that move between the affirmation of its finite locus and a grander narrative that accounts for the conditions of possibility of order, can an ethics be said to orient their own questions? That is to say, once we assert the impossibility of appropriating a pre-ordinal ground whereby thought appears limited to avowing the contingency of its conditions (as aporetic or problematic), then Derrida and Foucault appear to be left without any foundation by which relational existence can be negotiated.

These issues form the focus of chapters 4 and 5. Chapter 4 takes up Derrida’s and Foucault’s explicitly ethical works to examine the divergent ethico-political orientations they construct. Through what I view as a genealogical trope, both seek to articulate an originary violence more pervasive than the empirical and which cannot be transcended. In doing so both thinkers risk being incapable of identifying violence at all. In both cases the attempt to escape from this dilemma is grounded in an articulation of an economy of violence governed by two opposite poles of a “better” and a “worse” violence. This in turn is meant to provide a means by which the refusal of a non-violent standard or ground nevertheless provides an ethical orientation.

Chapter 5 engages with a series of questions related to the nature of politics that follow from what I view as two competing economies of violence that emerge from Derrida’s and Foucault’s ethico-political orientations. Following the discussion of their divergent methodologies in chapter 3 and their distinct ethical orientations in chapter 4, this chapter explicitly takes up the central question posed at the outset: that of philosophy’s relation to politics. This chapter examines the displacements of political metaphysics each thinker develops. It does so to examine both how their correlative yet distinct ethical orientations constitute the political terrain upon which dominant logics or systems are to be resisted, and further, to ask, how we are to think the disparity in the political strategies that their works evoke? Here, their incommensurability, elaborated throughout the book, is claimed to hold political import in itself. To the extent that Derrida’s and Foucault’s accounts are self-affirmingly finite and situated there is no position transcendent to the political from which the polemic between them can be decided. Ultimately, their incommensurability points to the inherent limitation of their work: conceptual impasse without resolution.

Except for the first chapter, the scope of this book is defined by the construction of a continuous dialogue between Derrida and Foucault on a series of questions that appear across their work. This is only partly a stylistic decision but more so a methodological one that serves two fundamental conditions for my central claims to be successful. First, the pursuit of a dialogue between them shows they constitute parallel philosophical and political orientations. Second, it demonstrates both the coherence and the incommensurability of their work. As such, their critique of one another can be maintained only from within their particular “grander” narratives. Polemic between them is accordingly irreducible, since each pursues a different and incommensurable “grander” narrative that necessarily constitutes the other as having failed to affirm his position within this terrain. It is thus the moments where the dialogue between Derrida and Foucault breaks off that we can draw out implications from their work. But then, where shall we begin? With the question of beginnings and origins and the authors of its most radical articulations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger.

NOTES

1.In chapter 5, I discuss a range of “post-foundational” thinkers who challenge such a conception of contingency. For a further example of a political theory that defends a universalist human naturalism, see Alisson Assiter, Revisiting Universalism. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

2.On this point see Hugh Silverman, “Introduction.” Gianno Vattimo, “The Truth of Hermeneutics,” and Basil O’Neill, “Truth as Fundamental and Foundational,” collected in Hugh Silverman (Ed.) Questioning Foundations: Truth/Subjectivity/Culture. London: Routledge, 1993. See also Oliver Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Pp. 11–15.

3.For a particularly clear articulation of this argument see Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Julie Rose, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

4.Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. London: Penguin, 1993. Pp. 97, 115.

5.Ibid., pp. 109–114.

6.Jacques Rancière, Disagreement, p. 64. See also Slavoj Žižek’s discussion of Rancière’s account of archipolitics in The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso, 1990. P. 90.

7.Ibid.

8.Jean-Luc Nancy & Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Retreating the Political (Simon Sparks, Ed. & Trans.). London: Routledge, 1997.

9.Nancy & Lacoue-Labarthe, Retreating the Political. Pp. 107–121. See p. 109.

10.Nancy & Lacoue-Labarthe, “The ‘Retreat’ of the Political.” Retreating the Political. London: Routledge, 1997. Pp. 122–134. P. 123.

11.Benjamin Arditi, Politics on the Edges of Liberalism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. P. 12.

12.Benjamin Arditi and Jeremy Valentine, Polemicization: The Contingency of the Commonplace. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. P. 13.

13.Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory (David Macey, Trans.). Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988. P. 11.

14.Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Frederick Lawrence, Trans.). Cambridge: Polity, 1990; Charles Taylor, “Foucault on Freedom and Truth,” Political Theory, Vol. 12, No. 2, May 1984. Pp. 152–183; Michael Walzer, “The Politics of Michel Foucault.” Foucault: A Critical Reader. (David Hoy, Ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Pp. 51–68; Nancy Fraser, “Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions.” Praxis International, Vol. 1, No. 3, 1981. Pp. 272–287.

15.David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. London: Wiley, 1992; C. Strathausen, “A Critique of Neo-Left Ontology,” Postmodern Culture, Vol. 16, No. 3, 2006. Available at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v016/16.3strathausen.html [accessed January 2013].

16.Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso, 2005.

17.For a different account of the relationship between capital and ontology see Paul Rekret, “Generalized Antagonism and Political Ontology in the Debate Between Laclau and Negri,” Radical Democracy and Collective Movements Today: The Biopolitics of the Multitude Versus the Hegemony of the People, A. Kioupkiolis & G. Katsambekis (Eds.). London: Ashgate, 2014.

18.Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. P. 12. See also, for instance, Diana Coole, Negativity and Politics: Dionysus and Dialectics from Kant to Poststructuralism. London: Routledge, 2000; Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005; Etienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, London: Verso, 2002.

19.Stephen K. White, Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. See also Gianno Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post Modern Culture (John R. Snyder, Trans.). Cambridge: Polity, 1988.

20.See William Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse. 3rd Edition. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.

21.Stephen K. White, Sustaining Affirmation. P. 8. See also William Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse.

22.Ibid., p. 11.

23.Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. (Geoff Bennington & Brian Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1984.

24.White, Sustaining Affirmation. P. 12.

25.Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (R. Brassier, Trans.). London: Continuum, 2008. P. 51.

26.Meillassoux nonetheless pushes his argument toward a “speculative realist” ontology reproduces many of the same problems he locates in “correlationist” philosophy.

27.Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse. See also William Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.

28.See Jean-Francois Lyotard, Just Gaming. (Wlad Godzich, Trans.) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985, p. 16; Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (George van den Abbeele, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

29.Rancière, Disagreement. P. X.

30.Lyotard, The Differend, sections 22–23.

31.Rancière, Disagreement. P. 16.

32.Ibid., p. 39.

33.Ibid., p. 89.

34.Jacques Rancière, “The Thinking of Dissensus: Politics and Aesthetics.” Unpublished manuscript written in response to papers presented at Fidelity to the Disagreement conference, Goldsmiths College, London, September 17, 2003.

35.Ibid.

36.This claim is developed by Jean-Louis Déotte in “The Differences between Rancière’s Mésentente (Political Disagreement) and Lyotard’s Différend.” SubStance. Vol. 33, No. 1 (2004). Pp. 77–90.

Chapter 1

Genealogy, Ontology, and Situated Thought

Among the central premises shared by the philosophers under consideration in this book rests the claim that thought’s point of departure can never find an absolute justification. As we will see in the following chapters, competing responses to this basic paradox will not cease to be the source of a succession of implicit and explicit polemics. Before doing so, however, it is imperative we further come to grips with this claim to finitude in the first place, at least in the form of some of its most powerful reverberations. It is with this in mind that we turn to the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, to both situate thought within language, within history, and as socially mediated.

While for Nietzsche the subject, identity, and truth are preceded by an anterior field of relations between forces called the “will to power,” Heidegger posits the subject’s relation to the object or to others as emerging out of a primordial “being-in-the-world”; anterior to any determinate subject–object relation is the unconcealing of Being. Or, put otherwise, existence within a disclosed world is antecedent to any determinate relations within that world. Yet Nietzsche and Heidegger each fail to steadfastly commit to the limits to which they consign philosophy. That is, as we will see here, despite their discrete invocations of thought as situated, each nevertheless succumbs to a desire to legislate the political. In other words, each seeks to derive principles from out of his philosophy by which a social hierarchy would be justified and a new communal “health,” to use Nietzsche’s term, might be cultivated.

Not only do the implications of such a misjudgment ring as particularly nefarious given Nietzsche’s posthumous implication in, and Heidegger’s long-lasting enthusiasm for, Nazism. Likewise, it signals a question to which Derrida and Foucault will ceaselessly return and, indeed, will form the basis of their very public debate: how might a thought account for its existence upon a terrain which both precedes and exceeds it, without appropriating that terrain to itself, upon its own terms?

In the present chapter I seek to substantiate the terms of this inquiry by first outlining this question as it plays out in Nietzsche’s work, the Genealogy of Morals most of all. I then show how the tension that he builds between the epistemic and the ontological—between finite perspectives and the will to power—breaks down altogether when it comes to his well-known call for a system of social caste that would free the sovereign individual from the anonymity of collective social life. The question of the extent to which Nietzsche’s “grand politics” are merely coincidental to his philosophy has been the object of frequent debate, yet as we will see, in his own interpretation of Nietzsche, Heidegger will view a subject-centered metaphysics relating to the world as a resource for its consumption, as inherent to Nietzsche’s philosophy. But despite anchoring his thought in the question of Being to which existence finds itself “thrown” and so which it always experiences as an excess, Heidegger’s own account of finitude is nevertheless internally riven by its own (ultimately philosophically arbitrary) political hierarchies: authentic/inauthentic or proper/improper.

The permutations of Nietzsche and Heidegger’s ultimately unsuccessful confrontations with the affirmation of finitude set the stage, in the third and final part of this chapter, for a turn to Derrida and Foucault. Read through the lens of their engagements with Nietzsche and Heidegger, I hope to show in this chapter and throughout the rest of this work, that Derrida and Foucault’s work is equally animated in both cases by the attempt to propose a mode of thought that would renounce the desire to transcend its situated status.

NIETZSCHE, GENEALOGY, AND METAPHYSICS

At its core, Nietzsche’s genealogical method can be described as operating by placing moral systems within the prism of the “grander narrative” of a will to power. Using the frame of this narrative, Nietzsche provides an alternative account of the emergence of metaphysical systems and so demonstrates their essentially historical and contingent nature. As we will see, Nietzsche’s narrative of will to power occasions explanatory power, but it also leads him to come up against the paradox of the finite and situated nature of the enunciation of this narrative. To understand the paradox into which Nietzsche’s genealogy runs one must first confront the binary expression of the will to power upon which his philosophical edifice hinges.

This is evident in The Genealogy of Morals, a text whose argument revolves around Nietzsche’s distinction between two moral systems of differentiation; two systems of denoting actions and individuals deemed “good”—admirable and praiseworthy—and their consonant opposites.¹ The text famously opens with an account of a moral system of “strong” masters characterized by a pre-reflexive expression and experience of power. Given these “noble” masters’ expressions of power never encountered any impediments, their self-assertions as “good” denoted their possession of a strength autonomous of any measure or external criteria.² Conversely, weak “slaves” unable to assert their goals and desires directly were thus only consequently labelled as “bad.” Setting out from this originary nobility, the thrust of each of the three essays comprising the Genealogy lies in recounting, across three different intervals, the event of what Nietzsche calls the “slave revolt” in morals. This is the event whereby the noble or aristocratic distinction between good and bad is overturned through the emergence of a second system of differentiation. The latter, of course, amounts to the ethical system by which we are said to continue to live: slave morality.

The narrative turns of Nietzsche’s Genealogy are well known. It nonetheless bears highlighting how Nietzsche’s account is underlined by the irreducibility of struggle and violence to human existence, along with the philosophical work such a perspective does here. In the terms of Nietzsche’s argument, the erection of a system of moral values premised upon the slavish principles of Judeo-Christian monotheism provided not only the instruments for self-affirmation as a chosen people but also the construction of a metaphysical world that would allow the destruction of noble morality. By constituting a vision of the world that licensed and celebrated their own weakness, Nietzsche argues, the slaves simultaneously branded nobility as evil.³

This account of the emergence of a moral system couched in the slaves’ ressentiment against life along with their vengeance against the nobles is thus grounded upon a central genealogical supposition: metaphysical values arise from a field of struggle. Morality is, as he puts it, “the doctrine of the relations of supremacy.”⁴ Posited in these terms, Nietzsche’s interrogation of the “value of values” situates metaphysical postulations as violent exclusions and dominations while also insisting that any system of moral differentiation originates with social and political struggle.⁵

Yet the implications of such a view extend further. To claim that “this world is the will to power—and nothing besides!,” as Nietzsche famously does, implies that struggle and domination are inherent to every claim to truth.⁶ Such an assertion is underscored by an ontological vision of ephemerality and flux; a world composed of events, a “determination of degrees of relations of force.”⁷ Concordantly, the crime and error of Christian slave morality and indeed of all metaphysics is thus to have sought to fix, determine, and transcend this cosmological drama and so, to have “robbed of its innocence the whole purely chance character of events.”⁸ This is an offence for which slave morality is condemned: to have posited a transcendent world against which actions are measured and standards are developed to which all must conform.⁹ The central gesture of genealogy thus amounts to confronting the “will to truth” characteristic of slave morality with the perspectival and partial nature of its moral claims in order to cultivate a sense of their dubiousness.¹⁰

It’s important to note that Nietzsche’s genealogy hinges in part upon an understanding of humanity in vitalist terms whereby the subject, identity, or agent are but effects of a surface of relations between forces. This view of the multiplicity of forces continuous with life itself is called the “will to power” and it implies that the function of a custom or institution is only a marker of a will that has become master of something less powerful. On this account, all living creatures, humans included, are governed by a desire to express or discharge power.¹¹ Moreover, from this perspective a still further insight follows: because humans are self-conscious creatures, our will to power is not expressed directly, but is mediated by particular perspectives through which we interpret and understand our power.

The ontology of will to power thus ostensibly offers the theorist a non-metaphysical interpretive and evaluative standard. In place of an epistemological assessment of ideas based on their correspondence to reality, it permits perspectives on the world to be evaluated in terms of the degree of enhanced potential of will to power that they allow us to experience.

Accordingly, slave morality is deemed destructive on the basis that its cardinal belief that the pain and suffering of existence is a punishment for sin represses will to power.¹² Metaphysical ideals, Nietzsche argues, are “ideals which are all hostile to life, ideals that defame the world.”¹³ In other words, the value and meaning of life could be posited as transcendent and independent of life only on the basis of the negation of existence itself. At the core of metaphysics therefore lies a “will to truth”: truth provides for the absence of any meaning to suffering but it only does so by devaluing sensual life.

In sum, by first affirming a will to power behind all values and standards, Nietzsche sets the function of genealogy as tracing descent and origins in order to undermine universal pretensions.¹⁴ Moreover, the meta-question of the “value of values” that animates it is thus a moral one; the ethical ideal of truth emerging from herd morality is viewed as the source of every ideal.¹⁵ The will to truth, a “moral prejudice of all knowledge,” to use Michel Haar’s phrase, is based on a fundamental conviction: “that truth is more important than anything else, than every other intention.”¹⁶ The will to truth’s desire for unity and identity over difference and dynamism in turn attempts to justify and explain the suffering of existence.

The Paradox of Perspectivism

If Nietzsche’s genealogy works by inserting the phenomena he investigates within the terms of a “grander narrative” of the world as will to power, this in turn raises a question that will become increasingly central to our analysis: does theory here exceed or transgress the will to truth? Or, is it too subject to the same desire for truth? Any response to this question must begin by asserting that there is a perfect continuity between Nietzsche’s grander narrative of the will to power and his doctrine of perspectivism. If life is will to power “and nothing besides!” as Nietzsche asserts, then the values of identity, stability, and universality repress both the inherent force or power of knowledge and the necessarily perspectival nature of that account. No concept can be free of perspective since every concept originates from out of the play of differences between forces. “Perspectival seeing,” Nietzsche says, “is the only kind of knowing.”¹⁷ The will to power as a play of appearances expresses a dynamism that eludes identification by stable concepts or an essence of being.¹⁸

On these terms, Nietzsche is theoretically coherent. An immediate continuity relates the ontological assertion of life as will to power to the epistemological assertion that all knowledge is perspectival. Any recognition of life as a phenomenon comprises a recognition of the violent and arbitrary character of life and the partial, violent character of all knowledge. Since there is an indefinite play of forces it follows that there is an indefinite number of interpretations.¹⁹

Through this perspectival account, Nietzsche presents a decisive genealogical claim: the affirmation of the contingency of social relations is inseparable from a reflection on thought’s point of departure from out of those very relations. Thought cannot adopt an Archimedean position beyond social order and, as such, can only ever be partial. But to maintain this coherence between the narrative of will to power and perspectivism, Nietzsche produces a paradox that, we’ll see, embraces Derrida and Foucault’s work as well: if all knowledge is affirmed as perspectival, then it follows that there can be no privileged position from which the “grander narrative’ of will to power can be derived. If all knowledge is situated and finite, in other words, then it appears that the account of life as will to power too must be affirmed as such. There is, as Jean Granier notes, an apparent oscillation between Nietzsche’s affirmation of perspectivism and the identity of some definite knowledge.²⁰

It might be that Nietzsche’s most important contribution to post-foundational ethics and politics is to seek to make a virtue out of this circularity. In this regard, it is insufficient to conclude, as Jurgen Habermas does, that Nietzsche is guilty of self-referentiality to the extent that the doctrine of perspectivism seems to exclude the possibility of providing an account of will to power as such.²¹ The claim of a vicious circularity between perspectivism and will to power first countenanced, by Walter Kaufmann and Arthur Danto and later seized upon by Habermas, relies upon the false assumption that Nietzsche’s position would have to be extra- perspectival in seeking to account for the conditions of all perspectives themselves.²² But to view will to power and perspectivism as contradictory makes sense only if one discounts the very terms of Nietzsche’s “grander” “ontological” narrative about life itself. Given Nietzsche’s embrace of perspectivism, the oscillation between particular perspectives and his “grander” narrative does not necessarily amount to vicious circularity. As Clive Cazeaux suggests, the critical appraisal of circularity or contradiction in Nietzsche relies on a particular understanding of ontology, one which Nietzsche himself denies.²³ Kaufmann, Danto, and Habermas all appear to imply that will to power refers to a fundamental realm of beings or things in themselves, beyond appearances and independent of context.²⁴ Yet Nietzsche does not assert that knowledge must be of the object in itself or independent of context; he is totally consistent in claiming that knowledge is never total nor necessary. As Tracy Strong argues, will to power can be conceived instead as a form-giving force: knowledge is a mode of will to power and, thus, immanent to what it describes.²⁵ Or, as Diana Coole puts it, “will to power is not an origin but interpretation and becoming.”²⁶ There is no will to power in itself; there are only violent and partial interpretations of it, each of which is in turn but its expression.

Conceiving will to power in these terms does not free Nietzsche from the paradox of its circularity, but it is a circularity that merely confirms his theoretical coherence. Such an account of genealogy is supported by several of Nietzsche’s interpreters who argue that genealogy need not refer its account to any ultimate ground since comparisons and evaluations can be made between perspectives based on criteria that they share.²⁷ Points of reference can be asserted as neutral insofar as they are internal to two or more perspectives. For Maudemarie Clark these “neutral” criteria are located in relevant beliefs that differing perspectives share.²⁸ For David Owen will to power is not only internal to but also in excess of metaphysics since it succeeds in coherently supplying the conditions for metaphysical assertions and beliefs.²⁹ In a similar vein, John Richardson argues that the preservation of ambiguity between wills acts as a measure of the will to power that can cross different perspectives; in fact, it is the aptitude for crossing and multiplying perspectives that signals health.³⁰ Thus, as Nietzsche puts it,

the more feelings about a matter which we allow to come to expression, the more eyes, different eyes through which we are able to view this same matter, the more complete our “conception” of it, our “objectivity”, will be.³¹

As an ontology, will to power ultimately makes a claim to legitimacy because it offers a “better” perspective successful in explaining and evaluating given cultural practices, thus circumscribing them in its own terms.

Ultimately, the circularity between Nietzsche’s perspective(s) and the grander narrative of will to power can be neither arrested nor circumvented. Yet the claim being pursued here is that, from Nietzsche’s point of view, the circularity between epistemology and ontology does not mark the incoherence of genealogy but rather expresses an ethical claim: genealogy affirms its origins in relations of force and struggle and so relinquishes the claim to a totalizing knowledge.

This affirmation of situatedness forms what Charles Scott calls the “ethical recoil” inherent to genealogical discourse, whereby its circularity grounds its resistance to “authoritatively reestablish[ing] itself.”³² That is to say, given their circularity, the authority of Nietzsche’s narratives always recoils back onto them so that their autonomy and certainty are undermined.³³ Genealogy’s claim to exceed the will to truth thus rests both with the narrative that relegates the latter to an anterior field of forces and the affirmation of finitude by which it refuses to ground the legitimacy and authority of its assertions. It’s with this view of the ethics of genealogy in mind that Nietzsche’s disavowal of finitude in his call for a “grand politics” seems particularly incongruous, as we will see next.

Nietzsche’s “Grand Politics”

Even from within the terms of the will to power, Nietzsche’s anchoring of the possibility of overcoming slave morality in the institution of a hierarchical and aristocratically structured society can seem particularly inconsistent. The crucial moment occurs where Nietzsche posits the overcoming of herd morality in the formation of a “sovereign individual” with the capacity to posit his own values: an individual with the power to appeal to himself rather than universal values as ultimate authority.³⁴ Herein lies the predicament: for just as a hierarchical slave society produced a peculiar herd morality, Nietzsche thinks a new “morality” of sovereignty would arise out of a new social hierarchy; this would be a new “pathos of distance.” He is generally unequivocal that the possibility of a sovereign individual rests upon the insular function of an unbridgeable chasm between the perpetually weak that require metaphysical comforts to support life and the few strong individuals who can affirm life as it is. Thus, the legitimacy of an order of rank is derived from what Nietzsche sees as the restrictions herd morality places upon individual difference. A universalizing morality, Nietzsche argues, is “detrimental for the higher men.”³⁵ He posits instead a new form of society wherein the strong would act as “commanders and legislators,” as creators of value for those lacking the power to do so.³⁶

Nietzsche’s politics thus rests on an inconsistency: society is delivered from the corrosion of the will to truth only by those individuals who can effect a break from it.³⁷ Nietzsche not only champions but also undermines his own ideal. The creator of values encourages others to become sovereign, yet in commanding obedience forms blind followers.³⁸

Considered more broadly, the problem of Nietzsche’s “grand politics” implies a fundamental risk that we will encounter once again in the figure of Heidegger. The attempt to think a politics in excess of the will to truth is always at risk of reproducing the foundational move it seeks to escape insofar as it fails to “recoil” upon its own authority. Indeed, this is one way of understanding the abiding question for the paradigm of post-foundational political thought at stake here: how can a politics be constructed around an affirmation of the perspectival limits of a situated thought? As we proceed, we will see that the question rests at the center of the debate between Derrida and Foucault. Both, I will argue, express thought’s “recoil” upon its finitude—to use Scott’s term again—but they do so in incommensurable terms. Yet it is Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche, his circumscription of the latter within the horizon of metaphysics, that will offer the model for Derrida’s and Foucault’s arguments and so it is to this reading to which we now turn.

HEIDEGGER AND SITUATED THOUGHT

If I am correct in arguing that the contingency of social order emerges as a central question in Nietzsche’s genealogy and furthermore, that there is a consequent disavowal of this question in his “grand politics,” then one can understand Heidegger’s critique of Nietzsche as an extension of this disavowal to Nietzsche’s work as a whole.³⁹ On this view Nietzsche’s overcoming of metaphysics is grounded in the subjective legislation of the world that Heidegger sees as definitive of modern thought itself. Despite extending across almost thirty years and amounting to over 1,000 pages of essays and lecture transcripts, a singular argument lies at the core of Heidegger’s interpretations of Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s overcoming of metaphysics ultimately fails, Heidegger claims, since while the “revaluation of all values” may have opened metaphysics to the nihilism that lies at its essence, it nonetheless marks the exhaustion of the metaphysical desire for ground itself.

If Heidegger’s critique of Nietzsche is a crucial reference point for us here, it is because it offers an instructive instance of the form of polemic that will define the Derrida/Foucault debate. But it serves a broader purpose as well. Derrida and Foucault both attempt to vindicate Nietzsche from Heidegger’s critique, and it is in looking to those vindications that we can see how genealogical insights intersect with Heideggerian ones in their work. Before we can turn to these debates, however, we must elucidate Heidegger’s own conception of the situatedness of thought.

Heidegger and the Thrownness of Thought

In his opus Being and Time, Heidegger describes truth in the following terms: “the uncoveredness of entities within-the-world is grounded in the world’s disclosedness. But disclosedness is that basic character of Dasein [literally denoting human ‘being-there’] according to which it is its ‘there’.”⁴⁰ Anterior to any determinate relation between a subject and an object or any theoretical abstraction, Heidegger posits a more primordial Being-in-the-world. Both objects and other subjects emerge within in a web of functional relations or what in Being and Time Heidegger calls a “totality of involvements” that together reveal the “worldhood” of the world.⁴¹

The problem of the finitude of thought is thus posed here in terms that diverge substantially from Nietzsche. For Heidegger, particular perspectives merely presuppose an anterior “disclosure” of the world through Dasein’s specific actions and involvements. The finitude of thought is thus reframed here in terms of a concept of “thrownness.” That is, insofar as existence is “thrown” into or “delivered over” to its possibilities and so to its Being, there is always already a greater totality of meanings that precede existence and through which existence questions and confronts its world.⁴²

In work published after Being and Time Heidegger would come to partially displace the priority assigned to Dasein as the agency posing the question of Being by an account that privileges a history of the different modes of the world’s disclosure or “unconcealment.” Yet the notion of finitude at stake here would remain a guiding thread. In these later more epochally and historically focused works, there is also an increased concern with metaphysics, conceived as a reduction or “forgetting” of the world’s disclosure.⁴³ In so many words, metaphysics encompasses for Heidegger all modes of inquiry that have attempted to account for and produce a determining rule for all entities in the world.⁴⁴ Any metaphysical “grounding” of Being (in Idea, first cause, subject, etc.) implies the forgetting of the question of Being itself; it amounts to a disavowal of the mode in which the world is first disclosed anterior to any account of what is. To reduce the world to its empirical content or some law by which the empirical is organized is to “forget” that it is or comes to be at all. As Heidegger remarks, “inasmuch as Being is put in question with a view to the arche, Being is itself already determined.”⁴⁵ It’s in light of such an argument that Heidegger can be considered to belong to a post-foundational paradigm; in dismissing any ontology grounded in system, logic, or categories of Being as merely reductive of the inceptive event of Being itself, he insists on the fact that the world first “is” or “happens.”

Heidegger’s writings in the period following the publication of Being and Time are significant not merely for infamous professions of Nazism but also for embracing a conception of ontological violence not present in the earlier texts. This is quite apparent in the well-known essay, written in the early 1930s, on “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In this text, Heidegger posits the artwork as exemplary of the generative event of the unconcealment of world. While the theme of thrownness or finitude reappears here, its terms are nevertheless slightly transformed. Not unlike the argument developed in Being and Time, Heidegger here claims that insofar as existence in the world is always temporally and spatially situated it can never be totally transparent. But in the later text Dasein’s finite Being-in-the-world emerges from an “undisclosable” outside—which he calls “earth”—an emergence that “gives” or marks the horizon of a given social order and indeed, intelligibility itself.⁴⁶ As Heidegger puts it in his infamously idiosyncratic prose, “truth is un-truth insofar as there belongs to it the reservoir of the not-yet-uncovered, the uncovered, in the sense of concealment.”⁴⁷ Accordingly, there is a more generative event of disclosure at stake here. The significance of the artwork in all this rests with what Heidegger takes to be its power to disclose the world, to configure a particular experience of existence. That is, the artwork is a particular type of object that sets up a world in contrast to the earth from which it is torn; the artwork is an empirical being through which Being is disclosed.⁴⁸

It’s at this point that the concept of ontological violence enters the frame. For, at the center of the event of the inception of the world, Heidegger says, is polemos or “originary struggle” between world and earth.⁴⁹ Every ordering, every emergence of a world, is inherently violent insofar as it is the product of “originary struggle” and it is this originary violence that Heidegger conceives as the “essence” of the political—violence anterior to any empirical politics.

Heidegger’s use of the concept of “violence” here might appear anomalous, yet his point is ultimately to underline the unnatural and contingent status of any given social order or “world.” Putting any specific violent event aside, social structures, conventions, hierarchies, and orders are themselves violent. There is, moreover, a revelatory privileging of the pre-Socratics in this context, which Heidegger views as holding a unique understanding of man’s incapacity to “subdue” or master all that “is,” and, by extension, a sense of the finitude that precludes the possibility of mastering the earth.⁵⁰ On these terms the pre-Socratics are ascribed a unique vantage insofar as they intuited the arbitrariness, the strangeness, and tragedy of human existence. They are ascribed a unique sense of the power of nature that gives man a sense of his own finitude. This is famously referred to as the revelation of man’s “unhomeliness” in the world, an experience that only confirms the absence of any absolute or necessary order of things.⁵¹ If all order is the product of a more originary polemos, it implies the anteriority of the ontological violence by which that order emerges over any particular or empirical act of violence within it.

In the same period that he writes the “The Origin of the Work of Art” Heidegger delivers a set of lectures titled Introduction to Metaphysics. These are famous most of all for a public declaration of Nazism, but here again he explicitly conceives the essence of the political in terms of an event of violent ordering anterior to any particular or determinate order.⁵² For Heidegger, the Greek polis derives its significance not merely historically as an original iteration of the state but in ontological terms as the site of the emergence of order itself; a “pole” of violent originary differentiation. Thus, Greek political experience is privileged on the basis of the sense ascribed to the pre-Socratic exposure to the groundless and “violent” truth of Being, the contingency of political order’s founding as such.⁵³ Polemos, Heidegger says, “allows what essentially unfolds to step apart into opposition, first allows position and status and rank… . In con-frontation, world comes to be.”⁵⁴ This account inaugurates a distinction crucial to the post-foundational tradition under consideration here: one between the inaugural or founding violence of a given social order and empirical violence. For while empirical violence may or may not occur, the inaugural violence of social order itself is anterior to and opens the possibility of instantiations of the empirical.⁵⁵

Heidegger Contra Nietzsche

Having briefly surveyed Heidegger’s version of the post-foundational account of the political, we can now turn to examine the ways this narrative frames his polemical reading of Nietzsche. Heidegger’s interpretive strategy in relation to Nietzsche will consist primarily in reading the latter’s work within his own conception of metaphysics. This follows two distinct moves. First, Heidegger assumes Nietzsche’s formulation of the inherent nihilism of metaphysics: “that the uppermost values devalue themselves, that all goals are annihilated, and that all estimates of value collide against one another.”⁵⁶ If each decline of a suprasensory authority only effects the rise of another itself destined to fall, Nietzsche’s “death of God” marks the arrest of this process.⁵⁷ That is, with Nietzsche metaphysics reaches a point where “nothing more remains to which man can cling and by which he can orient himself.”⁵⁸ Once Nietzsche makes evident the impossibility of any transcendent grounds, philosophy is brought to face the truth of its ultimately empty essence.

But second, Heidegger confines Nietzsche’s notion of overcoming within the margins of the history of the metaphysical. In other words, if Heidegger embraces the Nietzschean conception of nihilism, he nevertheless does not view it as a transgression beyond the history of the forgetting of Being, rather as its consummate moment. Insofar as the will to power amounts to a new evaluative standard for philosophy and morality, Nietzsche has not overcome the problem of nihilism; he is merely “the last metaphysician of the West.”⁵⁹ In sum, Heidegger places Nietzsche within the very limits of metaphysics that the former had himself drawn by rearticulating the implications of the ontology of will to power within his own “grander narrative” of the history of Being.

How exactly does the polemical strategy function here? How does Heidegger enact this transformation of the meaning of Nietzsche’s grander narrative into the terms of his own? First of all, he interprets Nietzsche’s notion of life as a will to power in strictly biological terms as a striving for preservation and enhancement by all things.⁶⁰ Will to power is thus interpreted as a new metaphysical principle wherein “values are the conditions of itself posited by the will to power.”⁶¹ That is, Heidegger interprets will to power as valuation itself, as that which gives values to things and to the world. Yet since any expression of the will to power exists only to enhance or overcome itself, particular beings have a value in Nietzsche’s narrative only insofar as they are a condition of the expansion of the will to power.⁶² If, as Heidegger suggests, one understands the subject as the exercise of will, then all Nietzsche has done is to ontologize, rather than overcome, the modern subject. In short, will to power’s indefinite desire for expansion takes the place of the ground of all existence.

In a further argument, Heidegger says that will to power can only act as the ground of forming values if the question of Being is abandoned and forgotten.⁶³ Will to power is posed as a nihilistic narrative insofar as it conceives the truth of the totality of beings merely as a collection of empirical objects and not in terms of Being itself. On these terms Nietzsche’s ontological doctrine forms for Heidegger the final expression of a metaphysical humanism, one which takes the form of an ontological doctrine of becoming and overcoming, which evaluates and organizes the world in terms of its own desire for expansion.⁶⁴ Will to power can therefore be read as an essentially humanist doctrine since it represents a subject’s desire to impose a single principle upon Being, a gesture Heidegger calls “justice” or “justification.”⁶⁵ This is a totalizing act, one that is inherent to all metaphysics of subjectivity but generalized by Nietzsche into a cosmic vision of endless willing.

So, if Cartesian doctrine invoked the modern subject by defining as intelligible anything that can be presented to a re-presenting subject, as Heidegger claims, then in defining will to power by a desire for certainty, Nietzsche’s philosophy marks a final extension, rather than a transgression, of that subject. Nietzsche may not seek to ground knowledge in some cognitive essence of the subject and, instead, situates it at the level of the body, drives, and forces. But he nonetheless offers a general and determinate account of the totality of beings purely in terms of whatever the subject—even if conceived as a mere collection of drives—can re-present to itself in the process of its own willing and self-overcoming.⁶⁶ While Nietzsche’s doctrine of perspectivism does not posit a single principle grounding truth as other metaphysical doctrines might, it nonetheless poses the desire for certainty itself as ground.

Heidegger’s argument amounts to the claim that, even if the sovereign individual exceeds the frame of certitude upon mental substance, it nonetheless amounts to a subjectivist metaphysics. Once Nietzsche determines truth as what serves the interests of the human will, Heidegger argues, subjectivist logic is merely brought to its final nihilistic conclusion. In addition, in bringing metaphysics to its conclusion, not only is Being “forgotten,” but beings are reduced to mere “resources” for the will to power. The world comes to be experienced through the will’s infinite desire to augment itself as mere objects “standing in reserve” for it.⁶⁷

It’s worth noting at this juncture that Heidegger’s polemical move against Nietzsche works by confining the latter’s ontology to the metaphysical by positing a competing and ostensibly more “fundamental” grander narrative, one which Nietzsche is said to disavow. By ascribing an originary or anterior status to the event of the unconcealing of Being, the polemical move works by circumscribing Nietzsche’s work within a competing grander narrative. From here, there remains only a question of where Nietzsche is to be situated within that narrative’s terms. This is a claim to which we will return momentarily, but it is first imperative to see the terms by which Heidegger himself disavows the situatedness of thought.

Heidegger’s Political Metaphysics

As our earlier discussion of Heidegger’s account of pre-Socratic experience has already implied, his argument centers upon cultivating an “authentic,” “proper,” or originary relation to the event of Being. But this desire for the proper—for a thought not bound or contaminated by any ontical or empirical determinations—ultimately implies Heidegger’s own disavowal of situatedness. This is especially evident in terms of the dual understanding of human Dasein which organizes Being and Time. On the one hand, Heidegger defines Dasein’s default state as “inauthentic” insofar as the “being-in-the-world” into which it is thrown is described as an anonymous public mode of existence. Heidegger calls this state of being das Man [the “one” or “they”] to denote what he views as the loss of the singularity of existence in everyday life to the anonymity or even “dictatorship” and “domination” of being-with others along with the rule by mindless conventions that accompany contemporary social life this is intended to imply.⁶⁸ On the other hand, this inauthentic “fallenness” to das Man is contrasted to an authentic existence whereby singular Dasein “resolutely” relates to or affirms its primordial condition as a finite being, as an existence always moving toward its own death. It’s not only that this division implies a certain heroic individualism, it begins to appear particularly nefarious where Heidegger seeks to overcome the opposition between “inauthentic” social life and an “authentic” singular existence. For he does so by positing a conception of authentic community in the infamous paragraph 74 of Being and Time. That is, Heidegger draws a course running from singular to communal authenticity by a Dasein seizing its fate as a member of das Volk.⁶⁹ Such a claim doesn’t merely appear particularly sinister given Heidegger’s own membership of the Nazi party just a few years after the publication of Being and Time. Even if we put aside the historical specifics for a moment, in insisting that an authentic community is one which seizes its historical “destiny” as a volk, whatever this entails, it restricts the possibility of the form of community possible. By definition, on Heidegger’s terms an authentic community would be constrained to the parochialism of tradition.⁷⁰ Not unlike Nietzsche, therefore, in his explicit engagement with politics, Heidegger disavows the finitude of thought, the contingency of social order and, instead, in determining the communal bond in advance, comes to place the philosopher in the position of legislator.

The political bankruptcy of Heidegger’s philosophy is widely noted. Yet in pushing some of his insights in other directions, several interpreters have sought to think against the grain of Heidegger’s political metaphysics to articulate a democratic form of community. Jean-Luc Nancy, for instance, has claimed Heidegger’s error lies with his failure to view Dasein’s being-toward-death as “radically implicated in its being-with.”⁷¹ By inscribing death as a collective experience rather than as a relation to oneself, Nancy asserts the excess of finitude over experience as undoing any “communion” or perfect community. A community of finite singularities, as Nancy says, is “inoperative” and cannot be subject to some philosophical principle.⁷² Similarly, Giorgio Agamben insists on the co-originarity of the proper and improper. Agamben argues inauthenticity is original since Being is never given in general but is only partially unconcealed to finite existence; on this basis, there can be no “proper” community or “proper” tradition.⁷³

Taking these reversals of Heidegger’s categories into account, we might postulate that the response to Heidegger’s work that remains sympathetic to its logic is encapsulated in the notion that existence is always thrown and improper. Accordingly, authentic questioning can only amount to an affirmation of finitude. The disclosedness of Being is, in other words, co-originary with its dis-propriation or concealment. These are themes, as we’ll see, central to both Derrida and Foucault’s work: once one refuses to countenance the possibility of transcending one’s point of departure, one is left without a proper perspective from which social order can be thought.

It bears remarking that Heidegger’s disavowal of finitude is not limited to the more reprehensible passages of Being and Time; it encompasses his later work as well. Yet insofar as in this work Dasein is displaced from the center of the analysis, the binary of authentic/inauthentic is reinscribed at the level of Heidegger’s account of the history of metaphysics as a proper or improper questioning of Being. That is, Heidegger’s later work, as we noted, is premised upon the recovery of an originary “presencing,” or “gathering,” of Being, an originary event of world disclosure whose “forgetting” culminates in the nihilism of Nietzsche’s ontology of will to power. But, it is often observed, this view rests upon a determinate teleology that consists of an originary primordial beginning, its forgetting, and, ultimately, its absolute corruption. Indeed, it’s more than noteworthy that at least until the mid-1930s Heidegger grounded the rise of National Socialism in the terms of such a “metanarrative of Being,” insofar as he understood the Nazis as offering a “total” renewal of the relation to Being and a recuperation of the originary Greek experience.⁷⁴ This seduction by fascism was, as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe puts it, neither an “accident” nor a “mistake,” but is intrinsic to Heidegger’s philosophy.⁷⁵ For in positing an originary truth the philosopher is then unrestricted when locating its authentic repetition in history, whether in fascism or otherwise. Heidegger thus unwittingly repeats, Lacoue-Labarthe insists, the sort of metaphysical determination of the political he ostensibly rejects.⁷⁶ The disavowal of finitude or thrownness that the teleological history of Being implies is thus not merely a philosophical error; it licenses the potential for any means for its recovery including a violence that, until the Holocaust, was unimaginable.

FROM NIETZSCHE AND HEIDEGGER TO DERRIDA AND FOUCAULT

Having looked to Nietzsche and Heidegger, we are now in a position to begin to see how questions of the relationship between epistemology and ontology might be crucial for political thought. For it is through an affirmation of finitude that philosophy relinquishes the desire to legislate politics. It is in this sense that I propose reading Derrida and Foucault as taking up genealogy as a method of averting the sort of dire ethical and political insinuations that one finds in the work of Nietzsche and Heidegger. It is notable that both Derrida and Foucault reject an argument made by the likes of Jurgen Habermas and Richard Wolin, that the sources of Heidegger’s Nazism are to be found in a normative deficit in his work, which might have otherwise served to ground legitimate political constraints upon it.⁷⁷ As I have claimed, for the post-foundational thinkers under review here, Heidegger’s fault lay not in the absence of normative grounds but with a failure to fully commit to the finitude of thought.

