‘Aux bords de la folie’1 revisits, from various angles, the question of madness, the history of psychiatry (in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), the history of confinement and hence the history of the relationships between the asylum and the prison, the history of pharmacology and behaviourism, the history of the representation of madness, and, finally, the question of the madness of power as that of the madness within power – in the Pascalian sense, which provides the occasion for Michaël Foessel to return to the debate between Foucault and Derrida concerning the respective roles of madness and dreaming in the constitution of classical reason.
Before delving into Foessel’s article, which is entitled ‘La folie ordinaire du pouvoir’,2 we must indicate a few of the salient features of this issue of Esprit with respect to our purposes here, and firstly the data provided by Marc-Olivier Padis in ‘Derrière la folie, les malaises ordinaires’: ‘According to the World Health Organization, one out of every four people experiences mental illness during their lives. In fifteen years, the number of children in France treated by child psychiatry has doubled.’3 Referring to a 2012 report of the ‘Conseil économique, social et environnemental’ concerning France, and to a book by Jean-Paul Delevoye, Reprenons-nous!,4 Padis speaks of ‘psychic fatigue’ and ‘collective burn-out’. While defending himself against the charge of wanting to make ‘a medical diagnosis of our society’, Padis nevertheless highlights a profound change in contemporary society with regard to mental illness: ‘Psychological concerns have become a mass phenomenon. Hence mental illness can no longer be localized on the remote margins of society. This does not mean that the madman does not retain his unsettling strangeness.’5 A key question is, precisely, the relationship between mental illness and madness – where it would not be possible to confine madness to mental illness if it is true that, as we have already suggested, and as Gladys Swain argues when she revisits the history of psychiatry in a way that deviates from Foucault,6 madness is constitutive of the history of thought, and hence equally constitutive of the ‘phenomenology of spirit’ in the strict Hegelian sense, where spirit can appear only in passing through moments of division, that is, of madness, those ‘intermittences’ of noetic life that would be essential to noesis, in which respect Pinel would provide Hegel with clinical data concerning mental illness.
In ‘Les contestations de la psychiatrie’, Jacques Hochmann, after recalling the genesis of the ‘sectorization’ of French psychiatric care,7 goes on to recall the debates that ensued between institutional psychiatry, anti-psychiatry, psychoanalysis and sector psychiatry, debates that focused on the place of delirium and more generally of psychological suffering in the process of individuation.8 Hochmann emphasizes the therapeutic scope of Paul Ricoeur’s concept of narrative identity, while recalling that what he calls the ‘pathologies of ill-being’ are not cases of madness.
What, then, are the relations between the extra-ordinary dimension of madness and what, in this special issue, is named – perhaps in contradiction with Hochmann’s recommendation – ‘ordinary madness’? It is starting from these contemporary questions that, in §§68–69, I will revisit the debate between Foucault and Derrida. And I will do so in order to try to think the psychosocial stakes of disruption – inasmuch as it stems from the dream and the nightmare, thereby constituting a factor contributing to the expansion of madness in its various forms, whether ‘ordinary’, ‘rational’ or ‘extraordinary’ – with Sloterdijk and his analysis of disinhibition constituting the principle of the Modern Age and capitalism.
In ‘La folie ordinaire du pouvoir’, Foessel invokes Pascal and his study of the relationship between power and madness – after briefly referring to the ‘Sarkozy case’ and to the strategy drawn from it by François Hollande:
Shortly before the 2007 presidential election, the weekly Marianne launched a campaign on the alleged ‘madness’ of Nicolas Sarkozy. […] By 2012, the turmoil of a chaotic quinquennium had convinced François Hollande to present himself as a ‘normal’ president. As if mental stability provided an entrance ticket for the Élysée.9
There remains much to say about this last point – and we will come back to it. What designation of ‘madness’ would the Sarkozy case have fallen under? And as for Hollande, might he not have been classified by 2015 as himself counting among the ‘rational madmen’?
