The Impasse of Post-Metaphysical Political Theory: On Derrida and Foucault

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IntroductionStephen 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 concepts and theorems that theorists employ.2 “Weak ontologies” are consequently not “anti-foundationalist” as their critics and less rigorous supporters alike often affirm, nor do they qualify their own accounts as “incontestable frameworks,” as a traditionally foundational or metaphysical account might.3 In other words, what “weak ontologies” do not do is create what Jean-François Lyotard has infamously called “meta-narratives,” totalizing accounts of the world.4 Nonetheless, given their

1. Stephen K. White, Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2000). See also Gianno Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-Modern Culture, trans. John R. Snyder. (Cambridge: Polity, 1988).

2. On “essential contestability,” see William Connolly, The Terms of Political Dis-course, 3rd ed. (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1993).

3. White, Sustaining Affirmation, p. 11.4. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans.

Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984).

Paul Rekret

The Impasse of Post-Metaphysical Political Theory:

On Derrida and Foucault

Telos 161 (Winter 2012): 79–98.doi:10.3817/1212161079www.telospress.com

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theoretical pretensions they necessarily form “generalizations” insofar as they stand for different accounts of the world.5 As White puts it, “[w]hat sort of engagement there will be between one small narrative and another only takes place within the conception, however implicit, of a ‘grand’ or at least grander narrative.”6 Thus, White’s imposition of the qualifier “weak” to post-foundational political ontologies denotes both the now commonplace affirmation of the absence of any final normative ground or foundation for political thought while at the same time affirming that there is nevertheless implicit in all theory a “grounding” and thus at least partially totalizing move.

Yet in turning to the so-called “cogito debate” between Jacques Der-rida and Michel Foucault over the status of Descartes’ Meditations and to later more implicit debates between them over the concept of sovereignty, I will show that a paradox or impasse emerges from out of this broad conceptual architecture. For if post-metaphysical political theories affirm their own contingency or “weakness,” they simultaneously and unavoid-ably efface that particularity insofar as the very articulation of one’s own situatedness is couched within the “grander narrative” one has produced. As we will see, both Derrida and Foucault affirm the “weakness” of their narratives, but each does so not only in different but in fundamentally incommensurable ways. In looking to the polemic between Derrida and Foucault, this article seeks to show that both thinkers can be seen to posit a narrative or medium that takes priority over the interlocutor’s account. Accordingly, the interlocutor’s failure is seen to consist in failing to think the correct “grander narrative,” which in turn marks him out as guilty of having sought to transcend it. The polemic between Derrida and Foucault ultimately hinges upon two incommensurable articulations of what is or happens, each claiming priority over the other.

Consequently, if as White argues theoretical constructions or nar-ratives are both irreducible and yet the result of always already being situated within particular conditions or relations, then this article will claim through a reading of the polemic between Derrida and Foucault, that post-metaphysical or “weak” ontological accounts lead us into an impasse they themselves do not affirm. In short, if what William Con-nolly conceives as the “essential contestability” of political concepts,

5. White, Sustaining Affirmation, p. 12.6. Ibid.

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resulting from the impossibility of deriving a metalangue to describe political phenomena, ought to be extended to the essential contestability of post-metaphysical political theories themselves, we are oriented to what seems to be an inherent paradox and perhaps even theoretical dead-end for post-metaphysical political theories lead us.7 For how are we to adjudicate between “grander narratives” insofar as the very basis of the debates or polemics between them consists precisely in what that grander narrative is? As post-metaphysical political thinkers, are we not caught in an end-less game of one-upmanship wherein each account seeks to assert its own priority over the other without any grounds to arbitrate among them? It is to a further examination of these questions to which we now turn.

Post-Metaphysical Political Theory and IncommensurabilityIf there is a single fundamental claim that might be said to delineate post-metaphysical political thought, it is that there is an inherent and irreducible contingency to all forms of social order. This effects both a shift in theo-retical focus from an attempt to found or justify a particular form of polity to the question of the means and mode by which particular foundations are constituted and in turn, posits a different role for philosophy’s relation to politics. The post-metaphysical thinker will view the tradition of political thought as having at its core a depoliticizing denial or, in Bonnie Honig’s words, “displacement” of the impossibility of a final foundation for social order.8 Faced then with what is viewed as the displacement of the con-tingency of the political, the common task of post-metaphysical political thought is to politicize: to undermine and rupture the authority or legiti-macy upon which any given social order is grounded. Theory assumes the task of exposing and undermining the artificiality and oppressive nature of every social order.

Defined in these terms, the oeuvres of both Derrida and Foucault are not merely exemplary of a post-metaphysical paradigm but rather, canoni-cal and even, one might say, “foundational.” From their early work on language and the accordant decentering that both undertook of the concept of a transcendental signified, to the deconstructive and archaeological critiques of a self-identical subject or agent, and extended to their later

7. Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse. 8. Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, NY:

Cornell UP, 1993), p. 2.

