The phrase ‘To perish from absolute knowledge’ from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil runs like a red thread throughout Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche, spanning a period of 20 years in which Foucault continuously turned to Nietzsche as his main philosophical and methodological role model. Beginning with his first lectures on Nietzsche in the early 1950s, Foucault repeatedly alluded to this phrase as the key to Nietzsche’s philosophical critique which anticipated the philosophical shift to ontology in the 20th century. Drawing on (...) a host of unpublished essays from Foucault’s archive, it will be shown that this phrase holds the key to Foucault’s Nietzsche interpretation and explains his reliance on historicity as the transcendental basis for his critical project. The article will rely on Foucault’s dynamic analysis of this phrase to narrate the development of his historical methodology between the 1950s and the mid-1970s, and will argue for the continuity and coherence of Foucault’s critical project. (shrink)

In this article the Derrida/Foucault debate is scrutinised with two closely related aims in mind: reconsidering the way in which Foucault’s texts, and especially the more recently published lectures, should be read; and establishing the relation between law and madness. The article firstly calls for a reading of Foucault which exceeds metaphysics with the security it offers, by taking account of Derrida’s reading of Foucault as well as of the heterogeneity of Foucault’s texts. The article reflects in detail on a (...) text of Derrida on Foucault as well as a text of Foucault on Blanchot. The latter text shows that Foucault was at times acutely aware of the difficulty involved in exceeding metaphysics and that he realised the importance in this regard of a reflection on literature. These reflections tie in closely with Foucault’s History of Madness as well as with Derrida’s reflections on literature and on madness. Both Derrida and Foucault contend that law has much to learn from literature in understanding the relation between itself and madness. Literature more specifically points to law’s ‘origin’ in madness. The article contends that a failure to take seriously this origin, also in the reading of Foucault’s lectures, would amount to a denial by law of itself. (shrink)

The article examines the inter-implication between Foucault's and Derrida's representations of one another's work in the debate over Histoire de la folie and discovers a chiasmic structure between them, an inverted mirroring of each in the other, in which philosophy and historicity alternately encompass and exceed one another. At the heart of this is a problem of language (and the reason that accompanies it), which defines the limitations of the historian's work.

ExcerptIntroduction Stephen K. White, whose work represents one of the more well-known recent attempts to define a paradigm of post-metaphysical political thought, is indicative of the omission of an impasse that this article will argue seems to haunt this field. White has proposed, in defense of accusations of a thoroughgoing relativism, that the discipline should be conceived in terms of what he calls, echoing a concept coined by Gianni Vattimo, “weak ontology.”1 White argues that to describe ontology as “weak” denotes (...) that in the absence of transcendent grounds there is necessarily an “essential contestability” to the…. (shrink)

Aunque la obra de Foucault haya influido en el pensamiento poscolonial y decolonial, a menudo se acusó al francés de eurocentrismo, renunciando, en algunos casos, a un diálogo enriquecedor entre su obra y estas corrientes de estudio. Teniendo como interés específico el tema del racismo, en este trabajo analizaremos primero el curso de Foucault Defender la sociedad y luego las contribuciones de pensadores y pensadoras decoloniales, de Frantz Fanon y Achille Mbembe. La consulta del archivo colonial ofrece posibles cronologías acerca (...) de la aparición del racismo de Estado que difieren con la de Foucault y sobre todo permite distinguir cómo este actúa en los distintos mecanismos de la analítica del poder. De este modo sostenemos que el racismo puede entenderse no solo como un dispositivo biopolítico, sino también como una dimensión fundamental del dominio que actúa al mismo tiempo como tecnología disciplinaria sobre el cuerpo del sujeto racializado y en el poder de muerte del soberano. (shrink)

In “Cogito and the History of Madness,” Derrida maintains that crisis is endemic to philosophy rather than being, as Husserl forcefully argued, a temporary condition that can and must be overcome through the resources of reason. A reflection on the place of madness in Descartes's Meditations serves as the point of departure for demonstrating that Derrida has done an injustice to philosophy; and a comparison of Derrida's views with the thought of Husserl, Heidegger, and Nietzsche reveals that Derrida's position in (...) “Cogito and the History of Madness” entails a sacrifice of the notion of responsibility that lies at the center of meaningful historical action. (shrink)

There are many case studies showing the benefits of the conceptual framework of Actor– Network Theory. It is enough to mention the classic texts by Bruno Latour on the Amazon forest and Michel Callon on scallop fishing. However, there are not many case studies discussing the circulation of knowledge in the humanities with the use of vocabulary taken from ANT. This text tries to partially fill the gap, analyzing a case encompassing the areas of both literary studies and philosophy. The (...) main topic of the paper is the circulation of Jacques Derrida’s views – or the views attributed to Derrida – as exemplified by one of his theses. The purpose of the text is not to reflect on the value of Derrida’s reflections, but only to show how the knowledge of his thought spread from France, through the USA, to Poland, from the 1960s to the beginning of the 21st century. Besides proving that the ANT vocabulary is suitable for studying the phenomenon of the circulation of knowledge in the humanities, the case study also shows that this vocabulary should be enriched. The author of the text proposes the concept of symbolization to better understand how Derrida and the ideas attributed to him have been perceived in various texts. (shrink)

In Specters of Marx, Derrida suggests that a non-revolutionary — ‘spectral’ — Marxism could alleviate a contemporary crisis in imagining the future in the late twentieth century. This ‘presentist’...