Foessel remarks that in 2012, in fact, ‘the feeling [that Sarkozy is crazy] goes well beyond partisan divisions: something, decidedly, was not right about this presidency [of Nicolas Sarkozy]’.10 On the basis of this remark, Foessel extends the question of this instability, this disequilibrium, to the whole of society, and he does so by referring to Foucault: ‘Foucault […] taught us that it is the nature of power to diffuse itself into the whole of society without it becoming possible to isolate some place or character that would totally escape its grasp.’11 The symptomatology of power as exercised by Sarkozy should, therefore, be inscribed into a diagnosis that is more alarming and ‘undoubtedly more characteristic of our epoch, according to which we would all be more or less crazy to the extent that we are alienated by a power that slips into the folds of our psyche’.12 As for this fundamental dimension of Foucault’s contribution, which posits that power is the condition of individuation (and here we should obviously mobilize Simondon with Foucault), it is necessary to point out that the exercise of knowledge as techniques of the self is a remedial practice that Foucault prescribed to himself.
In this contemporary symptomatology of power, what power, precisely, does this most concern? Should it still be understood starting from Sarkozy, Hollande and other representatives of national executives who can be found in the present world, or is it not rather a matter of a wholly other form of power – one that would precisely no longer be public power, and hence no longer political?
The power in question is no longer political, but economic, and the ‘representatives of national executives’ are its pitiful playthings. The ordinary character of contemporary madness results from this state of fact, which is brought to its peak, before any other cause, by disruption, and, more precisely, by the ordinary madness that results from the liquidation of the extra-ordinary by the nihilism in which capitalism fundamentally consists.
If this is not precisely what Foessel investigates, these are the questions to which his analysis nevertheless leads: ‘Is this a madness reserved for the powerful or a general spread of madness? Is it an irrational and ancestral pathology afflicting those who govern us or just ordinary delirium sustained by the extreme rationalization of contemporary ways of life?’13 Here, once again, we find the question of the new form of barbarism that would be contained in this rationalization – as the process by which the Aufklärung, that is, ‘classical reason’, is inverted into a rationalization that generalizes not just Dummheit (stupidity, stupor, stupefaction), but madness, and does so by somehow depriving it of its very extra-ordinariness, by the fact of counting with it.
It is a question, then, of specifying ordinary madness in a history of madness that extends beyond modernity, but still as the pursuit of the process of disinhibition in which capitalist madness consists, despite the fact that, long before the advent of modernity, ‘power […] produces delirium wherever it operates’.14 It is here that Foessel turns to Pascal, who situates the ‘grain of madness’ that makes madness possible in the imagination – whether it is the madness of those who govern or that of the governed: ‘No one before [Pascal] had ever described this desire [of the governed] to obey legitimate power as a hallucination close to madness.’15
Now, what is this ‘desire to obey’? We, who no longer live in the age of La Boétie or Spinoza, we who come after Freud, we know that power, which is an instance of transindividuation and a synthesis of all transindividuations, power insofar as it is primarily legitimated only on the condition of constituting itself in law (and here, undoubtedly, it is necessary to do more than just repeat Foucault), stems from a libidinal economy of the drives through which identifications and idealizations constitute a hallucinatory horizon that is indispensable to the formation of a we that this power embodies while, inevitably, disembodying it.16
Insofar as it is transindividuation, that is, binding, power cannot be thought without conceiving an economy of the drives, of which it is also the diseconomy – that is, the unbinding, and as ὕβρις.
As this (dis)embodiment, power is a matter of desire, of economy, a question of the binding and unbinding of the drives. It is on this basis that we must rethink the will to power – within a process of transindividuation that, from the dawn of the Modern Age, is also a process of disinhibition. Here we must examine the latter with respect to two fundamental points. The first is constitutive of exosomatization in general, as the care taken of the pharmaka that it generates. The second is historical, and characteristic of the Anthropocene, where exosomatization and disinhibition combine as the fulfilment of nihilism (that is, as the dissolution of use values and practical values into exchange value):
What, in fact, does ‘autrefois’ refer to here? There are alterities of this altra volta, which our epoch tends to relate only to that other time that was the age of ‘Christian morality’ (whose relations to Mosaic law and guilt should be understood more profoundly): on that other side, that of Montaigne and the Stoics, ‘moral philosophy’ takes us back to the question of αἰδώς (aidōs) and its relationship to δίκη (dikē), hermeneia and the pharmakon – and of what connects them in also constituting the question of ἀρετή (aretē), and hence of ἀλήθεια (alētheia), and therefore of παρρησία (parrhēsia), and all this as what (es) contains ὕβρις.