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more explicitly political works in relation to concepts such as sovereignty, the state, freedom, and democracy, both have had an immeasurable influ-ence in political theory’s rethinking of its founding concepts. Yet the status of theory in this case changes as well. If an account of the nature of the political in terms of contingency is to be coherent, then it must entail the situatedness or particularity of any such account. No Archimedian posi-tion exists beyond the field being described, and so an irreducible opacity haunts every post-metaphysical political theory.

Nowhere is the affirmation of the situatedness of theory more apparent than in Derrida’s often misquoted phrase that “there is nothing outside the text,” which Foucault, almost as notoriously, echoes: “there is no point where you are free from power relations.”9 Not only are all references to the ‘real’ indivisible from a field or realm from which one begins and which one cannot master, but moreover, the impossibility of absolute knowledge is affirmed by both not only in epistemological terms as the result of human finitude, since as Derrida argues in “Structure, Sign, and Play” such a conception of interpretation preserves the teleology of the possibility of total knowledge. Rather, the insurmountability of one’s own perspective is, for both thinkers, couched within the ontological description of an excess (as différance or power/knowledge) that cannot ultimately be mastered.10 Both Derrida and Foucault affirm that thought always begins from within particular fields or sets of relations, and as such, thought can only proceed strategically and provisionally. As a result, Derrida proceeds by showing that every theoretical articulation is always already inscribed both by its position in the metaphysical heritage it inherits and by its empirical situatedness. One can only, he argues, “operate according to the vocabulary of the very thing one delimits.”11 Thought cannot exceed its finite perspective and thus “[w]e must begin wherever we are,” and

9. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak (London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997), p. 158; Michel Foucault, Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, 1997), p. 167.

10. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 365; Michel Foucault, Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 2, trans. Rob-ert Hurley et al. (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, 1998), p. 273; Michel Foucault, Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 3, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, 2001), p. 14.

11. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 18.

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consequently, it is “impossible to justify a point of departure absolutely.”12 Echoing Derrida, Foucault will affirm that “we are in a strategic situa-tion” and moreover that “[w]e are always in this kind of situation.”13 Yet if Derrida and Foucault are exemplary of a post-metaphysical thought that both refuses to seek a ground for social order and simultaneously affirms the situatedness of its analyses in the refusal to assume an absolutely authoritative ground or Archimedean point for their work, then a paradox emerges: how are we to think and adjudicate the differences and diver-gences between their works? Given that their accounts obviously differ, and the claim pursued here is that they differ incommensurably, it seems that we are left at a complete impasse when we seek to negotiate and judge the differences between them.

Recent political theory has often been in a state of disavowal about this impasse, one that can take several basic forms. First, it can consist in some form of partisan position taking on behalf of one thinker against others. Second, William Connolly is exemplary of the insistence on the potential for multiplying and combining narratives. We can do so, he claims, insofar as we “soften the lines between faith, creed, doctrine and philosophy that have stalked the academy since the enlightenment.”14 Yet Connolly both deflates the importance of philosophical criteria of internal consistency and cogency while simultaneously inserting thinkers such as Derrida, Deleuze, or Foucault within his own “grander narrative” of affec-tivity. As such, he merely repeats the terms of the very impasse he seeks to overcome. Third, Richard Rorty has infamously insisted that the affirma-tion of contingency that proceeds from Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault—the “postmodern” decentering of subjectivity, which he views as granting a certain freedom and autonomy—is “pretty much useless when it comes to politics.”15 As such, the work of Derrida and Foucault is reduced by Rorty to a practice of self-creation restricted to the private

12. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 162, emphasis in original.13. Foucault, Essential Works, 1:167.14. William Connolly, “Afterword,” in Lasse Thomassen and Lars Tonder, eds.,

Radical Democracy: Between Abundance and lack (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2005). See also William Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1995).

15. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989), pp. 83, 65.

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sphere.16 This is because for Rorty, these philosophers and philosophy in general have little if anything to say to his liberal conception of politics as the pragmatic pursuit of justice. Yet it is not difficult to see that Rorty him-self first must ascribe to a vague and broad liberal ideology in which his liberal “ironists” are situated. To shift the Derridean or Foucauldian corpus to a highly contestable conception of the private sphere, as Rorty does, or to articulate a realm of affectivity from out of which one chooses and multiplies narratives, as Connolly does, is merely to regress right back into the impasse with which we began, since it merely amounts to construct-ing an alternative narrative within which these thinkers can be situated. Finally, Oliver Marchart has sought to reduce the sorts of polemics we are considering to purely ontic or political differences within a broader horizon of what he calls unstable ontologies.17 However, the main deficit with Marchart’s account is the apparent bracketing of ontological narra-tives upon which it relies. In doing so Marchart effectively obscures the incommensurability that we will show lies at the core of these debates. Moreover, while we make no claim to a necessary transitivity between ontological “grander narratives” and particular political strategies, in the context of a discussion of the critique of the concept of sovereignty in Derrida and Foucault’s work below, it will become apparent that particular “grander narratives” nevertheless identify competing points of political contact or possible political strategies in radically different ways. Let us then turn to the “cogito debate” to begin to show more clearly why all of these strategies are flawed and how exactly such an impasse is produced.

