Madness in English-Canadian Fiction - ub-dok - Universität Trier

Derrida makes a similar point on a more general level when he extends this criticism
to other disciplines. His critique of his contemporaries bears on their failure to
scrutinise with sufficient rigour the status of their own discourse, as Derrida himself is
continually doing. They are engaged in a critique of knowledge, truth, objectivity and
at the same time are producing impressive analyses of cultural products and human
activities. Their awareness of the problem of their own discourse, which claims
knowledge yet at the same time calls knowledge into question, is in a sense beside the
point. This awareness, Derrida suggests, should issue a rigorous questioning of their
own categories which will serve to displace those categories.
This sort of attack could, for instance, be launched at Foucault - as much as his insight
can be admired. Since Foucault, everyone who speaks about insanity these days cannot
avoid historically and systematically pondering over his or her own relationship to
logical reason. However, reflection on his position of reason is necessary too. For him
all rational knowledge about insanity appears as the rule of power of a misinterpreted
rationalism disjoined from the true nature of the "whole human being", first of all
observation, experience and empirically gathered facts are rejected as possible
correctives for thought and, secondly, every kind of criticism based on these correctives
is suppressed from the outset. Foucault imposes absolutism on his own thoughts in
that he himself projects a structure into the affair and then discovers the projected as
its secret truth legitimated this way as objective. This has the inevitable consequence
that all external criticism appears as an expression of just this secret truth and can
therewith be devaluated. Foucault does not reflect his own approach as conditioned by
the present and does not analyze the problems of the present. Instead he declares them
to be something which has come of secret and malicious powers: progress, technology,
science, state, society, politics - in principle the entire occidental history as the story of
rationalism and progressive cognition have made human beings lose touch with their
original unity with themselves, which lies in the unity and not the antinomy of
reason and madness.
Michel Foucault, the primary voice of the critique of speaking for others, can only
speak for himself and his own enterprise therefore can only be another attempt by
reason to define madness and not a project of a different order. Despite his ambition to
let madness speak for itself, he cannot avoid speaking for madness in the language of
reason, which excludes madness in the first place. That any translation of madness is
already a form of its repression, a form of violence against it and that the praise of folly
can only be made in the language of reason, is one of the fundamental points of
criticism in Derrida's analysis of Foucault.99 Madness, suggests Derrida in his response
99 Derrida, Jacques: Writing and Difference.- Transl. by Alan Bass.- Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978.- pp. 31-6
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