Some Marxists even, as if Foucault/Derrida = materialism/idealism.

Textual endless self-reflexive games versus materialist analysis. BUT: Foucault: remains HISTORICIST. He reproaches Derrida his inability to think the exteriority of philosophy – this is how he designates the stakes of their debate:

could there be something prior or external to the philosophical discourse? Can the condition of this discourse be an exclusion, a refusal, an avoided risk, and, why not, a fear? A suspicion rejected passionately by Derrida. Pudenda origo, said Nietzsche with regard to religious people and their religion.

Michel Foucault, "Mon corps, ce papier, ce feu," Histoire de la folie à l’age classique, Paris: Gallimard 1972.

However, Derrida is much closer to thinking this externality than Foucault, for whom exteriority involves simple historicist reduction which cannot account for itself (to what F used to reply with a cheap rhetorical trick that this is a "police" question, "who are you to say that" – AGAIN, combining it with the opposite, that genealogical history is "ontology of the present"). It is easy to do THIS to philosophy, it is much more difficult to think its INHERENT excess, its ex-timacy (and philosophers can easily dismiss such external reduction as confusing genesis and value). This, then, are the true stakes of the debate: ex-timacy or direct externality?

Slavoj Zizek, Cogito, Madness and Religion: Derrida, Foucault and then Lacan




Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...