The Impasse of the “Cogito Debate”In his reply to Derrida’s critique of his Madness and Civilization, Foucault categorizes the question at the core of the debate between them in the following way: “[c]ould there be anything anterior or exterior to philo-sophical discourse?”18 Yet this depiction of the so-called “cogito debate” is only partial. First, because I will show that the stakes of the debate are

16. Ibid., p. 120. See also Richard Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philo-sophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991).

17. Oliver Marchart, “The Absence at the Heart of Presence: Radical Democracy Between Ontology and Lack,” in Thomassen and Tonder, Radical Democracy. See also Marchart’s Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, lefort, Badiou and laclau (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007).

18. Foucault, Essential Works, 2:395.

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much broader than Foucault allows and, accordingly, because the depiction of Derrida as advocate and champion of philosophical discourse can only be maintained by reducing the scope of Derrida’s reading of Descartes through Foucault’s own articulation of the terrain in which it ought to be situated. From both sides of the debate, an analogous accusation emerges: that the interlocutor has repeated philosophy’s crime of the “Cartesian exclusion,” which would reproduce the conditions of the objectification and determination of the “other” from a privileged and self-authorizing position. Parallel accusations of having missed the “true” terrain of the Cartesian move, and thus of having assumed an illegitimate position beyond that terrain, are launched from both sides.

Understood in this way, the vast literature that emerged around the debate between Derrida and Foucault particularly in the 1980s and 1990s has generally disavowed the full reach and stakes of the debate. Partisans of Foucault have criticized Derrida’s “textualism,” arguing that the funda-mental point of discord lies between two distinct modes of conceiving the text’s relation to the world.19 Edward Said is indicative here to the extent that he argues that deconstruction fails to question the text’s “historical presentation” and thus lapses into a-historicism.20 Defenders of Derrida have broadly argued that Foucault’s history of reason and madness negates historicity since it is grounded in the assumption that the meaning of an event can be determined in relation to a finite historical structure. In assuming the possibility of such a historical delimitation or determination, Foucault reduces and restricts an excess that no delimitation of a structure can master.21 Finally, a number of thinkers have posited the possibility of a rapprochement or reconciliation between Derrida and Foucault since, from this perspective, their divergence arises not from a fundamental theo-retical distinction but only a question of “regional application.”22

Our claim is that none of these interpretations take the debate between Derrida and Foucault to its most “essential” point: their divergent accounts

19. Edward Said, “The Problem of Textuality: Two Exemplary Positions,” Critical Inquiry 4, no. 4 (1978): 701.

20. Ibid. 21. See Marion Hobson, Jacques Derrida: Opening lines (London: Routledge,

1998); Arthur Bradley, “Thinking the Outside: Foucault, Derrida and Negative Theology,” Textual Practice, 16, no. 1 (2002): 57–74.

22. Alan D. Schrift, “Genealogy and/as Deconstruction: Nietzsche, Derrida, and Foucault on Philosophy as Critique,” in Hugh Silverman and Donn Welton, eds., Postmod-ernism and Continental Philosophy (Albany: SUNY, 1988), pp. 193–213.

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of what Derrida once called the “medium of differentiation” and White terms the “grander narrative” upon which the organization of social relations is situated.23 Since each thinker conceives this medium or “nar-rative” in different terms, each necessarily sees the other as having failed to affirm it as the field from which their own discourse is produced. For both thinkers, this failure amounts to the assumption of a metaphysical Archimedian and self-authorizing position for their own discourse. It is in failing to view the “cogito debate” in terms of two incommensurable “grander narratives” that the literature has generally failed to fully grasp its rather far-reaching implications. In order to clarify this claim we will begin by briefly discussing Derrida’s deconstruction of Foucault’s project before turning to Foucault’s reply.