Before making our way to these lands of other times, which may still lie before us, remaining to come, perhaps, and perhaps even as the only future possible for us beyond disruption and the Anthropocene – visible and accessible through a very narrow doorway, as thin as the eye of a needle – let us continue reading ‘La folie ordinaire du pouvoir’, where the key question is the imagination. For Pascal, writes Foessel, ‘all men imagine, which leads them to a universal delirium. “I am not speaking of madmen, but of the wisest men” (Pascal).’17 Here, Pascal extends Montaigne, who extends Seneca. The question is imagination, that is, the dream – and it is around the dream and its status in Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy that Derrida and Foucault will face off against one another.
In 1954, seven years before History of Madness, Foucault published a long introduction to the French translation of ‘Dream and Existence’, an article published by Ludwig Binswanger in 1930 in which the question of the dream and its status in psychoanalysis, psychiatry, psychology and philosophy is central.18 The reflections on imagination that Foucault puts forward in his introduction are at times astonishingly close to those of Simondon19 – whom he would at that time no doubt have encountered in the courses and seminars of Canguilhem and Merleau-Ponty.
The dream, as I have insisted upon repeatedly here, is the condition of exosomatization, and it is also the seat of the unconscious and the pathway of the expression of the drives. But we cannot reduce it to this nocturnal scene of the unconscious, and we cannot interpret it solely from the perspective of its ‘latent’ content – this is what Binswanger says, and then Foucault. A fantastic as well as historial – geschichtlich – foundation is its condition, composed of those ‘affective tonalities’ characteristic of individuals, such as these are inscribed into epochs, and, beyond these epochs, into transgenerational existential dimensions.
According to my own analysis – which extends the analysis that Foucault set out before he published History of Madness, and, as we shall soon see, where this latter work itself extends, in his reading of Descartes’ Meditations, his own ‘Introduction’ to ‘Dream and Existence’ – we must refer, here, to an oneiric condition that makes exosomatization possible, and that is itself made possible by exosomatization, as the fund [fonds] of tertiary retention that is the vector of fantasies, hallucinations, collective retentions and protentions of every kind, characteristic of the epochs that are thereby formed, and linking these epochs in the never achieved, always threatened and necessarily threatened unity of Geschichtlichkeit.
The questions of madness and dream belong to the broader question of imagination, inasmuch as ‘humankind […], each time that it imagines, finds itself, unawares, close to hallucination’.20 In the conflict of interpretation that opposes Derrida and Foucault with respect to the Meditations, a dispute I will not claim to settle, Derrida’s objections, however powerful they may be, do not seem to me to do justice, whatever may be their necessity, to the clarifications Foucault offered in 1972 in ‘My Body, This Paper, This Fire’.21 This text, Foucault’s reply to Derrida, clarifies – by opening a question that I believe to be crucial – the scope and significance of the meditation as dream, and as the dream dreamed by Descartes. The dream that meditation would be will condition and nourish not only the project of ‘classical reason’ but the process of disinhibition examined by Sloterdijk (see §57).
In Pascal’s epoch, ‘institutions […] make people delirious inasmuch as the latter confuse them with reality, and imagine that they must honour the great because they are great and not because they possess the signs of greatness’.22 But if so, what then is our situation today, that is, in the ‘epoch’ of 24/7 capitalism that destroys the common faculty of dreaming?23 Does there not appear, on this point, a solution de continuité,24 a ‘break in continuity’ (that is, a dissolution), between the classical age and ourselves?
Do we not find ourselves in this epoch of the absence of epoch precisely insofar as this description characterizes a certain regime of ordinary madness striking, in an extra-ordinary way, not just the governors and the governed, that is, public powers, but also private powers, who have become immensely powerful by dissolving, through disruption, the difference between public and private? This difference, as we know, is a major component of the psyche, that is, of the extravagances of all kinds of which it is capable, and to which each of us can testify through our own dreams.