From this perspective, the ethico-political burden upon theory is thus to navigate a path that neither seeks legitimate grounds for the political nor goes in search of some ontological source for a coming authentic society. In this regard, both Derrida and Foucault reject a “proper” dwelling for thought and will instead pursue a theory that affirms its own limits. Indeed, Derrida has sought, across a broad array of texts, to challenge Heidegger’s attempt to think the presencing of Being itself free from any particular ontic determinations, that is, free from empirical inscription. Being, Derrida argues in “The Ends of Man,” can be articulated only through ontic metaphors.⁷⁸ Heidegger’s question of Being, he claims, is tied to a “metaphysics of proximity,” to a question of the proper relation between Dasein and Being.⁷⁹ Derrida locates a notion of proximity as authenticity throughout Heidegger’s work: the question of Being is a question about the “truth” of Being; the overcoming of the metaphysics of subjectivity is sought through the recovery of the question of Being in the attempt to fix or secure a new mode of “exemplary Being.”⁸⁰ For his part, in The Order of Things, his only extensive engagement with Heidegger, Foucault labels him a quintessentially modern subjectivist thinker insofar as his work is grounded upon the conception of a finite being who grasps the condition of possibility of his knowledge (time, history, or the destining of Being) as the grounds for his “becoming.” On this interpretation, knowledge attempts to recover the ever-receding origin that makes it possible.⁸¹

The insistence upon the situatedness and finitude of thought is a constant theme in the work of both Derrida and Foucault, and it is the figure of Nietzsche who for both often stands in for the refusal to countenance the possibility of a recovery of origin or ground. Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy is a key reference point here.⁸² In Deleuze’s assessment the will to power expresses the pure play of difference; it is an expression of the world as a network of ephemeral and contingent forces caught in indefinite struggle. In other words, will to power forms a differential and genetic element of forces. Accordingly, not unlike Heidegger, Deleuze presents a systematic reading of Nietzsche. But where Heidegger detects in Nietzsche a subjectivist metaphysics, Deleuze finds only affirmative joy in difference.

In accord with Deleuze’s reading, both Derrida and Foucault position Nietzsche beyond the realm of metaphysics to which Heidegger condemns him, placing him instead in the position of a rupture with the desire for ground and for the “proper.” In this regard, in the early programmatic essay “La Différance” Derrida hinges the key insight from his own work to Deleuze’s Nietzsche book. “Différance,” Derrida says, by way of a reference to Deleuze’s Nietzsche, “is the name of differences of forces, that Nietzsche sets up against the entire system of metaphysical grammar, wherever this system governs culture, philosophy, and science.”⁸³ Foucault has also lavished praise for Deleuze’s analysis of difference in Nietzsche and links his own reading to this notion in the essay “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx.”⁸⁴

It’s significant that both Derrida and Foucault explicitly interpret Nietzsche in terms that reject the singular narrative that Heidegger imposes on his work. Indeed, it’s the very lack of an ultimate truth or a consistent argument that is said to rest at the heart of Nietzsche’s work. Thus, Derrida argues that Nietzsche’s texts cannot be subsumed to a single identity; their very heterogeneity marks out the singularity of Nietzsche’s work. “One must forbid oneself,” Derrida says, “with Nietzsche above all—to force his name into the straightjacket of an interpretation that is too strong to be able to account for him.”⁸⁵ The fragments of Nietzsche’s work do not, Derrida argues, form elements of a coherent whole; their heterogeneity denotes the impossibility of the imposition of thematic unity. It is thus rather ironic that, as Derrida points out, it is Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche that amounts to a metaphysical one insofar as it presupposes the telos of a final truth in Nietzsche, one to be deduced from an accurate and “proper” interpretation of his work.⁸⁶ Similarly, Foucault has praised Deleuze’s understanding of difference in Nietzsche.⁸⁷ Not unlike Derrida, he too insists that, given the inherently fragmentary nature of Nietzsche’s writing, no authority acts upon the reader. Instead, Nietzsche invites the reader of his text to “use it, to deform it, to make it groan in protest.”⁸⁸ These interpretations yield a Nietzsche in excess of metaphysics but do so on the basis of two distinct reading strategies that this book takes up as it proceeds.

For the time being though, suffice it to say that both Derrida and Foucault proceed by orientations derived in part from Nietzsche. As implied by Deleuze, both posit language as a field or network of differences as a relational field governed by no privileged term. Once the sign is no longer thought as an intermediary transmitting some prior substance and instead itself becomes the object of philosophical inquiry, its position comes into crisis. The unity of a transcendental signified is challenged so that the possibility of permanent truth comes into question. In this regard, Nietzsche is privileged as a figure who not only avows this view of language but explicitly rejoices in it. Accordingly, in several early works, namely Of Grammatology and “Structure, Sign and Play” in the case of Derrida and “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx” and The Order of Things in the case of Foucault, Nietzsche is held up as a singular thinker disrupting the unity of signifier and signified. Of course, a critique of metaphysics is not solely the property of Nietzsche’s work, but he is nevertheless unique insofar as rather than mourn the impossibility of a transcendental signified, a final truth, or an object fully present to knowledge, he celebrates their impossibility. It is this affirmative relation taken up in relation to the absence of ultimate truth that I think holds a central place in Derrida and Foucault’s oeuvres, albeit in different registers, and, thus, deserves further scrutiny.

Joy in Man’s Demise

Two basic principles mark out Derrida and Foucault as genealogical thinkers. First, they oppose the sanctity of origins and, therefore, reject a conception of truth as separated from power or violence. And, second, they refuse to view the absence of a transcendent truth in terms of negativity or lack. The latter claim is particularly apparent in Derrida’s early essay “Structure, Sign and Play.” In this text, Nietzsche is categorized, along with Heidegger and Freud, as a figure of the rupture with metaphysics. All three thinkers are viewed as disrupting the possibility of grounding any system or structure (whether linguistic, moral, political, or psychic), since they each question the emergence of system itself, but Nietzsche is seen as exceptional.⁸⁹ For he is unique in affirming that in the absence of the possibility of a center—the absence of the possibility of a permanent ground constituted by a transcendental signified—the domain of play becomes “indefinite.”⁹⁰

This interpretation of Nietzsche is perhaps clearest in a contrast that Derrida draws between Nietzsche and Claude Levi-Strauss at the end of the essay in question. For Levi-Strauss also responds to the crisis of metaphysics by rejecting concepts as truths in themselves and, instead, describes them as tools that the anthropologist adopts from his or her intellectual tradition. Yet in making this claim Levi-Strauss contrasts his own method of conceptual “bricolage,” whereby in retaining conceptual tools whose value one nonetheless doubts method is isolated from truth, from what he calls the conceptual “engineer” who aspires to a totalizing knowledge. In beginning with a well-defined language and lexicon, the engineer thus always delimits and determines his object of study in advance. However, Derrida argues that the blind spot of such a claim is that “the engineer is a myth.”⁹¹ To conceive of a subject who creates a theoretical system from nothing, as Levi-Strauss does of the engineer, amounts to a teleological ideal. Not only is the engineer a myth, but, moreover, he is the invention of the bricoleur since thought is irreducibly an act of bricolage:

as soon as we admit that every finite discourse is bound by a certain bricolage and that the engineer and the scientist are also species of bricoleurs, then the very idea of bricolage is menaced and the difference in which it took on its meaning breaks down.⁹²

In assuming that a ground for meanings and concepts cannot be posited because the empirical realm is simply too vast, as Levi-Strauss does, the argument goes, is still to maintain the possibility of a ground. This is to relate to the absence of a theoretical foundation for one’s work as unfulfilled desire. In contrast to Levi-Strauss’ tortured empiricism, Derrida posits Nietzsche’s “joyous affirmation of the play of the world and the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation.”⁹³ Nietzsche’s affirmation of the absence of a final truth “determines the noncentre as otherwise than as loss of the centre.”⁹⁴ However, Derrida also cautions that thought cannot simply abandon its heritage and that interpretation always works through an inherited discourse. The Nietzschean affirmation of an absence of foundations cannot absolutely break with its history; metaphysics is active in the language that opposes it.⁹⁵ While reflecting upon Nietzsche’s attempt to break with metaphysics in the closing lines of “Structure, Sign and Play,” the vision it beckons is both celebrated and feared by Derrida, for it is, and perhaps always will be, unclear what sort of existence it might produce: “a birth in the offing, only under the species of nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity.”⁹⁶

Nietzsche’s invitation to celebrate the end of metaphysics holds an equally privileged place in Foucault’s earlier work. For instance, in the essay “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx” Foucault argues these three thinkers invite a new mode of interpretation that reflects only itself. That is, for these “masters of suspicion” the sign does not re-present a depth of hidden meaning but is instead a surface phenomenon; there is simply “nothing to interpretation.”⁹⁷ Nietzsche’s account of philosophy’s will to truth, capital in Marx, and the relations between the conscious and unconscious in Freud all fold depth and interiority onto a surface of positivity.⁹⁸ Their critique and reversal of depth place thought to a surface of language, conceived not as the reflection of the world but as its own positivity.⁹⁹ If language is the medium of thought, this further implies that interpretation becomes an infinite task. But here infinity is constituted not by virtue of human finitude as it is for Levi-Strauss, but rather because if language is what there is, then there is nothing apart from interpretation such that its object is “inexhaustible.”¹⁰⁰ On this view interpretation is founded only upon suspicion and in this sense, it assumes ascendancy once the teleological question of truth is undermined.¹⁰¹ Moreover, Foucault argues that once the being of language emerges as a theoretical question unto itself, a further Nietzschean query assumes increasing importance: “who speaks?”¹⁰² That is, once one admits Nietzsche’s insight that “words have always been an invention of the ruling classes,” interrogation looks to the force that language evinces rather than its mere meaning.¹⁰³

In this regard, Foucault echoes Derrida in posing Nietzsche as a liminal figure at the boundaries of the modern paradigm or “episteme,” and of modern subjectivity in particular. In addition, like Derrida, Foucault sees Nietzsche as unique insofar as rather than mourn him, Nietzsche finds “laughter” and joy in man’s demise.¹⁰⁴ This assent to the rejection of metaphysics also reflects upon how both Derrida and Foucault conceive the function of theory and so deserves further unpacking.

From the Critique of Metaphysics to Genealogy

Once one rejects the transcendental signified, as I have suggested Derrida and Foucault both follow Nietzsche in doing, the task of theory takes a very particular form. That is, it seeks to undermine or disrupt a “will to truth” that makes claims to absolute, a-historical, universal truth. It does so by inscribing difference, conflict, and struggle at the origin of every truth. Or at least, this is one way of describing the philosophical method Nietzsche calls “genealogy.” While this is a method more closely identified with Foucault, its rarely noted that, at least in his first book Of Grammatology, Derrida asserts his work as a “genealogy of morals” as well.¹⁰⁵ Indeed, he proclaims his work to be a reprisal of Nietzsche’s question of the “value of values.”¹⁰⁶ The gesture is especially evident in the course of a critique of Levi-Strauss’ writing on the nature/culture divide in the chapter of Of Grammatology titled “The Violence of the Letter,” to which we now turn.¹⁰⁷

Derrida’s argument centers upon a passage of Levi-Strauss’ memoir Tristes Tropiques wherein the anthropologist recalls his unintentional introduction of the written word to the Nambikwara people of Brazil. On Levi-Strauss’ description, an abrupt violence emerges among the Nambikwara once their leaders mimic the anthropologist’s writing and use this pretense to have acquired Western knowledge as a means of manipulating others.¹⁰⁸ Levi-Strauss frames the story as the narrative of the European’s corruption of the tribe’s original simplicity; the introduction of writing is characterized as a fall from innocence or, in Derrida’s words, a fall from an “authentic community … fully self-present in its living speech,” infested from without by the corruption of the written word.¹⁰⁹ But the point for Derrida is that this is a deeply misguided view. For one thing, it’s apparent from Levi-Strauss’ own account of life among the Nambikwara that writing appears in the community’s symbols, their property, their kinship rules, and their myths. Moreover, Levi-Strauss makes it equally apparent, as Derrida notes, that the social life of the tribe is not without violence, hierarchy, and rank already. Writing and the violence that accompany it are phenomena that Levi-Strauss can only imagine himself to have introduced because of a Eurocentric perspective that views them as unique properties of the West. The image of the Nambikwara painted in Tristes Tropiques is in this sense grounded upon a Rousseauist nostalgia for a pure and natural state. It’s a view, in other words, rooted in a desire for a mythical pure knowledge not mediated by the written word and a society not divided by struggle. Moreover, it amounts to the infantilization of the culture it identifies with this desire.¹¹⁰

In the course of his reading of Levi-Strauss, Derrida makes an entirely genealogical claim: the violence which Levi-Strauss associates with writing and with literate civilizations is in fact irreducible; there is no innocent origin to which we might return. The point becomes even more apparent in a further confession of Levi-Strauss’s. The Nambikwara, he recounts, subscribe to a moral edict that forbids the tribe’s members from revealing proper names. But on one occasion, while playing a game with some children, a participant divulges an opponent’s name to Levi-Strauss and the latter is eventually able to induce the children to disclose the names of all the villagers. As far as Derrida is concerned, this anecdote amounts to yet another instance of the guilty anthropologist’s sense of a violation of “virginal space,” a desecration of the purity of the tribe members’ names.¹¹¹ Yet the point, he goes on, is that neither the disclosure nor even the concealment of the proper name constitutes a primordial violence. For, as Derrida argues, the act of naming itself amounts to a more “originary violence.”¹¹² To name is to classify, to inscribe “within a system,” and so is to commit an epistemic violence upon the world.¹¹³ In emphasizing the name prohibition, or his transgression against it as a kind of “violent” act, Levi-Strauss disavows this more originary and irreducible violence.

Derrida’s claim here is not unlike his argument regarding the introduction of the written word for in both instances, Levi-Strauss reflects a science which invents a non-violent origin which then becomes the object of its desire. To imagine a non-violent thought or society outside written language amounts to a “logocentric” myth of origins. Accordingly, in a decisive echo of Nietzsche, Derrida describes his own theoretical aim as undermining the “presumed difference between knowledge and power.”¹¹⁴

It is particularly notable that Derrida avers his repetition of the genealogy of morals by challenging conceptions of truth divorced from power and violence, if only because such a notion is so much more readily ascribed to Foucault. The parallel between them testifies to the extent to which the works of these two thinkers intersect. In this regard, two of Foucault’s essays are particularly significant for understanding his methodological debt to Nietzsche: an oft-cited paper delivered in 1971 entitled “Nietzsche, Genealogy and History” and a less frequently referenced series of lectures from 1973 called “Truth and Juridical Forms.”¹¹⁵ It’s to the latter that I will turn since in the context of a discussion of the notion of “power,” Foucault most patently echoes some of Derrida’s formulations there.

In a crucial moment in “Truth and Juridical Forms” Foucault identifies Plato with a momentous rupture whereby the philosopher invents a concept of truth independent of power.¹¹⁶ If the birth of philosophy as we know it, the claim goes, implies a will to truth opposed to power, then it follows that prior to this, truth and power were considered inseparable. True discourse was once determined as speech with the capacity to inspire, to contest, and to command.¹¹⁷ As we will see in later chapters, Foucault would come to nuance this claim, especially in his extensive discussions of Plato in his final two lecture courses. But at this point it is nonetheless worth remarking that Foucault situates Nietzsche as the first to think what he calls, echoing Derrida, the “logocentric” ground of philosophy.¹¹⁸ Indeed, Foucault explicitly follows Nietzsche in conceiving truth as a product of the will insofar as he views the question of knowledge as inseparable from a question of power, of authority, and of “who speaks?”

In “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” Foucault develops a similar claim by drawing upon what he views as the priority assigned by Nietzsche to the notion of “event.” In conceiving truth as an event, Foucault says, Nietzsche undermines the sanctity of its origins. Moreover, he argues that Nietzsche does not conceive the event in terms of continuity or discontinuity, nor as a single teleological narrative or event as, for instance, Heidegger’s history of Being does. On this reading, the origin is not in excess of power; it is immanent to it.¹¹⁹

Even if Foucault would later come to carefully distinguish power from violence (a question to which we shall return), it is evident that in his work, as well as Derrida’s, genealogy is understood as seeking to undermine the metaphysical desire which, since at least Plato, has sought to legislate the political through a knowledge that would eradicate the violence of its own authority. In confronting philosophy with the nature of its own will genealogy seeks a new way of thinking the political. No longer will philosophy seek to legislate to politics as even Nietzsche and Heidegger, the great critics of metaphysics, do. Instead, genealogy provides Derrida and Foucault with a form of thought centered upon the question of thought’s point of departure without succumbing to Heidegger’s desire for the proper or proper origin. Instead, it thinks “difference or distance in the origin,” as Deleuze puts it.¹²⁰ Situatedness for Derrida and Foucault is irreducible.

But while steadfast assertion of finitude is deployed by Derrida and Foucault as a means of eluding the political metaphysics that I have shown plagues Nietzsche and Heidegger’s work, it also sets the grounds for a problem that will consume the rest of this book. For while both affirm the inescapability of finitude, they thus also forsake any standard or ground by which the accounts proffered by finite thought might be appraised. This poses a further issue, one that arises in an interview with Derrida revolving primarily around the question of Nietzsche. Here Richard Beardsworth suggests to him that there is an element in deconstruction that exceeds the Nietzschean thematic of the play of different forces.¹²¹ Largely affirming Beardsworth’s suggestion, Derrida responds in the following terms: “the logic of force reveals within its logic a law that is stronger than this very logic.”¹²² In accounting for difference itself, Derrida implies, theory by necessity transcends and so is something other than merely another iteration of difference. The implication is that unlike Foucault, Derrida claims to affirm that the postulation of what I called a “grander narrative” ultimately amounts to a “grounding” move.

This accusation might seem incongruous considering how similar I have suggested Derrida and Foucault’s theoretical strategies are. But everything hinges upon how difference is to be conceived. We are thus approaching the problem of the incommensurability of these two thinkers; let us look to it further.

NOTES

1.Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (Douglas Smith, Trans.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

2.Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, I: 7.

3.Ibid., I: 7.

4.Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (Walter Kaufman, Trans.). New York: Vintage, 1996. Section 19.

5.Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, Preface: 6.

6.Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 550.

7.Ibid., p. 552.

8.Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality (Walter Kaufmann, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Section 13.

9.See Nietzsche, Daybreak. Section 10.

10.David Owen, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality. London: Acumen, 2007. P. 46. Owen argues that the burden of Nietzsche’s claim does not lie with disproving metaphysics and that the cultivation of doubt and skepticism is sufficient to begin to eliminate the need for metaphysical justifications.

11.Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil. Section 13. On this point, see Mark Warren, Nietzsche and Political Thought. London: MIT, 1988; Paul Patton “Power in Hobbes and Nietzsche.” Nietzsche, Feminism, Political Theory (Paul Patton, Ed.). London: Routledge, 1993. Pp. 144–161.

12.Ibid. See sections 202, 203.

13.Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals. II: 24.

14.Keith Ansell-Pearson, Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker: The Perfect Nihilist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. 125–126.

15.Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals. Preface: 6; Michel Haar, “Nietzsche and Metaphysical Language.” P. 18.

16.Ibid.

17.Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals. III: 12.

18.Jean Granier, “Perspectivism and Interpretation.” The New Nietzsche (David B. Allison, Ed.). London: MIT Press, 1985. Pp. 190–200.

19.Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science. Section: 374.

20.Granier. “Perspectivism and Interpretation.” P. 197.

21.Jurgen Habermas. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Frederick Lawrence, Trans.). Cambridge: Polity, 1990. P. 74.

22.Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950. P. 176; Arthur Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. P. 62. This common claim uniting these thinkers is pointed to by Clive Cazeaux in his Metaphor and Continental Philosophy: From Kant to Derrida. London: Routledge, 2007.

23.Clive Cazeaux, Metaphor and Continental Philosophy. P. 109.

24.Ibid.

25.Tracy Strong, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration. London: University of California Press, 1976. Pp. 233–234.

26.Dianna Coole, Negativity and Politics: Dionysus and Dialectics from Kant to Poststructuralism. London: Routledge, 2000. P. 102.

27.I owe this point to Cazeaux, Metaphor and Continental Philosophy. P. 109.

28.Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. P. 141.

29.David Owen, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality. Pp. 33, 46.

30.John P. Richardson, Nietzsche’s System. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. 279–280.

31.Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals. III:12.

32.Charles E. Scott, The Question of Ethics: Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. P. 15.

33.Ibid., p. 16.

34.Nietzsche, The Gay Science. Section: 335.

35.Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 228.

36.Ibid., p. 211.

37.Daniel Conway, Nietzsche and the Political, p. 10.

38.Ibid. See also Keith Ansell-Pearson, Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker, p. 149.

39.Heidegger sees Nietzsche’s “grand politics” as expressing the more fundamental ontological principle of will to power and as such are not central to his “metaphysical” reading. See Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics (David Farrell Krell, Ed.) (Frank A. Capuzzi et al., Trans.). San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1987. P. 151.

40.Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson, Trans.). London: Blackwell, 1962. P. 263.

41.Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 189; I owe the term “worldhood” to Charles Guignon, “Introduction.” The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger (Charles Guignon, Ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. 1–41. See p. 10.

42.Ibid., p. 174.

43.See, for instance, Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche Volume II: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same (David Farrell Krell, Trans.). San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1984. P. 188. See also Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (William Lovitt, Trans.). London: Harper, 1977.

44.Heidegger, Nietzsche Volume II, p. 187.

45.Ibid., p. 188.

46.Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought. London: Harper, 1975. P. 47.

47.Ibid., p. 60.

48.Ibid., pp. 46–47.

49.Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics (Gregory Fried, Trans.). London: Yale University Press, 2000. P. 65.

50.Ibid., pp. 167–171.

51.Ibid., pp. 171, 177, 179.

52.Miguel de Beistegui, Heidegger and the Political. London: Routledge, 1997. P. 115.

53.Ibid., p. 179.

54.Ibid., p. 65.

55.See John D. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. P. 112. See also Slavoj Žižek’s Violence. London: Verso, 2008.

56.Heidegger. Nietzsche Volume I: The Will to Power as Art (David Farrell Krell, Trans.). San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1977. Pp. 156–157.

57.Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (William Lovitt, Trans.). London: Harper, 1977. P. 61.

58.Ibid., p. 61.

59.Heidegger, Nietzsche Volume III, p. 8; Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche Volume I, p. 4.

60.Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, p. 75.

61.Ibid., p. 75.

62.Heidegger, Nietzsche Volume I, pp. 18–24; Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche Volume III, pp. 196–197; Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, p. 79.

63.Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, p. 75.

64.Ibid., p. 77.

65.cf. Heidegger, Nietzsche Volume II, p. 202; Robert Sinnerbink, “We Hyperboreans: Platonism and Politics in Heidegger and Nietzsche.” Contretemps. No. 3, July 2002. P. 164.

66.Robert Sinnerbink, “We Hyperboreans: Platonism and Politics in Heidegger and Nietzsche.” Contretemps. No. 3, July 2002. P. 164.

67.Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology.” The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. P. 17.

68.Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 164.

69.Heidegger uses das Volk at Being and Time, p. 436.

70.Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 436.

71.Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. P. 14.

72.See also Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993; Christopher Fynsk, Heidegger: Thought and Historicity. Ithaca, NY: Cornell, University Press, 1993.

73.See Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities (Daniel Heller Roazen, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Pp. 185–204.

74.John D. Caputo. Demythologizing Heidegger. P. 2. See also Miguel de Beistegui, The New Heidegger. London: Continuum, 2005. P. 164; John D. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger, p. 172; and Gregory Fried, Heidegger’s Polemos: From Being to Politics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. P. 161.

75.Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political (Chris Turner, Trans.). London: Blackwell, 1990.

76.Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics, p. 28.

77.See Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity; and Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.

78.Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy. (Alan Bass, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago, 1982. P. 131.

79.Ibid., p. 133.

80.Ibid., p. 127.

81.Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge, 2002. P. 364.

82.Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (Hugh Tomlinson, Trans.). London: Continuum, 2006.

83.Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p. 18.

84.Michel Foucault, Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984 Volume Two. Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology (James Faubion, Ed.) (Robert Hurley et al., Trans.). London: Penguin, 2000. P. 277.

85.Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. P. 217.

86.In Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles. (Barbara Harlow, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago, 1979. Derrida takes up a brief entry into Nietzsche’s notebook: “I have forgotten my umbrella” to show that it exceeds Heidegger’s metanarrative, and thus, Heidegger’s reading cannot possibly be sustained. See also Derrida’s “Interpreting Signatures” Looking After Nietzsche (Lawrence Rickels, Ed.). Albany: State University of New York, 1990. Pp. 1–18. Here Derrida once again seeks to undermine Heidegger’s unifying interpretation of Nietzsche. See especially pp. 52–54.

87.Foucault, Essential Works, Volume II, p. 277.

88.Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 53.

89.Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Alan Bass, Trans.). London: Routledge, 1991. P. 353.

90.Ibid., p. 354.

91.Ibid., p. 360.

92.Ibid., p. 361.

93.Ibid., p. 369.

94.Ibid., p. 369.

95.Ibid., p. 370.

96.Ibid., p. 370.

97.Foucault, Essential Works Volume II, p. 275.

98.Ibid., p. 273.

99.Ibid., p. 272.

100.Ibid., p. 274.

101.Ibid., p. 276.

102.I owe the theme of the question of “who speaks?” to Alan D. Schrift in “Foucault and Derrida on Nietzsche and the End(s) of ‘Man.’ ” Exceedingly Nietzsche: Aspects of Contemporary Nietzsche-Interpretation (David Farrell Krell & David Wood, Eds.). London: Routledge, 1988. Pp. 140–142.

103.Foucault, Essential Works Volume II, p. 276.

104.Ibid., p. 420.

105.Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Trans.). London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. P. 140.

106.Ibid., p. 140.

107.Gary Shapiro develops this argument in “Taming, Repeating, Naming: Foucault, Derrida and the Genealogy of Morals.” Nietzsche as Postmodernist: Essays Pro and Contra (Clayton Koelb, Ed.). London: State University of New York, 1990. My own analysis is indebted to Shapiro’s insights on the genealogical character of Grammatology.

108.Derrida, Of Grammatology, pp. 125–127.

109.Ibid., p. 119.

110.Ibid., p. 114.

111.Ibid., p. 113.

112.Ibid., p. 112.

113.Ibid., pp. 112, 109.

114.Ibid., p. 128.

115.Foucault, Essential Works Volume II; Michel Foucault, Essential Works Volume III: Power (James D. Faubion, Ed.) (Robert Hurley et al., Trans.). Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1998. Pp. 1–89.

116.Foucault, Essential Works Volume III, p. 32.

117.See Nathan Widder, “Foucault and Power Revisited.” European Journal of Political Theory. Vol. 3, No. 4, 2004. Pp. 411–432. Foucault would come to refine this account of pre-Socratic truth in his final three lecture courses and in his accounts of parrhesia in particular. See chapters 4 and 5.

118.Ibid., p. 12.

119.Ibid., p. 116.

120.Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 2.

121.Derrida (with Richard Beardsworth), Interventions, p. 224.

122.Ibid., p. 226.

Chapter 2

Cartesian Exclusions

In his reply to Derrida’s critique of the History of Madness Foucault categorizes the question at stake in their polemic in the following way: “could there be anything anterior or exterior to philosophical discourse? Can its condition reside in an exclusion, a refusal, a risk avoided, and why not, a fear?”¹ At stake for Foucault is philosophy’s persistent capacity to assert its sovereignty as a privileged mode and means of analysis. Yet this depiction of the debate is limited for two reasons. First, the stakes are even broader than Foucault admits. Second, the depiction of Derrida as champion of philosophical discourse works only by a certain restriction of Derrida’s reading of Descartes, and of deconstruction more broadly. Ultimately, the claim pursued here is that the debate amounts to two competing accounts of the nature of social order that in turn implicate the theorist’s position in relation to the latter.

Once the debate is conceived in these terms, it becomes apparent that their interchange amounts to two thinkers accusing one another of the crime of repeating modern philosophy’s “Cartesian exclusion,” and so of illegitimately and “violently” determining theory’s object. In other words, Derrida and Foucault can be said to denounce one another for actively participating in the will to truth, of committing the metaphysical move that, as we saw, Nietzsche defined as positing discourse as transcendent to the social relations from which it emerges. Moreover, both Derrida and Foucault employ a polemical strategy analogous to the one we have seen that Heidegger employs against Nietzsche. That is, they reinscribe one another’s work within the terms of a competing grander narrative. It is with these concerns in mind that this chapter is organized.

While the first part of this chapter will offer a step-by-step account of the “Cogito debate,” the second part will build on the conclusions drawn from the debate in looking to the parallel ways by which both thinkers offer a theoretical challenge to the notion of social order itself. In the process, I problematize Derrida and Foucault’s criticisms of one another, showing both thinkers to displace the subject by an account of the “medium” in which that subject is produced. In this sense, both thinkers can be said to adopt, and yet to radicalize, Heidegger’s view, examined in the previous chapter, of subjectivity and intersubjectivity as reductive of the “clearing” of Being through which order is given. But insofar as they can be seen to offer competing “grander narratives” articulating this medium, the terms animating the incommensurability of their work become clear.

READING THE COGITO DEBATE: TEXT AND HISTORY

That the debate between Derrida and Foucault has drawn a vast amount of scholarly attention should be of no surprise given that it was the only extended public dialogue into which two of the most influential and widely read thinkers of the twentieth century entered. Furthermore, given the large amount of attention that the debate has proffered, it’s no less astonishing that there exist a multitude of interpretations of exactly what the debate was in fact over.² But these overwhelmingly overlook its expansive stakes, and tend to do so in one of three ways.

First, Edward Said is typical of those defenders of Foucault who maintain that he questions the text’s “historical presentation” and, in doing so, averts Derrida’s a-historicism.³ That is, Said argues that the fundamental point of discord lies between two distinct modes of conceiving the text’s relation to the world.⁴ In this case, the theorists are characterized by the plane upon which they locate the existence of the text. That is, Derrida’s “deconstructive” method is viewed as akin to “negative theology” since it demonstrates what is absent from the text, while Foucault’s discursive analysis places the text into its constitutive networks of language, power, and knowledge.⁵ On the one hand, as Said puts it, textual analysis is conducted as a mise en abyme, which identifies some inescapable element of negativity which indefinitely prohibits the text from self-completion, or as a mise en discours, which identifies the broader context in which the meaning of the text is constituted.⁶ Not unlike Said, Roy Boyne frames the debate as a question of the field in which one locates the text. On Boyne’s account, either one privileges “the social real” as Foucault does, or one commences from its “philosophical reflection,” as Derrida does.⁷ Michael Sprinker too echoes Said’s contention that the polemic revolves around the question of history and method and, thus, he concludes that, unlike Foucault, Derrida is guilty of an a-historicism that thrusts all texts into a single and self-referential opening to their “undecidability.”⁸ These analyses are typical of those partisan to Foucault since, at their broadest point of agreement, they cite Derrida’s incapacity to historicize the text. In question is not the success of deconstruction’s undermining of the metaphysics of the transcendental signified but rather its failure to disturb a broader political and cultural space. As Said puts it,

if everything in a text is always open equally to suspicion and to affirmation, then the differences between one class interest and another, or between oppressor and oppressed, one discourse and another, one ideology and another are virtual in—but never crucial to making—the finally reconciling element of textuality.⁹

Unlike Foucault, Derrida is incapable of moving us beyond the text to the structures that surround and condition it.

Second, partisans of Derrida have usually sought to rescue him from the charge of a-historicism by viewing the terms of the dialogue as a debate over the question of historicity itself, a polemic over the conditions of possibility of historical analysis.¹⁰ On this interpretation, Foucault’s history of reason and madness negates historicity; it assumes that the meaning of an event can be defined in relation to a finite historical structure. All such structures, Derrida is said to show, are undermined by an excess that they cannot master. Because it is grounded in the assumption of a determinate historical structure, Foucault’s enterprise is said to result in the erasure of historicity.

While the arguments raised by this approach, I think, prematurely dismiss the position of Foucault’s 1972 reply, they do begin to shift the terms of the debate to what I am arguing is the fundamental difference between the two thinkers, namely, the way in which each locates finitude.¹¹ Nevertheless, seeing the dissimilarity between Derrida and Foucault from the perspective of Derridean deconstruction precludes the possibility of seeing the way that Foucault, after the publication of The History of Madness, also sought to respond to these questions. But the contrast between these two theoretical enterprises implies a further question: is it possible to compare them at all?

Jean-Luc Nancy and Pierre Macherey have suggested that it is not. The dialogue between Derrida and Foucault, they each argue, takes place between two wholly irreconcilable planes of analysis. An “irreducible heterogeneity” lies between them, as Nancy says.¹² For while Foucault puts in question the theoretical-practical schemas of reason, Derrida’s analysis is concerned with the means philosophy employs (inevitably unsuccessfully) to maintain its schemas and representations. Albeit only implicitly, this portrayal comes closest to recognizing that the Derridean and Foucauldian approaches necessarily view one another as erring since they are restricted to interpreting one another from within their respective grander narratives.¹³Something like the mirror opposite of Nancy’s and Macherey’s accounting is countenanced by Alan D. Schrift, who maintains the possibility of reconciliation between Derrida and Foucault. While, on the face of it, viewing their projects as reconciliatory may appear to be opposed to Nancy’s and Macherey’s claim, in fact it’s merely a more optimistic version of the same thesis. This is insofar as for Schrift, the basis of their reconciliation rests with the fact they engage different pursuits so that their divergence amounts to a question of “regional application.”¹⁴ That is, these are diverging objects of analysis and not distinct theoretical perspectives, there is no fundamental obstruction to a rapprochement. While this reading might interrupt the impasse to which the circularity of the debate sometimes seems to lead, it only does so in overlooking the way the debate works in formal terms. Only in omitting the issue of the way a “grander narrative” is posited by each thinker can Derrida and Foucault’s reconciliation be proposed. All of this is not to say that these accounts of the debate are totally incorrect; it’s just that they lack explanatory power. They describe how the debate proceeds, they take sides, but they do not look to the conditions of the polemic itself, as I seek to do next.

Derrida on The History of Madness

Let us begin by looking to the form of Derrida’s argument. The essay “Cogito and the History of Madness” targets the core of Foucault’s project in The History of Madness: his desire to let madness itself speak. For Derrida, such a project inevitably fails, for the sort of “archaeology” of the silence of madness attempted by Foucault cannot but reproduce the conditions that have always objectified madness. This is because, as Derrida asks, echoing Foucault’s own definition of madness as the “absence of a work”: “Is not an archaeology, even of silence, a logic, that is, an organized language, an order, a sentence, a syntax, a work?”¹⁵ In attempting to transcend the language of Western reason in order to “speak” madness, Foucault’s project is, in Derrida’s view, itself mad.

Derrida’s argument here is structurally similar to the one he makes against Levi-Strauss’ notion of the absolute singularity of the name discussed in the previous chapter. Like the name, madness cannot be said without being reintroduced into reason in general and thus silenced once again.¹⁶ An archaeology of the silence of madness is, Derrida argues, impossible: “A history, that is, an archaeology against reason doubtless cannot be written, for, despite all appearance to the contrary, the concept of history has always been a rational one.”¹⁷ Foucault’s apparent denial of the inherent violence of all discourse, even one that would seek to recuperate the historically excluded voice of madness, thus sets in motion Derrida’s critique. For Foucault’s project can proceed, Derrida argues, only insofar as he has violently determined and defined madness from the outset:

everything transpires as if Foucault knew what “madness” means. Everything transpires as if, in a continuous and underlying way, an assumed and rigorous pre-comprehension of the concept of madness, or at least its nominal definition, were possible and acquired.¹⁸

If madness is, as Foucault claims in The History of Madness, always in excess of philosophy and Western reason, then it cannot be spoken at all. Foucault would have to remain silent not to betray his subject since to give voice to the silence of madness is already to violently determine it. Derrida suggests that the only way Foucault’s project could be justified would be by imagining an originary presence of madness within history. But if this were the case, if madness were indeed some determinate object accessible to a theorist whose role would be to recover it, then madness would not be the totally alien other of reason Foucault considers it to be. In other words, madness cannot be accessible to reason. In constructing knowledge of madness Foucault must make it reasonable, yet in doing so, madness is no longer mad, it has been violently reduced by the theorist.

Furthermore, Derrida argues that Foucault seems to disavow this violent reduction of madness, and that this is itself a form of violence. To put this in terms developed in the previous chapter, we might say that for Derrida Foucault has failed to affirm the genealogical principle that theory is always violent and that thought cannot help but reduce and determine. This is both an epistemological error (a thought effacing its finite and perspectival nature) and an ethical and political error (thought violently reduces and determines what is ultimately indeterminate).

This act of disavowal of the violence of the theoretical enterprise is most apparent in the preface to The History of Madness. Foucault there quite explicitly locates an originary presence of madness in history when he contrasts the objectification of madness in modernity with the Ancient Greeks who, he claims, had no conception of an “other” to logos. The Greeks are said to have posited no opposite or other to reason but rather held only a distinction between sophrosyne and hybris, between moderation and excess. Only in the classical age is madness made silent, thus concealing that modern reason cannot constitute itself except by excluding its opposite unreason.¹⁹ Only by conceiving, Derrida argues, an “originary presence” of madness among the Greeks, that is, a non-violent prior unity and abundance of madness and reason, can Foucault portray his own discourse as a non-violent and non-determining return to this undifferentiated presence of madness.²⁰ That is, it is only in declaring that such an originary and determinate presence of madness once existed, can Foucault imagine that his own book functions as a non-violent return to this original moment before the modern exclusion of madness from the category of reasonable discourse.

But this is not Foucault’s only error in Derrida’s eyes. In addition to positing madness as present and available to thought, Derrida argues that Foucault is caught dating the event of division between reason and madness across two irreconcilable moments. For while Foucault famously draws a structural correlation between the “great confinement” carried out in European societies in the seventeenth century and Descartes’ Meditations, his account is grounded upon a contradiction. He simultaneously claims that the exclusion of madness occurs in the seventeenth century and that reason had no other for the ancient Greeks. If, Derrida argues, the event of division between reason and madness occurred with Socrates’ insertion of reason within his reassuring logos, as Foucault seems to imply in his original preface, then it’s a division essential to the history of philosophy. In this case, the significance of the seventeenth century cannot be maintained along with Foucault’s privileging of the Greeks. Conversely, if hubris was not in fact contained by reason in the way Foucault describes in the preface to The History of Madness, then the Socratic dialectic could not have had the familiarity that Foucault assures us it does.

For Derrida, these confusions and ambiguities arise for one fundamental reason: Foucault has not recognized the a priori grounds of the opposition between reason and its other; he has failed to think what Derrida refers to as the “common root of meaning and nonmeaning” and, thus, the point wherein “the original logos in which a language and a silence are divided from one another.”²¹ In other words, from Derrida’s perspective, the crucial difference between him and Foucault is that the latter does not adequately question these grounds insofar as he locates the opposition in historical events. As a consequence, his thought does not accede to the fundamental point of division of madness from reason which, Derrida claims, is anterior to any determinate historical account. In other words, Foucault is accused of collapsing the economy of historicity into the historical, the de jure into the de facto, the transcendent into the empirical.²² To accede to a point completely beyond reason as Derrida claims Foucault does would be to position oneself beyond language itself. Accordingly, Foucault’s archaeologist inhabits an illegitimate transcendent and Archimedean position, rather than think the locus or medium of the conditions of possibility of reason, history, language, and so on: “It is the meaning of ‘history’ or archia that should have been questioned first, perhaps. A writing that exceeds, by questioning them, the values ‘origin’, ‘reason’, and ‘history’ could not be contained within the metaphysical closure of an archaeology.”²³ The point for Derrida is thus to elucidate a more originary medium of differentiation as it functions in The Meditations, and to demonstrate how Foucault in turn obscures that medium.

Derrida Reading Foucault Reading Descartes

Having examined the broad terms of Derrida’s critique of Foucault, we can now turn to examine his expansive and extensive critique of Foucault’s interpretation of Descartes’ Meditations. The crucial moment occurs at the beginning of the second chapter of The History of Madness.²⁴ The chapter is devoted to the “Great Confinement” of a newly defined “mad” individual that occurs across Europe during the seventeenth century, and Foucault turns to Descartes to establish a distinction between attitudes toward madness that existed during the Renaissance and Classical periods. This epochal shift, marked by an institutionalization of the mad commencing in seventeenth century Paris, is framed by the formation of a “rigid division” between reason and madness exemplified in the Meditations.²⁵ For Descartes, Foucault argues, errors of the senses, illusions, and dreams all form obstacles to the overcoming of doubt, yet madness is treated as categorically different:

In the economy of doubt, there is a fundamental disequilibrium between on the one hand madness, and dreams and errors on the other. Their position is quite different where truth and the seeker of truth are concerned. Dreams and illusions are overcome by the very structure of truth, but 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.²⁶

Madness falls outside the categories of truth and error and, therefore, is a priori disqualified from the activity of doubting. For Foucault, this gesture marks an immense epistemological shift, one that relocates the question of the possibility of knowledge from the quality of the object to be known to the mind of the thinking subject. Once madness is defined by philosophy as the absence of thought, it is excluded from the thinking subject; since madmen are incapable of reason, “I, when I think, cannot be considered insane,” as Foucault puts it.²⁷

Foucault’s reference to Descartes makes up only a few sentences among a text of hundreds of pages, yet it becomes the central hinge upon which Derrida’s condemnation of the book’s argument rests. Despite its brevity, Derrida takes the interpretation of Descartes as exemplary of an epistemic violence that makes the alterity of madness an object that is present and accessible to reason. For one thing, it is indicative of the way by which Foucault reads the mutual exclusion of reason and madness as an event in history. This is, from Derrida’s perspective, a fundamental error. The exclusion cannot be historical but is rather economical in the sense that it is essential to the “economy” of language as such.²⁸ Any reasonable language or discourse is defined by its decisive break with madness and, thus, Descartes’ exclusion of madness is not a particular event as Foucault would have it but instead is the constitutive foundation of the possibility of language, reason, and history as such.²⁹

Derrida’s point isn’t merely that, in his inscription of determinate meaning and a determinate history upon madness, Foucault has obscured the violence such a gesture commits upon the alterity of madness. It’s also that in doing so, Foucault’s assessment is grounded in the pretense that his own theoretical enterprise doesn’t do violence to madness. The presumption of a non-violent appropriation of madness implies that Foucault posits a transcendent position for his discourse. In short, Foucault is guilty of a “structuralist totalitarianism,” an “internment of the Cogito,” insofar as he invokes, what Derrida calls, an “evasive transcendence” or Archimedean position that, in effacing the violence of its own discourse, succumbs to the error of all metaphysics.³⁰

Derrida further distinguishes his own narrative from Foucault’s through what initially appears as the relatively pedantic question of how to interpret Descartes but is in fact much more crucial. The argument here hinges over what point exactly in the Meditations Descartes performs the act of excluding madness. Derrida fundamentally disagrees with Foucault’s reading whereby madness is relegated to the category of a mental illness to be repressed. In fact, the act of exclusion as designated by Foucault is claimed to be a merely minor impediment to the act of doubting and not a totalizing termination of doubt. For Descartes, Derrida argues, madness is a less radical form of doubt than Descartes’ other exemplars of the dream and especially the “evil genius.” First, he argues that Descartes doesn’t posit madness as an act of doubt but only as a rhetorical device composed for an imagined non-philosophical interlocutor. Second, the dream functions to question all sense perceptions and is thus more radical than madness as a form of doubt. Third, doubt is only radically considered in the instance when Descartes imagines an evil genius who would lead us to question ideas not only of sensible origin as in dreams but also of intelligible origin.³¹ The evil genius thus represents the possibility of total error and delusion wherein, unlike the example of the dream, even deductions of mathematical truth may be false.

