ABSTRACT
The double trajectory of Foucault and Derrida, at times divergent, at times parallel, can finally be seen as a case of mutual complementarity. Their story began with a fundamental dispute as to the nature of otherness. For Foucault, the idea of the other expressed the tantalizing promise of difference and a new realm of being to explore. Derrida saw that Western reason has always relied, mostly in an unstated way, on the promise of a world of pure being, and he knew that such a promise could never be honoured. He attacked Foucault’s Utopian aspirations to know difference in its pre-rational purity. Foucault was not happy to accept the critique, and his disparaging reply characterized Derrida as reason’s lackey. But Foucault’s work, after their direct exchange, effectively accepted that the whole being of difference resided in some obscured relation to reason, to politics, economics and the here and now of historicity.