On this point, Foessel opens doors but he does not cross the threshold – he does not enter the labyrinths onto which they open. After noting that our world is saturated with images ‘far more than was Pascal’s’, he adds that, in our societies, ‘the trappings of power can no longer sustain their illusions. Doctors no longer wear “square hats”, and judges do so less and less often for fear of seeming ridiculous. It is, rather, an epoch where the powerful are looked upon with what has become a widespread ironic gaze.’25 But who are the ‘powerful’ involved here? Would it not be better to refer to the powerless – and to the question of powerlessness, which, perhaps, tends to incite distrust more than it does irony, if not contempt? And where this is a distrust and contempt in the face of what, perhaps, stems precisely from a new form of madness, as well as of barbarism, triggered by a new age of ὕβρις, which means in particular that power is itself transformed, and that the forms hitherto taken by power find themselves struck with impotence?26
As for these forms, which were those of public power, Foessel quotes Pascal, who narrates a fable to a young nobleman in the first of his Three Discourses on the Condition of the Great: ‘a man is tossed by a storm onto an unknown island, whose inhabitants were having trouble finding their king who had gone missing’,27 and whom he resembled. The king having disappeared, ‘all legitimacy has deserted the world. The inhabitants are in want of a king and they desire nothing more than to fill this void with their imagination’,28 by recognizing their king in the shipwreck survivor. ‘It is their imagination, and not an act of will or reason, that makes of them a “people”.’29
We could, however, present things somewhat differently, by positing that their imagination is constituted by tertiary retentions that produce collective secondary retentions and collective secondary protentions, supporting the libidinal economy that a society cannot do without – failing which, no longer being able to ‘economize’ its drives, it sees them unleashed, giving rise to the barbarism that will destroy it. It is this that Freud describes at the beginning of The Future of an Illusion.30
The king cannot be a king without what Foessel and Pascal describe as his trappings. But these alone are not enough to underpin his power: they require other artifices, whose functions are not simply decorative or sumptuary. These other artifices are supports of processes of transindividuation, through which the retentional and protentional compromises that promise a common future are metastabilized – and they form epochs by unifying collective protentions. Understood from this perspective, imagination, will and reason cannot be neatly distinguished, still less isolated from one another.
This is the whole question posed by what Sloterdijk refers to as psychotechnics, which is today implemented by a psychopower that is ever more elaborate, and that is specific to capitalism. The industry of cultural goods heralded by Adorno and Horkheimer bore the germ of a ‘new form of barbarism’ precisely in that it is such a psychopower: as such, it leads to public powerlessness by transferring the symbolic power of political embodiment – of which ‘trappings’ are the most visible surface, and the most visibly contingent – to commodities, and through this merchandise to the merchants, that is, to private powers.
It is for this reason that Foessel can end his study in a rather sceptical tone, with a note about what came to be called the ‘spirit of 11 January’:31
Most recently, the French authorities proclaimed the existence of a ‘spirit of 11 January’ in which national unity would (magically) reside. This was not without an element of collective psychosis from the moment it was forgotten that this ‘spirit’ is at best only a metaphor: eight-year-old children who did not have the chance to perceive it found themselves at the police station.32
Indeed, it is a question of knowing how the classical forms of power, which have become contemporary forms of powerlessness, apprehend the new forms of hyperpower granted in particular by the contemporary disruptive situation that constitutes
another discourse of the Truth: that of the market, where, by right, anyone can claim the status of leader. In the collective imaginary, ‘oil kings’ take the place of kings draped in purple robes. It is true that proof of their greatness no longer depends on fantasies of birth right: it is generally in some unassuming garage that they claim to have had some commercial or technical idea that was to revolutionize the world.33
This narrative could no doubt benefit from some nuance. Long-term investments, led by military public authorities, conceived then concretized by universities endowed with massive resources, and channelled by an industrial politics that is also a wholly other culture of risk – which should be analysed with Sloterdijk and Fressoz – make these kinds of narratives possible, oscillating between fairy tales and marketing strategies and based on planetary-scale ‘storytelling’.