Setting out from this claim, Derrida draws a fundamentally different “grander narrative” to Foucault. At the core of this account is Derrida’s assertion that, at the moment of absolute delusion provoked by the evil genius, the Cogito is nevertheless affirmed by Descartes. As Derrida puts it, for Descartes, “[the Cogito] is valid, even if I am mad.”³² On this view, the presence of reason is only constituted when reason itself is “mad,” when the opposition between reason and madness is undecidable; a space radically anterior to any necessary relation between reason and madness, time and thought, temporality, and truth.³³ The Cogito is the “zero point” “which no longer belongs to a determined reason or a determined unreason”; it is the “common origin” of meaning and nonmeaning whereby “all the determined forms of the exchanges between reason and madness are embedded.”³⁴ Rather than exclude madness as Foucault believes, Derrida holds that Descartes fully appropriates it in the Cogito and he does so at the very moment of hyperbolic doubt embodied by the evil genius. For it is at this point, Derrida says, Descartes accedes to the “essential” point beyond the totality of a historically determined reason where the Cogito cannot be reduced or confined to a historical structure or totality.

This is admittedly a rather opaque claim, but suffice it to say it implies that for Derrida the decision for reason over madness is not a determinate historical event in either Socrates or Descartes.³⁵ Any claim to temporalize the Cogito, to determine it within the horizon of a history would be, Derrida says, “violence itself.”³⁶ Instead of viewing it as a determinate historical event, Derrida locates the “common origin” of reason and madness at the moment of radical hyperbolic doubt of the evil genius. This is because, as he argues, thought can only think determinate forms by the guarantee and grounding it receives from God.³⁷ Only once Descartes posits God as the guarantor of truth and, thus, as the source of a totalizing closure, is the division or differentiation of reason from madness possible. The Cogito is only saved from the silence to which hyperbolic doubt leads by the divine: “Descartes knew that, without God, finite thought never had the right to exclude madness, etc. Which amounts to saying that madness is never excluded, except in fact, violently, in history.”³⁸ The argument amounts to a typically Derridean move; madness is shown to be the condition of possibility of Descartes’ project since it constitutes the absolute doubt that allows the Cogito to be defined, but it also marks the Cogito’s impossibility since the exit from madness is only made by a conception of totality that is only ever achieved by a God. Madness is in principle inseparable from reason, yet is de facto exceeded in determinate historical events. Put otherwise, the Cogito becomes non-madness once it speaks, once it becomes temporal and discursive. But any claim to speak of, or on behalf of, madness is always already necessarily grounded in its exclusion, since language must both open to and determine the otherness of madness. This is its condition of possibility. Therefore, just as Foucault is read as constituting his archaeology of madness only by deviating from his initial definition of madness as pure silence in order to make it speak and, in the process, determine it as an object of history, Descartes makes the same move in turning to the guarantee of certainty in God. In conceiving reason and madness as historically determinate, both Descartes and Foucault are seen to violently determine the infinite hyperbole of madness as a closed or determinate object either through the transcendence of totality by the divine (Descartes) or by the Archimedean or transcendent position of the theorist (Foucault).

Derrida’s critique is thus premised upon shifting what he elsewhere calls the “prior medium in which differentiation in general is produced” away from where it is located by Foucault.³⁹ The polemical move here has echoes of Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche, for in endorsing a competing “medium” of social relations, Derrida’s account seeks to show that Foucault, having failed to correctly situate Descartes within that medium, has necessarily sought to violently transcend it. Derrida’s critique of Foucault is thus grounded upon a rearticulation of the medium of the constitution of a determinate relation of reason and madness, no longer conceived as a singular historical event but as a condition of historicity and language as such. Any historical account of this separation always already presupposes it as soon as it speaks. Moreover, there is no concept of reason that is not already inscribed by madness, nor is there any madness that is not traversed by reason, and, thus, neither can be questioned from the perspective of the other. In short, Foucault is accused of repeating the Cartesian exclusion. That is, his archaeology betrays madness as soon as it begins to speak, much as the Cartesian guarantee of certainty cannot but violently determine the irreducible indefinite excess of hyperbolic doubt.

A Discursive Field of Differentiation

Foucault’s response to Derrida, “My Body, This Paper, This Fire,” appeared as an appendix to the second edition of The History of Madness nearly ten years after Derrida’s essay had first been published. We can nonetheless mostly forgo biographical particulars to assert that by the time the response appeared the nature of Foucault’s enterprise had shifted significantly. For all intents and purposes, the response to Derrida came from a different thinker than the one who had written The History of Madness. By 1972, when “My Body, This Paper, This Fire” had appeared, The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge had already been published and Foucault had already announced his later emphasis upon “power” or power/knowledge with the essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.”⁴⁰ This later Foucault would no longer claim the possibility for an experience of madness as pure exteriority.⁴¹ Indeed, by the early 1970s Foucault had repudiated his attempt to think a non-violent relation to the absolutely other and, thus, had fully ascribed to the genealogical principle of the inherent violence of theory, as we saw in chapter 1. Without explicitly acknowledging Derrida’s critique of his attempt to think an originary experience of “madness itself” as present to thought, he had nevertheless explicitly revised the aim of his enterprise and, at least in part, done so through a critique of this aim in The History of Madness. For instance, in The Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault admits that the earlier book “had accorded too great a place, and a very enigmatic one too, to what [he] called an ‘experience’, thus showing to what extent one was still close admitting an anonymous and general subject of history.”⁴² In effect, Foucault implicitly admits that to the extent that he had aspired to uncover an experience of madness wholly in excess of metaphysics, Derrida’s critique is accurate.⁴³

However, if Foucault can be said to admit this element of Derrida’s critique, he nevertheless maintains that it is Derrida, and not he, who has repeated the “Cartesian exclusion.” In putting his rebuttal in these terms, Foucault addresses what this book claims lies at the core of the debate: the terrain upon which this exclusion is constituted and so the “medium of differentiation” along with the theorist’s relation to the latter. For while Derrida argues that the Cogito, as constituted through the violent reduction of hyperbolic doubt, cannot be fully enclosed within a historical structure, Foucault argues that in this interpretation, the Cogito only exceeds a finite determined totality in terms of the status assigned to it by philosophical discourse.⁴⁴ That is, the radical and excessive event of madness that Derrida locates in the example of the evil genius is premised upon a narrowly philosophical reading of the text that thus implicitly disavows other forms of discourse (medical, juridical) that circulate in The Meditations. Foucault’s reply therefore suggests that it is Derrida who is guilty of expressing what Nietzsche calls the will to truth. This is insofar as Foucault claims Derrida violently excludes the singular elements of Cartesian discourse by taking up an Archimedean position to locate within it “transcendental” philosophical problems. His response thus once again shifts the point where the division or differentiation is to be located, both in Descartes’ text and in Derrida’s, to the denial of the inescapable power and violence of discourse. In this instance, it is Derrida’s reading of Descartes that is circumscribed within the limits of metaphysics and whose account fails to think the terrain where the metaphysical may be exceeded.

Not unlike Derrida’s reading, Foucault’s response hinges upon a seemingly trivial claim. Foucault argues that Derrida is wrong to assume that the dream hypothesis is a more radical exercise of doubt than the example of madness, insofar as the dream affects only the matter of meditation. The doubt caused by a potentially dreaming subject affects only the object of the meditating subject’s knowledge and so only puts in question the truth of the most immediate sensory impressions. On the other hand, the possibility of madness posited by Descartes affects the epistemological and medical characterization of the social and juridical qualification of the meditating subject itself. In other words, while Derrida looks to the exercises of doubt that put in question the subject’s access to knowledge of the world, it is the prior test of madness that examines the thinking subject itself. What is more, in organizing his interpretation of Descartes in terms of the question of hyperbolic doubt, Derrida is said to ignore the broader ethical features of the discourse. That is, he effaces the ascetic transformation that the meditating subject undergoes to prove capable of performing the philosophical act of doubting prior to the performance of the act itself. Before the examples of the dream and evil genius there is a prior demand for the formation and determination of a specific type of subject that is deemed qualified to doubt.⁴⁵

As such, what Foucault calls Derrida’s “philosophical” reading of Descartes is said to overlook that the text forms not only a philosophical system of propositions wherein the subject remains fixed and unaffected by the demonstration but also first and foremost a subjective exercise, which, in acting as a discursive event, calls for a transformation of the doubting subject. The Cartesian discourse is defined by Foucault as a “discursive meditation,” which functions as

“a set of discursive events which constitute at once groups of utterances linked one to another by formal rules of deduction, and series of modifications of the enunciating subject which follow continuously one from another” and thus, “the utterances which are formally linked, modify the subject as they develop.”⁴⁶

These two complementary elements of the text, conceived as discourse and the discursive modification of the subject, are disregarded from the outset of Derrida’s analysis insofar as he does not proceed in analyzing the text as “a set of utterances which are produced each in its place and time.”⁴⁷ Indeed, insofar as it is a discursive event, Foucault maintains that the analysis of Descartes’ text must endeavor to determine the meaning of its utterances and the relation between the status of the utterance and the position of the speaking subject.

Foucault’s response is thus based upon the claim that only through an analysis of the Meditations as discourse is the position of the subject in relation to its context and to itself established. The Cartesian meditation constitutes both the form of the subject who is authorized to speak the truth (to form axiomatic statements) and the exclusion of a subject who may not (the subject qualified as mad). The meditation is thus what, in chapter 4 we will see, Foucault would later theorize as an ethical technique to produce a particular mode of subjectivity. The meditation functions as a modification of the subject capable of the enunciation of philosophical truths. As such, it is a “spiritual exercise” that, in altering the subject, produces either a subject deemed capable of speaking the truth or one who is disqualified from truth-speaking.⁴⁸

Foucault’s reply thus hinges upon situating Descartes’ exclusion of madness elsewhere than the scene of the evil genius proposed by Derrida, and his exegesis should be understood with this in mind. Descartes begins, Foucault argues, with a single proposition: that every truth received by the senses must be doubted. As such, for the exercise of meditation to proceed its subject must conform to the terms of a being capable of absolute doubt. However, Descartes is also cognizant that a subject capable of a truly absolute doubt would be mad and, accordingly, would be disqualified from participating in a rational discourse. This implies, Foucault maintains, that by necessity Descartes must perform an askesis or exercise to confirm the subject of the meditation as rational. Only in this context, Foucault argues, does Descartes propose the example of the dream as superior to the example of madness as an exercise of doubt. Unlike the dreamer, the mad subject is incapable of doubting, and this is by virtue of his madness.

This might seem a minor exegetical point, but in fact, as far as Foucault is concerned, it transforms the status and function of madness in the Meditations. As Foucault puts it, “Madness is posited as disqualificatory in any search for truth,” and, thus, the meditation amounts to an event whereby Descartes “parts company with all those for whom madness can be in one way or another the bringer or revealer of truth.”⁴⁹ Madness is excluded because the exercise of the madman’s doubt does not qualify as that of a rational subject. Accordingly, Descartes disqualifies the madman before the meditation even begins, by identifying him, through the frame of the seventeenth-century juridical and medical category of demens, as someone incapable of speaking truth. The moment of the exclusion of madness is thus posited at the intersection of several discourses that determine in advance the legitimate subject of philosophy.

On this reading, Derrida only views the dream as a more radical probing of sense perception because he has already discounted discursive variances between the subject of the dream and the subject of madness. And he can only do so since he has already revoked any philosophical significance to the exclusion of the mad subject. For Derrida, the example of madness is not a serious act of doubt but merely a rhetorical device meant to draw in the philosophical novice. In doing so, Foucault argues, it is in fact Derrida who has performed a “Cartesian exclusion” revoking philosophical status from madness. Derrida is guilty, the argument goes, of “erasing” differences within the text in the name of the sovereignty and priority of philosophical discourse.⁵⁰ Moreover, while Derrida had viewed Descartes’ example of the evil genius as the most radical instance of doubt in The Meditations, on Foucault’s reading, this challenge emerges only at a point in the text where madness has already been mastered and excluded by philosophy, insofar as its status as a philosophical act has been dismissed.⁵¹ The example of the evil genius amounts to a tamed, restricted, and fictional version of madness, one that appears to philosophical discourse only once the mad subject itself has been objectified and excluded from the exercise. Derrida has in this sense asserted the sovereignty of philosophy by “avoid[ing] placing discursive practices in the field of transformation where they are carried out.”⁵²

Foucault thus consigns Derrida to the dustbin of a-historical idealism; it is Derrida who, in this instance, is said to take up a position totally transcending history insofar as he submits all texts to a reigning philosophical discourse. “The philosopher,” Foucault says, “goes directly to the calling into question of the ‘totality of beingness’.”⁵³ Such a claim hinges on Foucault’s argument that Descartes’ exclusion of madness is not constituted in an (unavoidable) disavowal of the alterity of madness by making it an object present to thought but, rather, in the dispersed discourses that form and determine the other as a certain type of subject (one who cannot doubt rationally) and, thus, as a certain type of object of knowledge (insane, mentally ill, etc.).

The polemical move here entails shifting the accusation of a “violent” renunciation of the medium of social relation back upon Derrida. In conceiving the relation of logos-madness as a necessary and irreducible condition of possibility of all meaning, historicity, and language, Derrida disavows the discursive context or conditions from which Descartes discourse emerges. It is a question then, once again, though this time on Foucault’s part, of making the claim to have acceded to a point anterior to the exclusion of the other that occurs in the Meditations: a point that for Foucault cannot lie in the “quasi”-transcendental nature of the excess of the evil genius, because madness is already excluded by Descartes before the act of doubting can take place.

Two Incommensurable Grander Narratives

Having closely navigated Derrida and Foucault’s dialogue, we’re now in a position to return to our central argument. The so-called Cogito debate comprises two accusations of a violent disavowal of the event of exclusion of madness in The Meditations and, accordingly, two indictments of the desire to govern or totalize alterity by objectifying it within a domain the interlocutor has mastered in advance. Accordingly, each accuses the other of failing to heed what I have been calling the genealogical imperative to affirm the perspectival and situated nature of thought since, in reducing and totalizing an unmasterable excess inherent to social mediation, each is accused of ascribing to himself a transcendent position.

This is not viewed merely as the epistemic error of an incorrect understanding of social reality. Given the field of social relations is viewed by both Derrida and Foucault as an unmasterable excess, failure to accurately locate it constitutes an ethical and political failure. To objectify and determine madness in this instance amounts not only, one might say, to a repetition of the Cartesian exclusion but, more broadly, to the metaphysical move inaugurated by Plato and reiterated through the philosophical tradition of a thought that seeks to objectify social order as such. Taking such a view necessarily entails a series of further implications for the incommensurability of these two competing grander narratives. This becomes particularly evident if we look to their competing conceptions of subjectivity, as I argue next.

DOUBLING THE EMPIRICO-TRANSCENDENTAL DOUBLE

In an essay titled “Absolute Immanence” Giorgio Agamben draws a distinction between, on the one hand, Deleuze and Foucault and, on the other hand, Derrida and Levinas, as marking two distinct Heideggerian trajectories in twentieth-century philosophy. Deleuze and Foucault are said, in a lineage passing through Spinoza and Nietzsche, to be thinkers of pure immanence, while Derrida and Levinas, in their affinity to Kant and Husserl, are named by Agamben as thinkers of transcendence. In drawing a distinction in these terms, Agamben’s essay suggests a productive way of thinking the difference between Derrida and Foucault. But while Agamben does devote several paragraphs to the immanent structure of Foucault’s formulation of “life” (to which we will return in chapter 3), the name of Derrida appears only in a highly schematic diagram in the end of the essay. Agamben’s text is given over to thinking the concepts of immanence and life in Deleuze and we are left guessing what the precise terms and stakes of drawing such a distinction might be. But in developing Agamben’s suggestive schema in terms of the differences between Derrida and Deleuze, Daniel W. Smith provides some insights that are productive for our own analysis.⁵⁴ In tracing the paths of Derrida’s thought of transcendence and Deleuze’s thought of immanence through the questions of subjectivity, ontology, and epistemology, Smith provides the parameters for an analysis of the divergence between Derrida and Foucault. Foucault, like Deleuze, conceives both experience and Being in the terms of immanence, that is, implying the notion that there is nothing beyond Being and that there is an immanence between Being and beings. On the other hand, Smith argues, that while Derrida is not simply a transcendental philosopher, he nevertheless insists upon what he calls a “formal structure of transcendence.”⁵⁵

While Smith’s account is helpful for thinking through the implications of Agamben’s diagram, he nonetheless passes too quickly over some of the nuances of Derrida’s work. As we will see later, to insist on a purely transcendent structure to deconstruction is to efface the Derridean claim that all transcendence is irrevocably tied to and contaminated by the empirical realm from which it attempts to delimit itself. I would claim that, insofar as it is engaged in undermining or disrupting transcendental grounds, Derrida’s work is in fact much closer to Foucault’s than either Agamben or Smith allows. Indeed, Derrida and Foucault converge upon the pursuit of what is anterior to and “outside” the duality of the empirico-transcendental. Furthermore, as we will see later, I would claim both attempt to think the primacy of difference anterior to its subordination to some ground or repetition. This is reflected by the genealogical thematic that I claimed in chapter 1 emerges with both thinkers; they both undermine efforts to completely exceed originary violence.

Nevertheless, if there are similar theoretical effects and consequences that result from Derrida and Foucault’s distinct ways of undermining the binary of empirical and transcendental, this is accomplished through two distinct efforts, which we might think, as Agamben suggests, in terms of immanence and (quasi)transcendence. While Derrida maintains the necessity of working through transcendental ideas as regulative of thought, Foucault attempts to displace the transcendental altogether. In other words, Derrida attempts to submit the conditions of the possibility of experience to their simultaneous impossibility and, thus, works in the terms of an essential interruption or contamination of universal and transcendental conditions of experience. In a very different theoretical decision, Foucault displaces the question of transcendental conditions altogether by what he calls in The Archaeology of Knowledge, their “conditions of emergence.” It is thus the way in which Derrida and Foucault attempt to displace or undermine the necessity for transcendental principles that their differences appear.

In this context, if it’s not an outright irony, then there’s at least a degree of incongruity in the accusation of adopting what amounts to a transcendent position (as Foucault argues of Derrida) or empiricist position (as Derrida argues of Foucault) in relation to the binary of reason and madness. Indeed, both thinkers are perhaps best known for seeking to displace the empirico-transcendental binary dominant in modern philosophy and social theory. Yet it is precisely in the broader terrain of modern subjectivity that we can continue to locate the way their respective grander narratives are ultimately incommensurable.

As both Derrida and Foucault suggest, Descartes’ Meditations inaugurates an abstract subjectivity opposed to a concrete empirical reality, yet it is Kant who radicalizes this formulation by grounding subjectivity in the relation and difference between subject and object. With Kant, knowledge of the object comes to depend on the subject’s constitution of objectivity; reason becomes grounded on universal laws that form the transcendental conditions of knowledge. Thus, as Gerard Granel puts it, Descartes’ “I think” eventually becomes with Kant, “I represent to myself that I think.”⁵⁶ For Kant, the world and its objects are received by reason according to transcendental conditions, that is, through the way objects that are sensibly present are represented to thought. Grounded in Kant’s “Copernican revolution” of the conditions of subjective knowledge, the rise of modern philosophies of subjectivity would bring with them a new vision of the political. By establishing some universal grounds of human identity, particular philosophies of subjectivity would provide a ground upon which political philosophies and policy would be based. From Hobbes to Rawls and beyond, political philosophy has worked by asserting a substantive, universal, and unchanging human nature and the consequent desire for a harmony between a given human essence or identity and political institutions. The metaphysics of subjectivity would thus serve not only to determine the self’s relation to the world and its possible knowledge of it but, crucially, the self’s relations to others.

Heidegger is a crucial reference point for Derrida’s and Foucault’s critique of the subject. This is insofar as Heidegger displaces the epistemic question of “how can the subject have knowledge?” with the ontological question of Being. In doing so he seeks to think what is anterior to determinate relations between subject and object or subject and subject. As he puts in “The Letter on Humanism”: “Every determination of the essence of man … always presupposes an interpretation of beings without asking about the truth of Being.”⁵⁷ In conceiving Being as a medium through which determinate relations to the self, the world, and to others are given or produced, Heidegger thus locates the subject in a more originary relation to Being. With Heidegger, then, the question of the subject is transformed from an investigation into the substance that governs thought’s relation to the world and to others, to a question of thought’s appearance or becoming. On this view, the being of the subject, as Jean-Luc Nancy says, “takes place, that is to say it comes into presence.”⁵⁸ This is an approach to the question of the subject that Derrida and Foucault both share. Both seek to attend to the space generated by the paradox of a thinking “I” which is both ground and object of thought.

If we now turn to examine Derrida’s and Foucault’s critiques of the subject, this is for two reasons. First, it will substantiate the different and ultimately incommensurable ways they conceive the relation between the empirical and transcendental that we saw was central to their debate over the Meditations. Secondly, it will point to the ways in which each seeks to think, following Heidegger, the anterior medium in which thought is situated. Yet while both can be said to draw on Heidegger, by thinking difference as primary and so not subordinated to some ground or repetition, they also move beyond him.⁵⁹ Both seek, in other words, to avoid taking up an archipolitical position that would either transcend its medium or offer unmediated access to pure difference in itself.

Exceeding Presence and Absence

Derrida conceives his negotiations with the subject in terms of an “undecidable” movement or ambiguity between the empirical and the transcendental. We have already seen this ambiguity at work in his interpretation of Descartes. In that context, Derrida argues that Descartes maintains a distinction between right and fact, but simultaneously displaces it through a movement between the complete excess of madness and its determination by reason. From Derrida’s perspective, to neglect the essential and unmasterable excess of all social relation amounts to historicism. These conceptual coordinates are evident in Derrida’s critique of Foucault. To view history as a series of facts, as Levi-Strauss and Foucault are accused of doing, is to commit violence in the denial of a more originary violence. On the other hand, to reject empirical history as the reduction of an originary excess or alterity would be to accede to a transcendent position outside all time and space and so, a denial of the situatedness of thought altogether.⁶⁰ Derrida thus endeavors to avoid either extreme; the opposition between totality and excess, or empirical and transcendental, is for him preceded by a differential logic.

In this regard, across his work Derrida continually traces failures of identity, order, unity; for there is a more originary division and difference that cannot be mastered. While I have been referring to this “non-originary” difference as a “medium,” this should be qualified, for it refers more precisely to a locus anterior to any medium, a differential movement that cannot be conceived or conceptualized.⁶¹ The medium of thought cannot exist within time and space since it refers to the differential movement that gives them and, thus, is irreducible to the logic of an origin that would be re-presented to thought. The terms of the argument often seem confounding, but they are employed in the aim of signifying an experience of the disruption of unity, origin, or ground. Indeed, Derrida never ceases to try to demonstrate that any “presence” or origin is merely the effect of a difference and deferral that is “between” the empirical and transcendental, since it produces their conditions of possibility while making their unity impossible.⁶² It is precisely this “between” which forms the “medium” or “milieu” that allows, but also ultimately prevents, the constitution of the subject. It thus marks, in Derrida’s words, “the spots of what can never be mediated, mastered, sublated, or dialecticized through any Erinnerung or Aufhebung.”⁶³ In other words, whatever is “present” to thought is always the effect of a dispersion or dissemination that thought can neither master nor appropriate. The claims here are admittedly difficult to decipher, but a sharper understanding is gained by looking more closely to his deconstruction of the subject, as I will now seek to show.

For Derrida, metaphysics amounts to the desire to overcome the distance between thought and its object. It amounts in this sense to the ideal of an object or concept in full “presence” to thought.⁶⁴ As Derrida argues across a range of texts, such an ideal is grounded in a particular conception of the voice; for it is the voice that breaches the gap between thought and its other. Voice, the argument goes, allows thought to posit an enclosed space in which it can hold a direct and unmediated relation to the signified. As Derrida puts it in Of Grammatology:

the nonexterior, nonmundane, therefore nonempirical or noncontingent signifier—has necessarily dominated the history of the world during an entire epoch, and has even produced the idea of the world, the idea of world origin, that arises from the difference between the worldly and non-wordly, the outside and the inside, ideality and nonideality, universal and nonuniversal, transcendental and empirical.⁶⁵

Voice permits the notion of a thought that speaks directly to itself and, accordingly, an experience of time where space is reduced to zero. In this sense, voice becomes the vehicle for meaning sustained and represented beyond different signifiers without contamination by the empirical. In other words, it supports a conception of the subject affected by phonemes that do not pass through any exteriority (the world, the nonproper, or an other) and, thus, grounds the notion of a transcendental signified divorced from its empirical transcription.

Derrida’s project is thus in part an attempt to disrupt the identity of the subject by insisting on the irreducibility of time and space to it.⁶⁶ On one hand, for a concept to mean, it must function as a meaning-content through and across time-space, which means that it must function beyond particular instances such that meaning is re-presented across time. Yet, on the other hand, in speaking, even to oneself, thought is always exteriorized, it necessarily moves through time and space. Thought and meaning thus must pass through an inescapable spacing or outside, which, consequently, always traverses and contaminates the inside of thought’s self-presence; mediation and repetition are unavoidable. There is thus always already what we might call, anticipating Foucault, a “double” between hearing and speaking and between thought and its other.⁶⁷

In accordance with his interpretation of the Cartesian Cogito, Derrida’s work might be conceived as amounting to an insistence upon an aporia that lies between the conditions of particular meanings and their ultimate impossibility. By reinscribing the notion of the sign as a withdrawal of presence rather than merely as a conduit for it, the very “play of differences”—what he sometimes names différance—comes to be conceived as originary. That is, if meaning implies the persistence of content across time and space, Derrida argues that each time it reiterates itself, a given meaning is not identical to its previous iterations. In this sense, the sign is as much a deferral of meaning as it is a passage to it, for it defers arrival at an original signified. Accordingly, presence can only be conceived as a movement simultaneously given and withdrawn. But if différance is originary in this sense, it too cannot be made present to thought; “différance is not,” as Derrida says.⁶⁸ For it is only the “between” of presence and absence, transcendental and empirical.⁶⁹

Between the Same and the Other

Not unlike Derrida, in The Order of Things Foucault famously attempts to displace the metaphysical foundations of modern conceptions of subjectivity by showing the latter to be the effect of what he elsewhere calls non-originary “spaces of dispersion.”⁷⁰ But in Foucault’s work, the conditions of the empirico-transcendental double are located in the specific organizing principles of modern knowledge which he calls episteme or “historical a priori.” This refers, as Foucault puts it, to the “conditions of possibility” or “conditions of emergence” for the empirical sciences at a given time and place.⁷¹ In Foucault’s words,

This apriori is what, in a given period, delimits in the totality of experience a field of knowledge, defines the mode of being of the objects that appear in that field, provide man’s everyday perception with theoretical powers, and defines the conditions in which he can sustain a discourse about things that is recognized to be true.⁷²

In categorizing and delimiting the episteme by identifying regularities that appear in scientific and theoretical discourses of a given age, Foucault claims he does not locate the conditions of discourse as transcendent to it, but as immanent; as forming networks or spaces in which particular discourses may appear.⁷³ On this view, the subject is constituted through the intersection of particular discourses since, as autonomous fields of regularities and transformations, discourse is not dependent on individual speakers for meaning. The subject, he says, is “a position that may be filled in certain conditions by various individuals.”⁷⁴

The central thrust of The Order of Things lies in the claim that man, as a subject of representation, emerges in a seismic historical shift in the structure of discourse. With the emergence of a modern age, Foucault argues, language is no longer viewed as providing a spontaneous link to objects themselves. As he puts it, “words ceased to intersect with representations and to provide a spontaneous grid for the knowledge of things.”⁷⁵ Once the media of knowledge had become objects of analysis in their own right, a new epistemological question arises: to represent things, man must negotiate a historical context that precedes him, since man is conceived as appropriator of language and, thus, as representing Being. Modern thought thus emerges out of an attempt to ground the act of representation in an origin that precedes and exceeds it, and, therefore, is granted its status as the foundation of knowledge.⁷⁶ This origin or foundation is nothing other than the finitude of man itself. That is, man’s capacity for representation is grounded in the empirical forces of life, labor, and language that precede and form him. Yet man is not only an object produced in the world but also a subject that constitutes the world.⁷⁷ Modern thought, Foucault argues, emerges as a series of attempts to overcome this apparent tension of man as transcendental subject and empirical object in the search for

a discourse whose tension would keep separate the empirical and the transcendental while being directed at both; a discourse that would make it possible to analyze man as a subject, that is, as a locus of knowledge which has been empirically acquired but referred back as closely as possible to what makes it possible, and as a pure form immediately present to those contents.⁷⁸

Modern knowledge is thus grounded in an analytic of man as subject who constitutes the world of objects in which he is included.⁷⁹ And from this perspective, modern philosophy amounts to a series of attempts to overcome the distance between man as subject and as object of knowledge, to overcome the empirico-transcendental double and resolve man to himself, to make all difference correspond to the Same.

In what is a marked correspondence to the early Derrida’s writings discussed earlier, in The Order of Things Foucault argues that there is a “middle region” anterior to the empirico-transcendental double, which in turn allows the dispersal of Same and Other and forms the terrain upon which their identity is sought.⁸⁰ Analogous to the productive failure of self-presence through différance operative in Derrida’s work, the “middle region” of the historical a apriori between the doubles prevents, Foucault argues, their perfect coincidence. Between the reflexive knowledge of philosophical theory and the codes governing language lies the “positive unconscious” of the knowledge of a given age.⁸¹ This refers to discursive regularities exhibited in theoretical and scientific discourses of a particular age, which nevertheless elude the consciousness of the theorist.

What exactly then is this medium for Foucault? Like Derrida, Foucault’s attention to this “middle region” does not constitute an attempt to unite man to his unthought other or origin but, rather, exhibits knowledge’s partial determination by a field that it cannot master. That is, the grounds of knowledge are reinscribed into the historical rules immanent to that knowledge. As such, the subjection of thought to the transcendental is displaced by what in The Order of Things Foucault calls “the pure experience of order and its modes of being” that exceed and produce the conditions for the double.⁸²

If Derrida presents the inescapability of the question of the transcendental, I would claim that Foucault, on the other hand, attempts to displace the act of positing of absolutes or grounds altogether. He does so by turning instead to attend to the positivity of discursive statements which produce the conditions of subjective experience. Yet the historical a priori is not a realm independent of experience since discourse, Foucault argues, is always already present to thought even if it goes unacknowledged. The role of Foucault’s archaeologist is precisely to analysis and formalize this field. “He must,” Foucault says,

reconstitute the general system of thought, whose network, in its positivity, renders an interplay of simultaneous and apparently contradictory opinions possible. It is this network that defines the conditions that make a controversy or a problem possible, and that bears the historicity of knowledge.⁸³

Accordingly, rather than conceive the medium of thought as the aporia by which any transcendental ground is posited, Foucault instead appeals to an immanent field of discourse wherein no one set of elements grounds another. It is therefore a total dislocation of the perceived necessity of submitting thought to transcendental grounds that Foucault posits, and he does so by conceiving thought as differential play of discursive singularities governed by no prior ground.

BETWEEN DERRIDA AND FOUCAULT

Both Foucault and Derrida thus follow Heidegger in positing an outside or medium that gives thought or makes it possible. Claire Colebrook’s account of Derrida and Foucault’s critique of Heidegger is instructive in this regard.⁸⁴ Colebrook argues that like Heidegger, Derrida and Foucault conceive the conditions of thought as given by an anterior medium. However, both draw on what I have argued are genealogical themes to undermine Heidegger’s question of Being. For Heidegger, any ground or arche is effected by an anterior relation to Being which is subsequently determined or reduced by metaphysical thought and, thus, concealed or forgotten. As an empirical being man has, Heidegger argues, his condition of possibility in his ontological Being. Thus, Heidegger locates the origin of difference in the existence of Dasein or the disclosure of Being. Conversely, in a decisively genealogical move, neither Derrida nor Foucault posits a more originary or authentic ground of questioning. Rather, as Colebrook insists, both think an originary difference that disrupts the possibility of positing an originary disclosure. Both attempt to maintain a Nietzschean affirmation of the irresolvable play of differences and the resulting inescapability of perspectivism that for both functions to displace the concept of origin and the possibility of any totalizing or authoritative position for thought. Nevertheless, from this conclusion, both proceed in radically different directions.

In The Order of Things Foucault argues that Heidegger’s attempt to recover the origin of man in the experience of the self-concealing withdrawal of Being is an impossible task, the doubling of man is always already begun, and, consequently, cut off from an originary experience. Heidegger, Foucault implies, accords a primordial status to the experience of origin as a moment when the transcendental (the cultural practices that give history) and the empirical (the actual movement of history) are identical, and, thus, man’s unity is established.⁸⁵ As such, Heidegger is caught in an infinite regress since he thinks man as both source and product of history.⁸⁶ In contrast to Heidegger, Foucault posits no privileged medium of difference, the a priori itself changes with history; the “a priori of positivities,” he argues, “is not only the system of a temporal dispersion—it is itself a transformable group.”⁸⁷ The episteme or a priori has no unified structure except insofar as regularities appear to the Foucauldian archaeologist.

Derrida also challenges Heidegger’s displacement of metaphysics. Heidegger’s attempt to retrieve an originary relation to Being from the metaphysics of subjectivity is, Derrida argues, inevitably contaminated by metaphysical gestures. In the essay “Envois,” for instance, Derrida argues that Heidegger’s attempt to overcome the representational relation between subject and object to think an originary sending or givenness of Being cannot itself completely overcome the representational relation.⁸⁸ Derrida’s claim can be exemplified through Heidegger’s essay “The Age of the World Picture.” Here Heidegger conceives history as a series of epochs unified by the destiny of Being as “sending” and he identifies the Greek, medieval, and modern epochs as three distinct such “sendings” or modes of the relation to Being. These are then contrasted to the pre-Socratics who, Heidegger holds, posited no separation between subject and object but thought only in terms of logos as an originary gathering of Being exposed to chaos.⁸⁹ But, as Derrida shows, this conception of representation as the forgetting of an originary unity which thought then seeks to recover mirrors the very way by which Heidegger conceives Being: as forgetting and recovery. Heidegger fails to overcome representational thinking, Derrida argues, because there is no access to a pure outside or pre-ordinal space. The history of Being as “sending” is always already threatened, there is no primordial unity of experience, the origin is inescapably dispersed.⁹⁰

In short, while Derrida and Foucault inherit Heidegger’s explicit attempt to think an anterior medium to thought, both make the genealogical move of refusing to prioritize an originary medium of Being totally anterior to any determinate relation. For both, the origin is always already dispersed to a multiplicity; there is no single set of conditions that give a ground for thought to question its relation to the world or to others. Against Heidegger, the ontological claim of the play of differences also informs a perspectivism that permits no concept beyond its situatedness within history, language, gender, or other modes of social mediation.

Derrida and Foucault can both be said to attempt to think genealogically. That is, both reject a position for their own thought that would exceed its contingency or its determination within social order. But at the same time, both seek to undermine all metaphysical attempts for thought to ground itself by postulating a non-contingent, non-relational transcendental that would thus “violently” determine and govern relationality. Yet a difference arises between Derrida and Foucault from out of the different ways each thinks the empirical-transcendental binary and the way by which each seeks to displace it to think its anterior medium. This suggests that what is at stake between them is therefore the possibility of a mode of questioning that could affirm its own violence and so, according to both of their logics, be a lesser violence and secondly, to do so by relating thought to the limit of order; the limit between inside and what is outside every determinate order. It is to these questions we will now turn.

NOTES

1.Michel Foucault, Essential Works Volume II, p. 395.

2.An overview of the debate along with a comprehensive bibliography and chronology covering it is found in Aryal et al. (Eds.), Between Foucault and Derrida, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. See also Antonio Campillo in “Foucault and Derrida: The History of a Debate on History.” Angelaki. Vol. 5, No. 2, 2000. Pp. 113–135; Peter Flaherty, “(Con)textual Contest: Derrida and Foucault on Madness and the Cartesian Subject.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Vol. 16, No. 2, 1986, pp. 157–175. A number of texts have addressed the stakes of the debate in terms of questions that exceed the scope of the present inquiry. For example, to the question of negative theology: Arthur Bradley, “Thinking the Outside: Foucault, Derrida and Negative Theology.” Textual Practice. Vol. 1, No. 16 (2002), pp. 57–74; to the relation between reason and literature: Shoshana Felman, “Madness and Philosophy or Literature’s Reason.” Yale French Studies, No. 52, 1975. Pp. 206–228.

3.Edward Said. “The Problem of Textuality: Two Exemplary Positions.” Critical Inquiry (Summer 1978). Pp. 673–714.

4.Ibid.

5.Ibid, pp. 675, 676.

6.Ibid, p. 673.

7.Roy Boyne, Foucault and Derrida: The Other Side of Reason. London: Unwin Hyman, 1990. P. 108.

8.Michael Sprinker, “Textual Politics: Foucault and Derrida.” Boundary 2. Vol. 8, 1980. Pp. 75–89. See also in this regard Damile Stempel, “History and Postmodern Literary Theory,” Tracing Literary Theory (Joseph Natoli, Ed.). Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Pp. 80–104.

9.Said, “The Problem of Textuality,” p. 703.

10.See, for instance, Ann Wordsworth, “Derrida and Foucault: Writing the History of Historicity.” Post- Structuralism and the Question of History (Attridge et al., Eds.) London: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Pp. 116–125; Marian Hobson, Opening Lines. Pp. 32–35; Geoffrey Bennington, “Cogito Incognito: Foucault’s ‘My Body, This Paper, This Fire.’ ” Oxford Literary Review, Vol. 4, No. 1, 1979, pp. 5–8.

11.For instance, Hobson, in an otherwise exemplary analysis, relegates Foucault’s critique of Derrida to a footnote wherein she argues that he continues to assume what he intends to prove, namely, the exclusion of the subject of madness. Hobson does not acknowledge the way in which, as we will see later, Foucault shows that the disqualification of the subject of madness occurs prior to the excess of the evil genius and, thus, suggests that the excess of hyperbolic doubt is always already mastered by modern philosophical discourse and, consequently, puts into question the totality of Derrida’s reading of Descartes. See Opening Lines, p. 239.

12.Jean-Luc Nancy, “Mad Derrida: Ipso Facto Cogitans Ac Demens.” in Adieu Derrida (Costas Douzinas, Ed.). London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. See also Pierre Macherey, “The Foucault-Derrida Debate on the Argument Concerning Madness and Dreams” (Olivia Custer et al., Eds.); Foucault/Derrida Fifty Years Later: The Futures of Genealogy, Deconstruction, and Politics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.

13.Very recently, a similar claim has been made by Arkady Plotnisky, “The Folded Unthought and the Irreducibly Unthinkable: Singularity, Multiplicity and Materiality, in between Foucault and Derrida” (Y. Aryal et al., Eds.). Between Derrida and Foucault, pp. 207–236; and Peter Gratton, “Philosophy on Trial: The Crisis of Deciding between Foucault and Derrida” (Y. Aryal et al., Eds.). Between Foucault and Derrida, pp. 251–262.

14.Alan D. Schrift, “Genealogy and/as Deconstruction: Nietzsche, Derrida, and Foucault on Philosophy as Critique,” Postmodernism and Continental Philosophy (Hugh Silverman and Donn Welton, Eds.). Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988. Pp. 193–213.

15.Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Alan Bass, Trans.). London: Routledge, 2001. P. 41.

16.Hobson, Opening Lines, p. 35, see also Jacques Derrida, On the Name (Thomas Dutoit, Ed.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.

17.Derrida, Writing and Difference, pp. 42–43.

18.Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 49.

19.Michel Foucault, The History of Madness (Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa, Trans.), London and New York: Routledge, 2006. P. XXIXI.

20.Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 48.

21.Ibid., p. 51. Quoted in Hobson, Opening Lines, p. 33.

22.Ibid., p. 50.

23.Ibid., pp. 42–43.

24.Foucault, The History of Madness, pp. 44–47.

25.Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (John Cottingham, Trans. and Ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

26.Foucault, The History of Madness, p. 45.

27.Ibid.

28.Derrida, Writing and Difference, pp. 51, 68.

29.Ibid., pp. 50–51.

30.Ibid., pp. 69–70.

31.Campillo, “The History of a Debate on History.”

