Vol. 9 · No. 2 · 2003

Bruce Baugh

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Abstract

Let me start with an apparent aside. In the midst of his dialectical demolition of Foucault's Histoire de la folie, in "Cogito et histoire de la folie,"1 Derrida argues that although Foucault wants to do an archeology of madness's silence, an archeo-logy is a logically ordered work (465), and that even though Foucault wants to protest against reason's sequestration of madness, "reason in the classical age" can only be brought before the tribunal of Reason in general (466), which could then rule on the unreasonableness of classical reason. Then, in a footnote that was dropped from the version in Writing and Difference (1967),2 he adds: "A bit like how the anti-colonialist revolution can only liberate itself from a de facto Europe or West in the name of transcendental Europe, that is, of Reason, and by letting itself first be won over by its values, its language, its technology, its armaments; an irreducible contamination or incoherence that no cry-I am thinking of Fanon's-could exorcise, no matter how pure and intransigent it is" (466).