The issue, therefore, is to return to the problem of the foundations of legitimate authority, and to understand to what extent [mesure] (and in what excess [démesure]) they allow a becoming-in-common that does not degenerate into explosions of ordinary and extraordinary madness perpetrated with countless pharmaka, which could, in such cases, end up being transformed into fatal means of destruction.
In order to grasp the possibilities of contemporary delirium – both ordinary and extraordinary – we must therefore place them in a new history of madness, where it is precisely a matter of thinking the immensely varied instances of ὕβρις in its primordial relationship to the pharmakon, that is, to tertiary retention, and in particular inasmuch as tertiary retention is what makes the process of disinhibition possible, which occurs at the very moment of coalescence of the conditions that give rise to the state form [État].
To explore these questions more deeply, let us turn back to the debate between Derrida and Foucault with respect to the relations between dream, madness and reason.
Derrida summarizes Foucault by recalling that the ‘great confinement’ is a ‘political decree’ corresponding to the ‘Cartesian decree’, the latter defined as the ‘advent of a ratio’ that is intrinsically isolated from all madness, which ‘would have been impossible for Montaigne, who was, as we know, haunted by the possibility of being mad, or becoming mad, in the very act of thinking itself’.34 The ‘Cartesian gesture’ belongs, for Foucault, to the ‘historical (politico-social) structure of which [it] is only a sign’.35 We shall see how Derrida rejects this point of view, about which he makes the rather unnuanced claim that it stems from a ‘structuralist totalitarianism’.36
Having recalled this, the essence of the debate between Derrida and Foucault concerns the relationship between madness and dream, and above all the function of dreams in the experience of doubt:
the hypothesis of dreams is the radicalization […] of the hypothesis according to which the senses could sometimes deceive me. In dreams, the totality of sensory images is illusory. It follows that a certainty invulnerable to dreams would be a fortiori invulnerable to perceptual illusions of the sensory kind.37
The issue is certainty, and the (classical, modern, Cartesian) truth that forms therein: ‘certainties and truth that escape perception […] are […] of a nonsensory and nonimaginative origin. They are simple and intelligible things.’38 These ‘simple and intelligible’ things, however, are not themselves dubitable in the dream. All representations, on the other hand, may be ‘doubtful’ or false, because they are ‘composite things’.
Because their objects are such ‘composite things’,
Physics, Astronomy, Medicine and all other sciences which have as their end the consideration of composite things, are very dubious and uncertain; but […] Arithmetic, Geometry and other sciences of that kind which only treat of things that are very simple […] contain some measure of certainty and an element of the indubitable. For whether I am awake or asleep, two and three together always form five, and the square can never have more than four sides.39
It is after the experience of the dream, and in the encounter with the indubitable that resists every test of being put into doubt, that, according to Derrida, Descartes will be led to a new extrapolation and radicalization, which is that of madness, but which for Derrida, contrary to the claims of Foucault, is merely the extension of the hypothesis of the dream.
Derrida wants to show, contra Foucault, that what is excluded is not, in and of itself, madness – it is illusion in general, and above all sensory illusion:
All significations or ‘ideas’ of sensory origin are excluded from the realm of truth, for the same reason as madness is excluded from it. And there is nothing astonishing about this: madness is only a particular case, and, moreover, not the most serious one, of the sensory illusion which interests Descartes at this point.40
When Descartes formulated the hypothesis of ‘a more common, more universal experience than that of madness: the experience of sleep and dreams’,41 he envisaged, at the heart of the life of the mind, at the heart of reason, ‘the possibility of an insanity – an epistemological one – much more serious than madness’,42 which will lead, Derrida tells us, to the ‘hypothesis of the evil genius’:
Descartes has just admitted that arithmetic, geometry, and simple notions escape the first doubt, and he writes, ‘Nevertheless, I have long had fixed in my mind the belief that an all-powerful God existed who can do everything…’ […] [T]he hypothesis of the evil genius will evoke, conjure up, the possibility of a total madness […] that will no longer be a disorder of the body, of the object, […] but […] will bring subversion into pure thought and into its purely intelligible objects, into the field of clear and distinct ideas, into the realm of mathematical truths that had escaped natural doubt.43
Madness is what, in the thought of Descartes, originally haunts the very possibility of thinking: this is what Derrida will attempt to show, counter to the Foucauldian thesis according to which classical thinking is constituted by the exclusion of madness, consigning it to the exterior of thinking in the Meditations on First Philosophy, which was published in 1641 and so would correspond to the ‘great confinement’ of 1656 described in History of Madness.