32.Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 67.

33.Ibid., pp. 393–394. (n.27).

34.Ibid., p. 68.

35.Hobson, Opening Lines, p. 35.

36.Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 70.

37.Ibid., p. 68.

38.Ibid., p. 395 (n.28).

39.Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (Barbara Johnson, Trans.). London: Routledge, 1981. P. 129.

40.Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge, 2002; Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (A. M. Sheridan Smith, Trans.). London: Routledge. 2000.

41.Lynne Huffer denies that a “pure” experience of madness was ever Foucault’s aim but such a claim is rather convincingly countered by Guiseppe Bianco’s careful analysis of the iterations of Foucault’s thesis on madness. See Lynne Huffer, “Looking Back at the History of Madness” (Olivia Custer et al., Eds.). Derrida/Foucault Fifty Years Later, pp. 21–37; Guiseppe Bianco, “Verbose Dialectics’ and the Anthropological Circle: Michel Foucault and Jean Hyppolite” (Paul Rekret, Trans.). Pli, No. 24, 2013.

42.Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 16.

43.I am not prepared to go so far and assume, as Roy Boyne does in Derrida and Foucault: The Other Side of Reason, that it was as a direct reaction to Derrida’s critique that Foucault had revised the aim of his oeuvre.

44.See Wendy Cealy Harrison, “Madness and Historicity: Foucault and Derrida, Artaud and Descartes.” History of the Human Sciences. Vol. 20, No. 27, 2007. Pp. 79–105.

45.Foucault would return to this theme of the askesis or self-transformation of the subject in his final works on ancient ethical and political practices. In these later works the event of decision in Descartes remains for Foucault the archetypal instance of a modern subject who is always determined prior to philosophical exercise. These themes will be explored in chapter 4.

46.Michel Foucault, Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984 Volume Two. Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology (James Faubion, Ed. and Robert Hurley et al., Trans.). London: Penguin. P. 406.

47.Ibid., p. 405.

48.Foucault would once again take up the question of the idiosyncratic form of spiritual exercise of The Meditations in his very last work. On this point see chapter 4.

49.Foucault, Essential Works, Volume Two, p. 409.

50.Ibid., p. 412.

51.Ibid., p. 415.

52.Ibid., p. 416 (emphasis added).

53.Ibid., p. 412.

54.Daniel W. Smith, “Deleuze and Derrida, Immanence and Transcendence: Two Directions in Recent French Thought,” Between Deleuze and Derrida (Paul Patton and John Protevi, Eds.). London: Continuum, 2003. Pp. 46–66.

55.Ibid., pp. 48, 54.

56.Gerard Granel, “Who Comes after the Subject?” Who Comes after the Subject? (Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy, Eds.). London: Routledge, 1991. P. 159.

57.Heidegger, Basic Writings, pp. 225–226.

58.Jean-Luc Nancy, “Introduction,” Who Comes after the Subject? p. 7

59.In several texts, Leonard Lawlor suggests that, while they may engage in different theoretical work, Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault should all be considered as thinkers of immanence. cf. Leonard Lawlor, The Implications of Immanence and Thinking through French Philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003.

60.This argument is made by Hobson in Opening Lines, p. 40.

61.This point is made by Claire Colebrook in Ethics and Representation: From Kant to Poststructuralism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999.

62.Derrida discusses the structure of his quasi-transcendentals as a “between” in Dissemination, p. 230.

63.Derrida, Dissemination, p. 230.

64.Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (Alan Bass, Trans.). Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982. P. X.

65.Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 7.

66.Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p. 51.

67.Leonard Lawlor suggests this analogy in Thinking through French Philosophy. (See especially pp. 11–23.) See also Leonard Lawlor, The Implications of Immanence, pp. 51–52.

68.Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p. 6.

69.Derrida, Dissemination, p. 109.

70.Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 10.

71.Foucault, The Order of Things, p. xxii.

72.Ibid., p. 172.

73.Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, pp. 220–221. See also Todd May, Between Genealogy and Epistemology: Psychology, Politics and Knowledge in the Thought of Michel Foucault. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993. P. 23.

74.Ibid., p. 122.

75.Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 331.

76.Timothy Rayner, Foucault’s Heidegger: Philosophy and Transformative Experience. London: Continuum, 2007. P. 48.

77.Gary Gutting, Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. P. 199.

78.Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 349.

79.Ibid., pp. 199, 343.

80.Ibid., pp. xxiii, 370.

81.Ibid., p. xiv.

82.Ibid., p. xxiii.

83.Ibid., p. 83.

84.Colebrook, Ethics and Representation. P. 168.

85.Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 364. I draw here on R. Kevin Hill, “Foucault’s Critique of Heidegger.” Philosophy Today. Vol. 34, No. 4 (Winter 1990). Pp. 334–341.

86.Ibid.

87.Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge. P. 127.

88.Jacques Derrida, Psyche: Inventions of the Other (Catherine Porter, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pp. 94–128.

89.Heidegger, Basic Writings. P. 129.

90.Derrida, Inventions of the Other; Claire Colebrook, Ethics and Representation.

Chapter 3

The Aporia and the Problem

If thought is to affirm its finitude, then it must relinquish mastery of its terrain. But to claim this is the case due to the expansiveness or complexity of the social is to make an empiricist argument, one that still holds out a teleology of the object as potentially mastered. By contrast, Derrida and Foucault stake their own claims to finitude on ontological grounds: any given social order necessarily has an excess that thought can never master. This is nowhere more apparent than in Derrida’s often quoted aphorism that “there is nothing outside the text”; and which Foucault, almost as notoriously, echoes: “there is no point where you are free from power relations.”¹ Not only are all references to the “real” inseparable from a differential movement, but there is no overcoming this movement to a stable, external truth. As Derrida says, “nontotalisation can be determined in another way: no longer from the standpoint of a concept of finitude as relegation to the empirical, but from the standpoint of the concept of play.”² Similarly, in “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx” Foucault argues that “depth was only a game and a surface to fold … everything which elicited man’s depth was only child’s play.”³ To affirm that finite perspectives are insurmountable, then, is to reject “depth” of meaning and of truth, in favor of surface differences.

Such a view further implies that thought can only proceed provisionally and strategically. One can only, Derrida argues, “operate according to the vocabulary of the very thing one delimits.”⁴ If thought cannot exceed either its finitude or the play of difference then, “we must begin wherever we are,” he says elsewhere, and consequently, it is “impossible to justify a point of departure absolutely.”⁵ Echoing Derrida, Foucault will affirm that “we are in a strategic situation” and moreover, “we are always in this kind of situation.”⁶ Elsewhere, he would say that “the perspectival character of knowledge derives … from the polemical and strategic character of knowledge.”⁷

This perspectival view of knowledge that Derrida and Foucault share has come in for the oft-rehearsed criticisms that it leads to nihilism, to conservatism, or to quietism. While we will return to the issue in more detail, it’s worth pausing briefly to examine how this argument relates to the question of finitude. Among the more nuanced exemplars of such a critique is an essay by philosopher Rudi Visker, who argues that Foucault’s approach leaves him caught between two equally unsatisfactory normative conclusions.⁸ Given his thoroughgoing perspectivism, Foucault is said to be caught between either a position that turns “every order into authentic order by accepting exclusion as being constitutive” or to “condemning every order to inauthenticity by appealing to a pre-ordinal self-sufficiency.”⁹ Relativism or primal spontaneity are said to be the only options on offer once one asserts the finitude of thought and the irreducibility of epistemic violence.

Yet in this chapter I will show that such criticisms make little sense from within the terms of Foucault’s or indeed Derrida’s “grander narratives”; the limits of their work must be sought elsewhere, in the terms of their incommensurability. Nonetheless, at least when considered within the logics of their own work, both offer terms for navigating the normative paralysis that would seem to result from the affirmation of finitude. The desire to touch what Visker calls the “pre-ordinal”—although both thinkers more readily refer to it as the “outside”—is always moderated by the affirmation that thought always sets out from some ordered inside. To think is to commence from a determinate time and place such that a “pure” experience of dis-order, of the play of a pure and ungrounded difference, is necessarily inaccessible. Difference cannot be thought in itself; it is always, as Colebrook argues, a difference of or from some ground, origin, or apparatus.¹⁰

In chapter 2, I argued that the debate between Derrida and Foucault hinged upon the ways by which they each disperse the subject to its medium in which, for instance, a determinate relation between reason and madness is constituted. Both think the formation of determinate order as occurring between the determinate and a pre-ordinal space or “outside.” But this begs the question: What is the outside? What is it to think that which exceeds order and how might one do so without simply violently reducing or objectifying it?

In both Derrida’s and Foucault’s work one finds a Nietzschean affirmation of the outside as an indefinite play of differences irresolvable to cognitive content. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has suggestively sought to think this radical empiricism—neither commencing from fixed terms nor attributed to a subject—which underlies the conceptions of force in both Derrida and Foucault’s work in terms of Heidegger’s ontology. Both Derrida and Foucault, she argues, “may be trying to touch the ontic with the thought that there is a subindividual (or random, for Derrida) space even under, or below, or before … the ‘preontological’ Being as [Dasein’s] ontically constitutive space … [where] Dasein tacitly understands and interprets something like Being.”¹¹

Proceeding from Spivak’s formula, we might think this pre-ordinal, pre-ontological, and pre-human “space” in Foucault’s terms as “the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization.”¹² In his book-length study of the latter, Gilles Deleuze refers to this as “savage forces” of the outside.¹³ Similarly, for Derrida, it is a “systematic play of differences” or the “game of the world” without a transcendental signified to arrest its indefinite movement.¹⁴ Indeed, we get a glimpse here once again of the Nietzschean transposition of Heidegger characteristic of both thinkers; the movement or play of difference is anterior to its amalgamation in a Being that then forms the horizon for determinate social order. Accordingly, if for Derrida and Foucault, multiplicity is “prior” to its amalgamation in a Being that then gives determinate order, then it would undermine Heidegger’s question of Being as the disclosure of a singular “clearing” or locus for thought, since the play of difference would undermine an ontology that begins from what Rodolphe Gasché calls “a totality that, in an originary fashion, precedes its severance into a multiplicity.”¹⁵

But despite the implicit, and at times explicit, critique of Heidegger in this conception of the outside, Derrida and Foucault both nonetheless appropriate his notion of social order as the result of an anterior decision or event. For Heidegger, presencing—the event of disclosing an order—is an event of unconcealment or a-letheia. Heidegger’s question of Being, or “question of the question,” proceeds from the fact that phenomena must always be disclosed or unconcealed in order to be questioned such that, unconcealment is anterior to any particular question of a ground or origin. Like Heidegger, Derrida and Foucault think arche or grounds as effects of a prior differentiation. Both think within the terms of what in Being and Time Heidegger calls “equi-primordiality,” a multiplicity of origins of underivable or irreducibly original phenomena.¹⁶ Thought takes place in a “medium” that cannot be reduced to a single principle or condition. Thus, as we saw, Colebrook suggests that for all three thinkers thought has an “other” or outside that is anterior to, and which gives thought.¹⁷ For it is Heidegger who first seeks to think ontology as different modes across the history of the separation of thought and its other. Being, Heidegger argues, is disclosed in the ways thought questions its world.¹⁸ But as Colebrook also implies, Heidegger’s notion of Being still entails the conception of a single or general “unthought” or outside, a single medium differentiating from itself.¹⁹

It is thus, as I argued in chapter 1, by a Nietzschean cosmology of the play of difference which both Derrida and Foucault displace or exceed Heidegger’s question of Being, both refuse in other words, to posit a single or originary medium of thought which thought might recover as its origin and ground to think the origin as difference. What is at stake in both Derrida’s and Foucault’s works is, at least in part, an attempt to relate to the pre-ordinal, to an “outside” marking the contingency of every order without committing the Heideggerian error of positing an originary mode of this relation. Before pursuing the divergent formulations of a post-Heideggerian form of the “question” in their work, we thus turn to examine more closely their mutual formulations of the “outside.”

THINKING THE OUTSIDE

It’s a fundamental premise of Derrida’s philosophical edifice that the “inside” of a determinate order or concept and its “outside” (what Visker calls its “primordial spontaneity”) are ultimately irreducible and inseparable from one another. In the preceding chapters, we have already seen that Derrida works to establish the experience of an “essential” and unmasterable relation between terms. The aim of such a procedure is to produce the experience of an aporetic or uncontrollable position which, neither inside nor outside a determinate structure or concept, is instead in the undecidable between or “medium of differentiation,” wherein Derrida takes that object to be produced. In the process, he seeks to show that any attempted closure of the determinate inside from its outside, any attempt to make the object present to thought, is always already disrupted through, in Derrida’s words, an “eruption of the outside within the inside.”²⁰ Exemplified in Derrida’s reading of Foucault’s early conception of madness, concepts, and discursive systems are fissured by contradictions and heterogeneities that philosophy ceaselessly disavows. The point is to reveal that the identity of a concept (e.g., “reason” in Foucault’s text) is always contaminated by what exceeds it. Any attempt to delimit an inside from its outside absolutely is thus undermined. As Derrida describes it, “by means of the work done on one side and the other of the limit the field inside is modified and a transgression is produced that consequently is nowhere present as a fait accompli.”²¹

As we saw, for Derrida this aporia underlying any concept or order is not affirmed on the basis of some empirical limitation, but because the “presence” of the object to thought is an ontological impossibility. But conversely, unbounded access to the indeterminacy of non-presence is ultimately precluded as well. Non-presence amounts to a purely negative experience, which, while unavoidable, cannot be the object of thought. Derrida calls this a “quasi-transcendental” condition of experience; any order is “at once” inescapably haunted by an outside that it can neither master and make present nor do without.²² Accordingly, the sort of normativist critique proffered by Visker makes little sense; there is finally no transcending the “inside” of determinate order for a pure experience of the “outside” of “primordial spontaneity.” Deconstruction, Derrida says, “always finds itself between these two poles.”²³

An analogous oscillation between the inside and outside of order spans Foucault’s work as well, though in his case this is not always as self-evident. For while there is an indubitable continuity to Derrida’s work, Foucault is usually viewed as having undergone a series of breaks and changes of course; from an explicit investigation of “the thought of the outside” in work on avant-garde literature in the 1960s—especially that of Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, and Pierre Klossowski—to a rejection of aesthetic transgression in the more sanguine analyses of power and ethics in the works of the 1970s and 1980s. That’s not to say that a deeper continuity running across Foucault’s oeuvre hasn’t been posited before. Each of Gilles Deleuze and Pierre Macherey, for instance, takes the relationship between subjective interiority and exteriority, inside and outside, as definitive of Foucault’s trajectory.²⁴ Less often remarked, Foucault himself articulates his oeuvre in these terms in an important and little noted methodological discussion in a lecture course in 1977.²⁵ In any case, the issue demands further unpacking if we are to get a better sense of continuities and discontinuities running across Foucault’s work, and also if we are to begin to bring it into dialogue with Derrida’s.

While on Deleuze’s vitalist reading of Foucault, exteriority is described as a wild, “unformed element of force,” Foucault himself is much less willing to grant any positive characteristics to the term in his work. In a crucial reflection on method in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” he refers to it simply as a “non-place,” while in the essay on Blanchot, it is termed simply as a “void.”²⁶ In the latter text Foucault offers an account of a thought of this outside as one that

stands at the threshold of all positivity, not in order to grasp its foundation or justification but in order to repair the space of its unfolding, the void serving as its site … a thought that, in relation to the interiority of our philosophical reflection and the positivity of our knowledge, constitutes what in a phrase we might call ‘the thought of the outside.²⁷

Insofar as it locates the “outside” in the anonymity of language, conceived here as an exteriority to which the interiority of the subject is dispersed, this text is typical of Foucault’s earlier so-called archaeological phase. The “archaeologist” oscillates between the inside of the text—what it represents—and its constitutive exteriority—the being of language itself.²⁸ Thought might occur within the space of rules, of language, and of historical context, but it can also reflect upon those very conditions and, thus, encounter its own limits, even if it cannot master them, since doing so would be to re-enter the interiority of representation once again.

The limitation of such a view, however, rests with the awkward status it assigns to its own discourse as a “pure” experience of order, as if one could take up a position totally outside the orders whose rules one formalizes.²⁹ Accordingly, it is my claim that it is finally in announcing an explicit Nietzschean inheritance to his methodology in the early 1970s, one that explicitly rejects any privileged position for its own texts, while explicitly affirming them as events of power unto themselves, that a fully coherent “thought of the outside” emerges in Foucault’s work. This is a crucial claim and it deserves further unpacking.

The decisive articulation of the notion of the outside that defines the crucial final decades of Foucault’s career comes in “The Order of Discourse,” his inaugural lecture to the College de France delivered in late 1970. By articulating the principles and means for ordering discursive practices by a metaphor of “battle,” Foucault announces a new theoretical trajectory.³⁰ This implies that the archaeological method of The Order of Things and Archaeology of Knowledge is supplemented by a conception of discourse as effected by a multiplicity of force relations traversing institutions, spaces, disciplines, and epochs. This very explicitly “genealogical” analysis of power would not merely seek to formalize the conditions of existence of statements but also to examine the production and regulation of discourse. As Foucault explains it,

in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its powers and dangers, to cope with chance events, and to evade its ponderous, awesome materiality.³¹

While discourse is incorporeal, its objects (sexuality, population, deviancy, etc.) produce actual material effects.³²

Foucault’s attentiveness to the question of power thus supplements his approach with a crucial dimension. No longer proceeding merely by the formal rules of formation of a discourse, it attends also to “the knowledge effects produced by the struggles, confrontations, and battles that take place within our society, and by the tactics of power that are elements of this struggle.”³³

This dispersal of knowledge to an “economy of power relations” proceeds by way of two related moves. First, conceived as the effect of events that exceed it, knowledge appears as the “result of conditions that fall outside the domain of knowledge” since it does not represent an ideal object or universe.³⁴ Second, knowledge always involves “relations of struggle” since behind it, he argues, “there is a will.”³⁵ In this way, knowledge is dispersed into what Foucault often calls an “economy of power relations” that always circulates with knowledge, and which knowledge disavows. For instance, in Discipline and Punish and related works from the late 1970s, Foucault puts this method to work by situating the emergence of a modern subject of rights and freedoms as an effect of a range of practices and discourses directed to the control and observation of bodies. These emerge within a range of new institutions, including schools, factories, prisons, and hospitals. The experience of the “outside” here, as opposed to the work on an aesthetic reflection on the performativity of language, rests with the dispersal of knowledge to a range of strategies and technologies revolving around the goal of forming an orderly and “normalized” individual.

Notably, such an account seems to undermine the sort of normativist critique we exemplified previously with Visker. For it rejects a view of the limit between the inside and outside as a purely negative or repressive force. Rather, in intersecting, interrupting, or supporting one another, competing discourses produce their own resistances to one another. As Foucault explains in Discipline and Punish, “mastery and awareness of one’s body can be acquired only through the effect of an investment of power in the body… . But once power produces this effect, there inevitably emerge the responding claims and affirmations, those of one’s own body against power… . Suddenly what made power strong becomes used to attack it.”³⁶ This account of “resistance” has come in for a good deal of criticism. Along with Visker, Jurgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, Nancy Fraser, and Michael Walzer all characterize Foucault as a “theorist of confinement” who offers no principles by which power might be condemned.³⁷ Yet such a claim conceives power and its resistance as belonging to different orders where Foucault only assigns an immanence to power relations in terms of what, at one point, he calls a “tactical polyvalence of discourses”:

discourse can be both instrument and effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point of resistance and a starting-point for an opposing strategy… . Discourse transmits and produces power, it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it.³⁸

Resistance is not situated outside of power; it is “never in a position of exteriority in relation to power,” but rather, it is located in the varying and unstable points within networks and which marks their contingency.³⁹ So while the ongoing debate over the ontological sources of resistance to power in Foucault’s work has centered upon the search for something that would oppose power, which would act as a material or ideological point from which power could be resisted, refused, or overthrown, his account in fact admits no originary object that is only subsequently to become the object of social order. In the words of Pierre Macherey, where “the inside is an operation of the outside,” such an ontological source of resistance is neither possible nor desirable.⁴⁰ Like Derrida, Foucault’s conception of an “outside” does not rest with positing something transcendent to social order, nor does it constrain thought to a morass of relativism. Rather, in presenting social order as always already in contact with its outside, both thinkers insist upon an inherent contingency of any order, which the impossibility of its total closure from the outside assures.

THE QUESTION OF THE QUESTION

All of this begs a further question: if there’s no ultimate starting point for thought, if it always begins from a determinate position within order, how can it proceed by anything besides that order’s terms? Responding to this question demands we can begin to ask how these two approaches seek to disrupt the very question of normative grounds or foundations to thought. The terms for such a response are already partly found in Nietzsche. As we saw in chapter 1, Nietzsche’s importance for political thought lay in part with his putting a meta-question to philosophy’s procedures themselves. Unlike his predecessors, he is not engaged in seeking or affirming a ground or first principle that would both explain and govern the social but rather, he, attempts to theorize in such a way that the conditions, forces, and effects of positing the question of grounding itself are brought within the scope of inquiry. This sort of theory produces what in chapter 1 I called a “genealogical recoil” against the will to truth itself; questioning the “value of values” or the function of truth stages a seismic philosophical event, one whose reverberations are not only epistemological or ontological, but ethical and political. That is, Nietzsche’s meta-questioning opens a horizon from which Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault all seek to radically undermine the metaphysical desire to secure meaning or truth as foundations for social order. In their own way, each seeks instead to think the conditions that make those very desires and questions possible. Nietzsche’s “will to power,” Heidegger’s “Being,” Derrida’s différance, and Foucault’s “power” all amount to grander narratives that shift the site of questioning from the desire to ground or order, to the event of ordering itself. Yet, if Nietzsche and Heidegger can be said to radically open a new post-essentialist questioning of the political, there are, we have seen, fundamental moments in the works of both wherein that question is arrested.

While Nietzsche confronts political philosophy with the inescapable contingency of communal life, this opening is always accompanied by its own attempt to legislate a hierarchical political order. For in viewing the institution of an order of rank as a necessary condition for the enhancement of humanity, Nietzsche abandons the insights of his own philosophy for the Platonic gesture of philosophy’s legislation of the limits of the political. Similarly, Heidegger’s search for a “proper” determination of Being leads him back to what he conceives as the event of the inception of metaphysics among the pre-Socratics. Such a notion is still caught, both Derrida and Foucault argue, in the metaphysical move of freeing the event of Being from its relation to any particular being. His desire for a non-ontic, non-empirical, originary event of Being not only exposes a desire for a pure origin that becomes especially nefarious when read in the light of his Nazism as somehow revisiting that originary moment. Besides its patent evil, philosophically this amounts to a disavowal of the irreducibility of the ontological from the ontic or empirical, insofar as the notion of the “proper” at stake here presumes an unconditioned question of Being.

In response, Derrida and Foucault assert the finitude of the question, its situatedness at some determinate point from within social order. Of course, they do so in incommensurable ways. This begs the question of how their mutual strategies of questioning differ from each other? As Foucault’s critique of Derrida in “My Body, This Paper, This Fire” suggests, he would interrogate the orientation from which deconstruction begins, the specific choices that Derrida makes in framing the objects of his work. Foucault claims that, in showing the specificity of the power-knowledge networks that have constituted the objects of the latter’s analysis, he thinks beyond Derrida to theorize the very conditions of the latter’s analysis. In his reading of the Meditations Derrida does not attend, Foucault maintains, to the discursive structures conditioning the philosophical “system” that Derrida takes for granted. On the other hand, Derrida too problematizes Foucault frames the objects of his analyses. The archaeological or genealogical analysis can proceed, Derrida maintains, only by first determining or totalizing the discursive and epochal structures that form the objects of Foucault’s reading of Descartes.

There is an indefinite oscillation here between two sets of accounts of constitutive conditions, each staking a claim to have preceded the other, and each, therefore, pointing to the interlocutor’s ethical failure of having obscured the terms by which his analysis proceeds. In question here is therefore questioning itself.

The Question of the Question

At this juncture, it is worth turning to the early essay “Violence and Metaphysics,” wherein Derrida first formulates finitude in terms of a restriction of questioning. As he puts it, “the question is always enclosed; it never appears immediately as such, but only through the hermeticism of a proposition in which the answer has already begun to determine the question.”⁴¹ To say that the question is determined by its answer, as Derrida does here, is to assert that questions always proceed from some determinate order; no response therefore ever completely transcends the conditions from which it emerges. But while the question is thus irreducibly determined by its context, Derrida nevertheless posits a still more anterior moment. In “Violence and Metaphysics” he refers to this simply as “the question of the question” and he describes it as follows:

that fragile moment when the question is not yet determined enough for the hypocrisy of an answer to have already initiated itself beneath the mask of the question, and not yet determined enough for its voice to have been fraudulently articulated within the very syntax of the question.⁴²

There’s an attempt here to articulate an experience of the pre-determinate or pre-ordinal, a motive force of the question in itself, rather than particular questioning. Derrida goes on,

The questioning of foundations is neither foundationalist nor antifoundationalist. Sometimes it questions, or exceeds the very possibility, the ultimate necessity, of questioning itself, of the questioning form of thought, interrogating without confidence or prejudice the very history of the question and of its philosophical authority. For there is an authority—and so a legitimate force of the questioning form of which one might ask oneself whence it derives such great force in our tradition.⁴³

But then might an interrogation of the desire of questioning itself permit thought to encounter its outside and, thus, an engagement with the media that precede it? Moreover, how might such an experience of the pre-ordinal not simply amount to yet another claim to have transcended situatedness? These questions indicate a recurring theme in Derrida’s work, one central to his philosophical project. Yet it is perhaps above all in a series of writings on Heidegger that the stakes of this inquiry are not only most pronounced, but lend themselves to dialogue with Foucault.

With this in mind, it is prescient to look to Derrida’s book Aporias. For he not only interrogates the “question of the question” there, but in opposing the conceptual impasse into which his deconstructive method submits thought to what he calls “the problem,” he presents an expansive and rigorous confrontation with Foucault.⁴⁴ In Derrida’s terms, to establish a “problem” amounts to the delimitation of an object of analysis, a thoroughly metaphysical move that assumes the theorist can master or make present his object. By posing the aporia as prior to any question or problem, Derrida thus not only posits the necessity of a movement of “nonpassage” to presence as irreducible, he does so explicitly in response to Heidegger and as an implicit rejoinder to Foucault.

This is all still rather beguiling though. We can get a better sense of what Derrida is doing if we look to the central argument of Aporias, which consists in a deconstruction of the main premises of Heidegger’s Being and Time. The latter is a text whose importance, Derrida argues, arises in part from its rejection of a purely ontic or empirical understanding of death. That is, it poses a more radical site of questioning. For in insisting that death is a horizon of the human condition, one that cannot be recovered by thought, Heidegger rejects the empiricist’s attempt to master his object. Yet Derrida argues that Heidegger still errs insofar as he seeks to overcome the empirical tout court. That is, in categorizing Dasein by either those who take up a “resolute” or proper relation to death and those who take on an “irresolute” or improper one, Heidegger is said to set death as a “pro-ject” or “border” ordering existence. Put otherwise, while Heidegger understands death is among the irrecuperable or inappropriable conditions of human existence, Derrida claims he nonetheless sets this “non-experience” as a determinate “border” line, one that governs how Dasein relates to its existence. But crucially for our analysis, in the course of his deconstruction of the role death plays in Being and Time, Derrida articulates what he takes to be another experience, more originary than death, that conditions thought.

With these claims in mind, Derrida’s deconstruction of Heidegger in Aporias works through two of Heidegger’s organizing distinctions. First, the ontological difference that for Heidegger determines that human Dasein can experience death “as such” as opposed to the mere “perishing” of the animal. Second, an ethics of authenticity that defines inauthentic Dasein as one that flees from the fact of its finitude for the anonymity of Das Man wherein, given its improper relation to death, the singularity of its existence is lost.⁴⁵ But Heidegger’s decision to organize his analysis around a proper or authentic Dasein, Derrida argues, not only generates all manner of hierarchies organizing his work, but it is also ultimately indefensible: “The decision to decide from the here of this side is not simply a methodological decision, because it decides upon the very method: it decides that a method is pre-ferable, and better, than a non-method.”⁴⁶ It is finally the decision to frame his analysis around Dasein’s authentic Being-towards-death that marks the juncture in Heidegger’s early work where, to use Derrida’s formulation from “Violence and Metaphysics,” the answer already determines the field of Heidegger’s questions.

Second, death can only order Heidegger’s philosophy in this way, Derrida maintains, because death is an aporia; it has no limits, it is undecidable. That is to say, if death amounts to the cessation of experience, a thing that by definition cannot be experienced, then the relation to death is impossible; one can either be or be dead, but “being-dead,” as Derrida puts it, is an impossibility.⁴⁷ Not only, the argument goes, can Dasein not relate to its death as Heidegger claims, but as a consequence, it cannot appropriate “the there” or the unity of existence for which death is meant to act as the horizon of its existence. Death, Derrida argues, absolutely resists the determination or closure of existence as an object of analysis. Accordingly, the attempt in Being and Time to think the impossible marks, as far as Derrida is concerned, not only the project’s ultimate impossibility itself but also Heidegger’s nostalgia for presence, to which Derrida wants to oppose a more radical and insurmountable experience of finitude.

But Derrida also wants to demonstrate that such a logic of aporia undermines not only Heidegger’s text, but every attempt to closure or order. The aporia itself cannot be experienced, except in the form of what Derrida terms in French a pas (meaning both “step” and “not”)—it appears only as “the line that terminates all determination.”⁴⁸ This unavoidable “step” thus makes the object present to thought but only in its simultaneous withdrawal of that presence:

To mark and at the same time to erase these lines, which only happen by erasing themselves, which only succeed in erasing themselves [n’arrivent qua’ s’effacer], is to trace them as still possible while also introducing the very principle of their impossibility.⁴⁹

In other words, the aporia marks an exposure to the outside insofar as it indicates a medium anterior to any determinate closure and in this state of absolute undecidability, Derrida says, “we are exposed, absolutely without protection, without problem.”⁵⁰ There is thus no possibility of positing pure limits or ultimately, even of identifying the point at which one’s analysis begins.

One thread in Derrida’s book Of Spirit pursues a similar trajectory to Aporias. Derrida once again seeks to disturb and undermine Heidegger’s attempt to think an originary and non-ontic unity of Being that overcomes the metaphysics of presence. As in Aporias moreover, Derrida seeks to unravel Heidegger’s philosophical desire to exceed metaphysics by posing a pure question of Being. The text takes a number of twists and turns that need not concern us here, except that uniquely in Of Spirit, Derrida also locates a different moment in the later Heidegger wherein the desire for a pure question of Being is displaced.⁵¹ The context for this argument is a late essay of Heidegger’s plainly titled “Language.” In the latter text Heidegger elaborates a notion of “listening” as a means of experiencing language in itself, as anterior to any particular human. As Derrida describes it, “listening” implies “the promise which, in opening every speaking, makes possible the very question and therefore precedes it without belonging to it: the dissymmetry of an affirmation, of a yes, before all opposition of yes and no.”⁵² For Derrida, this insistence on “listening” entails a call and a responsibility that “overwhelms the question itself.”⁵³ Or, to put it in less austere prose, it amounts to an affirmation of being always already within the ordinal and determinate.

Derrida elaborates a similar claim in the late text The Politics of Friendship, when he argues that there is an affirmation that is “more originary than the question and which, without saying yes to anything positive, can only affirm the possibility of the future by opening itself to determinability and therefore by welcoming what still remains indeterminate and indeterminable.”⁵⁴ In effect, Derrida locates in Heidegger what he views as the avowal of an in-appropriable outside prior to any question. We might also add that this formulation amounts to what we have described as a genealogical claim. In affirming its own finitude, in “opening itself to “determinability,” thought not only affirms that it will inevitably violently reduce that which exceeds it, it also affirms an irreducible excess over it, it “welcomes what still remains indeterminable.”

It is with the aforementioned in mind that we can understand Derrida’s argument in Aporias, that the relation to death “as such” can only appear through what is other: “self-relation welcomes or supposes the other within its being-itself as different from itself.”⁵⁵ The relation to one’s own death is only ever promised, never given or present; one cannot “be-dead.” Given this neither-here-nor-there structure of the relation to death, Dasein’s “awaiting itself” in its being-toward-death cannot form the basis of a singular or authentic existence since it cannot be a determinable limit or frame. Accordingly, existence can thus only await the indeterminate, merely anticipate “something” that is not itself. Since existence cannot therefore be the object of thought, Derrida proposes the relation to death might be conceived more radically than Heidegger fathoms, as an “absolutely awaiting each other.”⁵⁶ An awaiting of “each other” (the French “tout autre” can mean both all otherness and every singular other) occurs in the impossibility of simultaneity between being and death, existence appears in the aporetic form of an indefinite non-coincidence:

the waiting for something that will happen as the completely other than oneself, but of waiting (for each other) by awaiting oneself [s’attendre en s’attendant du même coup soi-même], by preceding oneself as if one had a meeting with a oneself that is but does not know.⁵⁷

The affirmation of the “nonpassage” of the aporia and, thus, of the fact of finitude signaled by the impasse between pure indeterminacy or pure determinacy, implies the impossibility of a delimitation of the self from what or who is other. The other cannot be determined since it is never present. In this sense, like Heidegger, Derrida avows the finitude of existence by insisting upon the anteriority of others, languages, conventions, traditions, and so on. But contra Heidegger, Derrida argues that this anterior medium can never be appropriated or theorized; it always exceeds any determinate human experience. The relation to death cannot be recuperated, since otherness always precedes determinate experience. There is therefore “expropriation” and “inauthenticity” at the heart of existence—a radical anteriority that we cannot master or appropriate to thought but to which we necessarily respond.⁵⁸

Thus, to affirm alterity within identity, the outside as inseparable from the inside, as Derrida does, is an attempt to undo the very notion of their delimitation; the outside “affects the very experience of threshold,” as Derrida puts it.⁵⁹ The aporia amounts to the experience of an absolute border whose crossing or erasure opens the space of every positive and identifiable border: “Perhaps nothing ever comes to pass except on the line of a transgression.”⁶⁰

Problematization

Like Derrida, Foucault seeks to affirm every question, including his own, as the effect of the specific order or apparatus that makes it possible. But where Derrida’s approach in this context is best summed up by the logics of aporia, Foucault’s displacement of what he once referred to as “the dialectic of the question and answer” takes place through what, by the early 1980s, he was calling “problematization.”⁶¹ Of course Foucault was an infamous revisionist; folding each phase of his work, from the archaeology in the 1960s to the ethics in the 1980s, into the one which follows. But this ultimate characterization of his work in terms of “problematizations” is particularly elegant insofar as it encompasses all three phases of his work rather neatly: the analysis of discourse, power, and ethics. As he puts it in a late interview,

I tried to locate three major types of problems: the problem of truth, the problem of power, and the problem of individual conduct. These three domains of experience can only be understood in relation to one another, not independently.⁶²

The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge in particular address the criteria governing the formulation and circulation of statements and, thus, the ways of distinguishing true and false in particular contexts. As we have seen, in the 1970s Foucault complements this discursive analysis with a “power” axis that reflects upon the rules, techniques, and objectives governing relations between human beings. These analyses occur in the well-known works on “power-knowledge”; Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality in particular, but also his lecture courses from this decade. Here strategies, apparatuses, and institutions are analyzed as technologies of power that circulate and reinforce knowledge in attempts to determine and regulate the normal and abnormal, the permissible and impermissible, the natural and unnatural. Finally, in the early 1980s, The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self and the lecture courses from 1982 to 1984 analyze experiences of value in terms of modes of relating to, and governing oneself. Foucault himself outlines this continuity in a late interview:

It was [throughout my career] a matter of analyzing, not behaviors or ideas, nor societies and their “ideologies,” but the problematizations through which being offers itself to be, necessarily thought—and the practices on the basis of which these problematizations are formed. The archeological dimension of the analysis made it possible to examine the forms themselves; its genealogical dimension enabled me to analyze their formation out of the practices and the modifications undergone by the latter. There was the problematization of madness and illness arising out of social and medical practices, and defining a certain pattern of “normalization”; a problematization of life, language and labor in discursive practices that conformed to certain “epistemic” rules; and a problematization of crime and criminal behavior emerging from certain punitive practices conforming to a “disciplinary” model.⁶³

Through the notion of problematization, the three axes or “realms of exteriority” of knowledge, power, and ethics are united by what Foucault simply calls “thought”:

By “thought,” I mean what establishes, in a variety of possible forms, the play of true and false, and consequently constitutes the human being as a knowing subject; in other words, it is the basis for accepting or refusing rules, and constitutes human beings as social and juridical subjects; it is what establishes the relation with oneself and with others, and constitutes the human being as an ethical subject … In this sense thought is understood as the very form of action—as action insofar as it implies the play of true and false, the acceptance or refusal of rules, the relation to oneself and others. The study of forms of experience can thus proceed from an analysis of “practices—discursive or not—as long as one qualifies that word to mean the different systems of action insofar as they are inhabited by thought.”⁶⁴

As Paul Rabinow points out, this definition of thought, as constituted in problematizations, establishes it as an exceedingly broad domain of experience.⁶⁵ Tripartite domains of knowledge, power relations, and ethics are assembled in relation to particular difficulties or questions that demand a response. Experience is defined by the interrelations between these three axes in their concrete forms in institutions, disciplines, various techniques, and systems of rules. No priority can be given to any one axis since, in the complexity of their interactions, each axis “is affected by transformations in the other two.”⁶⁶ “A problematization,” Foucault says, therefore emerges as a complex “reply to some concrete and specific aspect of the world.”⁶⁷

The conditions for particular questions are thus found in seemingly disparate conditions, themselves the result of concrete events: “the development of a given into a question, this transformation of a group of obstacles and difficulties into problems to which diverse solutions will attempt to produce a response, this is what constitutes the point of problematization and the specific work of thought.”⁶⁸ On this view, the question always appears within the particular terrain formed by a given problem.

Accordingly, problematizations do not amount to particular representations of the world; there is no prior presence that problematizations order. Rather, subjective experience emerges only through the experience of particular problems. Problematizations, Foucault writes in The Use of Pleasure, are the different ways “through which being offers itself to be, necessarily thought.”⁶⁹ Thought, Foucault argues, “develops the conditions in which possible responses can be given; it defines the elements that will constitute what the different solutions attempt to respond to.”⁷⁰ In contrast to Heidegger, Foucault does not pose a selfsame Being that gives the conditions for existence and that is then forgotten in its metaphysical or representational determination. Being is not prior to problematization; the medium of differentiation or specific forms of the relation between the inside and the outside are effected by the relations of forces which coagulate into determinate conditions through which thought questions or problematizes its existence. A given “clearing” or order of existence is the effect of the becoming of a multiplicity of events that coagulate into regularities. We might say that, not unlike Derrida’s argument, for Foucault the multiplicity of forces that form the conditions for a given field of thought are anterior to ontological differences since, as Foucault argues in The Order of Things, Heidegger’s question of Being is rooted in a particular modern mode of thinking the “unthought” which gives it a unified structure or origin to be recovered.

By contrast, a history of problematizations proceeds by uncovering the conditions of questions as formed by concrete techniques, effects, and conditions and, thus, denies any transcendent term as a ground for understanding the particularity of events:

Far from being the still incomplete and blurred image of an Idea that would, from on high and for all time, hold the answer, the problem lies in the idea itself, or rather, the Idea exists only in the form of a problem: a distinctive plurality whose obscurity is nevertheless insistent, and in which the question ceaselessly stirs. What is the answer to the question? The problem. How is the problem resolved? By displacing the question. The problem … is a dispersed multiplicity… . We must think problematically rather than question and answer dialectically.⁷¹

The problem gives an account of the combinations of heterogeneous elements that have their modes of existence made visible as a product of their constitutive outside.

NEITHER A PROBLEM NOR AN APORIA

If Foucault thinks that the reductive nature of “the question” can be disturbed by a genealogy that analyzes “problems” conceived as the conditions of questions themselves, then Derrida’s response could be said to argue that the very possibility of delimiting a given “problem” already relies upon an illegitimate attempt to transcend history itself. The far-reaching implications of such a claim are particularly apparent in the late essay “To Do Justice to Freud,” written almost ten years after Foucault’s death. Much as in “Cogito and The History of Madness,” in this text Derrida accuses Foucault of setting up what he calls here, echoing his critique of Heidegger in Aporias, an illegitimate “border.”⁷² However, in this later essay, the thematic of the “border” is related to Foucault’s oeuvre as a whole and moreover, to the issue of how theory posits its questions, since in this instance Derrida extends the argument to the notion of “problematization.”⁷³ At stake is thus the very mode in which both thinkers displace the question in order to think its constitutive outside.