At the beginning of the second chapter of Madness and Civilization, dedicated to the “Great Confinement” that occurs across Europe during the seventeenth century, Foucault situates Descartes between attitudes toward madness that existed during the Renaissance and Classical periods. This epochal shift, marked by an institutionalization of the mad that had commenced in Paris and traversed Europe, is conditioned for Foucault by a “rigid division” between reason and madness exemplified in Des-cartes’ Meditations.24 For Descartes, Foucault argues, errors of the senses, illusions, and dreams all form obstacles to the overcoming of doubt, yet madness is categorically different. Madness falls outside the categories of truth and error and is disqualified from the activity of doubting a priori: “dreams or illusions are overcome from within the structure of truth itself; but madness is excluded by the subject who doubts.”25 Consequently, once madness is constituted as the absence of thought, it is excluded from the thinking subject; “I who think, cannot be mad,” as Foucault puts it.26

The question of the mutual exclusion between reason and madness, Derrida argues, is erroneously located by Foucault on the terrain of history and not, as it ought to be, in the “economy” of language.27 For Derrida

23. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London: Routledge, 1981), p. 129; quoted in Hobson, Opening lines, p. 64.

24. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. John Cottingham (Cam-bridge: Cambridge UP, 1996).

25. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie a l’age classique (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), p. 57 (my translation).

26. Ibid.27. Derrida, Writing and Difference, pp. 51, 68.

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language and reason always already mark a break with madness; language is always already differed and deferred from madness.28 Foucault is thus guilty of a “structuralist totalitarianism” insofar as he invokes, what Derrida calls, an “evasive transcendence” that works by effacing its particularity and situatedness, and so succumbs to a fundamental metaphysical error.29 Any claim to temporalize the cogito, Derrida says, is “violence itself.”30 While Foucault claims madness is excluded as the other of the cogito, and consequently thought as an illness to be repressed and governed, Derrida argues that Descartes never excludes madness at this point in the medita-tion, since the madman is a case of only a minor impediment to the act of doubting and not a totalizing termination of doubt. Madness, Derrida says, is a less radical form of doubt than the examples of the dream and especially the evil genius. First, the dream functions to question all sense perception and is thus more radical than madness as a form of doubt. Sec-ond, doubt is only radically considered in the instance of imagining an evil genius wherein we are forced to question ideas not only of sensible origin, as in dreams, but also of intelligible origin.

It is at the moment of the possibility of absolute delusion provoked by the evil genius that the cogito is, Derrida claims, nevertheless affirmed by Descartes. The presence of reason is only constituted when reason itself is “mad,” when the opposition between reason and madness is undecidable, a space radically anterior to any necessary relation between reason and madness.31 As Derrida puts it, for Descartes, “[the cogito] is valid, even if I am mad.”32 The cogito is the “zero point” that “no longer belongs to a determined reason or a determined unreason.”33 Derrida argues that at the moment of the hyperbolic doubt of the evil genius, Descartes accedes to the “essential” point beyond the totality of reason, which is merely historically determined, and accordingly, the cogito cannot be reduced or confined, as the Foucauldian enterprise does, to a historical structure or totality. Only when Descartes posits God as the source of a totalizing closure does the decision and differentiation occur: “Descartes knew that, without God, finite thought never had the right to exclude madness, etc.

28. Ibid., pp. 50–51.29. Ibid., pp. 69–70.30. Ibid., p. 70.31. Ibid., pp. 393–94n27.32. Ibid., p. 67.33. Ibid., p. 68.

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Which amounts to saying that madness is never excluded, except in fact, violently, in history.”34 Madness is the condition of possibility of Descartes’ project since it constitutes absolute doubt, but it also marks the project’s impossibility since the exit from madness is only made in violently total-izing it. Derrida’s move contra Foucault is thus to shift the place of what he elsewhere calls the “prior medium in which differentiation in general is produced” away from where it is located by Foucault.35 In articulating a competing and incommensurable narrative of the Cartesian moment of exclusion to Foucault’s, Derrida can thus claim that Foucault has assumed an illegitimate and Archimedean position for his discourse through a vio-lent exclusion of the true locus of madness and an illegitimate foundation of its exclusion.

In his reply to Derrida, produced as an appendix to the second edi-tion of Madness and Civilization nearly ten years after Derrida’s essay had first appeared, Foucault is adamant that it is Derrida, and not he, who has repeated the “Cartesian exclusion.” For while Derrida argues that the cogito, as constituted in the excess of hyperbolic doubt, cannot be fully enclosed within a historical structure, Foucault argues that in the Derridean interpretation the cogito only exceeds a finite determined totality in terms of the status assigned to it by philosophical discourse.36 Derrida is said to efface the multiplicity of discursive elements coexisting in Descartes’ text because he only reads it from the position of a sovereign philosophical discourse that disavows any other (juridical, medical) discursive elements. It is Derrida whose reading of Descartes is circumscribed within the limits of metaphysics, whose account fails to think the terrain where the meta-physical may be exceeded.