Having established his own, contrary thesis, Derrida then introduces the question of the relationship between language and madness, which is also examined by Foucault at the very end of History of Madness, where the issue is that of an opposition between normality and madness: ‘Foucault says: “Madness is the absence of a work [oeuvre].” […] Now, the work begins with the most elementary discourse […]. The sentence is, by its essence, normal. It bears normality within it, that is, sense.’44 Sense belongs to language, and so that which can manifest itself as non-sense, as madness, is thus above all historical.45
Having established this point, Derrida goes on to show that the point of the Meditations is not to establish what reason is in its relation to madness, but what the Cogito is, for which madness is, on the contrary, a possibility – which inhabits and conditions every possibility of thinking, and firstly of thinking rationally. For Descartes, it is a matter of thinking the Cogito (Second Meditation) such as it is, and as that which underlies everything that is, which is to say everything that makes sense, and hence, also, everything that thinks:
The hyperbolical audacity of the Cartesian Cogito, its mad audacity […] would consist in the return to an original point which no longer belongs to either a determined reason or a determined unreason, no longer belongs to them as opposition or alternative. Whether I am mad or not, Cogito, sum. Madness is therefore, in every sense of the word, only one case of thought (within thought).46
The Cogito is neither enclosed nor enclosing: ‘Invulnerable to all determined opposition between reason and unreason, [the Cogito] is the point starting from which the history of the determined forms of this opposition, this opened or broken-off dialogue, can appear as such and be stated.’47 The possibility of this opening up or breaking off, however, introduces the possibility and even the necessity of ὕβρις. The Cogito is, indeed, ‘the impenetrable point of certainty […] where the project of thinking this totality by escaping it is embedded. By escaping it: that is to say, by exceeding the totality, which – within existence – is possible only in the direction of infinity or nothingness.’48 Such a possibility, which is therefore that of ὕβρις, is also that of madness: ‘In this excess of the possible, this excess of law and meaning, over the real, the factual and the existent, this project is mad, and acknowledges madness as its freedom and its very possibility.’49 It is inhabited by this ὕβρις that manifests itself as ‘demonic’:
it is not human, in the sense of anthropological factuality, but is rather metaphysical and demonic: it first awakens to itself in its war with the demon, the evil genius of nonmeaning, by pitting itself against the strength of the evil genius, and by resisting him through reduction of the natural man within itself. In this sense, nothing is less reassuring than the Cogito at its proper and inaugural moment.50
The ‘demon’, however, the ‘evil genius’, is also the return [revenance] of the δαίμων of Socrates, which constitutes the inaugural experience of philosophy as such, and which, in Book VI of the Republic (509c), appears with the question of άγάθων (agathon) as that which ‘exceeds the totality of the world’ – άγάθων, the question of which lies also at the heart of the reading of Phaedrus in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’:
This project of exceeding the totality of the world, as the totality of what I can think in general, is no more reassuring than the dialectic of Socrates when it, too, overflows the totality of beings, planting us in the light of a hidden sun that is ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας. And Glaucon was not mistaken when he cried out: ‘Lord! What demonic hyperbole, “δαιμονίας ὑπερβολῆς”’.51
From one hyperbole to another, from Plato to Descartes, from the tragic ‘demonic’ to the ‘evil genius’ of monotheism, Derrida reminds us that at the bottom of thinking there lies the same madness, including and firstly for and in Descartes, and that this is ὕβρις as such: ‘Such a ὕβρις keeps itself within the world. Assuming that it is deranged and excessive, it implies the fundamental derangement and excessiveness of the hyperbole that opens and founds the world as such by exceeding it.’52