In this later essay it is Freud this time whose work, Derrida claims, is violently reduced by Foucault. The latter’s ostensibly reductive metaphysical gesture is “to situate Freud in a historical place that is stabilizable, identifiable, and open to a univocal understanding.”⁷⁴ Derrida’s argument is grounded upon the claim that Freud explicitly recognizes the death drive as a hyperbolic force that operates in the ego and cannot be mastered. This implies that unlike Descartes, Freud accepts that hyperbolic excess cannot be excluded from thinking. But it further indicates that his work cannot be reduced or confined to its epoch, discursive formation, or given problematization. That is, in situating psychoanalysis within a discursive regime or an apparatus of power-knowledge as he does in The History of Madness, The Order of Things and elsewhere, Foucault presumes a position for himself, the argument goes, that would transcend the death drive. Foucault, Derrida says, “regularly attempts to objectify psychoanalysis and to reduce it to that of which he speaks rather than to that from out of which he speaks.”⁷⁵ To place Freud within a given field, to see him as a “figure of order,” one must discount the transgressive and hyperbolic element in Freud’s text. Moreover, as Derrida points out, in The History of Madness Foucault himself places Freud alongside Nietzsche as a figure who entered into a dialogue with madness prior to its pathologization by psychology and, thus, like Nietzsche, Artaud, and Holderlin, antedates and inspires Foucault’s own arguments.⁷⁶

The principal claim in “To Do Justice to Freud” is that Freud functions as what Derrida calls a “supplement” in Foucault’s text. Freud, the argument goes, is both excluded by being placed inside the history of the ordering or determination of madness and placed outside insofar as he makes a dialogue with madness possible. Freud can thus only lie at the impossible “border” of Foucault’s history:

Freud, is the double figure of the door and the doorkeeper. He stands guard and ushers in … That is why—and this would be the paradox of a serial law—Freud does and does not belong to the different series in which Foucault inscribes him. What is outstanding, outside the series [hors-série], turns out to be regularly reinscribed within different series.⁷⁷

Foucault’s delimitation of the reduction of madness is said to be founded upon that which it excludes. Therefore, much like the argument in “Cogito and the History of Madness,” here Derrida implies that Foucault has failed to ask “the question of the question” of the relation between the inside and outside (here denoted by the figure of Freud), which makes his analysis possible. As such, rather than do him “justice,” Foucault is said to commit violence against Freud.

Obviously, there are strong resonances between Derrida’s arguments in “Cogito and the History of Madness” and “To Do Justice to Freud.” But the later text differs insofar as the argument now encompasses all of Foucault’s work. A “problem,” Derrida argues, can only appear through the promise of the presence of knowledge of a given field. Yet since presence is always already divided and deferred, any problem is only constituted in the covering over of an aporia:

The self-identity of its age, or of any age, appears as divided, and thus, problematic, problematizable … as the age of madness or an age of psychoanalysis -as well as, in fact, all the historical or archeological categories that promise us the determinable stability of a configurable whole.⁷⁸

Derrida returns to this argument once again in his late lecture series, The Beast and the Sovereign. The point, as he puts it there, is “to call into question the concern to periodize.”⁷⁹

In other words, it is Foucault who, from Derrida’s perspective, delimits or closes the inside from the outside, who denies the instability and impossibility of all limits, and who violently “decides” the contours and context of his history, before presuming to undermine it through his genealogy. The point for Derrida is that the possibility of any genealogy of problematizations cannot proceed except by violently and teleologically determining its objects and, thus, by covering over the aporia or hyperbolic excess, which is the condition for history. Derrida makes a similar argument in Rogues, arguing that the determination of context or field in Foucault’s works is an “infrastructure of technoscientific discovery” and. thus, he goes on:

Whenever a telos or teleology comes to orient, order and make possible a historicity, it annuls that historicity by the same token and neutralizes unforeseeable and incalculable irruption, the singular and exceptional alterity of what [ce qui] comes, that without which, or the one without whom, nothing happens or arrives.⁸⁰

It is Foucault who, Derrida argues, enacts the closure of the outside in attempting to form an interior horizon as the field for his histories of problematizations.

The argument can be expounded by returning to the argument development in Aporias. For in the course of that text Derrida traces the etymology of the word “problem” to its Greek origins as a reference to “projection” or “protection.” The early meaning of the term, he suggests, echoes his account of the constitution of a problem as the ordering or delimitation of a domain or field. That is, the constitution of problems in disciplinary, ontological, or territorial terms, Derrida says, refers to the erection of a border, identity, or closure.⁸¹ Yet, as we have seen, for Derrida the setting up of a problem or limit is always already threatened; it is always already marked by the “experience of nonpassage” of the aporia that denotes the impossibility of any total or non-negotiable border. The aporia is that milieu where, Derrida suggestively says, “it would no longer be possible to constitute a problem, a project, or a projection.”⁸²

We can infer that for Derrida, Foucault’s notion of problematization is not genealogical enough, since it disavows the borders it constructs. From this perspective, Foucault is terminally incapable of maintaining the question open as a question and so, it is up to deconstruction to conduct, as Derrida puts it, “the problematization of problematization.”⁸³ The aporia is not merely situated prior to problematization; it is also an excess that prevents the possibility of mastery by a given decision. Foucault’s method of problematization, then, could for Derrida only be constituted in a violent reduction of its anterior medium.⁸⁴ Deconstruction thus posits itself as anterior to, and less violent than, the genealogy of problematizations since this experience of a non-totalizable excess or outside that exceeds any determination or problematization marks the failure of its attempted closure.

Immanence and Transcendence

If Derrida’s deconstruction of Foucault is internally coherent, as I have shown at length, it nonetheless doesn’t hold when considered from within the terms of Foucault’s own argument. But since neither thinker attempts to sustain an absolute justification for their discourse, we might posit that each account is ultimately justifiable only in terms of the point from which their analysis sets out. As a question of the “violence” or reductive nature of their respective analyses, the polemic between them emerges from two distinct points of evaluation internal to both discourses, so that each seems to be caught in an indefinite circularity. The accusation of failing to sustain an avowal of finitude emerges, on this view, from two distinct strategic points of departure.

Conceived in these terms, the polemic between Derrida and Foucault is therefore unavoidable since, in an ironic logic, both affirm the situatedness of their thought within determinate order and, thus, posit no absolute justification for their analyses. As Derrida put it in Of Grammatology, it is “impossible to justify a point of departure absolutely,” and, thus, he goes on, deconstruction always proceeds from a particular point, it always begins “in a text where we already believe ourselves to be.”⁸⁵ To work strategically for Derrida is to sustain what he calls a “radically empiricist” point of departure, one which proceeds along or through a “minimal” consensus in the interpretation of given phenomena or texts.⁸⁶

Deconstruction has been criticized, most notably by David Wood and Peter Dews (albeit in different inflections) in terms of this strategic mode of questioning. Inherent to the first step of any deconstruction they argue is a nostalgia for metaphysics or logocentrism by which Derrida first constructs a metaphysical whole totality that he then deconstructs.⁸⁷ The starting point of any deconstruction, in other words, is the invention of the very object (text, concept, etc.) that it then problematizes. Such an argument echoes Foucault’s own attack in “My Body, This Paper, This Fire” on what he sees as Derrida’s preservation of the sovereignty and privileged status of philosophy in his reading of Descartes. Yet, Foucault, as we will see, makes a similar “strategic” affirmation about the truth status of his genealogies and so succumbs to the same circularity.

This negotiation with the veracity of Derrida’s and Foucault’s analyses in relation to dominant paradigms of truth is not a temporary problem, or a minor error of interpretation to be overcome. Rather, it is the condition and fate of all “strategic” and genealogical thought that affirms its finitude within the terms of an ontological narrative of which it is the author. Thus, while the debate between Derrida and Foucault may revolve around certain formal interpretative differences (e.g., the historical status of Descartes’ Meditations), still more fundamentally, the dispute centers on the terms in which finitude is to be affirmed. It is on this point that the distinction Agamben draws between a thought of transcendence and a thought of immanence, discussed previously, proves helpful.

Foucault perhaps most clearly explains the immanence of the conditions of thought to thought itself through a conception of “life” elaborated in a late essay he penned to preface to Georges Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological.⁸⁸ In that text Foucault understands life itself as a continuous process of concept formation immanent to a “conceptually structured environment,” a milieu that is “mobile, on an undefined territory.”⁸⁹ In appropriating Canguilhem’s formulation of knowledge in terms of the conceptual structuring of an environment, Foucault conceives the subject’s relation to its environment(s) as defined by complex “interactions,” and not as having constituted it or been constituted by it.⁹⁰ To form the conditions for responding to conceptual problems is thus a mode of negotiating existence; it amounts to specific possibilities within a complex and unstable environment. Thought does not reflect upon a world that precedes it but is rather an active event in itself. Thus, conceptual systems or grounds are not reducible to a single element (a subject, an object, or Being), because any ground is itself the effect of a regularity that then affects meaning, subjectivity, and decisions.⁹¹ Accordingly, thought is always a response and never a solution since it responds to immanent conditions to which it can never perfectly resolve itself.

This formulation insinuates further parallels between a notion of the concept as immanent to life, and the aporetic logic of the (im)possibility of the concept that guides Derrida’s work. Both thinkers affirm the contingency and ultimately the failure of all concepts to attain a transcendent truth and the consequent violence that all concepts do to things. Yet, the implications that both thinkers draw from this state of affairs are radically different and even irreconcilable. Derrida tirelessly persists with the “quasi-transcendental” question of the impossibility of the concept or of order and, accordingly, calls for an affirmation of the responsibility that for him finitude entails. Foucault, on the other hand, concludes that, if a transcendent truth is not attainable therefore all interpretation or concept formation is an “infinite task” without telos which violently “upset[s], shatter[s] with the blow of a hammer,” then thought might perhaps affirm itself as such, that is, as difference and as an event of power.⁹² As Foucault puts it, “knowledge is always a certain strategic relation in which man is placed … that’s why it would be completely contradictory to imagine a knowledge that was not by nature partial, oblique, and perspectival… . Knowledge simplifies, passes over differences, lumps things together, without any justification in regard to truth.”⁹³ If thought cannot exceed its own determinate conditions, then this implies it can proceed only in terms of an analysis immanent to the conceptual milieu in which it finds itself. The impossibility of transcendence signals for Foucault the possibility of proceeding without posing questions of justification, of the Idea, or of Truth.

Foucault consequently accorded no exceptional status for his own texts. And it is with this in mind that we should understand his labeling of all of his works as “fictions”:

I am quite aware that I have never written anything but fictions. I’m not saying for all that that this is outside truth. It seems to me the possibility exists to make fiction work in truth, to induce effects of truth with a discourse of fiction, and to make it so that the discourse of truth creates, ‘fabricates’ something that does not yet exist, therefore, “fictionalizes.” One “fictionalizes” history starting from a political reality that makes it true, one “fictionalizes” a political outlook that does not yet exist starting from an historical truth.⁹⁴

Any delimitation of a problem, apparatus, or discourse begins from within what Foucault calls a given (and needless to say, contingent) “game of truth” and to one extent or another, works from within that game’s conditions.⁹⁵ Thus, the work “does need to be true in terms of academic, historically verifiable truth”; it must accord with certain functions and demands of the particular discourse of truth in which it is inserted.⁹⁶ But this only refers to a notion of truth as demonstrable, verifiable, and acquired through an act of cognition. In a series of lectures in 1974, Foucault explicitly refers to this as a mode of truth that disavows its inescapable relation to power.⁹⁷ We might also note that this is a mode of truth only first fully realized in Descartes’ Meditations, for it is in that text that truth is posited as something that is acquired through an adequation of the subject to the object.⁹⁸ Truth, in this sense, is tied to particular rules or laws that determine a correct method for attaining truth.⁹⁹

From Foucault’s perspective, it is still from within the terms of a mode of truth as adequation between subject and object that Derrida will deconstruct Foucault’s text. Of course, for Derrida any delimitation of a problem in history will always be reductive and epistemically violent. “All pathbreaking,” Derrida says in reference to Foucault, “opens the way only at a certain price, that is, by bolting shut other passages, by ligaturing, stitching up, or compressing, indeed repressing, at least provisionally other veins.”¹⁰⁰

But it is another mode of truth that, I think, Foucault seeks to formulate: one not grounded in an identity between subject and object, but which affirms itself as an event of power. Genealogy should be judged, Foucault argues, not in terms of its capacity to prove demonstrable truths, but in terms of its “effectiveness,” insofar as its “fictions become true.”¹⁰¹ Foucault clearly illustrates this claim in an interview in a discussion of Discipline and Punish:

The book makes use of true documents, but in such a way that through them it is possible not only to arrive at an establishment of truth but also experience something that permits a change, a transformation of the relationship we have with ourselves and with the world where, up to then, we had seen ourselves as being without problems—in short, a transformation of the relationship we have with our knowledge. So this game of truth and fiction—or if you prefer, of verification and fabrication—will bring to light something which connects us, sometimes in a completely unconscious way, with our modernity, while at the same time causing it to appear as changed. The experience through which we grasp the intelligibility of certain mechanisms (for example imprisonment, punishment, and so on) and the way we are enabled to detach ourselves from them by perceiving them differently, will be, at best, one and the same thing.¹⁰²

As far as Foucault is concerned, this attempt to exceed the realm of verification and coherence does not amount to a nihilistic assertion that “everything is permissible” since, as he argues, the work arises from within, and cannot totally escape the demands of the “game of truth” that forms its conditions.¹⁰³ Yet, he claims that, in drawing out the historical contingency of particular institutions, the work “disturbs what was previously considered immobile; it fragments what was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself.”¹⁰⁴ His aim is thus not to demonstrate its adequation to truth, but to be “effective”; to “deprive the self of the reassuring stability of life and nature.”¹⁰⁵ Its very effectiveness arises with its ability to introduce discontinuity “into our very being.”¹⁰⁶ In inducing particular effects—a new understanding of the function of the prison for instance—the work “becomes true” since it enters into and transforms, particular economies of power relations.¹⁰⁷

Like Derrida, Foucault too thus seeks to affirm the inseparability of his theory from epistemic violence and, as such, affirms the necessary reductions, delimitations, and generalizations in which any historical analysis will engage. Yet for Foucault, if knowledge is inherently “violent” it need not proceed in terms of seeking out justifications or identify with a transcendent truth. These notions are given over to the “problematizations” through which they are constituted in a field of power. Conversely, in both “Cogito and the History of Madness” and “To Do Justice to Freud,” Derrida questions the constitution of given problematizations themselves; their elaboration, he argues—with reference to Descartes and then Freud—will always be inextricably tied to a violent effacement of the aporia and consequently, violent delimitations not acknowledged by Foucault.

Accordingly, we are caught in an infinite regress between the problem and the aporia, each purporting to figure the conditions in which the other might appear. Foucault’s genealogies appear to be constituted upon a violent reduction of the aporias that make them possible since they assume the possibility of the presence of a given field of knowledge. Derrida’s work on the experience of the aporetic, on the other hand, is formed within “games of truth” and thus maintains the sovereignty of philosophical questions. The notion of violence points us back to the ethical dimensions of Derrida and Foucault’s work. But as we will see in the next chapter, an ethics grounded in the affirmation of two grander narratives will merely reproduce the problem of the incommensurability of these two approaches on another terrain. It is to these issues we now turn.

NOTES

1.Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 158; Michel Foucault, Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984 Volume I. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (Paul Rabinow, Ed.) (Robert Hurley et al., Trans.). London: Penguin, 1997. P. 167.

2.Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 365.

3.Foucault, Essential Works, Volume II, p. 273.

4.Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p. 18.

5.Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 162, emphasis in original.

6.Foucault, Essential Works, Volume I, p. 167.

7.Foucault, Essential Works Volume III, p. 14.

8.Rudi Visker, “From Foucault to Heidegger: A One-Way Ticket?” Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters (Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, Eds.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Pp. 295–323.

9.Ibid., p. 311.

10.This is how Claire Colebrook defines the impasse of representational thought for Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault in The Ethics of Representation.

11.Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “More on Power/Knowledge,” from The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Donna Landry & Gerald MacLean, Eds.). London: Routledge, 1996. Pp. 141–174. Quoted on p. 147. The quotation from Heidegger is from Being and Time, p. 39; the emphasis is Spivak’s.

12.Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction. London: Penguin, 1998. P. 92.

13.Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, pp. 120–122.

14.Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p. 11; Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 221.

15.Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1986. P. 182.

16.See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 170, for Foucault as thinker of equi-primordiality see Edward McGushin’s Foucault’s Askesis: An Introduction to the Philosophical Life. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007, p. 30; and Colebrook, The Ethics of Representation, pp. 167–168; for Derrida see Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror, p. 182.

17. Colebrook, The Ethics of Representation, p. 168.

18.Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 6.

19.Colebrook, The Ethics of Representation, p. 169.

20.Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 34.

21.Jacques Derrida, Positions (Alan Bass, trans.). London: Continuum, 1981. P. 12.

22.Derrida, Dissemination, p. 166.

23.Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion (Gil Anidjar Ed.). London: Routledge, 2002. P. 251.

24.Gilles Deleuze, Foucault; Pierre Macherey, “Foucault: Ethics and Subjectivity,” In a Materialist Way: Selected Essays by Pierre Macherey (Ted Stolze, Trans.). London: Verso, 1998. Pp. 96–107.

25.Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977–1978 (Michel Sellenart et. al., Eds.). London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007. Pp. 116–120.

26.Deleuze, Foucault, p. 85. See Michel Foucault, Essential Works, Volume II, p. 377, 150.

27.Foucault, Essential Works, Volume II, p. 150.

28.Rayner, Foucault’s Heidegger, pp. 52–53, p. 57.

29.This argument is developed at length in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.

30.Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 205.

31.Ibid., p. 231.

32.Ibid.

33.Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, p. 3.

34.Foucault, Essential Works, Volume III, p. 13.

35.Ibid., pp. 14, 11.

36.Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings. London: Harvester, 1980. P. 56.

37.See Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity; Charles Taylor,” Foucault on Freedom and Truth,” Political Theory, Vol. 12, No. 2 (May 1984), pp. 152–183; Michael Walzer, “The Politics of Michel Foucault.” Foucault: A Critical Reader (David Hoy, Ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, pp. 51–68; Nancy Fraser, “Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions.” Praxis International, Vol. 1, No. 3, 1981. Pp. 272–287. I owe the phrase “theorist of confinement” to Sergei Prozorov, Foucault, Freedom and Sovereignty. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. P. 26.

38.Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I, p. 101.

39.Ibid., p. 96.

40.Macherey, “Foucault: Ethics and Subjectivity.”

41.Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 99.

42.Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 98, quoted in Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. P. 96.

43. Derrida, Acts of Religion, p. 236.

44.Rodolphe Gasché defines the aporia as “conceptual impasse” in The Honour of Thinking: Critique, Theory, Philosophy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007. P. 331.

45.Derrida, Aporias, p. 35.

46.Ibid., p. 56.

47.Ibid., p. 73.

48.Ibid., pp. 7, 78.

49.Ibid., p. 73.

50.Ibid., p. 12. Italics added.

51.Derrida refers to “Language” in Poetry, Language, Thought.

52.Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question (Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, Trans.). London: University of Chicago Press, 1989. P. 94.

53.Ibid., p. 94.

54.Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship (George Collins, Trans.) London: Verso, 2005. P. 38. Quoted in Geoffrey Bennington, “Derrida and Politics.” Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader. Pp. 193–212.

55.Derrida, Aporias, p. 61.

56.Ibid., p. 65.

57.Ibid., p. 66.

58.Ibid., p. 77.

59.Ibid., p. 33.

60.Ibid., p. 33.

61.It appears that the earliest uses of “problematization” by Foucault occur circa 1983–1984. See Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech. New York: Semiotext(e), 2001; Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume II: The Use of Pleasure. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992, p. 10; the reference to the dialectic of the question and answer is in Michel Foucault, Essential Works, Volume II, p. 359.

62.Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977– 1984 (Lawrence D. Kritzman, Ed.), London: Routledge, 1990. Pp. 242–54. Quoted on p. 243.

63.Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, pp. 11–12.

64.Foucault, Essential Works, Volume I, pp. 200–201.

65.Paul Rabinow, “Introduction” to Michel Foucault, Essential Works, Volume I, p. xxxiv.

66.Foucault, Essential Works, Volume I, p. 388.

67.Foucault, Fearless Speech.

68.Ibid., p. 48.

69.Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, p. 11.

70.Foucault, Essential Works, Volume I, p. 421, cf. Edward McGushin, Foucault’s Askesis, p. 16.

71.Foucault, Essential Works, Volume II, p. 359.

72.Jacques Derrida, “To Do Justice to Freud’: The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis.” Critical Inquiry. No. 20 (Winter), 1994. Pp. 227–266, p. 233, cf. Aporias, p. 12.

73.Ibid., p. 264.

74.Ibid., pp. 233–234.

75.Ibid., p. 232.

76. Ibid., pp. 238–239.

77.Ibid., p. 235.

78.Ibid., p. 259.

79.Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I (Geoffrey Bennington, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. P. 332.

80.Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. P. 128.

81.Derrida, Aporias, p. 40.

82.Ibid., p. 12.

83.Derrida, “To Do Justice to Freud,” p. 264.

84.Derrida, Dissemination. P. 101.

85.Derrida, Of Grammatology, pp. 162–163.

86.Ibid., p. 162.

87.Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Political Theory. London: Verso, 1987, p. 37; David Wood, The Deconstruction of Time. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1989. Pp. 267–292.

88.Foucault, Essential Works, Volume II, pp. 465–478.

89.Ibid., p. 475.

90.I take this idea from Gary Gutting’s “Foucault’s Philosophy of Experience.” Boundary 2. Vol. 29, No. 2 (Summer 2002). Pp. 69–85.

91.Colebrook, The Ethics of Representation, p. 167.

92.Foucault, Essential Works, Volume II, pp. 274–275.

93.Foucault, Essential Works, Volume III, p. 14.

94.Michel Foucault, Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–1984 (Sylvère Lotringer, Ed.) (Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston, Trans.). New York: Semiotext(e), 1996. P. 213.

95.Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, p. 6.

96.Foucault, Essential Works, Volume III, p. 243.

97.Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the College de France, 1973–1974 (Graham Burchell, Trans.). New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. cf. pp. 236–237. On this point see also Edward McGushin, Foucault’s Askesis. P. 39.

98.Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de France 1981–1982 (Graham Burchell, Ed.). London: Picador, 2005. P. 190.

99.Ibid., p. 190.

100.Derrida, “To Do Justice to Freud,” p. 230.

101.Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 93.

102.Foucault, Essential Works, Volume II, p. 244.

103.Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, p. 6.

104.Foucault, Essential Works, Volume III, p. 375.

105.Ibid., p. 380.

106.Ibid., p. 380.

107.On the relation between truth as event of power and the thought of the outside, see Timothy Rayner, Foucault’s Heidegger: Philosophy and Transformative Experience. My claim to the truth status of Foucault’s own work is indebted to Rayner’s analysis.

Chapter 4

Economies of Violence

In the discussion of the “cogito debate” developed in chapter 2, it was claimed that the polemic between Derrida and Foucault amounted to two accusations of a disavowal of the event of exclusion of madness from reason. For both thinkers, such a disavowal amounts to a desire to make what is “other” the object of knowledge. This amounts to restricting alterity to reason’s own terms and, in this sense, entails for both Derrida and Foucault more than a simple logical error. Rather, they both view it in ethical terms, as the theorist’s pretense to mastery of difference or alterity. That is, both view the debate from the perspective of the problem of epistemic violence. This is a distinct conception of violence and it demands further unpacking.

In this regard, we might return to an earlier reference to Martin Heidegger’s work from the 1930s. In chapter 1 we saw that he views every social order as “ontologically violent” insofar as order is reductive of what “is.” That is, beyond empirical instances of violence, the very structures by which our existence is organized (language, culture, etc.) are violent.¹ This is an insight not far removed from Nietzsche’s claim that all metaphysical and moral concepts have their origins in relations of struggle. In this light, Derrida and Foucault might be understood as accusing one another of disavowing this originary or irreducible violence of origins. It is the denial of violence that for each thinker defines the interlocutor’s objectification of madness, a denial moreover, premised upon the failure to affirm the “grander narrative” by which social order works.

Yet if the failure to think the correct “grander narrative’ amounts to an epistemic violence then this raises the broader question of what is implied here as ethical. This is especially intriguing insofar as once we insist on the irreducibility of violence and refuse, as I have shown Derrida and Foucault do, either the possibility of appropriating a spontaneous primordiality or the possibility of a non-violent order, one is confronted with the question of whether one can conceive violence at all? In other words, if no ground is posited from which particular orders are to be evaluated, then both Derrida and Foucault are seemingly left without the means by which the irreducibility of a violent social existence can be negotiated. Their work might be, as one critic has put it, nothing more than the “sabotaging of a reigning epoch’s agenda.”²

In fact, as the argument developed in this chapter will show, both Derrida and Foucault do seek to posit an ethics grounded in thought’s affirmation of, and accommodation with, what “is.” Put otherwise, if the worst violence amounts to the disavowal of violence, then the ethical act is inseparable from the affirmation of a “grander narrative” and the experience of finitude it implies. On these terms, the ethical is collapsed into the ontological so that “ought” becomes inseparable from “is.” But as this chapter seeks to argue, to hinge ethics to the ontological in this way implies not only a form of amor fati but further entails the incommensurability of ethical positions. This much will become apparent as we look to the ethics of deconstruction and bring this into dialogue with the conception of ethics that emerges in Foucault’s late work. We begin by looking to Derrida’s more explicit engagements with the ethical before turning to Foucault.

DERRIDA’S ETHICS OF ALTERITY

One possible point of entry into the knotty set of issues implied by an investigation of an “ethics of deconstruction” proceeds from Derrida’s critique of empiricism already discussed in chapter 2. As we saw there, Derrida accuses Foucault of an attempted recovery of the presence of madness in history that collapses the irreducible “originary violence” of order itself into the empirical violence of particular orders. Similarly, in “Violence and Metaphysics,” Derrida’s first major essay on the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, he implies that the latter succumbs to the same error. But while the form of Derrida’s critique of Levinas is not unlike that of Foucault, insofar as Levinas’ project is explicitly grounded upon the displacement of ontology by ethics, it offers fecund terrain for Derrida to elaborate his own account of the ethical.³

At the center of Levinas’ philosophical project rests the attempt to displace the identity of the subject (often simply referred to as “the Same”) in order to cultivate an infinite responsibility for the “the Other.”⁴ Yet Derrida argues that in viewing “coherence in ontology” as “violence itself,” Levinas holds out the possibility of a non-violent relation to alterity whereby a purer logos would incorporate the absolutely other.⁵ But such an appeal to a non-reductive and non-violent relation to the other, Derrida’s argument goes, amounts to yet another evasion of the originary violence of all social relation.⁶

Even some of Derrida’s more sympathetic critics, however, have not always fully grasped the precise role that the affirmation of finitude and originary violence that attends it plays in this accounting of ethics. For instance, Simon Critchley’s influential Ethics of Deconstruction illustrates the way in which a failure to come fully to terms with finitude amounts to a misfiring critical position. Critchley argues that Derrida’s critique of Levinas seems to posit an irreducible gap between same and other, inside and outside and, in doing so, posits an absolute separation between ethics (responsibility to alterity) and politics (actual empirical action within a given order).⁷ Without articulating how the ethical might inform determinate political action, the argument goes, Derrida’s work has little meaningful ethical and political import.⁸ This sort of argument is not uncommon among Derrida’s detractors, but it misconstrues the way in which for Derrida the contamination of any conception of the outside or other is irreducible. For while the claim to finitude here might imply an inevitable act of epistemic violence upon the other, for Derrida this does not entail the failure of ethics but rather, it’s very condition.

This becomes apparent in looking to the critique of Levinas in “Violence and Metaphysics.” For while Levinas seeks to theorize an exteriority totally transcendent to the reifying discourse of philosophy, a sort of pure difference of pure difference, Derrida asserts the inescapability of the same. As Derrida explains, it is necessary “to state infinity’s excess over totality in the language of totality … it is necessary to state the other in the language of the Same … it is necessary to think true exteriority as non-exteriority.”⁹ The other can only appear within a given and particular context which is in turn destructive of its singularity.¹⁰ “There is no phrase,” Derrida goes on, “which is indeterminate, that is, which does not pass through the violence of the concept… . The very elocution of nonviolent metaphysics is its first disavowal.”¹¹ Accordingly, originary violence is the irreducible condition of all relation since “the other cannot be absolutely exterior [or “cannot be, or be anything,” Derrida adds in a footnote to this sentence] to the same without ceasing to be other.”¹² The same or inside is, Derrida argues, the “only possible point of departure” for any relation to the other.¹³ Consequently, violence is the condition of all relationality and all ethics; violence is what Derrida calls in Of Grammatology the “nonethical opening of ethics.”¹⁴ “One never escapes,” Derrida says, “this economy of war.”¹⁵ On this argument, thought is bound to negotiate rather than transcend violence if it is to avoid what Derrida calls the “worst” disavowal of violence.¹⁶

But then how exactly might this argument for the contamination of the other by the Same offer an ethical orientation to thought? The claim that Derrida’s response to such a question is impoverished is not only Simon Critchley’s. For instance, William Connolly has argued that deconstruction is limited merely to provoking an experience of contingency. While on Connolly’s view such an experience is indeed a core element of a post-foundational political thought, it nevertheless amounts, he argues, to a merely negative and reactive critique that fails to produce positive theoretical alternatives.¹⁷ In a different register, Alain Badiou sees the Levinasian-Derridean inspired account of ethics as at best, banal and insufficient. “Infinite alterity is quite simply what there is,” Badiou argues, and so it offers no ethical or political insight.¹⁸ Similarly, Ernesto Laclau argues that the attempt to attribute an ethics of responsibility to the other as constitutive of, or constituted by, deconstruction is invalid. As he puts it,

The illegitimate transition is to think that from the impossibility of a presence closed in itself [i.e., originary violence], from an “ontological” condition in which the openness to the event, to the heterogeneous, to the radically other is constitutive, some kind of ethical injunction to be responsible and to keep oneself open to the heterogeneity of the other necessarily follows.¹⁹

If the impossibility of the closure of the relation to the other or outside revealed by deconstruction, Laclau argues, is to be constitutive of experience, it must always be prior to any ethical injunction.²⁰ Deconstruction is just “what happens,” while ethics, the claim goes, is not reducible to ontology.²¹ So while Laclau’s more structuralist reading of deconstruction as ontology diverges from Critchley’s, both nevertheless postulate an absolute gap between the unconditional and particular decisions in Derrida’s work and so a failure to inform political practice.²²

While it is not incorrect to note the absence of, in Connolly’s words, “positive” political positions ensuing from deconstruction, this is only because such alternatives would not make sense on Derrida’s terms. Yet this isn’t to say that a sort of ethical orientation does not issue from his work. Indeed, this is one way of reading the desire, articulated in “Violence and Metaphysics,” for “the lesser violence in an economy of violence.”²³ Such an imperative amounts in other words to the avowal of originary violence: “the avowal of violence, is the least possible violence, the only way to repress the worst violence.”²⁴ So while Laclau is right to insist it is contradictory to posit an ethical command transcendent to deconstruction, it is not an injunction beyond all violence which Derrida elicits, but, rather, the affirmation of what “is”: the irreducibility of a force or violence undermining presence or the “proper.”

In this light, it makes sense to conceive Derrida’s work as a form of amor fati, one defined by an imperative to undermine the will to truth’s disavowal of originary violence. Much as we will see is the case for Foucault as well, there is no categorical difference here between the description of what happens and an “ethics” grounded in its affirmation. Genealogical “ethics” is defined by this irreducibility of fate and injunction. But this solicits a further series of questions: How do we recognize a “worse” violence? What exactly might a “violence against violence” amount to?²⁵

The Messianic as Ethical Orientation

Derrida once said in an interview that “deconstruction is a positive response to an alterity which necessarily calls, summons or motivates it.”²⁶ It elicits, he says elsewhere, a “desire for the other,” which acts as an “injunction” or an “unconditional appeal.”²⁷ Such an “injunction,” however, does not imply any specific practices or institutions, nor does it amount to a normative principle. But it does, as Derrida says, elicit “motivational force.”²⁸ To conceive desire for the other or outside as an ethical orientation is therefore, at its core, to refuse or disavow what “is”: that a purely non-violent relation to the other is impossible. Such an account might seem to offer little in the way of ethical principles for action, yet given it takes the finitude of thought as axiomatic, such a normative ground for action is impossible. Nevertheless, it’s perhaps in response to the growing chorus of criticisms of the absence of an ethics organizing his work that the theme of the “desire for the other” becomes an increasingly prevalent one organizing Derrida’s writing in the 1980s and 1990s. This notion of alterity is often formulated by Derrida in temporal terms, as a horizon or messianic event, which, in receding from finite experience, is said to be always futural and, thus, “to-come.”

This formulation of alterity as a futural horizon is useful to understanding the terms by which Derrida formulates an ethics for finite existence. The logic at work here is in fact relatively straightforward. Take, for instance, one of Derrida’s earliest accounts of the logic of the futural event or “to-come” in the context of a discussion of the concept of invention.²⁹ Invention, he argues, “begins by being susceptible to repetition, exploitation, reinscription.”³⁰ That is, because the novelty of an invention is recognizable only in relation to a system of conventions, this means that every invention demands a violent inscription of its singularity within the general in order to be recognized at all.³¹ Thus, as in the broader category of event to which it belongs, invention has an aporetic and promissory structure: it cannot be determined in advance since it implies the suspension of law and yet, to have occurred it must be recuperated by a program or laws. But this in turn means that invention is always susceptible to repetition and reinscription.³² In short, an event cannot be made present since the moment we identify it, we have reduced it.³³

For Derrida this logic of the event implies both the irreducibility and impossibility of the arrival of the other.³⁴ That is, alterity always exceeds any determinate relation or horizon. “Disjointure” is originary to the relation to alterity since the other cannot be made present. But this also implies that a final identification of the event of the arrival of an other is constantly deferred to an open future that can never arrive as such. As one theorist describes it, “At issue is the move from a promise of the future that insists on the “what” of the future, to the atheological, ‘dry’ promise that there is a future, before all else.”³⁵

Once again, we see the conception of alterity here collapses the distinction between ontological description and affirmation, between necessity and obligation. Situated between the determinate and indeterminate, between necessity and injunction, there’s a messianic logic at work here, described by Derrida simply as “an ‘it is necessary’ for the future.”³⁶ For while the promise of the arrival of the other implies a future non-violent relation, violence is in fact irreducible such that finite calculation, strategy, and convention are unavoidable.³⁷ An ethics of negotiating an economy of violence requires choosing among injunctions and, thus, of unjustifiable exclusions and determinations of the other. But the terms by which this choice is oriented is itself defined by an affirmation of what “is”: originary violence.

Ethics and the Necessity of Violence

If ethical decisions always take place within an economy of violence, then, as Derrida sees it, this further implies that finite decisions will necessarily sacrifice alterity. This notion is perhaps most clearly elucidated by Derrida in his book The Gift of Death.³⁸ While the book is mainly addressed to the work of Czech philosopher Jan Patočka, a tangential discussion of God’s demand to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac is illuminating. Derrida interprets Abraham’s response to God’s command to sacrifice his son as an unconditional call of the absolute other, one that suspends the authority of the law that “though shall not kill.” Forced to choose between his responsibility to God and his duty to his son, Abraham’s decision is ultimately, Derrida says, “undecidable.”³⁹ But the import of the account of Abraham’s dilemma for Derrida is that it is not exceptional, but rather has the structure of every ethical choice.⁴⁰ Given the irreducibility of originary violence, every genuine decision must involve the sacrifice of the other to the same.⁴¹ That is, every decision takes place by ignoring, by excluding, and, in short, by sacrificing others:

I cannot respond to the call, the request, the obligation, or even the love of another without sacrificing the other other, the other others. Every other (one) is every (bit) other [tout autre est tout autre], everyone else is completely or wholly other.⁴²

For responsibility to the other to be meaningful, it must be indefinite. Yet since we are always caught within finite and definite relations with others, duty and responsibility are ultimately insufficient.⁴³ Even feeding one’s cat, Derrida suggests, represents the sacrifice of all other cats in the world whom one does not feed.⁴⁴ Infinite responsibility to the singularity of the other therefore forms an impossible horizon that structures the demands of finite and, ultimately, unjustifiable decisions.⁴⁵

Derrida does not therefore conceive alterity in terms of some transcendent law against which acts are measured, as Critchley and others, seem to imply. To conceive it in this way is still to reduce the absolute to the finite, or amounts to the attempt to preserve it as totally infinite and transcendent, as Levinas does. But while on Derrida’s account every decision is necessarily violently reductive and sacrificial of the other, it does not mean that ethical decisions cannot be differentiated or that, as instances of failed responsibility or duty, they remain indistinguishable from one another. There is always the possibility, as Hent de Vries suggests, of the worst and the best.⁴⁶ Absolute responsibility to the singularity of the other precludes licensing anything. In this sense, Laclau is partially correct to argue that no state of affairs necessarily follows from deconstruction, since the impossibility of closure is a structural condition of all experience.⁴⁷ Yet Laclau’s argument occludes that the philosophy is especially critical of ethical or political decisions that seek to derive legitimacy from a metaphysical ground or dogmatic truth, since this is to disavow their finite and contingent status. Duty and necessity become indistinguishable here; closure is structurally impossible and yet, the possibility of openness to alterity “ought” not to be inhibited.

In the first part of his essay “The Force of Law,” Derrida rather schematically outlines this logic in terms of an account of the relationship between ideals of justice and determinate laws. Justice, says Derrida, is “infinite, incalculable, rebellious to rule and foreign to symmetry, heterogeneous and heterotopic.”⁴⁸ By contrast, finite and conditional law is a “stabilizable and calculable apparatus, a system of regulated and coded prescriptions.”⁴⁹ Accordingly, empirical law amounts to a sphere where one negotiates the determinate, and, thus, finite calculation is necessary. “The law,” says Derrida, “applies equally to all,” and yet “each case is other, each decision is different and requires an absolutely unique interpretation which no existing, coded rule can or ought to guarantee absolutely.”⁵⁰ Therefore, while law forms determinate horizons in the form of legal decisions, unconditional justice exceeds every horizon. As such, the justice of every single legal decision is by definition impossible.

Derrida’s argument posits the necessity of oscillating between two poles: from the injunction or command of the unconditional to calculation in the finite. As Derrida puts it, “infinite justice commands calculation.”⁵¹ In other words, the “ethical” takes place within the finite, but as its “infinitisation.”⁵² That is, justice cannot transcend its inscription in empirical law since justice requires a decision.⁵³ Yet every empirical inscription amounts to a sacrifice of the singularity of the other to “a system of regulated and coded inscriptions” and, thus, to a secondary violence in the form of commands.⁵⁴ In effect, to be responsible to the other is to engage in violence, for it amounts to the necessity of making decisions, of pursuing some paths and not others. Insofar as justice cannot be made present in any particular decision, it therefore remains always “to-come,” and, concurrently, our responsibility is only realized violently.⁵⁵

Derrida’s deconstructive method therefore seeks to make operative another order of violence than is operative in metaphysics. In “Violence and Metaphysics” Derrida refers to this other violence as a “violence against violence,” while in the book Rogues he refers to it as a “weak force” or a “force without power.”⁵⁶ But it is perhaps in the essay “The Force of Law” that Derrida most clearly makes a distinction between two orders of violence. On the one hand, a mystical or messianic force of non-representational, excessive, hyperbolic force undermines every identity or closure. On the other hand, the “mythical” violence of foundations disavows its own contingency; it denies that “its ultimate foundation is unfounded.”⁵⁷

In summary, if the ethical orientation proposed by Derrida affirms the messianic force which undermines identity, it nevertheless implies a second affirmation: of the irreducibility of transcending violence as such. This notion of an irreducibility of violence—of two orders of violence simultaneously distinguished yet inseparable; of opening and closing to the other or outside and motivated by a “desire” for it—forms a key point of dialogue and difference with Foucault. Before engaging in this dialogue, however, it is Foucault’s genealogical ethics that now demands examination.

FOUCAULT, THE SAME, AND THE OTHER

In an otherwise perceptive account of similarities and differences between Derrida and Foucault, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak inadvertently signals their profound difference on the question of ethics when she admits, “I cannot find anywhere in Foucault the thought of a founding violence.”⁵⁸ The disclosure betrays Spivak’s Derridean bias. For Foucault’s philosophy admits no category distinction between an originary or messianic force and the secondary violence of founding or legislating. Instead, it advances an immanent plane of relations between forces, out of which pretensions to transcendence emerge. To decry Foucault’s failure to interrogate “founding violence” is thus to impose a different “grander narrative” upon his thought.

If this is indeed the case, it begs the question of how Foucault proposes this economy of power relations is to be ethically negotiated. Can Foucault too provide a notion of “better or worse”? To respond to this question, we will begin by delineating an “economy of violence,” which can be found in Foucault’s genealogical works and which places him in a dialogue with Derrida over the question of violence. We will then turn to look to Foucault’s final works on ancient ethics in order to show that, like Derrida, Foucault also has a notion of “better” and “worse” violence and that it too is motivated by a “desire for the other” or the outside but in a form incommensurable to the schema proposed by Derrida.

Economies of Power and Violence

In outlining the inherent contingency of any relation of power, Foucault provides an analytic whereby power can be distinguished from what he sometimes calls “domination.” This is most clearly expressed in the late essay “The Subject and Power” wherein Foucault implies a category distinction between “violence” and “power”: “a relationship of violence acts upon the body or upon things; it forces, it bends, it breaks, it destroys, or it closes of all possibilities.”⁵⁹ Conceived as a positive force, power produces subjective possibilities and capacities while violence, a purely negative force, closes them off. For example, when Foucault says that “a system of constraints becomes truly intolerable when the individuals who are affected by it don’t have the means of modifying it” or “where the determining conditions saturate the whole there is no relation of power,” he offers a distinction between power as a strategic relation within a field of possibilities and domination as the ossification of a given order or more ominously, as the attempt to eliminate possibility altogether.⁶⁰ Foucault’s analyses thus always move within these poles: of limits as limiting and limits as constituting possibility.⁶¹ Such an “economy” offers in some sense a diagnostic tool to evaluate particular regimes of power.