Foucault argues that Derrida is wrong to assume that the hypotheses of the dream and “evil genius” are more radical exercises of doubt than the example of madness because both only affect the object of the medi-tating subject’s knowledge and so only puts in question the truth of the most immediate sensory impressions. Madness, on the other hand, Fou-cault argues, affects the epistemological and medical characterization of the social and juridical qualification of the meditating subject itself. From Foucault’s perspective, by organizing his interpretation of Descartes

34. Ibid., p. 395n28.35. Derrida, Dissemination, p. 129; quoted in Hobson, Opening lines, p. 64.36. See Wendy Cealy Harrison “Madness and Historicity: Foucault and Derrida,

Artaud and Descartes,” History of the Human Sciences 20, no. 27 (2007): 79–105.

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in terms of the hyperbolic doubt of the evil genius, Derrida effaces the askesis or ascetic transformation that the meditating subject undergoes in order to prove capable of performing the philosophical act of doubting prior to the performance of the act itself. Before the examples of the dream and of the evil genius upon which Derrida focuses, there is a prior demand for the formation and determination of a specific type of subject that is qualified to doubt.

As such, Derrida’s reading of Descartes is said to overlook that the text forms not only a philosophical system of propositions wherein the subject remains fixed and unaffected by the demonstration but also a subjective exercise that, in acting as a discursive event, calls for a transformation of the doubting subject. The Cartesian discourse is defined by Foucault as a “discursive meditation” that functions as:

a set of discursive events which constitute at once groups of utterances linked one to another by formal rules of deduction, and series of modi-fications of the enunciating subject which follow continuously one from another [and thus] the utterances which are formally linked, modify the subject as they develop.37

Only through an analysis of the Meditations as discursive ensemble is the position of the subject in relation to the discourse and in relation to itself established so that the Cartesian meditation marks both the constitution of a subject who is authorized to speak the truth and the exclusion of a subject who may not (the subject qualified as mad). The meditation is thus what Foucault would later call an ethical technique for the production of a par-ticular mode of subjectivity; or, in other words, the meditation functions as a modification of the subject capable of the enunciation of philosophical truths or one who is disqualified from truth-speaking.

Foucault’s argument against Derrida is premised upon the claim that Descartes begins his meditation with a single proposition: every truth received by the senses must be doubted and consequently, for the medi-tation to continue, its subject must form itself into a subject capable of doubting absolutely. However, a subject capable of absolute doubt would be mad and, accordingly, would be disqualified from participating in a rational discourse. As Foucault puts it, “madness is posited as disquali-ficatory in any search for truth,” and thus the Cartesian exclusion occurs wherein he “parts company with all those for whom madness can be in one

37. Foucault, Essential Works, 2:406.

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way or another the bringer or revealer of truth.”38 The madman’s doubt does not qualify as that of a rational subject, since he is disqualified by seventeenth-century juridical and medical discourse as demens and it is through this juridical category that he is always already determined as incapable of truth-speaking. Foucault’s claim, in short, is that Derrida’s interpretation has the effect of “erasing” differences within the text in the name of the priority of a philosophical discourse that, in order to preserve its sovereignty over the text, must ignore its own historical determination.39

Accordingly, while Derrida posits the example of the evil genius as the most radical example of doubt in the meditation, Foucault argues this example only emerges at a point in the meditation where madness has already been mastered, excluded, and transcended by philosophy: “[i]f the evil genius takes on powers of madness, this is only after the exercise meditation has excluded the risk of being mad.”40 In the Foucauldian read-ing, Derrida and Descartes both evoke madness as a fiction to be overcome and mastered by the subject of philosophy; as Foucault puts it, Derrida “avoid[s] placing discursive practices in the field of transformation where they are carried out.”41 From this perspective it is thus Derrida (and not Foucault) who makes the metaphysical move of occupying a position totally transcending history itself insofar as all texts are subsumed to a single philosophical discourse: “the philosopher,” Foucault says in refer-ence to Derrida, “goes directly to the calling into question of the ‘totality of beingness.’”42 It is a question then, once again, though this time on Foucault’s part, of claiming the interlocutor has acceded to a point anterior to the exclusion of the other that occurs in the Meditations; a point that for Foucault cannot lie in the “quasi”-transcendental nature of the excess of the evil genius because madness is already excluded by Descartes before the act of doubting can take place.

In essence, the “cogito debate” takes the form of a polemic wherein each thinker claims to posit the anterior medium or narrative for the oth-er’s account, and accordingly the interlocutor’s failure to affirm that locus marks him out as having sought to transcend it. Each thinker accuses the other of assuming an ahistorical and, thus, an Archimedean position for their analysis, and yet the condition for both of their claims is the prior

38. Ibid., p. 409.39. Ibid., p. 412.40. Ibid., p. 415.41. Ibid., p. 416 (emphasis added).42. Ibid., p. 412.

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articulation of a medium through which the event (in this case the separa-tion of the cogito from madness) occurs. The debate hinges on constructing a grander narrative within which the Meditations can be situated and then to accuse the interlocutor of having failed to think that narrative. More-over, these two narratives are incommensurable. Either one claims the Cartesian exclusion occurs in the terms of the quasi-transcendental condi-tions of the simultaneously impossible/possible separation of reason and madness, or the prior discursive condition of the constitution of a rational subject capable of engaging in the exercise of doubt. The two positions are incommensurable, and thus what the debate amounts to is an irresolvable game of one-upmanship involving a series of claims for the priority of one’s own grander narrative. Without any universal standard or criteria by which they can be judged, the post-metaphysical theorist can ultimately do no more here than raise his or her hands and admit an impasse.