It is here that, with an incredible audacity (the article appeared in 1963), and perhaps with a certain excess, with a kind of ὕβρις, Derrida refers to a ‘structuralist totalitarianism’ that ‘would operate’ in Foucault. This speaks volumes about the ‘poststructuralist’ question (and, as we shall soon see, shedding light on the years 1953–55 may be useful for an understanding of this debate on structuralism, and on the tendency towards ‘totalization’ that it manifests, a tendency which, here, Derrida opposes via Foucault53): ‘Structuralist totalitarianism would operate, here, an act of confinement of the Cogito of the same type as the violences of the classical age. I am not saying that Foucault’s book would be totalitarian […]; I am saying that it sometimes risks being so in the implementation of the project.’54 Behind the concerns with regard to Descartes, it is the whole Foucauldian project that is here challenged in advance – illuminating the relationship of Derrida to Foucault, which is a key dispute with respect to the question of history: ‘I believe […] that (in Descartes) everything can be reduced to a determined historical totality except the hyperbolical project.’55 But what I myself believe is that this challenge [contestation], which is in itself incontestable, that is, necessary, obviously bringing with it an indispensable vigilance – which is highly characteristic of deconstruction in its attention to the necessities of that which it is nevertheless a matter of deconstructing – this challenge is also contestable for us (the readers of Foucault as well as of Derrida) in that it leads Derrida into missing the heart of Foucault’s project in reading Descartes, which is to say where, in the Meditations, it is a question of the dream and of its noetic bearing.
Foucault had already tried, in 1954, and with Binswanger, to think the dream in its fundamental relation to anthropology, which was, however, not yet the anthropology of structuralism. Foucault plays out this question once again in his History of Madness, but in the meantime he has encountered the anthropological structuralism that Lévi-Strauss outlined in Tristes Tropiques in 1955.
Between the dream on one hand and ‘structure’ on the other hand, the issue is the play between:
This play is that of the dream insofar as it may or may not be realized. This is obviously not how it is for Foucault himself, neither in 1961 nor in 1954, but it is how it is for me, if not ‘for us’ (my readers and I, and you), today.
Even if this doubly epokhal redoubling is obviously not the question asked in ‘Dream and Existence’, the 1930 article that the French public became aware of via Foucault’s 1954 introduction (an introduction that is lengthier than the text it introduced, as would be the case for the long introduction to ‘The Origin of Geometry’ that Derrida would write at around the time History of Madness was being published), and even if this doubly epokhal redoubling is also not the question asked in History of Madness in 1961, nevertheless the privilege given to the dream in History of Madness and in its reading of the Meditations, which is very clear in Foucault’s response to Derrida in 1972 (in the afterword to the second edition), does succeed in highlighting a porosity between dream and meditation that is clearly fundamental with respect to my own thesis, which finds its origin in the reading of Binswanger, who on this basis himself proposes elements of an existential anthropology that forms the foundation of a Daseinsanalyse that would be a fundamentally new proposition in the history of psychiatry as well as psychoanalysis.
In his critique of ‘structuralist totalitarianism’, what Derrida interrogates is the Foucauldian concept of history. These questions themselves obviously relate to the doubly epokhal redoubling as the historical, factual and accidental condition of transindividuation (as the test and ordeal of the accident in which technics fundamentally consists qua exosomatic organogenesis that can ‘be otherwise than it is’, as Aristotle defined technics in its artificiality56).
Of this doubly epokhal redoubling, the age of disruption would be one notable stage as the absence of epoch, that is, the absence of dreams, where ὕβρις would, as it were, by itself unleash itself, that is, unbind itself from all social systems, which are themselves, above all, binding systems [systèmes de liaison].
Beneath the question of ὕβρις (which also finds expression in the dream, which thereby communicates with madness), and behind the question of its containment, there lies the question of history as a succession of transindividuated shocks, forming its epochs, or its ‘ages’.