A number of theorists have suggested that a radical agonistic politics arises from Foucault’s economy of power relations, one which would be grounded in what William Connolly has described as the constant pursuit to “find space for the other to live and speak,” or, as Leslie Paul Thiele puts it, “it is the enhancement of struggle—not its mere production or exacerbation—[that] must form the criterion of political judgment.”⁶² These theorists decipher in Foucault an ethico-political project grounded in the maintenance of a political sphere that contests any claims to necessity. On this account, Foucault pursues an “agonopluralistic” ethic that would engender certain conditions of freedom in relation to the regimes in which our subjectivity is constituted.⁶³ Yet this is a limited perspective, for it fails to ask how such an ethics derives what Derrida calls “motivational force.”⁶⁴ In other words, what theoretical resources does Foucault’s work offer for thinking its ethical motivations? As we will see in a moment, the chasm dividing Derrida and Foucault becomes especially gaping with regard to such a query.

Even among readers sympathetic to Foucault, the coherent formulation of an ethos is said to be missing from his work. Judith Butler, for instance, argues that Foucault generally occludes the fact that his own questions are motivated by a “desire to recognize another or be recognized by one.”⁶⁵ It is with the desire to confer or receive recognition from the other that Butler argues, in a decidedly Hegelian logic, motivates critique of identity and social hierarchy.⁶⁶ Without an account of the desire for recognition, the argument goes, Foucault is unable to address the constitutive ethical force of his own genealogies. More notoriously, in her paradigm-forming essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak criticizes Foucault along with Gilles Deleuze for what she sees as their abandonment of the question of the domination of the “subaltern” subject. In their refusal to ascribe to the intellectual the role of representing the interests of the oppressed and concordant desire to “let the other speak,” Deleuze and Foucault, she claims, fetishize the subaltern.⁶⁷ Their rejection of representation, she argues, amounts to a disavowal of heterogeneity that not only neglects economic and social hierarchies privileging Western intellectuals but also invents an oppressed subject capable of speaking of its conditions and being heard when doing so. On these grounds, Spivak opposes a Derridean deconstruction of Eurocentrism as staging an opening of the Western, first-world “Same” to the third-world oppressed other, to what she takes as Deleuze and Foucault’s implicit occlusion and silencing of the heterogeneity of the subaltern subject.

Arguments such as Butler’s or Spivak’s rest, however, with a conception of the relation to the other articulated in terms that might align with Derrida’s work, but certain not Foucault’s. Indeed, to query if “the subaltern can speak?” or “can I receive recognition from the other?” are the sorts of questions that Foucault’s ontology of power relations rejects altogether, for they pose the question of alterity in (quasi)transcendental terms.⁶⁸ In doing so, to recall Foucault’s argument in “My Body, This Paper, This Fire,” they assert the authority of philosophy over local discourses.⁶⁹ Our question is thus, how would a Foucauldian “ontology of immanence,” which ostensibly occludes the question of the other, find “motivational force”? The surest answer is found in Foucault’s late works on Ancient ethics.

Care of the Self and Knowledge of the Self

Consistent with our account up to this point, in the work on ancient Greek, Roman, and early Christian ethical practices that consumes most of the final years of his life as well as his last two published books, Foucault approaches his topic by bracketing juridical moral prescriptions and laws, to assess the “problematizations” to which diverse ethical practices are a response. On this view, moral rules change little over time; their analysis only obstructs an understanding of social change.⁷⁰ Differentiation emerges not upon the terrain of a history of moral obligations but upon a history of moral conduct; what Foucault calls “subjectivation.” Foucault’s focus on ethical practices thus displaces the juridical ethical question of responsibility for, or recognition by, an other with an analysis of the techniques by which we become subjects.⁷¹ In turn, it is in these distinct terms by which he conceives an ethical relation between same and other.

Foucault’s turn to ancient ethics is usually put down to a rejoinder to modern and contemporary forms of power and domination that consume his work in the 1970s.⁷² For, as Foucault describes apparatuses of power in Discipline and Punish and elsewhere, these anchor the development of subjective capacities and creativity to the intensification of power relations.⁷³ In the broadest terms, this form of power, originating with a Christian ethics of self-renouncement and developing up to contemporary neoliberalism, amounts to a quasi-juridical mode of “subjectivation.” That is, this is an experience of subjectivity mediated by the demand for constant self-examination and self-transformation, one that operates in relation to the strictures of some law or rule. By contrast, the work on ethics formulates a distinction between moral systems grounded in rigid control of the subject and Greek and Roman ethical practices. Foucault views the latter in terms of dynamic relations between the subject, his actions, and pleasures and moral rules.⁷⁴ In this regard, the genealogy of ancient ethics thus examines sets of practices that problematize the self’s capacity to direct or master itself as opposed to those where another directs the subject.

Ultimately, the distinction implied here between a juridical and an active ethics differentiates Foucault’s conception of the relation to alterity from Derrida’s as well as amounting to a rejoinder to Foucault’s critics, including Butler and Spivak. For Foucault’s formulation hinges upon a notion of two distinct modes of conceiving the subject’s relation to truth. This is a view that Foucault formulates across a range of works produced in terms of the Athenian distinction between “care of the self” and “knowledge of the self.” By a priority of the “knowledge of the self” Foucault seems to imply all those ethical systems that, from an early Platonist Christianity, are grounded upon a metaphysical experience defined by a desire for a transcendent “other world.” By contrast, “care of the self” entails ethics focused upon the activity of immanent transformation of both the self and the world.

The difference between these two modes of “ethical differentiation” is subtle, and yet crucial to understanding Foucault’s divergence from Derrida.⁷⁵ In ancient Greece and Rome, Foucault argues, one finds that a morality anchored in “care of the self” took precedence over the “knowledge of oneself.” That is, an ascetic process of self-transformation or askesis had been a precondition for philosophical access to truth. As Foucault puts it, “for the subject to have the right access to the truth, he must be changed, transformed, shifted, and become to some extent and up to a certain point, other than himself.”⁷⁶ In this context the role of knowledge resides merely in assisting the subject to form his ethical being and is thus secondary to the care the subject takes in relation to itself. In other words, logos were only instrumental to the ultimate goal of self-mastery or self-conversion.⁷⁷ Ethical practices were not grounded upon obedience to a law, and therefore, ethics is not grounded upon the construction of a systematic knowledge of the subject itself as it would be in, for instance, the prison, the factory, or the psychiatric hospital. Rather, one had to transform oneself to experience truth.⁷⁸ Such an experience of ethics entailed an active experience of truth. As Foucault puts it, “to have access to the truth is to have access to being itself, access which is such that the being to which one has access will, at the same time and as an after-effect, be the agent of transformation of the one who has access to it.”⁷⁹

An experience of ethics as ascetic practice sits in contrast to the modern experience of subjectivity, but the roots of this distinction reach further still. For instance, interiority is already an object of knowledge for an early Christianity that interprets the forces giving birth to man’s thoughts as originating either from God or Satan.⁸⁰ Along similar lines, in the modern context, an analogous investigation of the interiority, of the soul, is managed by carceral and clinical institutions focused upon the correction of behavior. Where the intentions and theological or psychological forces governing actions are the object of knowledge and corrective action, one can say that the care of the self has been surrendered to an other who bears a priori knowledge of the subject.

Foucault posits Descartes’ Meditations as a decisive turning point in this historical relationship between care and knowledge. On the one hand, as a “meditation” the text amounts to a spiritual exercise, a care of the self, so that the subject is transformed to be capable to access truth. On the other hand, since truth is grounded upon a correct method, the subject with the “right” to access truth is identified by an exclusion of care or any necessary self-transformation.⁸¹ Accordingly, Descartes marks a key junction between ancient and modern ethics since he generates a relation between the subject and truth that eliminates the need for a prior self-conversion. Following Descartes, truth is no longer conceived in terms of conversion, contest, or power but in terms of adequation between idea and object.⁸² Kant’s historical status is in this sense secondary to the Cartesian grounding of the subject, since he merely shifts the Cartesian guarantee of truth in God to an analysis of man’s faculties of representation.⁸³ In any case, once the subject’s relation to truth is de-spiritualized, it comes to be sustained instead by universal principles external to life rather than immanent to it.⁸⁴

An Other World or Making the World Otherwise

Insofar as the ancient conception of the care of the self is grounded in a notion of truth as “effective” and so as inextricable from power, this implies that, not unlike Derrida, “ought” is derived from “is” on Foucault’s account. That is, the priority that Foucault accords pre-Christian ethics rests with their apparent avowal of the immanence of knowledge and power. We can unpack these differences further. For while the ancient notion of care of the self is grounded in a relation to truth in terms of askesis or ethos, Foucault argues that the modern philosophical priority of knowledge of the self reverses the relation: in modernity truth demands that the subject become other. Moreover, once subjectivation is sustained by transcendent principles rather than local and effective truths, the function of care shifts from a relation that one forms with oneself to a relation to a given institution or individual. In this sense, in modernity power “begins to take care of its subjects,” as Edward McGushin puts it.⁸⁵ Conflated with philosophical anthropology, moral law dictates that one defer to an expert who has better access to knowledge of what is considered “normal.”⁸⁶ Any dissonance from the norm is thought to be the result of ignorance, moral weakness, biological defect, or perversion and calls for further “care.” Norms function as principles for differentiating, evaluating, and recognizing individuals, and, thus, increased subjective capacities are no longer tied to a practice of freedom or the formation of a relation to the outside but, rather, an intensification of power relations.⁸⁷ Modern power mediates the subject’s identity by an other who demands subjugation to universal rules and so demands integration into moral and political systems that precede the subject. This contrast between an ethics that takes care as primary and those that give primacy to knowledge is clear if one brings Foucault’s late work on ethics into dialogue with his histories of modern power.

The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self share a four-part analytical framework of ethical problematization that can draw a broad contrast between ancient and modern subjective experience and, even more broadly, begin to suggest how a Foucauldian approach can be said, not unlike Derrida, to formulate two orders of violence: one fully expressing its immanence to power, the other grounded in a transcendent truth and disavowal of power.⁸⁸

First, ethical problematizations always involve a substance or material of moral conduct. For the early Christians this consists in a body imbued with corruption and sin while in the modern regime of sexuality emergent in the seventeenth century, sexual impulses become the object of physiological and psychological knowledge.⁸⁹ By contrast the Greeks and Romans seem not to conceive a prior subjective interiority to be discovered and overcome.⁹⁰ Both Greek and Roman ethics were grounded, Foucault argues, in an ontology of strength whose primary concern was to refrain from excess where it came to physical pleasure.⁹¹

Secondly, ethical systems contain “a mode of subjection” whereby one lives one’s moral obligations. For the early Christians, this consists in submission to universal law.⁹² In the modern, post-Cartesian experience of knowledge, medical, legal, and psychological discourses determine the subject’s relation to a given norm and this in turn establishes their place in a given table or hierarchy. By contrast, ancient moral subjection was not governed by a “table of forbidden acts” but by need (itself governed by moderation), time (governed by circumstance, often in relation to a calendar or age), and status (governed by one’s position in relation to others).⁹³

Third, ethical systems have forms of “elaboration”: techniques through which the subject is transformed. In early Christianity, this consists in what Foucault refers to at one point as “decipherment of the soul and a purificatory hermeneutics of desires.”⁹⁴ The modern regime of sexuality inherits the Christian technique of confession and the hermeneutics of desire that accompany it, but where confession once led to penance it now tends to lead to therapy. Both Christian and modern sexual ethics are therefore grounded in the demand that the subject speak the truth of him or herself to the other and to have this truth reinterpreted and situated in relation to a religious law or socio-scientific norm. Conversely, the Greeks employed knowledge mainly as a guide to measured and controlled relation to pleasures, which Foucault calls a “domination” over the self.⁹⁵ If the Romans differed from the ancient Greeks, it is insofar as they were more concerned with the dangers involved with the excess of pleasures and thus betrayed an angst over the relationship between sexual act and body, placing a greater emphasis on abstinence and self-scrutiny, a greater value on the marriage bond, and an increased importance on practices of self-examination.⁹⁶

Finally, what Foucault refers to as the “telos” of ethical practice for the early Christians is defined by a desire for self-renunciation while for the modern confessional apparatus it lies in the production of a normal and productive citizen.⁹⁷ Conversely, Foucault describes the ancient Greeks and Romans as sharing an ethos whereby aesthetics and ethics were not distinct such that one lived well if one had gained control over one’s pleasures. The Greeks sought a “mastery of the self” whereby the individual, in developing a capacity for moderation, could become free in relation to his pleasures.⁹⁸ This was considered a precondition for a political life that would inevitably involve the mastery of others.⁹⁹ For the Hellenists and Romans the telos of ethics was the “conversion of the self,” which, in contrast to the ancient Greek vision of a triumph over pleasures, entailed self-control or self-mastery that itself would be the source of pleasure.¹⁰⁰ This gradual shift was reflected in the Romans’ increasing suspicion of the body or the polarization they drew between the love of boys—more common among the Greeks—and the institution of marriage.

In summary, Foucault’s study of Ancient ethics discovers a different moral position for philosophy wherein practices are not submitted to universalizing rules: a “morality with no claim to universality,” as Paul Veyne puts it.¹⁰¹ Thus, Foucault argues that rather than the “hermeneutics of desire” that modern society inherits from early Christianity, the Greeks invented an immanent ethical discourse focused upon what ethical practices do and what their effects are. “Norms” in this sense were immanent to practices since the stylistic criteria upon which they were based, and so excluded the necessity of universal moral law grounded in the supposed ethical substance of the subject. Moreover, on this understanding ethics did not imply a disjunction of truth from power.

It’s worth remarking at this point that Foucault’s late turn to pagan ethical practices was not intended to fulfill what many of his interpreters considered to be the absent normative ground in his work. Rather, the conception of ethics at the level of self-directed practices only echoes the broader theoretical impulse behind his oeuvre for a thought of the outside immanent to interiority and not transcendent to it.¹⁰² This implies that, if Foucault’s work can be said to propose a pole of “lesser violence” within an economy of power relations, this is insofar as it implies a subject whose relation to its exteriority is not grounded in a law that it seeks to re-present. This amounts to a thought of what is exterior or outside thought that would not, as Foucault already puts it in The Order of Things, “separate itself from what it is not and takes responsibility for itself.”¹⁰³ The Greek and Roman practice of subjectivation is not subjected to transcendence since it is not governed by a conception of the outside that thought re-presents and organizes.

Identity and Alterity

While Foucault’s understanding of ethics might not provide a normative ground for action—a demand Foucault would nevertheless reject—it nonetheless does offer something of an “orientation” by which the finite subject might negotiate a social existence inseparable from power. But while for Derrida such a claim implies an ultimately thwarted desire for the absolutely other, Foucault’s late work is anchored upon the example offered by ancient ethical practices implying a relation to the other not subject to the force of authority, but instead immanent to local values and goals. Accordingly, insofar as one can say there is a desire or responsibility to alterity motivating Foucault’s work, it is defined by the terms of his “grander narrative.” On these terms, ethics would not be grounded in the desire for the absolute but would work “effectively” to transform the self and the world in localized ways.¹⁰⁴

Recall that while Derrida ultimately rejects the possibility of a non-violent relation to the other, he nevertheless implies that an “economy of lesser violence” is possible only against the background of an (im)possible horizon or messianic promise of non-violence. As Derrida puts it,

a certain force and violence is irreducible, but none the less this violence can only be practiced and can only appear as such on the basis of a non-violence, a vulnerability, an exposition. I do not believe in non-violence as a descriptive and determinable experience, but rather as an irreducible promise and of the relation to the other as essentially non-instrumental.¹⁰⁵

An ethics of lesser violence is thus conceivable, Derrida argues, on the basis of an irreducible promise and desire for a relation to the other qua other, that is, as absolute alterity. By contrast, as we have seen, Foucault holds out no moral responsibility for the other. For his critics this amounts to an evacuation of ethical responsibility altogether. Indeed, Foucault himself seems to explicitly reject ethical responsibility as constitutive at times. For instance, in a late interview he states that “care for others … should not be put before care of oneself. The care of the self is ethically prior in that the relationship with oneself is ontologically prior.”¹⁰⁶ But there is a coherent rationale behind Foucault’s rejection of responsibility to alterity as it is usually articulated by contemporary continental philosophers. This is because for Foucault the “mastery” or “discipline” of the self is autonomous insofar as it rejects a transcendent truth imposed upon it.

On Foucault’s view, ethics amounts to a practice of self-transformation not governed by an other. Accordingly, to expand this analytic to include a relation to the other is to formulate an asymmetrical relation of power at risk of ossifying into a relation of domination. It is assumingly for this reason that Foucault argues that the relation of government or care of the self “defines the relation of power over the self independently of any statutory correlation and any exercise of power over others.”¹⁰⁷ In Foucault’s terms, otherness is not conceived as an “oppositional” difference that lies outside the horizons of the “same” and so does not begin from the perspective of an opposition between same and other as it does for Derrida.¹⁰⁸ Ethics here amounts to a recognition that no universal or unconditional ethical concepts can be located beyond their particular and determinate articulations. That is, Foucault does not locate alterity as transcendent to, or in excess of the empirical since for him singularity and otherness always already defines the present.¹⁰⁹

Such a view is echoed in a key moment in Deleuze’s book on Foucault where Deleuze aptly refers to Nietzsche’s dictum of “the iron hand of necessity throwing the dice of chance.”¹¹⁰ This formulation—used to describe the way in which power relations ceaselessly produce difference from out of positive, never stable sets of varying relations between discourses, rules, practices, institutions, spaces, and bodies—implies that alterity appears here from within the determinate, rather than as its absolute other. Alterity appears in the constant play of differences between chance (the outside) and necessity (the determinate inside).¹¹¹ Foucault’s account of alterity is defined by the fact that it does not emerge in the failure of the formal structure of a given concept but, rather, by its place in a field of relations and the transformations this undergoes. The event or arrival of otherness is not thought in terms of (quasi)transcendence but is instead theorized as immanent to the system in which it appears. No radical interruption is theorized nor is one necessary on this view, since Foucault seeks to show the ways in which any system or field is in constant mutation and reconfiguration. Otherness appears from within a system; the same is always already other. As Pierre Macherey puts it,

It is as though the subject were the same of the other—the being, on the contrary, dialectically, the other of the same—that is, this ‘identity’ without substance, which has no other thickness, no other materiality, than that of a difference or a limit.¹¹²

Otherness is articulated here, in terms not dissimilar to Derrida’s, as occurring at the inside of the outside. Yet, Macherey continues, for Foucault this limit is not,

between two independent orders, for example, between a world of exteriority, where there is the other, and a world of interiority where there is only the same. But it is a question of that limit which, in every order, in every normed system, reveals a margin (a certain possibility of refolding) in it and not outside it.¹¹³

Foucault thinks a relation to the other distinct from the one commonly conceived in contemporary “continental” political theory; his is an alterity without any mediation or opposition.

THE SAME, THE OTHER, AND THE BETWEEN

At this point let us return to our central claim: if there are different ethical strategies that emerge between Derrida and Foucault, this arises due to two competing “grander narratives” framed here as two theorizations of the ethical relation between same and other. But we have also seen that on a formal level, their projects proceed in parallel ways. That is, while both affirm finitude, where ethics is involved both nonetheless seem to define a “lesser violence” (to use Derrida’s phrase) as an avowal of that very irreducibility.

Moreover, their ethics are both organized around the affirmation of what “is,” yet their ontologies amount to two distinct accounts of existence such that the interlocutor’s work appears as a violent reduction and determination of otherness or excess. To put this into the terms we developed in chapter 3, if we start either from an orientation to the “aporia” of otherness or conversely, from the “problem” of the relation to self and others, the contrasting theory will necessarily appear to have failed to affirm the “true” medium of differentiation, and so will have failed both philosophically but also ethically. As we saw, the charge of ethical failure, explicit in the cogito debate, is generated by the axiomatic decision to negotiate finitude in one of two ways. Accordingly, the decision for a particular grander narrative is the anterior condition to the charge of ethical failure.

From this perspective, it’s clear that the incommensurability of Derrida and Foucault’s work cannot be overcome. There is no scope for a rapprochement between them no matter how formally similar their philosophies might be. Conciliation is revoked at the outset since each thinker posits an incommensurable “grander narrative” that acts as a methodological strategy that circumscribes the terms of the other’s text. It was these two strategies that we described in chapter 3 under the names of aporia and problem while in this chapter I have sought to describe the ethical implications that follow. There’s a circularity at work here between finitude and a “grander narrative” that necessarily reduces the interlocutor’s account but which itself cannot be grounded or justified.

Consequently, where we frame the ethical relation in Derridean terms, as we have seen, Foucault will have appeared to fail to account for the recognition of the other motivating his work. Analogously, this reduction can be reversed by depicting the relation between Derrida and Foucault in Foucauldian terms. From this position, as we saw in chapter 2, Derrida appears to elide the medium where difference occurs, and, thus, he disavows his own position within a particular power/knowledge apparatus.¹¹⁴ In privileging transcendental philosophical questions (How can I be responsible for the other? How can I recognize the other? etc.), Derrida effaces the very particular fields of ethical technologies that construct subjects able to ask and understand these questions. In seeing all discourses through the horizon of philosophical questions, Derrida is thus blind to the singularity or particularity of his own discourse.

Conversely, a more generous Foucauldian understanding of deconstruction is proposed by Edward McGushin and Antonio Calcagno who argue that deconstruction in itself qualifies as a mode of “care of the self.” On this interpretation, deconstruction would constitute a form of ethical askesis insofar as the experience of aporia qualifies as a subjective self-transformation to attain truth, rather than as a prior truth that determines the subject. Deconstruction, in other words, might consist in the establishment of a relation to oneself. As McGushin puts it, “The subject who goes through the experience of a deconstruction attains a new self-determination in terms of responsibility.”¹¹⁵ But such a claim involves the move once again of claiming priority for one grander narrative over another. That is, conditional for reading deconstruction in terms of Foucault’s account of ethics is the reduction of Derrida’s account of the relation to the Other to a set of particular practices and, thus, on Derrida’s terms, of the Other to the Same and a doubly violent disavowal of that reduction.

For both thinkers thought affirms its finitude, its own empirical and particular point of departure, but it also articulates an excess, a play of difference that it cannot master and yet can narrativize. Such a move is totalizing and self-defeating from the outset for it is both ultimately unjustifiable and irreducible. Ethics, on these terms, can only amount to the articulation of finitude and the accusation of a “worse violence” of any theorist whose work does not accord with a given grander narrative.

NOTES

1.See Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics. See also Slavoj Žižek, Violence. New York: Picador, 2008.

2.Kevin Thompson, “Forms of Resistance: Foucault on Tactical Reversal and Self-Formation.” Continental Philosophy Review. No. 36 (2003). Pp. 113–138.

3.The argument that the “ethics” of deconstruction arises through an engagement with Levinas is well known. See, for instance, Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction, and Drucilla Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit. London: Routledge, 1992.

4.Hobson, Opening Lines, p. 36.

5.Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 403, n.2. See also Hent de Vries, Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, 2002. P. 134; Hent de Vries, “Violence and Testimony.” Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination (Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, Eds.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. P. 23; Hobson, Opening Lines. P. 44.

6.Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Alphonso Lingis, Trans.). Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991. P. 80. See also Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (Susan Hanson, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

7.Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction, p. 42 and passim.

8.Ibid, pp. 200, 236.

9.Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 140.

10.Ibid., p. 142.

11.Ibid., p. 185.

12.Ibid., pp. 158 and 404, n.45.

13.Ibid., p. 156.

14.Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 140.

15.Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 185.

16.Ibid., pp. 146, 162, 191.

17.William Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. P. 36.

18.Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (Peter Hallward, Trans.). London: Verso, 2001. Pp. 25, 27. While Badiou’s discussion centers around Levinas, Peter Hallward suggests that Badiou’s critique of post-structuralist ethics clearly extends to Derrida. See Peter Hallward, “Introduction.” Badiou’s Ethics. Pp. xxi–xxvii.

19.Ernesto Laclau, Emancipations. London: Verso, 2007. P. 77.

20.Ibid.

21. Ernesto Laclau, “Deconstruction, Pragmatism, Hegemony.” In Deconstruction and Pragmatism (Simon Critchley and Chantal Mouffe, Eds.). London: Routledge, 1996. Pp. 47–68, 53. At least in one sense Laclau is correct for no ethical necessity could be said to follow from Derrida’s works without submitting them to some transcendent principle. We could also add Slavoj Žižek to this list since he relies on Critchley’s understanding of deconstruction. See Slavoj Žižek, “Melancholy and the Act.” Critical Inquiry. Vol. 26, No. 4 (Summer 2000). Pp. 657–681.

22.The reference to Laclau’s “structuralist” deconstruction is from Aletta Norval, “Hegemony after Deconstruction: The Consequence of Undecidability.” Journal of Political Ideologies. Vol. 9, No. 2 (2004). Pp. 139–157. For the debate over the status of ethics in Laclau’s theory of hegemony see Simon Critchley, “Ethics, Politics and Radical Democracy: The History of a Disagreement,” and Ernesto Laclau “Ethics, Politics and Radical Democracy: A Response to Simon Critchley.” Both in Culture Machine. Vol. 4. (2002). (https://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm) (accessed 18 July 2017)

23.Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 146.

24.Ibid., p. 162.

25.Ibid., p. 146.

26.Jacques Derrida, “Deconstruction and the Other: An Interview with Derrida.” Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers (Richard Kearney, Ed.). Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994. P. 118.

27.Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p. 53; Jacques Derrida, “Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism,” Deconstruction and Pragmatism (Simon Critchley and Chantal Mouffe, Eds.). London: Routledge, 1996. P. 83; Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc. (Samuel Weber, Trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988. P. 152.

28.Derrida, Rogues, p. XIV. See also Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Eric Prenowitz, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. P. 126.

29.Derrida, Inventions of the Other. Richard Beardsworth points to this essay as marking the beginning of a shift in Derrida’s work toward the question of the event, the opening to the new, and a futural logic of otherness. See Richard Beardsworth, “The Future of Critical Philosophy and World Politics.” Derrida: Negotiating the Legacy (Madeleine Fagan, et al., Eds.). Publication location: Evanston, 2007. Pp. 45–65. See also the “Conclusion” to Richard Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political, London: Routledge, 1996. Geoffrey Bennington rejects Beardsworth’s formulation of two distinct trajectories in Derrida’s oeuvre distinguished by a concern in the earlier work with an absolute past and the question of originary technicity and with an absolute future in the later work as a false and positivist dichotomy. See Geoffrey Bennington’s Interrupting Derrida. London: Routledge, 2000. Pp. 174–179.

30.Derrida, Inventions of the Other, p. 16.

31.One of Derrida’s privileged exemplars of this logic is following poem by Francois Ponge titled “Fable”: “with the word with begins then this text, of which the first line says the truth.” (Francois Ponge, Proêmes. Paris: Gallimard, 1948 quoted in Derrida, Inventions of the Other, p. 8.) The phrase is contained in the first word of the poem: “with.” However, only in its repetition does sense appear. Repetition confirms that what is new can appear, but this necessary repetition simultaneously destabilizes, undermines, and contaminates the new. On Derrida’s reading of Ponge see also Marion Hobson, Opening Lines, p. 184.

32.Derrida, Inventions of the Other, p. 16.

33.Ibid., p. 54.

34.Ibid., p. 11.

35.Matthias Fritsch, The Promise of Memory. New York: State University of New York Press, 2005. P. 60.

36.Derrida, Specters of Marx. P. 73.

37.See Derrida, “Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism,” p. 83.

38.Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (David Wills, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

39.Note the parallels in this account of the decision with that given in Derrida’s “Cogito and the History of Madness.” In both cases the absolute contingency of the decision is only concealed and stabilized by positing an absolute guarantor, which, in both cases, is figured by God.

40.Derrida, The Gift of Death, p. 72.

41.De Vries, Religion and Violence, p. 159.

42.Derrida, The Gift of Death, p. 68.

43.Ibid., pp. 51, 61, 68.

44.Ibid., pp. 66.

45.Ibid.

46.De Vries, Religion and Violence, p. 196.

47.Laclau, Emancipations, p. 78. As Laclau goes on to say, “a case for totalitarianism can be presented starting from deconstructionist premises.”

48.Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, p. 255.

49.Ibid., p. 250.

50.Ibid., p. 250.

51.Ibid., p. 257.

52.Bennington, Interrupting Derrida, p. 16.

53.Derrida, Acts of Religion, p. 254.

54.Ibid., p. 250.

55.Ibid., pp. 238, 257.

56.Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 117; Rogues, p. XIV.

57.Derrida, Acts of Religion, p. 242.

58.Spivak, “More on Power/Knowledge,” p. 150.

59.Foucault, Essential Works, Volume III, p. 340. Emphasis added.

60.Foucault, Essential Works, Volume II, p. 197; Foucault, Essential Works, Volume III, p. 325.

61.This is the central thematic of Jon Simons’ Foucault and the Political, London: Routledge, 2002. See also Paul Patton, “Foucault’s Subject of Power,” The Later Foucault (Jeremy Moss, Ed.). London: Sage, 1998.

62.William Connolly, Politics and Ambiguity. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. P. 94; Leslie Paul Thiele, “The Agony of Politics: The Nietzschean Roots of Foucault’s Thought.” The American Political Science Review. Vol. 84, No. 3 (September 1990). Pp. 907–925, quoted on p. 922. Jon Simons, Foucault and the Political; David Owen, Maturity and Modernity: Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault and the Ambivalence of Reason. London: Routledge, 1994.

63.William Connolly, “Beyond Good and Evil: The Ethical Sensibility of Michel Foucault.” Political Theory. Vol. 21, No. 3 (August 1993). Pp. 365–389. Quoted on p. 370.

64.Derrida, Rogues, p. XIV.

65.Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. P. 24.

66.Ibid. See also Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth Century France. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

67.Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Cary Nelson & Lawrence Grossberg, Eds.). Urbana: University of Illinois, 1988. Pp. 271–313. The interview to which Spivak refers is “Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.” Language, Counter-Memory and Practice (Donald F. Bouchard, Ed.). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977. Pp. 205–217.

68.For a critique of Spivak and defense of Deleuze and Foucault, see Warren Montag, “Can the Subaltern Speak and Other Transcendental Questions.” Cultural Logic. Vol. 1, No. 2 (Spring 1998). (http://clogic.eserver.org/1-2/montag.html) (accessed 18 July 2017).

69.For a critique of Spivak and defense of Deleuze and Foucault see Warren Montag, “Can the Subaltern Speak and Other Transcendental Questions.” Cultural Logic. Vol.1, No.2, (Spring 1998). http://clogic.eserver.org (accessed 21 July 2008).

70.Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, p. 250.

71.Ibid., p. 4; Foucault, Essential Works, Volume III, p. 177.

72.Stuart Elden offers a comprehensive account of the emergence of the theme of technologies of the self in Foucault’s oeuvre in Foucault’s Last Decade. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2016.

73.Foucault, Essential Works, Volume I, p. 317.

74.Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, pp. 29–30.

75.Foucault’s introduces the concept of “ethical differentiation” in The Courage of Truth: The Government of the Self and Others II, Lectures at the College de France, 1983–1984 (Graham Burchell, Trans.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. P. 35 and passim.

76.Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, p. 15.

77.Ibid., p. 317.

78.Ibid., p. 318. See also Beatrice Han, “The Analytic of Finitude and the History of Subjectivity”. The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (Gary Gutting, Ed.) (Edward Pile, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 176–209.

79.Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, p. 191.

80.See Foucault, Fearless Speech, p. 109.

81.Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, p. 190; Edward McGushin, “Foucault and the Problem of the Subject,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, Vol. 31, No. 5–6. Pp. 623–648. P. 638.

82.Han, “The Analytic of Finitude and the History of Subjectivity.”

83. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, p. 36. In this sense there is a reversal from the relative primacy of Kant in The Order of Things in Foucault’s last works. If we proceed in terms of a question of the relation to oneself rather than the representative relation between subject and object, then it is Descartes and not Kant who assumes the status of founder of the modern episteme.

84.Frederic Gros, “Course Context” in Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, p. 532

85.McGushin, “Foucault and the Problem of the Subject.” P. 641.

86.Laura Hedgehold, The Body Problematic: Political Imagination in Kant and Foucault. University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 2007. P. 260.

87.Ibid.

88.This distinction is suggested by Claire Colebrook, “Ethics, Positivity and Gender: Foucault, Aristotle and the Care of the Self,” Philosophy Today. No. 42, 1998. Pp. 40–52; David Owen, Maturity and Modernity, p. 159; and Sebastien Harrer, “The Theme of Subjectivity in Foucault’s Lecture Series ‘L’Herméneutique du Sujet.” Foucault Studies. No. 2 (May 2005). Pp. 75–96.

89.Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume III: The Care of the Self (Robert Hurley, Trans.). New York: Vintage, 1990. P. 239.

90.Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, p. 11.

91.Ibid., p. 4.

92.Ibid., p. 27; Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self, p. 239.

93.Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, p. 106; Timothy O’Leary. Foucault and the Art of Ethics. London: Continuum, 2006. P. 42.

94.Foucault, The Care of the Self, p. 239.

95.Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, pp. 68–69, 86. See also O’Leary. Foucault and the Art of Ethics, p. 73.

96.O’Leary, Foucault and the Art of Ethics, p. 73.

97.Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, p. 27; The Care of the Self, p. 239.

98.Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, pp. 78, 37.

99.Foucault, Essential Works, Volume I, p. 267.

100.Foucault, The Care of the Self, pp. 64–66.

101.Paul Veyne, “The Final Foucault and His Ethics.” Critical Inquiry (C. Porter and A. I. Davidson, Trans.). Autumn 1993. Pp. 1–9. P. 2.

102.It should be noted that Foucault has suggested other places where such a thought of the outside was constituted. In the lecture course Security, Territory, Population he suggests that the rise of monastic asceticism in the middle ages led to a number of practices wherein individuals were able to transform themselves without this transformation being governed by the authority of others. In the monastic community obedience to doctors, philosophers and abbots was given in the interest of arriving at a particular objective of health or virtue and not a good in itself. Moreover, medieval mysticism posited a direct relation to God and formed a practice of self-transformation via the immediacy of this relation, which allowed mystics to escape from religious practices of examination and confession and, thus, to short-circuit church hierarchy. Both cases suggest the possibility of a multiplicity of non-normalizing technologies of the self in history. See Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977–1978 (Michel Sellenart et. al., Eds.). London: Palgrave MacMillan. Pp. 174–177, 207–208. Similarly, in The Courage of Truth Foucault suggests that some trajectories in both modern art and revolutionary movements also represent such loci. See Foucault, The Courage of Truth, pp. 183–186.

103.Quoted from Nathan Widder, Reflections of Time and Politics. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. P. 186.

104.Foucault, The Courage of Truth, p. 244 and passim.

105.Derrida, “Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism,” p. 83.

106.Foucault, Essential Works, Volume I, p. 287.

107.Ibid.

108.Widder, Reflections on Time and Politics, p. 185; David Webb. “On Friendship: Derrida, Foucault, and the Practice of Becoming.” Research in Phenomenology. No. 33. Pp. 119–39. p. 134.

109.David Webb. “On Friendship: Derrida, Foucault, and the Practice of Becoming.” Research in Phenomenology. No. 33. Pp. 119–39. P. 8.

110.Deleuze, Foucault, p. 86.

111.Deleuze refers to the outside as a field of “chance” in Foucault, p. 117.

112.Pierre Macherey, “Foucault: Ethics and Subjectivity,” p. 98.

113.Ibid., pp. 100–101.

114.Foucault, Essential Works, Volume II, p. 412.

115.McGushin, “Foucault and the Problem of the Subject,” p. 633. See also Antonio Calcagno, “Foucault and Derrida: The Question of Empowering and Disempowering the Author.” Human Studies. No. 32, Vol. 1. 2009.

Chapter 5

The Postponement of Politics

Throughout this book, I have insisted that the theoretical question that unites Derrida and Foucault over thought’s capacity to both account for its “medium” and to affirm its own finitude is an immediately political issue. Indeed, in chapter 1 I presented Derrida’s and Foucault’s work as a response to the nefarious politics that plagues both Nietzsche and Heidegger’s philosophy, claiming that Nietzsche and Heidegger, either in the figure of the former’s construction of “grand politics” or the latter’s notion of an authentic or “proper” relation to Being, disavow finitude in succumbing to the philosopher’s desire to legislate the political.

In this context, I proposed that one might understand Derrida’s and Foucault’s work in part as a response to this disavowal. This takes the form of a genealogical approach that asserts the irreducibility of the violence or power at the origin of any truth and, concordantly, the violence or power of the philosopher’s discourse as well. The affirmation of finitude or situatedness of thought therefore immediately invokes a political question. This became particularly evident in chapter 2 where the debate between Derrida and Foucault was characterized by two accusations of precisely the sort of disavowal of which Heidegger accuses Nietzsche along with the attendant claim of epistemic violence, while in chapters 3 and 4 these lines of inquiry were pursued along the lines of epistemology and ethics respectively. In this chapter, I want to return finally to examine the political question more closely.

As I have already suggested, one implication usually drawn from affirmation the contingency of social order inherent to the post-foundational political paradigm to which Derrida and Foucault belong is a transformation of the role for philosophy in relation to politics. On this view, the philosophical tradition has been possessed by a will to truth for which, as Bonnie Honig puts it,

success lies in the elimination from a regime of dissonance, resistance, conflict or struggle… . [Politics is confined] (conceptually and territorially) to the juridical, administrative, or regulative tasks of stabilizing moral and political subjects, building consensus, maintaining agreements, or consolidating communities and identities.¹

Confronted with what it sees as this displacement of contingency, post- foundational theory has sought to politicize, to undermine the authority by which any given order is legitimated and organized. That is, theory assumes the task of rupturing the social bond, a gesture of indetermination of social order and, thus, of an exposure to the violence that accompanies the artificiality or non-necessity of every social order. It is within the scope of this articulation of the role of theory vis-à-vis the political that we can once again pick up the dialogue between Derrida and Foucault on more explicitly political terrain.

DESTABILIZING SOVEREIGNTY

The concept of sovereignty is as good a place to start as any, not only because it implicates both Derrida’s and Foucault’s work explicitly, but because it poses the very question of the foundation of the political itself. Defined as a foundational program for the justification of power, sovereignty represents the claim to a right to power whose grounds reason would discover. In this sense, the theorist’s reply to the problem of sovereignty amounts to a response to the problem of philosophy’s relation to politics. We turn first to examine Derrida’s work in this context before contrasting it with Foucault’s.

Among Derrida’s earliest critical engagements with philosophy’s desire to dominate or determine the political—what Jacques Rancière calls “archipolitics”—is his essay “Plato’s Pharmacy.”² The essay focuses upon a distinction Socrates makes between speech and writing as good and bad representations of truth, respectively, based on their proximity to the eidos or Idea. While speech is conceived in terms of aletheia, the unveiling of a fully present and transparent truth, Socrates describes writing as a support for memory and so, as lethe or concealment. Accordingly, Derrida says, Socrates denigrates writing to the status of a mere “prosthesis” or supplement to memory.³ Plato’s suppression of writing is, Derrida argues, reflective of a broader metaphysical desire to banish the external and empirical from meaning and value in order to posit a realm of pure presence or absolute origin which would govern it.⁴

The political implications here might admittedly be opaque. But if we look to Derrida’s late book Rogues, we not only find a structurally analogous argument, though in explicitly more political terms, but we also have a vantage from which to discern the politics implicit in his earlier work. Looking this time to the Republic, Derrida says that by granting “absolute sovereignty’ to the eidos of a “Good’ beyond Being, Plato inaugurates the structure of the “archaeo-teleological” politics that have defined the West until today.⁵ That is, Plato construes the Idea as “Other,” as an unconditional condition of knowledge, but also as that which gives knowledge the right to govern. In both texts therefore, Plato’s philosophy is interpreted not merely as an attempt to think the absolute, but also as inscribing that thought with a “mastering authority” or “sovereignty drive” that inaugurates the metaphysical desire for mastery of the empirical.⁶

In response, Derrida seeks to show that the concept of sovereignty is plagued by an aporetic or, what in this context he sometimes calls “autoimmune” logic, whereby the very act of foundation or justification of power produces its antinomies. Sovereignty is, Derrida argues, a privileged figure of autonomy insofar as it is an autos that gives itself its own nomos and, thus, is “the power that gives itself its own law, its force of law, its self-representation.”⁷ Yet (and this will form the crucial point of engagement with Foucault), as soon as sovereignty extends itself or its empire in space or attempts to maintain itself across time, it “autoimmunizes itself.”⁸ As soon as sovereignty tries to justify itself or assert its power, it opens to the excess of law and of language: “to confer sense or meaning on sovereignty, to justify it, to find a reason for it, is already to compromise its deciding exceptionality, to subject it to rules, to a code of law, to some general law, to concepts.”⁹ On Derrida’s argument, the sovereign’s establishment of even a single law already makes it vulnerable to critique in the name of that law. Pure sovereignty could only remain pure and undivided if confined to pure silence and lawlessness, and so in a total absence of sovereignty. To extend sovereignty across time and space is to subject it to the logic of “autoimmunity” and, thus, to open it to its “other.”

