Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism

78 NOTHING MAT(T)ERS
Foucault’s previous work: the book is successful because it is not original.
Psychiatry and psychoanalytic theory have dislocated, however minimally, the
perception of madness as simply unreason and created an opening for Foucault’s
critique. Foucault’s book was to be expected.
Derrida is particularly disturbed that Foucault does not acknowledge serious and
prior methodological and philosophical questions of language. The issue for him is
the history of the dissension within the original logos that separated into reason and
madness. “It thus seems that the project of convoking the first dissension of logos
against itself is quite another project than the archaeology of silence, and raises
different questions” (1978b, p. 39). Derrida prefers to find the origin of this division
internally, rather than in what Foucault terms The Decision, division by external
command. Derrida sees this internal revolution against the self as occurring during
the Middle Ages and altering the Greek tradition. He is concerned that Foucault has
hidden the “true historical grounds” (1978b, p. 39) of this decision by not
investigating its semiology. Derrida accuses Foucault of metaphysics: “The attempt
to write the history of the decision, division, difference runs the risk of construing
the division as an event or a structure subsequent to the unity of an original presence,
thereby confirming metaphysics in its fundamental operation” (1978b, p. 40).
Derrida also faults Foucault for proceeding as if he “knew what ‘madness’ means”
(1978b, p. 41) through a previous and already given understanding of the concept in
spite of reason’s language and use: all that is negative is madness. He is also
disturbed by the similar treatment of the concept of truth. Derrida’s second concern
with Foucault’s omission of the history of pre-classical logos relates to the
methodology and historicity of reason. The Great Internment is not studied as a sign,
it is not determined to be cause or symptom. Derrida points to Foucault’s
structuralism:
This kind of question could appear exterior to a method that presents itself
precisely as structuralist, that is, a method for which everything within the
structural totality is interdependent and circular in such a way that the classical
problems of causality themselves would appear to stem from a
misunderstanding. Perhaps. But I wonder whether, when one is concerned
with history (and Foucault wants to write a history), a strict structuralism is
possible, and, especially, whether, if only for the sake of order and within the
order of its own descriptions, such a study can avoid all etiological questions,
all questions bearing, shall we say, on the centre of gravity of the structure
(1978b, p. 44).
Foucault does not say whether Descartes’ expulsion of reason from thought in The
Meditations is “a symptom, a cause, a language” (1978b, p. 44). Nor are the
structural links to the entire drama of The Confinement elucidated. For Derrida, what
is necessary is a study of the intention and content of philosophical discourse, which
he then proceeds to give of the passage putting Descartes and Foucault in dialogue.
What emerges here is Derrida’s critique of the proposition that philosophy can call
up madness with language, which is itself a carrier and enforcer of normality. This is
the “essential and universal necessity from which no discourse can escape, for it