Gavin Rae (2025). From reason to madness and back: Critiquing reason through the Derrida–Foucault debate. History of the Human Sciences
https://doi.org/10.1177/09526951251337677
Abstract
There has recently been something of a resurgence of interest in the Derrida–Foucault debate, with this leading to a reassessment of its aims, content, and outcome. This article contributes to that endeavor by following Amy Allen’s claim that the debate was not concerned with madness per se, but with a critique of reason. However, I depart from Allen’s conclusion in two ways: First, Allen does not actually engage with the debate per se but sets out to offer arguments for why we should side with Foucault’s approach. As such, second, Allen not only falls into the logic of binary opposition of winner and loser, but also returns us to and so restricts critique to the parameters of Foucault’s thinking. In contrast, I argue that it is the disagreement itself that provides the ‘positive’ moment in the debate, insofar as it brings us to critique reason itself without necessarily restricting us to the parameters of either thinker. In short, the Derrida–Foucault debate continues to be of interest, not because of what it divulges about Foucault’s History of Madness per se, but because the differences that are revealed between Derrida and Foucault stimulate a critique—understood in terms of a questioning of the conditions of possibility—of reason itself, including its composition and limit, as well as its relationship to its other, including the question of that other.
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