History, both as movement of collective individuation (Historie) and as knowledge of this historicity (Geschichtlichkeit), presupposes hyperbole, that is, ὕβρις as excess towards nothingness or infinity, and as indeterminacy, but such that it ceaselessly composes with its determination, that is, its normalization, which is a passage.57 The principle of history involves a play between contradictory tendencies, the epochs of which are negotiations that mark passages and that pass through philosophy:
historicity in general would be impossible without a history of philosophy, and I believe that the latter would in turn be impossible if we possessed only hyperbole, on the one hand, or, on the other, only determined historical structures, finite Weltanschauungen. The historicity proper to philosophy is located and constituted in this passage, in this dialogue between hyperbole and finite structure, between the excess beyond totality and closed totality, in the difference between history and historicity…58
This difference, which is a différance, is also the work of what I try to think starting from the Simondonian ‘transindividual’ as the process of transindividuation
…in the difference between history and historicity; that is, in the place where, or rather at the moment when, the Cogito and all that it symbolizes here (madness, derangement, hyperbole, etc.) pronounce and reassure themselves then to fall, necessarily forgetting themselves until their reactivation, their reawakening in another statement of the excess which also later will become another decline and another crisis.59
Here, the question of language returns inasmuch as it conceals the possibility of a revenance and contains not only the possibility but the necessity of madness – just as the jar of Pandora contained all ills:
From its very first breath, speech, submitted to this temporal rhythm of crisis and reawakening, is able to open the space for speech only by enclosing madness. This rhythm, moreover, is not an alternation that additionally would be temporal. It is the movement of temporalization itself as concerns that which unites it to the movement of logos.60
Now, this also amounts to the question of the relationship between genesis and structure, which will be the cross that structuralism will have to bear, and a fundamental theme for Derrida, from 1953 (The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy) to 1968 (Of Grammatology) and beyond, passing through ‘“Genesis and Structure” and Phenomenology’, delivered in 1959 and published in 1967 in Writing and Difference. An economy is established between these two tendencies that no dialectic can ever ‘sublate’, that is, overcome:
crisis or oblivion perhaps is not an accident, but rather the destiny of speaking philosophy – the philosophy that lives only by enclosing madness, but which would die as thought, and by a still worse violence, if a new speech did not at every instant liberate previous madness while enclosing within itself, in its present, the madman of the day.61
Hence is manifested an essential anachronism of philosophical ὕβρις (of its fundamentally demonic tenor). Contrary to Foucault’s claims in History of Madness, this amounts to the question of the ‘madman within us’ as the destiny of the finite thought that will impose itself on the basis of this reading of the Meditations: ‘the reign of finite thought can be established only on the basis of the more or less disguised confining, humiliating, chaining and mocking of the madman within us, of the madman who can never be but the fool of a logos which is father, master and king’.62 This différance of madness is above all an economy:
At its height, hyperbole, the absolute opening, the aneconomic expenditure [dépense], is always taken back and taken over into an economy. The relationship between reason, madness and death is an economy, a structure of différance whose irreducible originality must be respected. This wanting-to-say-the-demonic-hyperbole is not one want among others.63
What is concealed within it is, indeed, the very possibility and necessity of wanting. It is the will inasmuch as it is not opposed to the imagination:
This wanting to say, which is not the antagonism of silence but its condition, is the original profundity of all will in general. Furthermore, nothing would be more incapable of grasping back this will than voluntarism, for, as finitude and as history, this wanting is also a primary passion. It keeps within itself the trace of a violence.64
In other words, wanting stems from ὕβρις, and what we call the will is its derivative – but we have seen (and this is something to which we will return) that ὕβρις stems from an imagination that itself stems from the dream, which will take us back to Foucault, by projecting us beyond that which Derrida opposes in Foucault.
The will, then, keeps the trace of violence, and this also amounts to the condition and the question of critique as the crisis of reason’s madness when it truly reasons, that is, the question of critique conceived (as a child is ‘conceived’) after this crisis, analysed after this synthesis, and vice versa:
But this crisis in which reason is madder than madness – for reason is non-sense and forgetting – and where madness is more rational than reason, for it is closer to the wellspring of sense, however silent or murmuring, this crisis has always already begun and it is interminable. It suffices to say that, if it is classical, it is not so in the sense of the classical age but in the sense of the essentially and eternally classical, albeit historical in a very unusual way.65
Derrida concludes his reading of History of Madness thus: ‘For what Michel Foucault teaches us to think is that there are crises of reason in strange complicity with what the world calls crises of madness.’66