Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- A note on references
- List of abbreviations
- PART I THE PHILOSOPHERS OF THE THIRD REPUBLIC (1890–1940)
- PART II THE REIGN OF EXISTENTIAL PHENOMENOLOGY (1940–1960)
- PART III STRUCTURALISM AND BEYOND (1960–1990)
- 8 The structuralist invasion
- 9 Foucault
- 10 Derrida
- 11 Philosophies of difference
- 12 Fin-de-siècle again: “le temps retrouvé”?
- Conclusion: the philosophy of freedom
- Appendix: philosophy and the French educational system
- References
- Index
10 - Derrida
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- A note on references
- List of abbreviations
- PART I THE PHILOSOPHERS OF THE THIRD REPUBLIC (1890–1940)
- PART II THE REIGN OF EXISTENTIAL PHENOMENOLOGY (1940–1960)
- PART III STRUCTURALISM AND BEYOND (1960–1990)
- 8 The structuralist invasion
- 9 Foucault
- 10 Derrida
- 11 Philosophies of difference
- 12 Fin-de-siècle again: “le temps retrouvé”?
- Conclusion: the philosophy of freedom
- Appendix: philosophy and the French educational system
- References
- Index
Summary
We feel in one world, we think, we give names to things in another; between the two we can establish a certain correspondence, but not bridge the gap.
(Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, iii, 56)Foucault and Derrida both reject the traditional project of philosophy, although they also propose alternative employments for its intellectual legacy. (They seek not a continuation of philosophy by other means but a continuation of philosophy's means for other ends.) But where Foucault is centrifugal in relation to philosophy, moving away from its traditional aporiae toward successor projects of archaeology and genealogy, Derrida is centripetal, relentlessly dissecting the body of failed philosophical knowledge. In this important sense, Derrida remains closer to the traditional vocation of the philosopher, a fact for which there are reasons both in his education and in his philosophical position. Both Foucault and Derrida were normaliens, and Derrida, four years younger, attended a lecture course that Foucault, at Althusser's invitation, gave at the École Normale in the early 1950s. But whereas Foucault was from early on as interested in psychology and history as in philosophy, Derrida pursued an exclusively philosophical training and first made his name as a Husserl scholar. Further, while Foucault had little in traditional modes of philosophical thought (except when, as in Les mots et les choses, they formed part of his historical subject-matter), Derrida maintained that although traditional philosophical issues are undecidable in principle, they are also ineliminable from our thought and in some sense require our constant attention.
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- French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century , pp. 289 - 317Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001