The Critique of Sovereignty and IncommensurabilityLest we should presume that this impasse that the cogito debate makes so clear is thought to be limited only to the texts involving the Meditations, let us turn to more typically political ground to at least begin to flesh out our fundamental claim that the impasse extends throughout both Derrida’s and Foucault’s oeuvres. We shall do so by comparing their engagements with the concept of sovereignty, since it forms a central target for both Derrida and Foucault’s more explicitly political works and exemplifies the seemingly unavoidable dead-end to which the polemic between them leads. Both thinkers pursue an engagement with this concept across a number of works and come to critique its continued centrality to political thought today. For both, it seems, sovereignty remains a privileged locus of a foundationalist politico-philosophical program. As such and in line with the articulation of post-metaphysical political theory above, the aim of both of their accounts is to politicize and thus undermine sovereignty’s foundationalist logic. But crucially, both do so in incommensurable ways. Moreover, by engaging with the question of sovereignty the impasse of their mutually exclusive grander narratives is explicitly inscribed upon a political terrain. Accordingly, the analysis of the question of sovereignty allows the inherently political nature of the impasse that results from their incommensurability, as articulated in my analysis of the cogito debate, begin to emerge more clearly. Let us turn first to Derrida’s engagement with the question of sovereignty before contrasting his position with Foucault’s.

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Derrida seeks to show that any conception of sovereignty is permeated by an aporetic logic, which Derrida comes to call, appropriating a term from immunology, “autoimmunity.”43 If immunity refers to a system’s attempt to protect itself, to be pure or self-identical, then autoimmunity refers to an error where the antibodies created to defend an immune system attack a body’s own cells. Autoimmunity is, Derrida says, that “strange illogical logic by which a living being can spontaneously destroy, in an autonomous fashion, the very thing within it that it is supposed to protect against the other, to immunize it against the aggressive intrusion of the other.”44 The production of a sovereign identity generates its own autoimmune process in striving for purity. “Nothing,” Derrida says, is left “unscathed in the most autonomous living present without a risk of autoimmunity.”45 There-fore (and this will form the crucial point of engagement with Foucault) as soon as sovereignty extends itself or its empire in space or attempts to maintain itself across time, it “autoimmunizes itself.”46 As soon as sover-eignty tries to protect or justify itself, it opens to the unmasterable excess of law and of language:

[t]o confer sense or meaning on sovereignty, to justify it, to find a reason for it, is already to compromise its deciding exceptionality, to subject it to rules, to a code of law, to some general law, to concepts. It is thus to divide it, to subject it to partitioning, to participation, to being shared.47

The sovereign’s establishment of even a single law already opens it to critique in the name of that law. Sovereignty could only remain pure and undivided in absolute silence and lawlessness and so in a total absence of sovereignty. To extend sovereignty to the empiricity of time and space is to subject it to the logic of autoimmunity and thus to open it to its other.

43. See Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” in Gil Anidjar, ed., Acts of Religion (London Routledge, 2002), pp. 40–101; “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida,” in Giovanna Borrador, ed., Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jür-gen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 85–136; and Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stan-ford, CA: Stanford UP, 2005).

44. Derrida, Rogues, p. 123.45. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” p. 82.46. Derrida, Rogues, p. 109.47. Ibid., p. 101.

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A brief essay on the status of the U.S. Declaration of Independence as the ground or foundation of the U.S. state is exemplary of Derrida’s revelation of the autoimmune logic inherent to all sovereign founding.48 The moment of institution, Derrida claims, the event of the declaration of “we the people” who assert themselves as independent and sovereign must exist as a people prior to the event of the declaration itself. “The signature,” he goes on, “invents the signer.”49 In other words, the aporia of the Declaration lies between its juridical or transcendental status and its de facto existence in space and time, insofar as the existence of the people (the “to be”) and the declaration that forms the people (the “ought to be”) cannot be simultaneous and yet must occur at the same time for the declaration to function.50 The event of foundation, of bringing something into being, simultaneously implies that “something” must exist anterior to the act of its determination.51 The people are thus never present, autono-mous, or self-identical, and thus can only remain “to come”: “[a]nother subjectivity is still coming to sign, in order to guarantee it, this production of signature.”52 The event of the signature of the Declaration always pre-supposes its repetitions, which are indefinitely still to come.