A brief essay of Derrida’s on the status of the U.S. Declaration of Independence as the ground or foundation of the U.S. state is particularly revelatory of what he sees as the aporetic or autoimmune logic of all founding gestures.¹⁰ An aporia emerges between the Declaration’s “performative” and “constative” status; between the event of its coming into being and the object that is brought into being.¹¹ The moment of institution, the event of the declaration of “we the people” who assert themselves as independent and sovereign, must logically exist as a people prior to the event of the declaration itself. “The signature,” Derrida says, “invents the signer.”¹² In other words, the Declaration sits undecidably between its juridical status and its de facto existence in space and time insofar as the existence of the people and the declaration that forms the people cannot be simultaneous and yet, must occur at the same time for the Declaration to function.¹³

In Specters of Marx this spatio-temporal logic is referred to as the “disjointure” at the heart of every founding event.¹⁴ This denotes that the final justification of any founding act is constantly deferred to an open future that never arrives as such. Or, put otherwise, the Declaration plays out what for Derrida is the aporia of all claims to sovereignty; the paradox of something creating itself, whereby the sovereign power must “presuppose itself in order to performatively enact itself.”¹⁵ Accordingly, for Derrida the Declaration expresses a deeper logic: founding violence can take place only in relation to the non-sovereignty or alterity that it cannot master.¹⁶

We can understand what Derrida is doing in these critical exercises on sovereignty in terms of an attempt to politicize any gesture that seeks to legitimate authority. It is also in this sense that we might understand the claim in the texts Specters of Marx and “Marx and Sons” that deconstruction is inherently a “repoliticization.”¹⁷ Repoliticization, Derrida tells us, consists in the “question of putting into question again.”¹⁸ Yet as we saw in chapter 4, for him such a “putting into question” must also affirm its own finitude if it is to be consistent. Therefore, he goes on, every critique of order is itself subject to a “law of finitude of decision,” for access to a pre-ordinal, purely politicized state equally presupposes transcending time and space.¹⁹

It’s worth remarking that we have already seen Derrida make a similar claim with regard to Heidegger. To posit an originally authentic, pre-ordinal experience that is corrupted over time only licenses its recovery by even the “worst” violence. This is a claim Derrida also makes against Walter Benjamin in the context of a reflection upon the latter’s essay “Critique of Violence.”²⁰ Benjamin’s evocation of a revolutionary “divine violence”—a suspension of the law—amounts for Derrida to an abandonment of justice since it withdraws the possibility of its inscription in finite law. But the larger point for Derrida is not only that an absolute, revolutionary violence is impossible, but equally that it can never be overcome: “Politicization, for example, is interminable even if it cannot and should not ever be total.”²¹ A conception of contingency is inseparable from some necessity. But conversely, necessity is always beset by contingency; no social order is ever total or complete.

In the late book Politics of Friendship, Derrida puts forward this argument again, this time in the context of Carl Schmitt’s political ontology.²² Readers familiar with Schmitt’s work will know it centers upon the account of an autonomous conception of the political; that is to say one not grounded in concepts drawn from other fields or disciplines, and that this is posited by in terms of a notion of the sovereign decision over the identification of the friend and enemy.²³ Not only does such a view imply a Hobbesian notion of sovereignty, it also assumes an autonomous notion of the political—that is, not reducible to morality, theology, economics, or aesthetics—grounded only in the polemos between friends and enemies. But, as Derrida maintains, any attempt to define the political is itself a political act and, thus, inherently partisan and unstable. In Schmitt’s case, this instability appears particularly prominent in his conception of war. In grounding his conception of the political upon the distinction between the friend and the enemy with whom war is an ever-present possibility, Derrida argues Schmitt has accordingly already presumed that war as such is ever-present as both a “possibility” that grounds his whole theoretical architecture and as an empirical possibility over which the sovereign must decide.²⁴ In other words, war is both possible and actual at once and it is only its aporetic status by which any concept of the political can be conceived. The point is that from Derrida’s perspective, both politicization (an unmasterable excess) and de-politicization (a finite decision) are irreducible.

Yet once we bring such a view back into dialogue with Foucault, it is evident that deconstruction is depoliticizing in a way which Derrida cannot acknowledge without risking his whole enterprise. For while he posits an indeterminate originary violence anterior to and conditional of any determinate identification of violence, war, or the political itself. Yet there is still an anterior finite decision over what “is” inherent to his “grander narrative.” We have already seen how the “cogito debate’ points to an incommensurability between Derrida and Foucault in terms that mark the limits of their theories. It is with this incommensurability in mind that we now turn to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish as an alternate and opposed engagement with sovereignty.

Of course, the critique of a juridical view of power is not restricted to Discipline and Punish but extends across Foucault’s work of the 1970s to include lecture courses that refer not only to discipline, but also to “biopower,” and technologies of government.²⁵ If instead of a cursory survey of this array of texts, I examine the argument developed in Discipline and Punish more narrowly here, it is because this is where Foucault’s critique of sovereignty is most thoroughly developed.

Discipline and Punish takes as its object a broad historical transmutation of the status of sovereignty that occurs from the classical to the modern age. In the classical age, Foucault argues, power operates through mechanisms of order and accordant exclusions of the disorderly they engender.²⁶ This is a structure of power relations premised upon the maximum visibility of sovereign power expressed through very public and very vicious spectacles of punishment designed to reflect the might and glory of the ruler.²⁷ Yet Foucault’s analysis centers upon a transformation that occurs with the rise of the disciplinary apparatus in the modern age. For at this moment punishment ceases to be hinged to strategies for the exclusion of transgressors to social order but, rather, around the way order might be produced out of disorder. That is, the purpose of punishment comes to be the productive and ostensibly free citizen. In this context, punishment becomes maximally inclusive rather than exclusive.²⁸ Disciplinary power is therefore viewed as substantively distinct from sovereignty insofar as it distributes power as widely as possible, and does so via a juridical rationality that employs a form of punishment that seeks to manage, rather than exclude, deviance.

This is important for Foucault in part because political theory is blind to this seismic transformation. While political theorists continue to conceive power through the frame of the juridical or sovereign foundation of order, in fact discipline, it is argued, functions at the level of what Foucault calls a rationality, consisting in “discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions.”²⁹ If a “medium” of the production of social order is to be observed it follows, this is to be located by theory at the level of what Foucault famously calls a “micro-physics” of power.³⁰ Looking more closely at how power functions on this account, we get a sense of just how different Foucault’s critique of sovereignty is to Derrida’s.

As I have already implied, in Discipline and Punish Foucault describes the telos of the disciplinary apparatus as the production of a normal and “docile” body.³¹ New disciplinary institutions such as the prison, the school, and the factory seek to produce particular forms of conduct through training regimens that rank individuals in relation to predetermined “norms.”³² Where “abnormal” elements are identified, further training is prescribed in the aim of treating them.

This is a mode of power in excess of the sovereign decision over exclusion and inclusion or the friend and the enemy. It seeks instead to produce the visibility of the body for the gaze of normalizing power. This focus on the body also translates to a more expansive attention to the social. “The phenomenon of the social body,” Foucault says, “is the effect not of a consensus but of the materiality of power operating on the very body of individuals.”³³ This implies that recognition of the self and its place in society is produced by an interiorization of the relation between the observers or trainers and the observed. Individuals, trained to function as a cog in a machine, begin to experience themselves as such.

Accordingly, anterior to the modern notion that continues to dominate political philosophy, wherein legitimate power is understood in terms of contractual relations, Foucault posits the practices for disciplining the body.³⁴ As such, the divergence from Schmitt or Derrida, not to mention much of contemporary political thought, is sharp here. For on Foucault’s account, de jure foundation of social order is not conditional upon the aporetic logic of sovereignty’s claim to power but, rather, is made possible by the practices that seek to form individuals who inhabit the juridical order with as little interference and resistance as possible.

The Politics of Presence

At stake between this account and Derrida’s is thus the medium through which social order is formed. This is especially evident in this instance, if we focus on how the relation between time and space is articulated in these accounts. As we saw, for Derrida sovereignty is destabilized through its circulation in the empiricity of time and space. In The Death Penalty, Volume 1, he puts this explicitly, arguing that Foucault’s account of sovereignty fails to account for its “impossibility.”³⁵ Throughout his oeuvre, Derrida has sought to show that the possibility of conceiving a present origin or foundation to order involves a disavowal of the aporia. This is particularly clear in his early essay “Ousia and Gramme” where, not unlike in “Declarations of Independence,” Derrida argues that the metaphysics of “presence” is made possible by the dominance of a linear conception of time which allows successive “nows” to be conceived as simultaneous in space. But successive “nows,” Derrida says, are (im)possibly present: “The impossibility of coexistence can be posited only on the basis of a certain coexistence, of a certain simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous.”³⁶ I have already implied that the ramifications of this understanding of the aporia of space-time traverse Derrida’s work.³⁷ Presence is possible only by a disavowal of an aporia whereby time (succession) and space (simultaneity) are its mutually exclusive conditions.³⁸ This is why sovereignty, as an event of foundation and self-identity, can never be present; it is always differed and deferred from itself through its extension in time and through space.

Conversely, Foucault conceives space and time in terms of a multiplicity of immanent conditions to social order. Disciplinary space is organized with the objective of making the body visible; of isolating, observing, and controlling detainees, soldiers, patients, and students.³⁹ In terms of this objective, institutional space is organized to isolate and circulate bodies through segments that make them observable for particular domains of knowledge. In Discipline and Punish Foucault emphasizes the disciplinary technique of “rank” as a means for organizing functional spaces. In hinging spaces to ranks, bodies are made intelligible and maximally visible as they progress from one ranking to another, and accordingly, their identification is facilitated by the physical space they occupy in a given structure.

If Foucault posits space as a means of making bodies visible for discipline, he views time as the operator of discipline.⁴⁰ Discipline organizes time into delineated parallel or successive segments according to order, level, and task.⁴¹ The movement of bodies is subdivided and programmed through the minutest possible number of segments into a regulated repetition and, thus, “a collective and obligatory rhythm” which allows the extraction “from time, ever more available moments and, from each moment, ever more useful resources.”⁴² In short, disciplinary power operates through particular organizations of time-space through which the object of power—the human body—becomes “no longer the mobile or immobile mass, but a geometry of divisible segments.”⁴³

Unlike Derrida’s formulation of the aporia of space-time, Foucault posits changing experiences of time and space as immanent to disciplinary practices. Discipline enters the body into a particular time and space, itself organized according to objectives of control and training, and themselves constantly refined according to the knowledge gleaned from these processes. The disruption of the founding or sovereign moment is thus not located in an engagement with the impossibility of its presence or autonomy. Instead, it is premised on the notion that a juridical or contractual order is itself conditioned by the production of the “presence” of a normalized and objectified body through time and space.⁴⁴ From Foucault’s perspective therefore, to understand social order in terms of its foundation or founding principles is, one might say, depoliticizing.⁴⁵ Moreover, it is in this sense that Foucault famously claims that by remaining within the framework of this mode of analysis, “we still have not cut off the king’s head.”⁴⁶ Sovereignty cannot, in other words, be the principle of intelligibility of social order.⁴⁷

We thus glimpse once again here how two incommensurable strategies of politicization emerge from out of these two competing grander narratives: on the one hand, the aporetic nature of any concept or act of sovereignty, and on the other, the fields of disciplinary practices that form the consensus conditional of sovereign power. As such, much as in his reading of Descartes, from the Foucauldian perspective Derrida merely imposes a meaning upon sovereignty in terms of its status as a purely trans-historical question. In this sense, the deconstruction of sovereignty is viewed as depoliticizing insofar as Derrida commits a violent exclusion in his interpretation of sovereignty that locates it within the scope of established philosophical questions. Derrida’s account of sovereignty, to echo the claim made by Foucault in the cogito debate, “goes directly to the calling into question of the “totality of beingness.”⁴⁸ Derrida continues to maintain, the argument goes, the sovereignty of sovereignty insofar as his focus upon political foundations effaces the broader disciplinary “field of transformations” through which the determination of social order occurs.⁴⁹

What then is the Derridean response to this Foucauldian critique? If in “Cogito and the History of Madness” Derrida argues that Foucault violently effaces the aporetic conditions of his own discourse and, thus, violently determines the objects of his analyses then, like any totality, Foucault’s displacement of sovereignty can be shown to be founded upon that which it excludes: “the evil slips in,” as Derrida says in “Plato’s Pharmacy.”⁵⁰ The claim to have displaced the question of sovereignty is mobilized by a sovereign determination of its “presence” within history. It amounts, in other words, to an implicit identification of the historical event which, in direct references to Foucault in several late texts, Derrida describes as a disavowal of the excess that makes it possible. As he puts it in Rogues,

A calculable event, one that falls, like a case, like the object of some knowledge, under the generality of a law, norm, determinative judgment, or technoscience, and thus of a power-knowledge and knowledge-power, is at least in this measure an event. Without the absolute singularity of the incalculable and exceptional, no thing and no one, nothing other and thus nothing arrives or happens … as other as the absolute exception or singularity of an alterity that is not reappropriable by the ipseity of a sovereign power and a calculable knowledge.⁵¹

Much as in his earlier critique, wherein he argues that the opposition between reason and madness cannot be exterior to language and thus can be articulated only in the language of reason, so sovereignty, Derrida appears to claim here, cannot be displaced except through an implicitly sovereign claim to transcend the “sovereignty drive.” Thus, if we characterize the implicit Foucauldian critique of Derrida as maintaining the “sovereignty of sovereignty,” Derrida seems to accuse Foucault of attempting a sovereign determination and transcendence of sovereignty itself; a claim to sovereignty over sovereignty itself.

Concordantly, sovereignty for Derrida cannot be displaced or sufficiently politicized by a historical account of the emergence of a disciplinary apparatus since a logic of “autoimmunity” or aporia would have to be the very condition of Foucault’s history of punishment. Anterior to its supposed disruption in history by a logic of discipline, sovereignty is made (im)possible for Derrida by the autoimmune logic that conditions it.

Once again, then, we hit upon an incommensurability. Each thinker can be understood to claim that he posits the anterior medium or narrative for the other’s account, and accordingly, the interlocutor’s failure to affirm that locus marks him out as guilty of having sought to transcend it. The irony of all this is that they are engaged in a parallel exercise. That is to say, Derrida and Foucault both seek to think indefinite and unmasterable processes or movements of an excess whose assertion allows the disruption of any foundation from which man’s proper political being might be derived. Both, moreover, affirm the enunciation of this medium or field as itself irreducible to it. For instance, as we saw in chapter 3, every deconstruction begins from within a particular text and can be deconstructed, while Foucault affirms his own work as “fiction” or itself an expression of power. Any account of the “medium of differentiation” is itself finite since it does not claim to transcend the vagaries of différance or power relations. We find in both thinkers a circularity between the finite situatedness of the enunciation within a “grander” (yet necessarily finite) account of “what happens,” of the context within which the enunciation occurs.

Considering Derrida’s and Foucault’s analogous, albeit incommensurable, critiques of sovereignty, it is prescient to return to a claim we made in chapter 1 in the context of a discussion of Nietzsche and Heidegger. For one way of conceiving the politics of an affirmation of finitude is in terms of a conception of a relation between philosophy and politics that precludes the possibility of a deduction of political praxis directly from philosophical argument. No determinate task follows from the politicizations Derrida and Foucault seek to effect, except perhaps the politicization of philosophy itself.

In the circularity between finite perspective and “grander narrative” upon which their respective oeuvres rest, this very process sometimes takes on an explicitly political form. This at least is one way to understand the privilege they assign to democracy in their late work. We might say that their conception of democracy is implicitly opposed to the will to truth, which, for both of them, has in one form or another sought to legislate the political. But how do they each understand democracy and how does this reflect upon their incommensurability? It is to these questions to which we now turn.

RADICAL DEMOCRACY

It’s been common in recent decades to situate Derrida and Foucault under the banner of a notion of “radical democracy.”⁵² A sense of what is at stake in framing democracy as “radical” is quickly gleaned from Claude Lefort’s pioneering book Democracy and Political Theory. Lefort views democracy as a particular form of founding social principle, one wherein the political is detached from other references to become an autonomous activity unto itself. In a democracy “power is an empty place,” as he famously puts it.⁵³ Liberated of any positive content, power in modern democracy becomes the object of a contest.⁵⁴ Whatever the limitations of Lefort’s account, his notion of a regime, whereby the polemical is by definition irreducible, marks a sharp distinction from liberal and communitarian theories. The theorist of radical democracy rejects the telos of democracy as the production of a rational consensus and instead situates contestation at an ontological level, competing accounts of the political itself are at stake in democratic contest.⁵⁵ From this perspective, theorists of procedural and deliberative models of democracy wrongly presume the neutrality of democratic institutions and thus exclude them as an object of democratic debate. In doing so, they are said to restrict the democratic process to a supposedly reasoned and rational debate that would inform policy.⁵⁶ Accordingly, if radical democrats take contestation as constitutive, then democracy cannot be founded or limited to a particular set of institutions. As Jean-Luc Nancy succinctly puts it, “There is no ‘demarchy’: the people do not make principle.”⁵⁷

Reading Derrida and Foucault in these terms makes sense insofar as we understand their approaches to democracy in terms of the broader logic of their work. That is, each views democracy as a “weak” or “fragile” set of practices and institutions in both ontological and empirical terms and as such, as inscribed by the logics of finitude conceived as problem and aporia. We come, therefore, to once again experience the incommensurability of Derrida and Foucault in political terms.

Democracy to Come

This much is gleaned from a brief sketch of Derrida’s concept of “democracy-to-come,” a notion increasingly prevalent in his later work. As the term implies, Derrida regards democracy as always futural, situated upon a horizon that never arrives as such. Yet this does not entail a utopian teleology as far as Derrida is concerned but, rather, that democracy cannot be made present. For democracy to “be” as such would mean that unconditional justice, equality, or freedom (or any other concepts we associate with democracy) would be made conditional. Yet, as we have seen in an earlier discussion, the recuperation of unconditionality by a de facto program or law will, by definition, violently exclude and call for further democratization in its turn. Accordingly, democracy is always both promised and undermined, constantly deferred to an open future which never arrives.

So far, the claim to the impossibility of reducing democracy to a determinate presence only affirms that it resembles the aporetic structure of all concepts as Derrida describes them. Yet democracy is unique because it is a concept whose critique is intrinsic to it. That is, critique of a specific democracy for restricting freedom or lack equality, for instance, is always made in the name of democracy as such. The point here is that the very concept of democracy is inherently open to democratic decision and so inimical to the will to truth. As Derrida puts it, “Of all the names grouped a bit too quickly under the category of ‘political regimes’ … the inherited concept of democracy is the only one that welcomes the possibility of being contested.”⁵⁸ Unlike other concepts, democracy is defined by the fact that it is defined by self-contestation; by the question of who, what, and how to govern. As such, it remains necessarily in question.⁵⁹ As Derrida characterizes it, the very absence of a foundation defines democracy: “the absence of a proper form, of an eidos, of an appropriate paradigm … that is what makes democracy unpresentable in existence.”⁶⁰

Derrida seems therefore to posit an intimate relationship between democracy and finitude. This becomes patent where he traces several aporias of democracy, for the account suggests that, unlike other forms of political regime, in its avowed autoimmunity, democracy is the “least violent’ form of regime. First, as Derrida puts it, “the alternative to democracy can always be required as a democratic alternation.”⁶¹ A suspension of democracy against, for example, an anti-democratic party is a means of both protecting democracy and also the “suicide” of democracy.⁶² In situations such as the suspension of elections in Algeria in 1992 to which Derrida refers, in order to prevent an expected victory by an avowedly anti-democratic religious party, democracy can protect itself only “by limiting and threatening itself.”⁶³ Moreover, insofar as any democracy is bound by a territory or defined by a particular population, it will exercise some sovereign power, exert the force of some finite laws, and, thus, exclude in its turn.⁶⁴ Democracy cannot exist without some power, yet as Derrida argues, every sovereign act is by definition anti-democratic since it will include and exclude.⁶⁵ Nevertheless, in a democracy in particular, the identity of the sovereign is never stable, as long as the people rule no sovereignty can be final. Moreover, in order to be democratic any notion of equality will have to be unconditional; that is, equality will have to assume a state “where every other is equally altogether other.”⁶⁶ Yet, in the same instance, in order to function democracy must make finite calculations, it must distinguish citizens from non-citizens or an elected majority from a minority.⁶⁷ The calculations that any democratic equality requires will necessarily be violent and reductive of the equality of all and the singularity of every one. In brief, these paradoxes point to the explicitly and inherently aporetic nature of democracy that allows it to function as the “least worst” political form for Derrida, one that closely figures the aporia of finite existence as he conceives it.

Parrhesia

In contrast to the pivotal position assigned to democracy among Derrida’s late works, the concept has received substantially less attention by both Foucault and his interpreters. While a number of Foucault’s readers have followed William Connolly’s lead in insisting upon the democratic ethos of Foucault’s work, until the recent publication of Foucault’s final lecture courses “Collège de France,” such a claim required some interpretative labor given what is otherwise a dearth of references to democracy in his oeuvre.⁶⁸ But with the problematization of democratic practices of parrhesia or truth-speaking among the Ancient Greeks in the 1984 course The Courage of Truth in particular, this is no longer the case. Indeed, as I read it, the course proposes democracy as an ethico-political horizon of Foucault’s work as such. Such an argument demands we view the notion of democracy in these lectures against the background of Foucault’s research since at least the early 1970s. For once read in the context of the texts on power, the account of democracy here implies a political regime wherein the experience of truth is inseparable from power.

This point is made most clearly if we understand Ancient Greek democracy as Foucault does, as consisting in two central elements. First, democracy has a particular political form, itself defined by two central juridical principles: the guarantee of equal participation in the exercise of power and the equal right to speak before the assembly.⁶⁹ However, Foucault argues that accounts of democracy restricted to this de jure level of analysis (Foucault mentions Lefort in this context) have effaced the defining feature of Greek democracy: the particular problematization of the political that Greek experience reflects.⁷⁰ This experience of a particular problem of democracy forms a second crucial element and in the context of the Greeks at least is characterized by the Greek practice of truth-speaking called parrhesia.⁷¹

If this second experiential element of democracy is so important to Foucault’s analysis, it is because he views it as a “modality of truth-speaking,” this implies a means of bringing the true to light, one which is not grounded in a method, the technical knowledge of the teacher or the opacity of the prophet.⁷² Instead, truth is manifest insofar as the bios and logos coincide. Or, to put it otherwise, this is a mode of speaking where the discourse uttered is identical to the life lived. So while the constitutional guarantee of equality was a necessary condition for democracy, so too is the parrhesiatic act of speaking a truth to which one is committed in the Assembly with the aim of guiding the polis.⁷³ In this sense, Foucault argues that parrhesia was conditional for an “ethical differentiation” whereby the true interests of the city could be determined.⁷⁴ What is “best” for the city emerged not on the basis of a claim to objective truth but through a contest whereby truth was recognized on the basis of its power to inspire, command, and contest. The condition for democracy was thus the constitution of a space for “logos in the sense of true, reasonable discourse, discourse which persuades, and discourse which may confront other discourses and will triumph only through the weight of its truth and the effectiveness of its persuasion.”⁷⁵ In short, democracy was conditioned upon an experience of truth not opposed to power.

Both Foucault’s 1983 and 1984 lecture courses trace events whereby, near the end of the fifth century BC, democracy in Athens comes into crisis. The analysis deserves some unpacking since the peculiarity of Foucault’s theory of democracy becomes particularly clear-cut as he shows how the “ethical differentiation” definitive of it implicates its “fragility.” On the one hand, Foucault argues, the experience of truth in pre-Socratic democratic practice necessarily inscribes informal inequality and difference into formal equality. For democracy to produce truth, Foucault maintains, a resulting inequality between speakers is necessary. On the other hand, truth is always threatened by democracy insofar as all can speak; nothing guarantees that the “best” will emerge through its practice. The strength of democracy is, to borrow Derrida’s phrase, a force of weakness. Or, as Foucault says,

there is no democracy without true discourse, for without true discourse it would perish; but the death of true discourse, the possibility of its death or of its reduction to silence is inscribed in democracy. No true discourse without democracy, but true discourse introduces differences into democracy. No democracy without true discourse, but democracy threatens the very existence of true discourse.⁷⁶

As criticisms of democracy proliferate in the fifth century BC, it ceases to be viewed as a privileged locus of truth-speaking.⁷⁷ Plato, for instance, exemplifies the view that democracy forms a danger to the city, insofar as equality in fact effaces the possibility of “ethical differentiation” and, thus, of the appearance of truth. As Foucault tells it, Plato’s contention against democracy is grounded in its granting all the right to speak. In doing so, it seems to exclude any guarantee that the truth will emerge. This is because democratic truth-speaking is open to the threat of rhetoric and flattery; insidious modes of speaking where logos and bios are disjoined. Moreover, the Assembly offers no guarantee that others will listen and will not suppress the truth.⁷⁸ On this basis, Foucault implies that there is a “fragility” inherent to democracy because it cannot “found” or guarantee truth.⁷⁹

Foucault’s account of the origin of metaphysics situates the latter as inseparable from this conception of the fragility of democracy. For it is by the desire and attempt to master and overcome the fragility of democratic truth that the Platonic invention of a truth beyond being is motivated. More particularly, the metaphysical is framed as Plato’s response to what he saw as the emergence of a lack of harmony among Athenian citizens between their bios and their logos and their consequent incapacity of speaking or recognizing true discourse in the democratic polis.⁸⁰ The Socratic confrontation of the citizen amounts to a displacement of the demos. This is insofar as it amounts to a new medium through which true discourse might care for the polis. This is a discourse that continues to command the interlocutor to bring their bios in harmony with their logos, but this time as philosophy rather than politics.⁸¹ In short, the Platonic response to the fragility of parrhesiatic truth in the demos supplants the Assembly as locus of truth and relocates it to the philosophical question of essence.

As my account of Foucault’s genealogy of parrhesia has thus far implied, the concept allows him to frame democracy as an experience that stands for a pre-metaphysical form of political community, one not grounded upon an essence that transcends its appearance. At this juncture, the incommensurability between these two accounts ought to be relatively self-evident: while Derrida locates the conditions for a truly democratic polity in an experience of the aporias of the constitution of democracy itself, for Foucault it lies in the “fragile” experience of a truth that relies merely on the speaker’s courage to utter it along with his audience’s willingness to listen. These views are not merely opposed; they each imply an epistemically violent disavowal of the other’s view.

Democracy and Perspectivism

What implications does this this notion of the polemical bring to bear on the concept of democracy? Theorists of radical democracy, I argued, hold that the truly democratic puts its very form in question, and that the terms of democratic contest cannot themselves be restricted. Yet my analysis suggests that radical democrats characterize irreducible contestability in competing and often incommensurable terms. For instance, Chantal Mouffe’s influential Schmittian conception of agonism, Jacques Rancière’s notion of the emergence of the claim to equality from the “part that has no part,” Jean-Luc Nancy’s reinscription of mitsein or most of all, Derrida’s and Foucault’s conceptions, stage the paradox of post-foundational thought: they each affirm a “radical” democratic political form yet necessarily reduce it to their own “grander narrative.”

This incommensurability is irreducible for two reasons. First, as Derrida and Foucault both affirm, there is no Archimedean position from which the “medium” of social order may be appropriated; and secondly, it follows that every “perspective” will be irreducibly finite and violent. The polemical field undermines the theoretical claim so that the preference for democracy is limited by its a priori rejection of an other “grander narrative” of the democratic. Despite claims to self-reflexivity common to “radical” accounts of democracy, this is a reflection that does not extend to the conception of democracy itself. We thus arrive once again at an impasse that results from incommensurability, whereby theory posits its own narrative by an axiomatic gesture whose totalizing effects are never thought through.

THE CLAIM TO UNIVERSALITY

Other critics take a different line of argument. Rather than look to the formal terms of post-foundational argument as I have, they focus instead upon the level of political strategy to suggest that the assertion of finitude undermines the pursuit of collective emancipatory aims. For instance, Wendy Brown and Diana Coole each view “postmodern” theory as opening every social order to contestation but as nevertheless failing to theorize the collective nature of politics. That is, theories such as those of Derrida and Foucault and others suppress the need for “negotiating the powers and values of enduring collectivities,” as Brown puts it.⁸² Or, in Coole’s words,

philosophies that begin with heterogeneity and flux … are inimical to the subsequent derivation of a politics … precisely because the political is the domain of collective life, it necessarily engenders, and indeed requires, shared practices, habits, norms, languages, no matter how diverse its participants.⁸³

Pushing the argument further, a number of scholars argue that the rejection of universal ideals that animates Derrida’s and Foucault’s work merely reflects the dominant logics of contemporary capitalism. In this regard, Étienne Balibar has described the present epoch as a “real universality,” insofar as capital’s concrete material processes increasingly incorporate all elements of life in all parts of the world.⁸⁴ This is a process accompanied by what Balibar calls a “generalization of minority status.”⁸⁵ On this framing, the politics of finitude expressed in Derrida’s and Foucault’s work amounts, to return to Brown’s formulation again, as “generic claims of particularism endemic to the universality of political culture.”⁸⁶ The affirmation of singularity or situated difference thus merely reflects its own context: the differentiating power of capitalism. Similarly, Jacques Rancière has argued that the assumption of a plurality of differences or differential identities has become a contemporary form of universality. For Rancière, in other words, the claim to otherness itself is caught between either the “submission to the universal as formulated by those who dominate” or the “confinement within an identarian perspective.”⁸⁷ Alain Badiou has argued that difference is simply an ontological fact; it cannot in itself form the ground of an emancipatory politics. An ethics of difference or otherness, Badiou argues, leaves one caught “oscillating between the abstract universal of capital and localized persecutions” without challenging the “false universality” of capitalism itself.⁸⁸ In short, for theorists who take global capital as the ontology of the present, the claim to difference itself appears as a rigid position that fails to challenge capitalism’s terms. To return to Brown’s formulation once again, the claim to difference or otherness is “partly dependent on the demise of a critique of capitalism and of bourgeois cultural and economic values.”⁸⁹

But returning to Derrida and Foucault, claims such as Coole’s and Brown’s only hold up where they are conceived in the terms of a competing “grander narrative,” one which understands capitalism in specific ontological terms. This becomes evident if we look briefly to some of Derrida and Foucault’s own engagements with the logics of contemporary capitalism, and to the ways in which the understanding of neoliberalism is subsumed to their own perspectives. Derrida’s most extensive engagement with the logic of contemporary capitalism occurs in the course of a discussion of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and The Last Man in Specters of Marx.⁹⁰ It is thus first to Derrida’s and then to Foucault’s assessment of liberalism we now turn.

The End of History

Turning briefly to Derrida’s reading of Fukuyama should suffice to provide a sense of how his “grander narrative” frames his account of liberalism. Writing in the mid-1990s, Derrida says that Fukuyama’s declaration of the death of socialism signals an “unprecedented form of hegemony” for liberalism.⁹¹ Yet Derrida goes on to claim that this does not imply that capital’s conquest of the world is complete. This is because Fukuyama’s liberal teleology hinges upon viewing liberalism’s own shortfalls as merely empirical and contingent. In turn, this makes room for Derrida to tease out the instability between foundational assertions for the legitimacy of liberalism and its de facto instantiations. For on this view Fukuyama only posits liberalism as universal by a brutal and violent effacement of the war, authoritarian, conflict, and suffering that always accompany liberal polity.⁹² It is, in other words, “evil in general” that Fukuyama and those like him disavow.⁹³ As Derrida caustically puts it,

at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelize in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that finally realized itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity.⁹⁴

In short, liberalism can only assert the principle of universal right by disavowing its violence in fact.

The instability between the de jure and de facto elements of liberal capitalism also forms the basis of Derrida’s argument in a series of late essays on the issue of globalization. On the one hand, Derrida maintains, the term “globalization” refers to processes of increasing interconnectivity of borders, markets, and so on. On the other hand, it inflicts growing inequalities within a new global geography.⁹⁵ The discourses around globalization, he continues, disavow that these processes are not equally beneficial to all.⁹⁶ Yet Derrida also notes a certain possibility inherent to globalization. For despite the inherently cruel nature of the world’s “marketisation” and “Christianization,” the discourse of globalization nevertheless implies a certain unconditionality and contingency.⁹⁷ On this basis, the impossibility of globalization’s immunity from transformation as it permeates across time and space marks the condition for its contestation.⁹⁸

One might take the view of Derrida’s arguments in this context as parasitic upon, and so caught, within the terms of liberal concepts he deconstructs. That is, that in merely teasing out liberalism’s conceptual impasse, Derrida is restricted to the demand for more liberal equality or freedom. By implication, despite his insistence that he is inspired by a militant “Marxist spirit,” this tends to amount to destabilizing the opposition between ideal and actual liberalism.⁹⁹ Indeed, further evidence of the liberal terms of the argument comes in Specters of Marx, where Derrida’s intervention centers upon the aporia that emerges from Marx’s claim to derive the “actual material conditions” of existence.¹⁰⁰ In contrast to Marx, Derrida seeks to cultivate an experience of what he calls the “hauntological” disruption of the actuality of the material.¹⁰¹ Without developing this claim in any detail, suffice it to say that from Fukuyama to Marx, and from liberalism to globalization, the pose Derrida strikes in relation to capitalism amounts to attending to the aporias that condition them and, thus, seeks to submit them to interminable critique.

Entrepreneurial Subjectivity

Accounting for Foucault’s own assessment of capitalism is rather less clear-cut. The relationship between his account of power and Marxist conceptions of capital and class is ambiguous to say the least. The extent to which Foucault’s analysis, especially his account of the emergence of modern power discussed previously, is compatible with, reducible to, or incommensurable with Marxist history continues to be the object of endless debate. For instance, David Harvey has proposed we understand Discipline and Punish as an extension of the chapter on the ‘Working Day’ in Capital Volume 1, while Jacques Bidet and Antonio Negri have, in very different registers, advocate understanding Foucault’s “power” as a sort of accompaniment to Marx’s analysis of capital.¹⁰² These questions deserve a good deal of more analysis than is possible here. Instead, I propose to bring Foucault into dialogue with Derrida on the narrower question of his accounting of neoliberalism as it is presented in his 1979 lecture course The Birth of Biopolitics. As an examination of neoliberalism, however, the text does not only offer a clear contrast with Derrida but also works as a response to those critics discussed previously, who seem to imply that the sort of trajectory he pursues fails to engage the central coordinates of capital. As we will see, Foucault does indeed confront contemporary capitalism, but he does so from within the frame of liberalism understood as a “regime of truth” or apparatus for the production of true and false discourse.¹⁰³

To be more precise, Foucault conceives liberalism as a “rationality” conditional upon a particular understanding of the market. Broadly speaking, Foucault’s approach builds upon insights he had been developing through the 1970s and so is not far off from the understanding of power we have examined in the context of a discussion of sovereignty. That is, liberalism is not conceived as a doctrine of the natural freedom of the individual but rather as entailing a multiplicity of interventions designed for the promotion of a specific conduct, and particular form of producing social order.

The Birth of Biopolitics can be said to trace three epistemological transformations in nineteenth- and especially twentieth-century liberal discourse, each marking what Foucault views as a new “governmental rationality,” a new set of responses to the problem of social order. First, classical liberals posit the state’s incapacity to master the complexity of market forces as an internal limit to government: government should not prevail over individuals’ freedom to produce and exchange and should be measured by “the regulative ideal of personal autonomy.”¹⁰⁴ If classical liberals grounded the legitimacy of government in the state’s respect for what was then constituted as the independent forces of life—“animal spirits” if you like—then the novelty of early twentieth-century “Ordo” liberalism rests with its rejection of the market as natural.¹⁰⁵ The market was no longer conceived as a natural object with its own laws of competition. Rather, it was the role of the state to intervene to ensure markets function.¹⁰⁶ Such a conception undermined the distinction between the legal and the economic, and legitimated endless intervention to ensure the effective functioning of capital through entrepreneurial and competitive activity.¹⁰⁷ This non-natural conception of the market lay the ground, Foucault argues, for the emergence of neoliberalism in the last decades of the twentieth century. Looking mainly to Chicago School theorists and the work of economist Gary Becker in particular, Foucault shows how neoliberalism extends this market logic to all spheres of social life, whereby the distinction between the social and the economic disappears altogether. Government itself comes to be conceived as an enterprise whose task is to expand competition to all elements of life.¹⁰⁸ In this regard, the role of the state is to intervene for the training and behavioral manipulation of an entrepreneurial subject, one able to individually manage all elements of its life and survival at the same time as the welfare state is withdrawn.

Putting aside the question of whether Foucault’s genealogy of rationality exhausts his analysis of contemporary capital, it nevertheless situates the analysis within the narrative of modern power, along with the ethical conception of the relationships between self and other developed in the previous chapter. For, as Nicolas Rose argues, on the neoliberal model of power, the expert acts as a crucial hinge between the individual and power in a way that requires almost no direct repression or intervention on existence.¹⁰⁹ The techniques in question parallel the confessional model described in chapter 4; teachers, doctors, job counselors, and market researchers, among others, each manage individual life to ensure the proliferation of neoliberal objectives of productivity, competitiveness, consumption, and innovation.¹¹⁰ The liberal’s ethical demand to govern oneself, to take on an entrepreneurial control and responsibility for one’s life, not only brings individual conduct in line with broad market principles, but it also does so under the guise of greater autonomy.¹¹¹

This implies there is therefore a crucial difference to the disciplinary apparatus of power here. For where disciplinary techniques were experienced as interventions, with the emergence of neoliberal power, increased productivity and efficiency are mediated by a desire for freedom and self-fulfillment. In other words, the objectives of power are continually aligned with the desires of the self, thus making them even more insidious.

The Failure of Universalism

At stake in this reiteration of the polemic between Derrida and Foucault is thus the terrain upon which the contemporary hegemony of neoliberalism is to be resisted. As we have seen, for Derrida that locus appears in the “disjointure” between liberalism’s ideals and its empirical reality. This is a distinction that is said to point not only to the aporia of liberalism’s claim to universality but also, therefore, to the indefinite possibility of its critique. In contrast, Foucault locates the conditions for the expansion of neoliberal capitalism in the constitution of an entrepreneurial subjectivity. This involves a subject that relates to itself and to others in terms of market calculations and, thus, internalizes the logic of the market as it expands to encompass ever further reaches of the globe and ever more elements of life. The possibility of disrupting neoliberalism’s dominance, therefore, does not hinge, on this account, upon its formal impossibility but is predicated upon the cultivation of a relation to the self not mediated by external norms imposed upon it. The immanent possibilities of the self’s becoming other would need to be, as Foucault puts it in a later essay, disconnected from the “intensification of power relations.”¹¹²

It is worth noting here that Foucault’s understanding of neoliberalism recalls the framing of ethics described in the previous chapter. That is, it amounts to a relation to the self mediated by the imposition of norms of entrepreneurial behavior. In turn, these amount to an economic rationality that disavows its relation to power. Analogously, it is the terms of an experience of the aporia that attends capital’s expansion that sets Derrida’s own argument into motion. It is apparent that the way in which the philosopher theorizes neoliberalism hinges upon the balance of how his grander narrative conceives its medium.

It is in terms of this view that we can revisit the argument that such theories fail to think the “real” universality of capitalism. For, as we saw, that argument posits as its object both the failure to think the nature of capitalism qua medium from which their thought emerges and by which it is conditioned, as well as the principles upon which an emancipatory movement would be organized. It is in these terms that Rancière characterizes Derrida’s ethics by a philosophical “modesty” and “moderation.”¹¹³ For it would appear that Derrida dispenses with emancipatory claims altogether for a reflection upon the hubris of thought. Or, as Slavoj Žižek puts it, the affirmation of philosophy’s failure that accompanies its elicitation signals its “resigned” or “cynical” stance.¹¹⁴ In this sense, Derrida is accused of abandoning democratic solidarity for a preoccupation with absolute dissymmetry. Moreover, this is a preoccupation that, as both Rancière and Alain Badiou argue, reflects a broader contemporary logic of humanitarian intervention, whereby the other is constituted as victim and, on this basis, restricted to radical passivity without agency.¹¹⁵

A comparable argument is mobilized against Foucault, one that ultimately hinges upon his capacity to articulate a grander narrative that would not be reduced to terms set by capital. For example, Balibar argues that in positing the immanence of resistance to power, Foucault fails to conceive a “transformation of the world” that would be a necessary condition for a free ethical relation to the self.¹¹⁶ Foucault is said to deploy an ethical pessimism that neglects deeper or more meaningful social transformation necessary if autonomous ethical practices are to be possible.¹¹⁷ This is insofar as, in his refusal to posit any form of gap between the subject and its conditions, Foucault is left incapable of conceiving practices which would subvert the system which generates them.¹¹⁸ Similarly, for Badiou Foucault is incapable of thinking what the former calls the “genericity” of a given time.¹¹⁹ That is, Foucault’s emphasis on the particular and local targets upon which power is exercised leaves him without any effective means to conceive the universal “truths” that found any genuinely emancipatory politics.¹²⁰

Yet these arguments gain their salience out of “grander narratives” of contemporary capitalism and of collective emancipation and revolt antithetical to both Derrida’s and Foucault’s work. For their critics, their work amounts to a conservative celebration of difference. But on what terms is their work said to be viewed as emancipatory? It is to this question we now turn.

REVOLT AND REVOLUTION

Both Derrida and Foucault certainly reject any conception of collective emancipation that promises to overcome an ideologically distorted or alienated self through a positive conception of man’s “true humanity.” Both explicitly refuse an orthodox Marxist revolutionary eschatology grounded in the desire to “re-appropriate” or “actualize” a positive conception of a true human essence.¹²¹ Instead, as I have implied, they each seek to affirm the ever-present possibility of resistance and the possibility of a less oppressive social order, while all the time insisting that the violence of social ordering is irreducible. Revolutionary political imaginaries are said to merely inscribe the social within a circular teleology that authorizes its own violence. In this sense, both question the very distinction between a wholly exceptional revolutionary event and more localized and modest reformism. This is a position that directly follows from their mutual assertions of finitude. As theory is motivated by the desire to commit “lesser violence,” its relation to the political is not predicated upon philosophy’s legislation of politics, as we have seen, but an accommodation with what “is.” This is politics as amor fati.

