ABSTRACT
We have seen that Foucault sought to recall the experience of a mode of being long since excluded from Western society. His best efforts could find only traces of this life of unreason. Suspicions and allusions, in the work of a few artists and writers, were all that seemed to remain of this dimension beyond our form of thought. Foucault’s secret Utopianism, his yearning for the Other of reason-in-general, was exposed by Derrida’s critique, which completed a process of re-evaluation already begun by Foucault himself. Derrida insisted that there could be no language of the Other which was not at the same time the language of reason, so that any attempt to think beyond the confines of reason-in-general was doomed from the start. Foucault’s reaction to this rebuke was to characterize Derrida as merely the last in a long line of philosophers all of whom asserted the unsurpassability of reason. But, in certain respects, Foucault’s response was unfair. It neglected to specify the overall nature of Derrida’s project. Foucault was not prepared to see that Derrida’s critique was more a questioning of strategies than of overall intentions. To examine this further, we need to ask about Derrida’s work, and to raise the vexed question, what is deconstruction?