The implication is that every foundation or constitution of sovereignty cannot but be violent or illegitimate since there is no anterior law to justify it.53 Thus, the Declaration plays out the aporia of all sovereignty—the para-dox of something creating itself—since it demonstrates that the sovereign power must “presuppose itself in order to performatively enact itself.”54 The foundational act can only take place through an indefinite repetition and consequently is inherently bound to the non-sovereignty and otherness that exceeds it.55 As Derrida puts it, “[i]n signing, the people say—and do what they say they do, but in differing or deferring themselves through the

48. Jacques Derrida, “Declarations of Independence,” in Elizabeth Rottenberg, ed., Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001, trans. Tom Keenan and Tom Pep-per (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2002), pp. 46–54.

49. Ibid., p. 49.50. Ibid., pp. 51–52.51. Noah Horwitz, “Derrida and the Aporia of the Political, Or the Theologico-Politi-

cal Dimension of Deconstruction,” Research in Phenomenology 32 (2002): 160.52. Derrida, “Declarations of Independence,” p. 50.53. Richard Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political (London: Routledge, 1996),

p. 99.54. Horwitz, “Derrida and the Aporia of the Political,” p. 161.55. Derrida, Rogues, p. 123.

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intervention of their representation, whose representativity is fully legiti-mated only by the signature.”56

We can show that an analogous move is made by Foucault. Space precludes an extensive analysis of the critique of the juridical model of power that extends throughout Foucault’s later works on biopolitical governmentality in particular. Rather than provide a brief overview of these works, we take here as an example a brief analysis of the critique of sovereignty in Discipline and Punish. As is well known, the latter book describes a broad historical transmutation of the status of sovereignty, which occurs from the classical to the modern age. With the rise of the disciplinary apparatus in the modern age, no longer does punishment revolve around strategies of exclusion in the name of the visibility of the sovereign’s power but rather around the way order could be produced from disorder, its aim being the formation of a productive and “free” citi-zen and individual.57 Thus, discipline is distinct from sovereignty insofar as it distributes power as widely as possible across society by a juridical rationality that punishes and controls deviance. Moreover, Foucault argues that political theory has almost totally effaced this massive disciplinary apparatus that appears in modernity. Discipline, he argues, is not to be located at the level of the juridical or sovereign foundation of power but rather in what he calls a rationality, which consists in “discourses, insti-tutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, and philanthropic propositions.”58 Contra Derrida, if a “medium” or narrative is to be observed, it is in terms of what Foucault famously calls a “micro-physics” of power relations.59

The telos of the disciplinary apparatus described in Discipline and Punish is the production of a normal and “docile” body.60 A particular conduct produced through regimens of training positions the individual in relation to a given norm, allowing the identification of an abnormal ele-ment, which further training aims to overcome. The relation between the

56. Derrida, “Declarations of Independence,” p. 50. 57. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan

Sheridan (London: Allen Lane, 1977).58. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings

(London: Harvester, 1980), p. 194. See also Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 215.59. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 214.60. Ibid., p. 25.

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body and power in discipline exceeds the sovereign decision upon which Derrida focuses insofar as it rests upon the desire to produce the visibil-ity of the body to the gaze of normalizing power. Moreover, discipline’s focus on the body translates to a broader focus on the social body. “The phenomenon of the social body,” Foucault says, “is the effect not of a consensus but of the materiality of power operating on the very body of individuals.”61 The recognition of oneself and one’s place in society is formed through an interiorization of the relation between the observers or trainers and the observed. Anterior to the modern question of the legiti-macy of power are the practices for disciplining the body. Discipline is the anterior medium wherein social order is constituted and which traditional philosophical questions of the legitimacy of authority and obligation have continuously effaced.62

The divergence from Derrida is sharp here, and at stake is the loca-tion of the grander narrative wherein the modern concept of sovereignty is to be located. The decentering of the founding or sovereign moment is thus not located in an engagement with the impossibility of its presence, autonomy, or ipseity. Rather, it is premised on the notion that a juridical or contractual order is itself conditioned by the production of the presence of a normalized and objectified body.63 For Foucault, the determination of relations cannot be reduced to the inherent instability of the extension of sovereignty or the founding event across space and through time. To question only the foundations and origins of power is, he argues, to depo-liticize them.64 It is in this sense that Foucault famously claims that by remaining within the juridical mode of analysis, “we still have not cut off the king’s head.”65 It is only by locating the event in practices that parallel, if not condition, the juridical that we can understand, Foucault argues, the production of order. Sovereignty cannot be, Foucault argues in Discipline and Punish, the principle of intelligibility of social power.66

Contra Marchart’s emphasis on merely ontic political differences that emerge around a shared ontological paradigm, we can see two incom-mensurable strategies of politicization emerge from out of these two

61. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 54.62. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 169.63. Ibid., p. 171.64. Ibid., pp. 92–97.65. Ibid., p. 89.66. Ibid., pp. 88–89.