Infinite Critique

It is in terms of this line of thought that Derrida maintains that revolutionary discourses tend to be caught up in a circular logic centered upon a promised future realization. As he sees it, the eleventh of the Theses on Feuerbach, where Marx famously calls upon philosophy to “change the world,” amounts to a call by Marx for a future in which his theoretical program will be realized and, as such, his discourse pleads to be judged by its power of producing emancipatory change. But insofar as the call to revolutionary action is made in the name of a determined communism, or what Derrida refers to as “the real presence of the specter,” it inserts into history the promise of a historical class become identical to itself.¹²² This is a move that, in injecting necessity into history, Derrida argues, “cancels historicity” itself.¹²³

Derrida’s stated aim here is to detach Marx’s account of history from a teleological narrative of emancipation, for if communism is the specter haunting Europe, as the famous first line of the Communist Manifesto asserts, then it amounts on his interpretation to a desire for an “end of the spectral.”¹²⁴ A future wherein the specter will become present signals, as far as Derrida is concerned, theory’s desire for the “end of the political as such.”¹²⁵ In opposition to the reductions he views as operative in Marx’s work, Derrida insists instead on the indeterminacy of history, or, as he puts it, of the “messianic promise” that “there is a future” as such.¹²⁶ Such a move, he insists, displaces Marx’s emancipatory eschatology with “interminable, infinite … critique.”¹²⁷ In this formulation the argument that Derrida’s work is reformist makes little sense, for the very distinction between reform and revolution is undermined.

But what exactly remains for politics here? If the work consists in the upending of the very idea of political philosophy then what’s left? It is important to point out here that politics is situated by Derrida in the inescapable process of de- and re-politicization: each act of critique opens social order to the alterity that it violently excludes, but once such a gesture is the object of a political decision or social movement, it too becomes susceptible to critique in turn. Alex Thompson usefully describes the aporetic logic that defines the Derridean account of the political:

There can be no politics of the moment of politicization, since it has no content, nothing that can be acted upon—it is the suspension of all decision… . Any political decision, any political event must be an experience of depoliticization by definition; it sets a rule… . Politicization cannot be the object of a political demand; what complicates this structure is that every political demand, while depoliticizing, will attest to a possible repoliticization.¹²⁸

Thus, total “depoliticization,” a complete and stable order, is impossible since it is undone by the excess that it cannot master. On the other hand, total politicization, a pre-ordinal space of pure contingency, is also proscribed on the grounds of finitude. In Alexander Duttman’s formulation, insofar as it affirms the determinate order as inescapable, Derrida’s work amounts to a reformism since “each decision calls for another one” and, thus, inaugurates an interminable process of reform after reform. However, given that no decision is ever final every depoliticization is inescapably open to the possibility of another repoliticization and in this sense, deconstruction appears as a philosophy of “permanent revolution.”¹²⁹

Revolt as Fact

In yet another recurring parallel, in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” Foucault argues that, given his eschatological view of history, Marx amounts to a modernist thinker.¹³⁰ Similarly, in The Order of Things he accuses Marx of a circular logic that grounds its validity upon its determination of history.¹³¹ It is in this spirit that Foucault explicitly privileges the careful, less speculative analyses of “The 18th Brumaire” and “The Civil War in France” over the programmatic tone of the Communist Manifesto.¹³² This critique of eschatology is developed further in the course of an assessment of the debts that Marx’s notion of class war owes to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century notions of race in Foucault’s 1976 lectures, Society Must Be Defended.¹³³ The notion of class war, Foucault argues, has its origins in older conceptions of an intrinsic social conflict despite a state of relative formal equality. His point is that accounts of a universal and authentic class subject in a permanent state of struggle and as privileged figure of emancipatory praxis are always in danger of reverting to the primitive state of an openly racist politics from which they first emerged.¹³⁴ More broadly, the point is that the notion of class as agent reduces the possibilities of struggle to a predetermined frame. The act of grounding or legislating struggle is, in Foucault’s view, theoretically illegitimate and politically unnecessary since struggle is always possible if not actual.

Echoing these claims, Foucault has in places rejected the idea of revolution outright. For one thing, he argues, acts of “revolution” offer no guarantee that the struggles which produced them won’t be recaptured, colonized, or recuperated by a hegemonic logic. Any discourse of resistance, Foucault says, “no sooner accredited and put into circulation, then they run the risk of re-codification, re-colonization.”¹³⁵ Moreover, he maintains that revolutionary theory tends to impose continuities upon history, and so tends to overlook struggle when it fails to fit its narrative. Moreover, to adopt a discourse of revolution amounts, for Foucault, to positing a pre-ordinal authenticity, “a nature or human foundation which, as a result of a certain number of historical, social or economic processes, found itself concealed, alienated or imprisoned in and by some mechanism of repression.”¹³⁶

Nonetheless, Foucault insists he does not reject all collective struggle; an anti-colonial liberation, for instance, is indeed liberating, but it can never be so finally, for its subject will never be “reconciled with himself.”¹³⁷ It is on these grounds that Foucault favors figures of “revolt” and “resistance” over the concept of “revolution.” Revolts, Foucault claims, interrupt the continuity of history; they emerge from “outside” history and escape it.¹³⁸ By interpreting revolts as “revolutions” we tame them by including them within the rationality of a history or disqualify them altogether.¹³⁹ Revolution, Foucault says, amounts to “a giant effort to domesticate revolts within a rational and controllable history.”¹⁴⁰ If revolutions transcend history, revolts are conceived as discontinuous events immanent to it. For on Foucault’s account revolts posit neither an essential nature to be liberated nor a global or single program to be instituted. Furthermore, on this logic there is no telos against which revolts are to be judged or legitimated. No order, nor any revolt, can ground itself and, thus, as Foucault famously puts it, “people revolt: that is a fact.”¹⁴¹ Thus, no revolt is either necessary or illegitimate, liberating or limiting, since every revolt necessarily risks its own rearticulation in terms of a dominant logic: “My point is not that everything is bad. But that everything is dangerous … and that we are always in a position of beginning again.”¹⁴² Accordingly, given that no revolt can totally transcend its determinate conditions, every act calls for further resistance.

Therefore, not unlike Derrida, Foucault assumes a position between a total politicization and depoliticization; avowing neither a revolutionary transcendence of the determinate to a pre-ordinal authenticity nor a total depoliticization that would be defined by the total reification of power relations. Both, thinkers, in other words, assume an account of the event of revolution that views the conditions of possibility of transformations as ineradicable—both total order and disorder are foreclosed as possibilities.

From Contingency to Necessity

We have already seen that such an account of revolt serves to deflect the widespread criticism that Derrida and Foucault’s theories merely reflect, and so fail to offer a substantive confrontation with, the conditions of contemporary capitalism. In this instance, the polemical move amounts simply to redefining both how contemporary capital functions and, thus, how it is to be effectively resisted. Indeed, Derrida and Foucault both theorize a relation between philosophy and politics that precludes the possibility of a deduction of political praxis from philosophical analyses. No determinate task follows from the politicization(s) effected by deconstruction or genealogy. Accordingly, no revolution can mark a completion of history or politics.

It is in this sense that I proposed conceiving Derrida and Foucault as post-foundational political thinkers. For if any concept of the political is contingent, the affirmation of this contingency should also involve a reversal of the relation between philosophy and political ontology. Philosophical discourse itself must be situated within a broader field of differences or forces if it is to accord with the post-foundational thesis. Once the autonomy of philosophy’s enterprise of providing and justifying forms of social order is disturbed by the affirmation that this gesture is pre-eminently violent and political, then the priority of the philosophical over the political can no longer be maintained. The “political” can no longer be reduced to any specific realm or institution, and moreover, every philosophy must be affirmed as emerging from a given determination of the political.

The political ethics presented by both Derrida and Foucault amounts to the demand for political thought to accommodate itself to its finitude. This is a position that not only seeks to sever the metaphysical desire to master politics but also outlines a political ethics that valorizes thought that avows its own violence. This is what in chapter 4 I described as an ethics that accommodates itself to its own limits. Put otherwise, this is ethics conceived as amor fati. Yet where the account of what “is” or what “happens” is itself grounded upon a “grander narrative” that can itself only amount to a situated perspective, the ethical claim seems undermined.

In this sense, Derrida and Foucault’s theoretical accounts are more totalizing of the political than they aver. For while they may not engage in the sort of metaphysical political theorizing that legislates policies or actions, they nonetheless each invoke a “grander narrative” that articulates the terms of the political as such. In other words, the claim to finitude is undermined by the very terms by which it is articulated. Derrida and Foucault might each seek to think the contingency or instability of any universal foundation or of the terms by which politics ought to be judged, but such a notion merely overlooks the way the basic conceptual architecture of their work amounts to a claim to its own necessity. A notion of finitude that articulates precisely the terms of its limits is by definition less finite than it avows.

But the point to be made here is consonant with my claims throughout this book. That is, where political thought affirms the finitude of its account, in positing an anterior medium for thought, it nonetheless implicitly and obliquely excludes all other accounts. That is, to signal the “essential contestability” of political concepts and institutions is not necessarily to affirm the contestability of conceptions of the political.

The impasse of incommensurability to which Derrida’s and Foucault’s philosophies of finitude submit thought becomes particularly stark where conceptions of democracy and revolution are at stake. And the reasons for this should be clear. For both thinkers seem to hold democracy as unique insofar as it is a form of political regime that inscribes finitude within its terms. Yet once we view finitude from the perspective of the incommensurability of their “grander narratives,” this appears no longer to be the case. That is, each of these conceptions of democracy appears as wholly restrictive and exclusive of the other. So too the concept of revolt here that, as conceived by both Derrida and Foucault, maintains critique as interminable. Still, it is wholly articulated within the terms of a particular account of what happens. Only once we view these arguments in terms of their incommensurability does it become apparent that their limits lie elsewhere, with the confines of a “grander narrative” that consumes their work.

NOTES

1.Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993. P. 2.

2.Jacques Derrida, Dissemination. On the political implications of “Plato’s Pharmacy,” see Catherine Zuckert, Postmodern Platos: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Strauss, Derrida. London: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Pp. 201–225.

3.Derrida, Dissemination, pp. 111, 113.

4.Ibid., pp. 104, 113, 162.

5.Derrida, Rogues, p. 139.

6.Ibid., p. 143.

7.Ibid., p. 11.

8.Ibid., p. 109.

9.Ibid., p. 101.

10.Derrida, Negations, pp. 46–54.

11.Ibid., p. 49.

12.Ibid., p. 49.

13.Ibid., pp. 51–52; on this point, see Noah Horwitz, “Derrida and the Aporia of the Political, or the Theologico-Political Dimension of Deconstruction.” Research in Phenomenology. Vol. 32 (2002). Pp. 156–176. P. 160.

14. As Derrida puts it, there is a “disjointure in the very presence of the present, this sort of non-contemporaneity with itself.” See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, The Work of Mourning and the New International. London: Routledge, 1994. P. 25.

15.Horwitz, “Derrida and the Aporia of the Political,” p. 161.

16.Derrida, Rogues, p. 123.

17.Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 87 and Jacques Derrida, “Marx and Sons,” Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s “Specters of Marx” (Michael Sprinker, Ed.). London: Verso, 1999. P. 221.

18.Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 87.

19.Ibid.

20.Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence.” Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (Peter Demetz, Ed.) (Edmund Jephcott, Trans.). New York: Schocken, 1986. Pp. 277–300. We put aside here the questionable nature of Derrida’s interpretation of Benjamin. A critical account of Derrida’s at times quite reductive understanding of Benjamin falls outside the scope of this work. However, on this point see, for instance, Robert Sinnerbink, “Deconstructive Justice and the ‘Critique of Violence’: On Derrida and Benjamin,” Social Semiotics, Vol. 16, No. 3, 2006. Pp. 485–497.

21.Derrida, Acts of Religion, p. 257.

22.Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, pp. 145–145.

23.Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (George Schwab, Trans.). London: University of Chicago Press, 2007. P. 35.

24.Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, p. 128.

25.For an overview of the shifting role that sovereignty takes in Foucault’s work, see Peter Gratton, The State of Sovereignty. New York: State University of New York Press, 2012.

26.The emergence of the asylum discussed in The History of Madness is archetypal of this form of power.

27.McGushin, Foucault’s Askesis, p. 267.

28.Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 211.

29.Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 194. See also Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 215.

30.Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 214.

31.Ibid., p. 25.

32.Ibid., p. 178–179, 181. I owe the analogy of moral foregrounding of the concept of “differentiation” in Discipline and Punish to McGushin’s Foucault’s Askesis.

33.Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 54.

34.Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 169.

35.Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, Volume 1 (Peggy Kamuf, Trans.). Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013. P. 51.

36.Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p. 55.

37.On the central organizing role of the aporia of temporal presence for Derrida’s work, see Martin Hagglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008; and Joanna Hodge, Derrida on Time. London: Routledge, 2007.

38. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p. 65.

39.Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 141–143.

40.Ibid., p. 147.

41.Keith Robinson, Michel Foucault and the Freedom of Thought. Indiana: E. Mellen, 2001. P. 163.

42.Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 151–152, 154.

43.Ibid., p. 163.

44.Ibid., p. 171. See also Keith Robinson, Michel Foucault and the Freedom of Thought, p. 173.

45.Ibid., p. 92–97.

46.Ibid., p. 89. While I eschew an extensive analysis of Foucault’s 1976–1979 lecture courses and The History of Sexuality Vol.1 here, it is notable that these works mark a further extension of Foucault’s displacement of the theme of sovereignty through the rise of what he calls “biopower.” The genealogy of biopower does not displace but rather extends the analyses of Discipline and Punish. Biopower revolves not only around the disciplining of the abnormal but also around the management of the population as a whole related to as a living organism which both grows and declines. Consequently, as Foucault argues in Security, Territory, Population, from the perspective of biopower, discipline appears as much more localized than Discipline and Punish suggests. If I have nonetheless traced Foucault’s politicization of sovereignty in the earlier work on discipline, it is because this text traces much more closely the role of space and time than the lectures on biopolitics and, thus, lends itself to a closer comparison with Derrida’s work.

47.Ibid., pp. 88–89.

48.Michel Foucault, Essential Works, Volume II, p. 412.

49.Ibid.

50.Derrida, Dissemination, p. 111.

51.Derrida, Rogues, p. 148. See also Derrida, The Death Penalty, Volume 1, p. 51; Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, p. 332.

52.See Lars Tønder & Lasse Thomassen (Eds.), Radical Democracy: Politics Between Abundance and Lack. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005, for an influential overview.

53.Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, p. 225.

54.Ibid., p. 7.

55.Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso, 2000. P. 21; The Politics of Radical Democracy (Adrian Little and Moya Lloyd, Eds.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008; See Lars Tønder and Lasse Thomassen (Eds.), Radical Democracy: Politics Between Abundance and Lack.

56.On the critique of Habermas, Dahl, and other liberal theorists of democracy, see in particular Chantal Mouffe’s The Democratic Paradox and Chantal Mouffe, On the Political. London: Verso, 2005.

57.Jean-Luc Nancy, “On Democracy” (Gilbert Leung, Trans.), paper circulated at the conference On the Idea of Communism held at Birkbeck College, March 13–15, 2009.

58.Jacques Derrida, “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides,” Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Giovanni Boradorri. Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Pp. 85–136. See p. 121.

59. Rodolphe Gasché, “In the Name of Reason: The Deconstruction of Sovereignty.” Research in Phenomenology. Vol. 34 (2004). Pp. 289–303. See p. 291.

60.Derrida, Rogues, p. 74.

61.Ibid., p. 31.

62.Ibid., p. 33.

63.Ibid., p. 36.

64.Ibid., p. 12.

65.Ibid., p. 37.

66.Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, p. 22.

67.Ibid., p. 22; Rogues, pp. 52–53.

68.William Connolly, “Beyond Good and Evil: The Ethical Sensibility of Michel Foucault.” Political Theory. Vol. 21, No. 3 (1993). Pp. 365–389. Connolly nevertheless wrongly locates a Foucauldian democratic ethos in a strict (quasi-transcendent) opposition between self and other.

69.Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others, Lectures at the College de France, 1982–1983 (Graham Burchell, Trans.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 150–151; Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, p. 22.

70.Ibid., p. 169, n.7.

71.It is the problematization of parrhesia by the Greeks, beginning with Euripides, which forms the object of Foucault’s final genealogies.

72.Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth, p. 3. “Alethurgy” is Foucault’s neologism. In his unpublished 1980 lecture course, he defines it as “the ensemble of possible procedures, verbal or non-verbal, by which we bring to light that which is posed as true, in opposition to the false, the concealed, the inexpressible, the unpredictable, the forgotten.” Foucault, The Courage of Truth, p. 20, n.3.

73.McGushin, Foucault’s Askesis. p. 15.

74.Foucault, The Courage of Truth, pp. 35–52.

75.Foucault, The Government of Self and Others, p. 105.

76.Ibid., p. 184. Quoted in Paul Allen-Miller, “Truth-Telling in Foucault’s ‘Le Gouvernement de Soi et des Autres’ and Persius 1: The Subject, Rhetoric and Power.” Parrhesia. No. 1 (2006). Pp. 27–61. See p. 33.

77.Foucault, The Courage of Truth, pp. 35–37.

78.Foucault argues that Plato sees the death of Socrates as a suppression of parrhesia.

79.Foucault, The Government of Self and Others, pp. 192–194.

80.Foucault, Fearless Speech, pp. 100–101.

81.This is a prevailing theme in Foucault, The Courage of Truth.

82.Brown, Edgework, p. 76.

83.Coole, Negativity and Politics, p. 9.

84.Etienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene. London: Verso, 2002. P. 147.

85.Ibid., p. 147.

86.Wendy Brown, “Wounded Attachments.” Political Theory, Vol. 21, No. 3 (1993). Pp. 390–410. P. 393.

87.Jacques Rancière with Kate Nash. “Post-Democracy, Politics, Philosophy: An Interview with Jacques Rancière,” Angelaki. Vol. 1 (1996). Pp. 171–178. P. 177.

88.Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Pp. 12, 7.

89. Wendy Brown, “Wounded Attachments.” P. 394; see also Slavoj Žižek, “Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, Please!” Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London: Verso, 2000. P. 96.

90.Francis Fukuyama. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Harper, 1993.

91.Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 50.

92.See Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, p. 69.

93.Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 69.

94.Ibid., p. 85.

95.Derrida, Negotiations, pp. 375–376.

96.Ibid., p. 122.

97.Jacques Derrida, “Globalization, Peace, and Cosmopolitanism.” Negotiations. Pp. 371–386.

98.Ibid., p. 373.

99.Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 85.

100.Ibid., p. 170.

101.Ibid.

102.See, for instance, David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital, Volume 1. London: Verso, 2010. P. 149; Jacques Bidet, Foucault with Marx. Zed Books, 2016; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire. New Haven, CT: Harvard University Press. For an overview of Foucault’s relationship to Marx see Simon Choat, Marx Through Poststructuralism.

103.Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978–9 (Michel Sellenart, Ed.) (Graham Burchell, Trans.). London: Palgrave Macmillan. P. 19.

104.Barry Hindess, “Liberalism, Socialism and Democracy: Variations on a Governmental Theme.” Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Rationalities of Government (Andrew Barry, et al., Eds.). London: University College London Press, 1996. Pp. 65–80. See p. 65.

105.Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, pp. 120, 161; and, more broadly, the lecture of February 7, pp. 101–128.

106.Ibid., p. 121. More broadly, see pp. 129–158.

107.Ibid., pp. 164–165, 175.

108.Thomas Lemke, “ ‘The Birth of Biopolitics’—Michel Foucault’s Lecture at the Collège de France on Neo-Liberal Governmentality.” Economy and Society, Vol. 30, No. 3 (2001). Pp. 190–207.

109.Nicolas Rose, Inventing Ourselves: Psychology, Power and Personhood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

110.Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, pp. 157–60.

111.Rose, Inventing Ourselves, p. 155; Jason Read, “A Genealogy of Homo- Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity.” Foucault Studies. No. 6 (2009). Pp. 25–36.

112.Foucault, Essential Works, Volume III, p. 317. For a dissenting view of Foucault’s analysis of liberalism that withdraws any normative claim to the work at all, see Paul Patton, “Foucault ‘Critique’ of Neoliberalism and the Genealogy of Public Reason,” New Formations, No. 80/81, 2013.

113.Rancière, Disagreement, p. 136.

114.This claim is made by Slavoj Zizek in “Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, Please!” P. 93 and “Melancholy and the Act,” p. 665. See also Alain Badiou’s Ethics.

115.This claim is made in very similar ways by Rancière in Disagreement, pp. 135–136; and Alain Badiou in his Ethics, p. 9.

116.Etienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, p. 15. See also Étienne Balibar, “Foucault and Marx: The Question of Nominalism” (Timothy J. Armstrong, Ed.); Michel Foucault Philosopher. New York: Routledge, 1992.

117.Alain Badiou and Bruno Bosteels, “Can Change Be Thought? A Dialogue with Alain Badiou.” Alain Badiou: Philosophy and Its Conditions (Gabriel Riera, Ed.). Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. P. 256. See also Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject. Pp. 251–255.

118.Ibid.

119.Ibid.

120.Ibid.

121.This formulation is made by Rancière, Disagreement, p. 83. See also Jean-Luc Nancy and Phillippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Retreating the Political, p. 111; Zizek, The Ticklish Subject. P. 190.

122.Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 103. Conditional to Marxist critique for Derrida is the reduction of the irreducibly “spectral” or “hauntological” to material conditions through an ontology of social relations within a mode of production, whose task is to produce the transparency or presence of these relations. On this point, see also Mathias Fritsch, The Promise of Memory, p. 85.

123.Ibid., pp. 74, 87.

124.Ibid., p. 103.

125.Ibid., p. 102.

126.Fritsch, The Promise of Memory, p. 60.

127.Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 90.

128.Alex Thompson, Deconstruction and Democracy: Derrida’s Political Friendship. London: Continuum, 2005. P. 167.

129.Jacques Derrida (with Alexander Garcia Duttman). “Perhaps or Maybe.” Pli, Vol. 16 (Summer 1997). Pp. 1–18. Quoted on p. 11; Alex Thompson points to this interview in Deconstruction and Democracy, p. 173.

130.Foucault, Essential Works, Volume II, p. 278.

131.Foucault, The Order of Things, pp. 340–343.

132.Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 76. See also Bradley J. MacDonald, “Marx, Foucault, Genealogy.” Polity. Vol. 34, No. 3. Pp. 259–284; and Simon Choat, Marx through Poststructuralism: Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze. London: Continuum, 2010. Pp. 94–124.

133.Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–1976 (Mauro Bertani & Alessandro Fontana, Eds.) (David Macey, Trans.). London: Penguin, 2003. P. 79; Warren Montag, “Towards a Conception of Race without Racism: Foucault and Contemporary Biopolitics.” Pli. Vol. 13, 2002. Pp. 112–125. See p. 117.

134.Montag, “Towards a Conception of Race without Racism.” P. 117.

135.Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 86.

136.Foucault, Essential Works, Volume I, p. 282.

137.Ibid., p. 282.

138.Foucault, Essential Works, Volume III, p. 449.

139.Ibid.

140.Ibid.

141.Ibid.

142.Foucault, Essential Works, Volume I, p. 256.

Conclusion

The argument developed throughout this book has been that, given an analysis of the stakes of the claim to finitude in Derrida’s and Foucault’s work, it becomes apparent that a finite account of the medium of thought itself is restricted to the limits of a given perspective. There is, in this sense, an irreducible opacity inherent to “post-foundational” theory. While politics can no longer lay claim to secure grounds, the gesture of rethinking the ontological cannot be separated or abstracted from the determinate conditions into which thought is “thrown.” Insofar as this is so, theory will necessarily be partial, oblique, and contingent. Or, put otherwise, political theories such as Derrida’s and Foucault’s may affirm their own contingency, yet they simultaneously necessarily undermine it in their formulation of grander ontological narratives in which they situate thought.

Accordingly, it is by placing the account of situatedness or finitude of thought at the core of its analysis that this book has demonstrated that the terms of a polemic between Derrida and Foucault can be found to run throughout their work. This is a polemic that results from their pursuit of two parallel, yet radically incommensurable accounts of what “is” or what “happens.” For in positing that the dialogue between Derrida and Foucault occurs over the question of the “medium” or terrain where thought is situated, several questions come into view as cutting across their works.

First, epistemic questions about the possibility of a knowledge that can conceive this “medium” while simultaneously avowing its own situatedness. Accordingly, chapter 2 had sought to show both that the polemic between Derrida and Foucault is irreducible, but also that they pursue analogous philosophical orientations, in turn often resulting in parallel themes in their analyses. Second, it was through ontological questions about the being of thought and its relation to its outside that chapter 3 examined the simultaneous convergence and divergence between Derrida and Foucault through the scope of their methodological principles; the mode by which their questioning proceeds in negotiating its own finitude and contingency. Third, the question of the possibility of providing an orientation for a self-affirmingly situated thought was pursued in chapter 4 through an engagement with the question of ethics. This was posited in terms of the way their philosophies admit their own inherently violent or reductive nature yet nevertheless seek to formulate a “lesser” violence. Finally, the question of the possibility of a situated and finite thought that might nevertheless maintain an emancipatory orientation was pursued in the engagement with politics in chapter 5. This was framed in terms of Derrida and Foucault’s attempts to reformulate philosophy’s relation to the political, especially as it is expressed in their conceptions of democracy, neoliberalism, and revolution.

It is thus in tracing the polemic between Derrida and Foucault as two ways of thinking social order and disorder that I have sought to demonstrate that there exists a politicized or polemical space that exceeds their accounts and which appears only negatively—inferred in the moments where their divergence points to the fundamentally incommensurable nature of their work. This is not only to imply that the self-affirmingly particular and situated origins of their thought result in their incommensurability, but to claim that incommensurability itself cannot be arrested.

Provided we maintain the theoretically uncompromising position I have taken in this work, there are three primary conclusions to be drawn from the claims made above. First, and most narrowly, that the Cogito debate be understood as a polemic over the means and terms by which the medium of differentiation is to be thought, and that this in turn results in a series of incommensurable claims to the priority of one account over the other. Second, and more broadly, that these terms extend to Derrida’s and Foucault’s oeuvres. The means by which they seek to affirm the finitude of their categories entail the self-sufficiency and, accordingly, the exclusivity of their competing “grander narratives.” Given that the basic conceptual architecture of their work remains stable throughout their oeuvres, the terms of the debate are thus not merely reducible to the Cogito debate but are implicitly or explicitly present throughout all their work. Finally, and most broadly, any thought that seeks to affirm its finitude through the articulation of a nonetheless generalized and self-sufficient medium thereby undermines that finitude. In other words, a theory that affirms its finitude but that can nonetheless locate the precise limits of that finitude is caught in an endlessly circular self-referentiality. A self-referentiality, moreover, most evident in polemic.

If I thus claim that the theories of Derrida and Foucault lead political thought to an impasse, this is nevertheless an assertion that requires a proviso, at least in the case of Foucault. For where my own account, in laying the grounds for an ongoing dialogue with Derrida, might be said to submit his work to sharp formulas and thus a certain formalism, there is nevertheless much of the content of Foucault’s oeuvre that exceeds these terms. This is not to suddenly shrink from the claims made throughout this book. Rather, it’s to insist that the richness of the historical enterprise undertaken by Foucault is not exhausted by them. This is evident if one looks to some of the fecund work pursued under the banner of Foucault’s name or inspired by his genealogies. From criminology to international relations, from the history of science to the study of neoliberal approaches to psychology and personhood or a decolonial conception of dialectics, Foucault’s oeuvre has informed, and continues to inform, a multitude of rich and provocative approaches to some of the most pressing questions we face today.¹ Conversely, as I have shown throughout, insofar as Derrida’s oeuvre is grounded in the irreducibility of an engagement with the formal conditions of given concepts and with the conditions of thought itself, there is a certain constraint that this work imposes upon its readers. Thus, even at its most inventive and fertile, theoretical work in the Derridean tradition largely echoes its terms.² That is, it is caught in the experience of the aporetic nature of any order, as Derrida conceives it.

Along these lines, it can be said that this book presents a particularly formalist picture of Foucault, while the very nature of his work outstrips such a view. Just as Derrida reduces the 600-odd pages of rich analysis in History of Madness to a three-page discussion of Descartes, so there is indeed something to be said for the claim that Foucault presented here professes something of the formalism of Derrida, or, even, that the former’s work is relegated to the terms of the latter, insofar as the very richness of detail of Foucault’s historical studies is not reproduced here. Something of a translation, an adaptation, if not a reduction, inevitably takes place whenever two thinkers are brought into dialogue with one another.

Despite this admission, the claim stands. For not only do the debates reconstructed throughout these chapters closely follow the very arguments delivered by Derrida and by Foucault. But the claim to finitude and the ontology of discourse, power, and knowledge in which it is situated remain as foundational to Foucault’s project. If his work is all the more fruitful for not being exhausted by these terms, it is nonetheless unthinkable without them.

It bears mentioning that a number of recent variations of continental social and political thought, while often explicitly influenced by Derrida and Foucault, have dispensed with the question of finitude altogether.³ Not without some echo in the current work, these “new materialist” theorists have for the most part viewed the Derridean or Foucauldian dispersal of the subject to the media of thought as still too subjectivist and anthropocentric; still too grounded in human categories of language, power, culture, and so on. In response, “new materialist” or “speculative realist” theorists have tended to circumvent an ontological explanation for the position of contemplation altogether to ascribe agency and ontological significance to all material beings, human or otherwise. In other work, I have argued that this sort of negotiation with the problem of finitude, one which seeks to circumvent it altogether, amounts to the trivialization of philosophy, for thought becomes arbitrary once it ceases to reflect on its conditions.⁴ Moreover, in failing to reflect upon the material conditions of thought, it reproduces the very ideal of autonomous thought it seeks to overcome.⁵ In response, I have instead begun to draw upon a heterodox Marxist tradition to rethink the conditions of finite thought in the very form of capitalist exchange relations and class divisions.⁶ This is a project that seeks to locate the sources of cognitive abstractions in the realm of social practice and, thus, to reverse the relationship between history and ontology as I presented it in both Derrida’s and Foucault’s work. Such a claim, however, will deserve further scrutiny elsewhere. Every book after all must grapple with its own finitude.

NOTES

1.I refer here to Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability 2nd Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006; Nicolas Rose, Inventing Ourselves; George Cicciarello-Maher, Decolonizing Dialectics, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.

2.Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999; Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso, 1985.

3.See, for instance, Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007; New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, Eds.). Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.

4.Paul Rekret, “The Head, the Hand and Matter: A Critique of New Materialism,” Theory, Culture & Society (forthcoming); Paul Rekret, “A Critique of New Materialism: Ethics and Ontology,” Subjectivity, Vol. 9, No. 3, 2016, pp. 225–245.

5.Ibid.

6.Ibid.; Paul Rekret and Simon Choat, “From Political Topographies to Political Logics: Post-Marxism and Historicity,” Constellations: A Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory, Vol. 23, No. 2, 2016, pp. 281–291.

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Index

Agamben, Giorgo, 2, 6, 30, 59, 93

alterity, 11, 12, 51–52, 58, 61–62, 63, 67, 75, 86, 91, 101–19, 140

amor fati, 102, 104, 146, 149

Arditi, Benjamin, 3

Arendt, Hannah, vii, 2, 3

Badiou, Alain, 1, 104, 140, 145

Balibar, Étienne, 140, 145

Barad, Karen, 2

Battaile, George, 77

Beardsworth, Richard, 38

Becker, Gary, 143

Bennett, Jane, 2

Bidet, Jacques, 142

Blanchot, Maurice, 77

Boyne, Roy, 46

Braidotti, Rosi, 2

Brown, Wendy, 139–40

Butler, Judith, 2, 109

Calcagno, Antonio, 118

Canguilhem, Georges, 93

capitalism, 5, 140–45

Cartesian. See Descartes, René

Cazeaux, Clive, 22

Christianity, 19, 110–14, 141

Clark, Maudemarie, 22

cogito debate, 46–48, 101, 117

Colebrooke, Claire, 66, 74

Connolly, William, 2, 6, 7, 103, 109

contingency, 1–7, 68, 76, 80, 103–4, 126, 149–50

Coole, Diana, 22, 139–40

Critchley, Simon, 103, 107

Danto, Arthur, 22

Deleuze, Gilles, vii, 59, 110; Foucault, 75, 77, 116; Nietzsche, 32–33, 38

democracy, 134–39

Derrida, Jacques: alterity, 49–53, 62, 63, 102–3, 105–8; aporia, 13, 63, 66, 76, 82–86, 91; Aporias, 82–84, 85–86, 89, 91; Beast and the Sovereign, 90; capitalism, 141–42, 145; ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’, 49–54, 81, 89, 95, 132; critique of Foucault, 91–93, 132–33; Death Penalty Volume 1, 131; decision, 83, 91, 106–7; ‘Declarations of Independence’, 127–28, 131; democracy, 135–36; différance, 32, 63–65, 80, 133; ‘Ends of Man’, 32; ‘Envois’, 67; finitude, 85, 128; ‘Force of Law’, 107, 108, 128; on Foucault, 48–54, 89–92, 118, 132–33; genealogy, 33, 34–35, 34–37, 68, 85, 91, 104; Gift of Death, 106; Of Grammatology, 33, 36–37, 63, 92; on Heidegger, 66–68; on justice, 107–8; metaphysics of presence, 32, 36, 50, 62–63, 102, 104, 126, 131, 132, 135, 146; ‘Ousia et Gramme’, 131; ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, 127, 132; Politics of Friendship, 85, 128; revolt, 146–47; Rogues, 91, 108, 128; sovereignty, 127–29, 131, 132–33; Spectres of Marx, 128–31, 141–42; Of Spirit, 84–85; ‘Structure, Sign, and Play’ 33, 34–35; on subjectivity, 32, 61–64; ‘To Do Justice to Freud’, 88–91, 95; truth, 80, 92–93; violence, 102–8, 115–16, 128, 149; ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, 81–82, 102, 108; on voice, 48, 62–63, 82

Descartes, René, 28, 45, 51–53, 55–57, 60, 61, 63, 89, 93, 94, 112

Dews, Peter, 92

difference, 60, 66, 74

Duttman, Alexander Garcia, 146

emancipation, 1, 5, 11, 139–40, 145, 146, 147, 158

exteriority, 45, 54, 63, 77, 79, 87, 103, 115, 117, 133

event, 25–27, 29, 31, 38, 47, 50, 51, 53–54, 56–57, 58, 75, 78, 80–81, 88, 93–94, 105, 116, 127–28, 131, 133, 148

finitude, 18, 25, 30–31, 32, 38, 47, 73, 74, 80–81, 93, 101, 117, 125, 139, 145, 149–50, 157–59

Foucault, Michel: alterity, 54–55, 65–66, 109–10, 116–17; archaeology, 48, 50, 86; Archaeology of Knowledge, 54, 60, 86; biopower, 129; Birth of Biopolitics, 142–44; Care of the Self, 87, 111–15; care of the self, 110–15, 118; Courage of Truth, 136–39; critique of Derrida, 54–58, 115–18; democracy, 136–39; on Derrida, 54–58, 89–92, 118, 129; Discipline and Punish, 79, 86, 95, 111, 129–30, 131, 142; discourse, 37–38, 51–52, 55–58, 64–66, 78–79, 86, 94, 110, 113–14, 116, 118, 130, 137–38, 142–43, 159; ethics, 87, 110; finitude, 64–66; genealogy, 37–38, 54, 78, 89, 94; Heidegger, 66–68; History of Madness, 50–51, 54, 89–90, 159; History of Sexuality, 86; ‘My Body, This Paper, This Fire’, 54–58, 81, 92, 110, 132; neoliberalism, 111, 142–44, 145; ‘Nietzsche, Freud, Marx’, 73; ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, 77, 147; ‘Order of Discourse’, 78; Order of Things, 54, 64, 65, 67, 78, 86, 88, 89, 115, 147; parrhesia, 136–39; problematization, 86–89, 110, 137; power, 9, 32, 34, 37–38, 54–55, 73, 78–79, 80, 81, 86–87, 89, 93–95, 109, 111–13, 115–17, 129, 130; resistance, 79–80, 148; revolution, 147–48; Society Must Be Defended, 147; sovereignty, 129–30, 131–32; subjectivity, 64–66; time, 129–30; truth, 80, 86, 92–95; Use of Pleasure, 87, 88, 111–15; violence, 108, 115, 139

Freud, Sigmund, 35, 89–90

Fukuyama, Francis, 141

Gasché, Rodolphe, 75

genealogy, 20, 36, 80

grander narrative, 58, 74, 80–81, 101, 108, 117, 129, 133, 139, 149–50, 157

Granel, Gerard, 60

Granier, Jean, 21

Haar, Michel, 20

Habermas, Jurgen, 21–22, 31, 79

Harvey, David, 142

Heidegger, Martin, 59, 67, 75, 80, 86, 89, 101, 125; ‘Age of the World Picture’, 67–68; artwork, 26; Being, 66–68, 80; Being and Time, 25–26, 29–31, 83–84; being-in-the-world, 17; being-with (mitsein), 29–30, 139; Dasein, 25–26, 29–31, 32, 66, 75, 83, 85; Introduction to Metaphysics, 27; ‘Letter on Humanism’, 61; National Socialism, 25, 31, 81; Nietzsche, 27–29, 33; ontological violence, 26–27; thrownness, 18, 25–26, 29–31, 157

historicity, vii, 5–6, 18, 25, 27–28, 30–31, 32, 37–38, 46–47, 62, 67, 145, 146, 147–48, 149, 159–60

Hobbes, Thomas, 60

Honig, Bonnie, 126

Husserl, Edmund, 59

immanence, 59–60, 79, 93, 110, 113–15, 145

incommensurability, 9–11, 13–14, 24, 39, 46, 58, 60–61, 74, 81, 96, 102, 109, 118, 129, 132–34, 135, 138–39, 149–50, 157–59

Kant, Immanuel, 7, 59, 60, 112

Kaufmann, Walter, 22

Klossowksi, Pierre, 77

Laclau, Ernesto, 6, 104, 107

Lacoue-Labarthe, Phillippe, 3, 31

language, 8, 10–11, 33, 34–35, 37, 46, 48, 50–51, 53–54, 58, 64–65, 77–79, 84, 86, 87, 103, 133

Lefort, Claude, 3, 134

Levinas, Emmanuel, 102, 107

Levi-Strauss, Claude, 34, 36–37, 62

life, 87, 93

logos, 49–50, 58, 67, 102, 112, 137–38

Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 7, 10–11

Macherey, Pierre, 47, 77, 80, 117

madness, 12, 47, 48–54, 101, 102, 133

Marx and Marxism, 35, 142, 145–46, 147, 159–60

McGushin, Edward, 113, 118

medium of differentiation, 12, 35, 46, 50, 53–55, 58, 61–62, 65–68, 74–76, 77, 84, 86–88, 117–18, 125, 130, 131, 133, 138, 139, 144–45, 150, 157

Meillassoux, Quentin, 7

metaphysics, vii–viii, 4, 13, 18–20, 22, 24, 25, 27–29, 30–33, 34–35, 38, 47, 52, 54, 55, 61–62, 67, 92, 103, 108, 131, 138

Mouffe, Chantal, 139

Nancy, Jean-Luc, 2, 3, 6, 30, 47, 61, 134, 139

Negri, Antonio, 142

neoliberalism, 140–45

new materialism, 159

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 32–36, 78, 80, 101, 125; Genealogy of Morals, 18–19; grand politics, 18, 23–24, 125; pathos of distance, 23; perspectivism, 21–23; sovereign individual, 18, 23, 29; will to power, 12, 17, 18–23, 27, 28, 80; will to truth, 20–21, 23–24, 28

nihilism, 1, 8, 24, 27–29, 31, 74, 95

normative deficit, 5–6, 31, 74, 77, 104, 114

ontological difference, 25–26, 83, 88, 140

originary violence. See violence

other, the. See alterity

outside, the, 59, 63, 66–68, 73–80, 84, 86, 88–90, 103, 104, 105, 108–9, 113, 115–17, 148

Owen, David, 22

Patočka, Jan, 106

perspectivism, viii, 3, 4, 6, 9, 18–23, 25, 28, 49, 58, 66–67, 73–74, 149–50, 157

Plato, 2, 37–38, 58, 81, 126–27, 138

polemic, 10–11, 28, 47–48, 53, 58, 92, 118, 144

political ontology, 1–8, 24, 26–27, 30–31, 60–61, 80–81, 125–26, 149–50

political science, 3

post-foundationalism, 2–6, 7, 27, 125–26, 149, 157

Rancière, Jacques, 1, 3, 10, 139, 140, 145

Rawls, John, 60

revolution, 146

Richardson, John, 22

Rose, Nicolas, 143

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 36

Said, Edward, 46

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1

Schmitt, Carl, 128–29, 130

Schrift, Alan D., 48

Scott, Charles E., 23

Smith, Daniel W., 59

sovereignty, 126–34, 136, 143; of philosophy, 57, 92, 96

space and time, 62–64, 74, 114, 127–28, 131–32, 141, 145

speculative realism, 159

speech, 36, 38, 126

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 2, 74, 108

Sprinker, Michael, 46

Strong, Tracy, 22

Taylor, Charles, 79

Thiele, Leslie Paul, 109

Thompson, Alex, 146

thought, 66–68, 73–76, 80–82, 92–96

Valentine, Jeremy, 3

Vattimo, Gianno, 7

Veyne, Paul, 114

violence, 9, 26–27, 31, 34, 36–39, 45, 50, 53–55, 58, 62, 68, 91, 92, 95, 101–2, 126, 146, 158

Visker, Rudi, 74, 76–77, 79

Walzer, Michael, 79

White, Stephen K., 7

will to truth, 20, 35, 36, 37, 45, 55, 80, 104, 126, 134–35

Wolin, Richard, 31

Wood, David, 92

Žižek, Slavoj, 145

About the Author

Paul Rekret is Associate Professor of Politics at Richmond University, the American International University London. He is author of Down with Childhood: Pop Music and the Crisis of Innocence and has published widely on issues in contemporary political theory and in music politics. He is host of Beholder Halfway, a series of radio essays on music politics airing monthly on Resonance Extra.