Winter 1994
Volume 20, Number 2

When Elisabeth Roudinesco and René Major did me the honor and kindness of inviting me to a commemoration that would also be a reflection, to one of these genuine tributes where thought is plied to fidelity and fidelity honed by thought, I did not hesitate for one moment.

First of all, because I love memory. This is nothing original, of course, and yet how else can one love? Indeed, thirty years ago, this great book of Foucault was an event whose repercussions were so intense and multiple that I will not even try to identify much less measure them deep down inside me. Next, because I love friendship, and the trusting affection that Foucault showed me thirty years ago, and that was to last for many year, was all the more precious in that, being shared, it corresponded to my professed admiration. Then, after 1972, what came to obscure this friendship, without, however, affecting my admiration, was not, in fact, alien to this book, and to a certain debate that ensued – or at least to its distant, delayed, and indirect effects. There was in all of this a sort of dramatic chain of events, a compulsive and repeated precipitation that I do not wish to describe here because I do not wish to be alone, to be the only one to speak of this after the death of Michel Foucault – except to say that this shadow that made us invisable to one another, that made us not associate with one another for close to ten years (untill 1 January 1982 when I returned from a Czech prison), is still part of a story that I also love like life itself. It is part of a story or history that is related, and that thus relates me by the same token, to the book whose great event we are commemorating here, to something life its postface, one of its postfaces, since the drama I just alluded to also arose out of a certain postface, and even out of a sort of postscript added by Foucault to a postface in 1972.

While accepting wholeheartedly this generous invitation, I nonetheless declined the suggestion that came along with it to return to the discussion that began some twenty-eight years ago. I declined for numerous reasons, the first being the one I just mentioned: one does not carry on a stormy discussion after the other has departed. Second, because this whole thing is more than just overdetermined (so many difficult and intersecting texts, Descartes's, Foucault's, so many objections and responses, from me but also from all those, in France and elsewhere who later came to act as arbiters); it has become too distant from me, and perhaps because of the drama just alluded to I no longer wished to return to it. In the end, the debate is archived and those who might be interested in it can analyze as much as they want and decide for themselves. By rereading all the texts of this discussion, right up to the last word, and especially the last word, one will be better able to understand, I imagine, why I prefer not to give it a new impetus today. There is no privileged witness for such a situation – which, moreover, only ever has the chance of forming, and this from the very origin, with the possible disappearance of the witness. This is perhaps one of the meanings of any history of madness, or even a history of sexuality: is there any witnessing to madness? Who can witness? Does witnessing mean seeing? Is it to porvide a reason [rendre raison]? Does it have an object? Is there any object? Is there a possible third that might provide a reason without objectifying, or even identifying, that is to say, without examining [arraisoner]?

Although I have decided not to return to what was debated close to thirty years ago, it would nevertheless be absurd, obsessional to the point of pathological, to say nothing of impossible, to give in to a sort of fetishistic denial and to think that I can protect myself from any contact with the place or meaning of this disscusion. Although I intend to speak today of something else altogether, starting from a very recent rereading of The History of Madness in the Classical Age, I am not surprised, and you will probably not be either, to see the silhouette of certain questions re-emerge: not their content, of course, to which I will in no way return, but their abstract type, the schema or spector of an analogous problematic. For example, if I speak not of Descartes but of Freud, if I thus avoid a figure who seems central to this book and who, because he is decisive as far as its center or centering of perspective is concerned, emerges right from the early pages on, right from the first border or approach,1 if I thus avoid this Cartesian reference in order to move toward another (psychoanalysis, Freudian or some other) that is evoked only on the edges of the book and is named only right near the end, or ends, on the other border, this will perhaps be once again in order to pose a question that will resemble the one that imposed itself upon me thirty years ago, namely, that of the very possiblity of a history of madness. The question will be, in the end, just about the same, though it will be posed from another border, and it still imposes itself upon me as the first tribute owed such a book. If this book was possible, if it had from the beginning and retains today a certain monumental value, the presence and undeniable necessity of a monument, that is, of what imposses itself by recalling and cautioning, it must tell us, teach us, or ask us something about its own possibility.

About its own possibility today,: yes, we are saying today, a certain today. Whatever else one may think of this book, whatever questions observations it might inspire in those who come at it from some other point of view, its pathbreaking force seems incontestable. Just as incontestable, in fact, as the law according to which all pathbreaking opens the way at a certain price, that is, by bolting shut other passages, by ligaturing, stitching up, or compressing, indeed repressing, at least provisionally, other veins. And so today, like yesterday, I mean in March of 1963, it is this question of the today that is important to me. the question such as I had tried to formulate it yesterday. I ask you to pardon me this once, then, since I will not make a habit of it, for citing a few lines that then defined, in its general form, a task that seems to me still necessary, on the side of [du côtèe de] Freud this time rather than on the side of Descartes. By saying "on the side of Freud" rather than "on the side of Descartes," let us not give in too quickly to the naivete that would precipitate us into believing that we are closer to a today with Freud than with Descartes, though this is the opinion of most historians.

Here, then is the question of yesterday, of the today of yesterday, such as I would like to translate it today, on the side of Freud, transporting it in this way into the today of today:

If this type of question made any sense or had any legitimacy, if the point was then to question that which, today, in this time that is ours, this time in which Foucault's History of Madness was written, made possibe the event of such a discourse, it would have been more appropriate for me to elaborate this problematic on the side of modernity, a parte subjecti, in the same sense, on the side where the book was written, thus on the side, for example, of what must have happened to the modern psychiatry mentioned in the passage I just read.

1 See Michel Foucault, Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique (Paris, 1961), pp. 53-57; herafter abbreviated F. Derrida refers here and throughout to the original edition of this work. The book was reprinted with different pagination in 1972 and included as an appendix "Mon corps, ce papier, ce feu," Foucault's response to Derria's "Cogito et histoire de la folie," a lecture first given in 1963 and reprinted in 1967 in Derrida, L'Écriture et la différence (Paris, 1967). A much abridged version of Histoire de la folie was published in 1964 and was translated into English by Richard Howard under the title Madness ad Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Rreason (New York, 1965); hereafter abbreviated M.

Since Derrida refers the to the unabridged text of 1961 and works with the original title throughout, we have referred to this work as The History of Madness (or in some cases, The History of Madness in the Classical Age). This is in keeping with "Cogito and the History of Madness," Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1978), pp. 31-63. For the reader who wishes to follow Derrida's itinerary through Folie et d&eactureraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classiques, we have given all references to the 1961 Fench version. Since all the other texts of Foucault cited by Derrida have been translated in their entirety, we have in each case given the French followed by the English page references. Tranlations have been slightly modified in several instances to fit the context of Derrida's argument. – Trans.

2 Derrida, "Cogito et histoire de la folie," p. 61; "Cogito and the History of Madness," p. 38.

Jacques Derrida is Director d'Études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and professor of French, Univesity of California, Irvine. His most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry is "Given Time: The Time of the King" (inter 1992).
Pascale-Anne Brault is assistant professor of French at DePaul Universiy. She has written articles on contemporary French literature and drama and is currently working on a book on the revisioning of female identity in classical Greek literature.
Micahel Naas is assistant professor of philosophy at DePaul University. He has written articles on contemporary French thought and is the author of Turing: From Persuasion to Philosophy (1993). he is currently working on a book on the thought of Jacques Derrida. Brault and Nass have previously translated two books by Derrida: The Other Heading (1992) and Memoires of the Blind, (1993).