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competing grander narratives. On the one hand the aporetic nature of any concept or act of sovereignty, and on the other the fields of disciplinary practices that form the consensus conditional of sovereign power. As such, much as in his reading of Descartes, from the Foucauldian perspec-tive Derrida merely imposes a meaning upon sovereignty in terms of its status as a purely trans-historical question. In this sense the deconstruc-tion of sovereignty is depoliticizing insofar as Derrida commits a violent exclusion in his interpretation of the aporia of sovereignty by locating it within the scope of “transcendental philosophical questions.” Der-rida’s account of sovereignty, to echo the claim made by Foucault in the cogito debate, “goes directly to the calling into question of the ‘totality of beingness.’”67 Derrida continues to maintain the sovereignty of sover-eignty insofar as his focus upon political foundations effaces the broader disciplinary “field of transformations” through which the determination of social order occurs. What is the Derridean response to this Foucauld-ian critique? If in “Cogito and the History of Madness” Derrida argues that Foucault violently effaces the aporetic conditions of his own dis-course, and thus violently determines the objects of his analyses, then, like any totality, Foucault’s displacement of sovereignty can be shown to be founded upon that which it excludes: “the evil slips in,” as Derrida says in “Plato’s Pharmacy.”68 The claim to have displaced the question of sovereignty relies on a sovereign determination of the presence of sover-eignty itself within history. It is the implicit identification of the historical event, which in Rogues Derrida argues disavows the excess that makes it possible:

[a] calculable event, one that falls, like a case, like the object of some knowledge, under the generality of a law, norm, determinative judgment, or technoscience, and thus of a power-knowledge and knowledge-power, is at least in this measure an event. Without the absolute singularity of the incalculable and exceptional, no thing and no one, nothing other and thus nothing arrives or happens. . . . as other as the absolute exception or singularity of an alterity that is not reappropriable by the ipseity of a sovereign power and a calculable knowledge.69

67. Foucault, Essential Works, 2:412.68. Derrida, Dissemination, p. 111.69. Derrida, Rogues, p. 148.

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Much as in his earlier critique, wherein he argues that the opposition between reason and madness cannot be exterior to language and thus can only be articulated in the language of reason, so sovereignty, Derrida appears to claim here, cannot be displaced except through an implicitly sovereign claim to transcend the “sovereignty drive.” Thus, if we char-acterize the implicit Foucauldian critique of Derrida as maintaining the “sovereignty of sovereignty,” Derrida seems to accuse Foucault of attempt-ing a sovereign determination and transcendence of sovereignty itself.

Concordantly, sovereignty for Derrida cannot be displaced or suffi-ciently politicized by a historical account of the emergence of a disciplinary apparatus, since autoimmunity would have to be the very condition of Foucault’s history of punishment. Anterior to its supposed disruption in history by a logic of discipline, sovereignty is made (im)possible for Der-rida by the autoimmune logic that conditions it. Once again we reach a point of impasse. Each thinker can be understood to claim that he posits the anterior medium or narrative for the other’s account, and accordingly the interlocutor’s failure to affirm that locus marks him out as guilty of having sought to transcend it. The irony is that, to put this very colloquially, both are in a sense doing the same thing. That is to say, Derrida and Foucault both seek to think indefinite and unmasterable processes or movements of an excess whose assertion allows the disruption of any foundation from which man’s proper political being might be derived Both, moreover, affirm the enunciation of this medium or field as itself irreducible to it (e.g., every deconstruction begins from within a particular text and can be deconstructed, Foucault affirms his own work as “fiction” or itself a power relation). That is, any account of the “medium of differentiation” is itself finite since it does not claim to transcend the vagaries of différance or power relations. We find in both thinkers a circularity between the finite situatedness of the enunciation within a “grander” (yet necessarily finite) account of “what happens,” of the context within which the enunciation occurs.

The circularity of these polemics between Derrida and Foucault cannot be arrested. Their very presence results from the inherent yet broad logic of a post-metaphysical paradigm. Insofar as we conceive of Derrida and Foucault as canonical and exemplary figures, a whole host of questions is raised. Does the post-Heideggerean political turn to ontological ques-tions lead us to a theoretical dead end? Are we caught in something akin

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to theological disputes: endless partisan debates defending this thinker or that as the “true” articulator of contingency, without resolution or end? A clear answer here would require demonstrating that an analogous impasse and incommensurability exists across a host of so-called post-metaphys-ical thinkers: Rancière, Lyotard, Deleuze, Laclau, Negri, and others. But at the very least, light needs to be shined on this paradox if our discipline isn’t to stall in endless self-reference.