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

NEUTRALITY AND DE/MEANING 79
belongs to the meaning of meaning” (1978b, p. 53). Derrida insists that his own
critique is “strictly Foucauldian” (1978b, p. 54). Writing is logos, is reason, it carries
meaning and normality and sense: madness is silence, absence, and the source of
writing. “Within the dimension of historicity in general, which is to be confused
neither with some ahistorical eternity, nor with an empirically determined moment of
the history of facts, silence plays the irreducible role of that which bears and haunts
language” (1978b, p. 54). Silence gives birth to language, which is separated from
madness by itself. Language is born of “a nothing that neutralizes everything…”
(1978b, p. 55). According to Derrida, Foucault defines madness as negativity, and
then reconfines it. No subversion of reason is possible with language. “The
misfortune of the mad, the interminable misfortune of their silence, is that their best
spokesmen are those who betray them best;” (1978b, p. 36). Derrida claims that
Foucault’s work is “a powerful gesture of protection and internment. A Cartesian
gesture for the twentieth century” (1978b, p. 55). Aiming to intern Classical reason,
Foucault misses the etiological question of the very possibility of meaning.
Descartes, at least, did not intern madness, he did not exclude it from the cogito as
Foucault has done, madness was within thought for most stages of doubt for the
Cartesian cogito. Foucault’s reduction of the Cartesian project “risks erasing the
excess by which every philosophy (of meaning) is related, in some region of its
discourse, to the nonfoundation of unmeaning” (1978b, p. 309, endnote).
Derrida’s Descartes strives to exceed the totality of that which can be thought—to
exceed history—in the direction of Nothingness and Infinity. Foucault does violence
to this project by enclosing it within a historical structure: “a violence of a
totalitarian and historicist style which eludes meaning and the origin of meaning”
(1978b, p. 57). Structuralism and political totalitarianism “beckon each other
historically,” and Foucault “runs the risk of being totalitarian” (1978b, p. 57).
Derrida’s greatest indictment of the Foucauldian project is: “Structuralist
totalitarianism here would be responsible for an internment of the Cogito similar to
the violences of the Classical age” (1978b, p. 57). Derrida refers to the epigraph
compelle intrare, from Foucault’s chapter on The Great Internment, to argue that
forcing the entry of madness into the world, and this emphasis on intraworldliness,
calling back and containing that which is supposed by the world, is the very essence
of violence. Yet in advancing this argument Derrida insists that he is not referring to
an other world, or to transcendence, for that would also be a violence similar to the
flaw he sees in Foucault’s argument.
Foucault responds to this “remarkable critique” (1972, p. 9) by quoting and
questioning at length Derrida’s reading of Descartes. Foucault argues that Descartes
uses madness to formulate epistemological questions, and does not proceed through
an exclusion or silencing of it. It is Derrida, he retorts, who arranges the debate to
ask whether or not there is something anterior or exterior to philosophical discourse,
and it is Derrida who passionately rejects the notion that philosophical discourse has
its condition of being in an act of rejection or refusal. Foucault hurls back the epithet
of “Cartesian”, it is Derrida who is “continuing the Cartesian exclusion” (1972,
p. 599). Descartes found that the philosopher excluded madness in order to establish
himself as sane. But, Foucault points out, Derrida rejects this as meaning the