Hi Loren,
OK, fair enough. This is your question, and I took quite a bit of license
with it in responding to Nick's post. But I think that the concerns you are
outlining here really feed in to what I was saying. More important, I think
they have to feed in, or else you end up seeing the Derrida/Foucault
exchange as a series of knee-jerk reactions to each other, or you reduce
important distinctions between the two thinkers. You suggest a reduction
yourself when you say that if you treat the world as a text than
deconstruction and genealogy fit rather well together. Perhaps, but they
only fit together in the broadest sense of being anti-foundationalist.
Further, there are certainly knee-jerk responses on both sides of the
divide: Derrida consistently states that Foucaultian archeology is history,
when Foucault explains over and over again that it is not. Foucault
suggests that Derrida's texts are nothing more than books, which is silly.
And both the debate between Derrida and Foucault and among interpreters of
their exchanged is tinged with a rather odd understanding of the division
the early Foucault enacts between the discursive and non-discursive, whereby
everyone seems to suggest that the discursive is the realm of meaning and
the non-discursive is not.
Still, since I said in the last post that I'm on Foucault's side here, I'll
suggest a way of making sense of his claim that Derrida fails to take
context into account. It's not that Derrida focusses on writing rather than
wider social and economic factors; it's rather, I think, that he remains
committed to a certain relation between identity and meaning while ignoring
the conditions of emergence of that commitment. Irigaray says the same
thing about Lacan and psychoanalysis generally when she says that they
remain committed to the economy of the Phallus as the only economy possible,
precisely because they haven't taken the time to examine the real capitalist
economy which supports such a commitment (and Lacan precisely refuses to
look at such things, saying that if one does than one is not doing
psychoanalysis anymore, one is doing sociology or even something else).
That's why, from Foucault's perspective, Derrida has illicitly reduced his
(Foucault's) options to thinking within a broken ontotheological framework
(while failing to see that the framework idea is itself an ontotheological
remnant) or engaging in some idealistic impossibility to breach language all
together and get at some immediate truth. It's because deconstruction, for
Foucault, ends up staging things in terms of this last binary option that it
refuses to give up, that it ends up being a shallow practice, and why it
really effects a return to metaphysics.
Nathan
n.e.widder@xxxxxxxxx
> -----Original Message-----
> From: loren [SMTP:lorendent@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: 14 February 2000 23:22
> To: foucault@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: Foucault & Derrida
>
> Thanks for the responses. However, my question focuses more on whether
> Derrida's reference to differance and the trace might replicate 2 origins
> that seems to indicate a return to metaphysics.....It seems that this was
> Foucault's critique of Derrida---It also seems that foucault critisizes
> the
> shallow textual practice of deconstruction--that it ignores the specific
> historical and political formations of a text or a particular origin.
> That
> foucault is perhaps more concerned with not just dispelling origins and
> binaries, but understanding how they are produced and in what context they
> emerge-. I'm not saying I agree w/ foucault, it seems to be a knee-jerk
> response, because it seems to me that if one reads the social space as a
> text, then geneology and deconstruction would align themselves rather
> nicely.
>
> Loren
OK, fair enough. This is your question, and I took quite a bit of license
with it in responding to Nick's post. But I think that the concerns you are
outlining here really feed in to what I was saying. More important, I think
they have to feed in, or else you end up seeing the Derrida/Foucault
exchange as a series of knee-jerk reactions to each other, or you reduce
important distinctions between the two thinkers. You suggest a reduction
yourself when you say that if you treat the world as a text than
deconstruction and genealogy fit rather well together. Perhaps, but they
only fit together in the broadest sense of being anti-foundationalist.
Further, there are certainly knee-jerk responses on both sides of the
divide: Derrida consistently states that Foucaultian archeology is history,
when Foucault explains over and over again that it is not. Foucault
suggests that Derrida's texts are nothing more than books, which is silly.
And both the debate between Derrida and Foucault and among interpreters of
their exchanged is tinged with a rather odd understanding of the division
the early Foucault enacts between the discursive and non-discursive, whereby
everyone seems to suggest that the discursive is the realm of meaning and
the non-discursive is not.
Still, since I said in the last post that I'm on Foucault's side here, I'll
suggest a way of making sense of his claim that Derrida fails to take
context into account. It's not that Derrida focusses on writing rather than
wider social and economic factors; it's rather, I think, that he remains
committed to a certain relation between identity and meaning while ignoring
the conditions of emergence of that commitment. Irigaray says the same
thing about Lacan and psychoanalysis generally when she says that they
remain committed to the economy of the Phallus as the only economy possible,
precisely because they haven't taken the time to examine the real capitalist
economy which supports such a commitment (and Lacan precisely refuses to
look at such things, saying that if one does than one is not doing
psychoanalysis anymore, one is doing sociology or even something else).
That's why, from Foucault's perspective, Derrida has illicitly reduced his
(Foucault's) options to thinking within a broken ontotheological framework
(while failing to see that the framework idea is itself an ontotheological
remnant) or engaging in some idealistic impossibility to breach language all
together and get at some immediate truth. It's because deconstruction, for
Foucault, ends up staging things in terms of this last binary option that it
refuses to give up, that it ends up being a shallow practice, and why it
really effects a return to metaphysics.
Nathan
n.e.widder@xxxxxxxxx
> -----Original Message-----
> From: loren [SMTP:lorendent@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: 14 February 2000 23:22
> To: foucault@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: Foucault & Derrida
>
> Thanks for the responses. However, my question focuses more on whether
> Derrida's reference to differance and the trace might replicate 2 origins
> that seems to indicate a return to metaphysics.....It seems that this was
> Foucault's critique of Derrida---It also seems that foucault critisizes
> the
> shallow textual practice of deconstruction--that it ignores the specific
> historical and political formations of a text or a particular origin.
> That
> foucault is perhaps more concerned with not just dispelling origins and
> binaries, but understanding how they are produced and in what context they
> emerge-. I'm not saying I agree w/ foucault, it seems to be a knee-jerk
> response, because it seems to me that if one reads the social space as a
> text, then geneology and deconstruction would align themselves rather
> nicely.
>
> Loren