Thinking the outside: Foucault, Derrida and negative theology

Textual Practice

Volumn 16, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 57-74

  Bradley, Arthur ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CHESTER   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 35448994621     PISSN: 0950236X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09502360110103694     Document Type: Article

References (20)

1. Michel Foucault, 'Maurice Blanchot: the thought from the outside', in Foucault/Blanchot (trans.) Jeffrey Mehlman and Brian Massumi (New York: Zone Books, 1987), pp. 7-60, p. 16, hereafter abbreviated in the text as (FB ).
2. See James W. Bernauer, Michel Foucault's Force of Flight: Towards an Ethics for Thought (London: Humanities, 1990), hereafter abbreviated in the text as (MF );
3. Jeremy R. Carrette, Foucault and Religion: Spiritual Corporality and Political Spirituality (London: Routledge, 2000), hereafter abbreviated in the text as (FR ), for fuller discussion of Foucault's reading of negative theology. I remain indebted to Bernauer and Carrette's work despite the differences of emphasis and interpretation set out below.
4. Jacques Derrida, 'From restricted to general economy: a Hegelianism without reserve', in Writing and Difference (trans.) Alan Bass (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 271, hereafter abbreviated in the text as (WD).
5. Jacques Derrida, 'Différance ', in Margins of Philosophy (trans.) Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 1-29, p. 6, hereafter abbreviated in the text as (MP ). Translation modified slightly.
6. See Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989);
7. John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997) for fuller discussion of Derrida's reading of negative theology. Caputo's book is the most complete survey of Derrida's readings of religion.
8. Jacques Derrida, 'The outside is the inside', in Of Grammatology (trans.) Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 44-65 and passim, hereafter abbreviated in the text as (OG).
9. Michel Foucault, Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique (Paris: Plon, 1961).
10. The Histoire was republished in a much abridged form in 1964 and this abridged version was translated by Richard Howard as Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Random House, 1965). Foucault reprinted the original version of the book in 1972 and added the essay 'Mon corps, ce papier, ce feu' as an appendix.
11. See Peter Flaherty, '(Con)textual contest: Derrida and Foucault on madness and the Cartesian subject', Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 16 (1986), pp. 157-75;
12. Bernard Flynn, 'Foucault and Derrida: madness and writing', in Hugh J. Silverman (ed.) Continental Philosophy 2: Derrida and Deconstruction (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 201-18,
13. and Roy Boyne, Foucault and Derrida: The Other Side of Reason (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990) for readings of the Foucault/Derrida debate.
14. In the 'Introduction' to his edited collection on Hegel, Stuart Barnett argues that Foucault's entire historical project is an unwitting reproduction of Kojève's reading of Hegel's master/slave dialectic: 'all of Foucault's work can be read as a history of the consciousness of the slave. He presents narratives of historical moments in which consciousness was a means of enforcing and maintaining subjection. Despite his own warning [that to be anti-Hegelian is to be totally Hegelian], then, Foucault would seem to be travelling down a road mapped out by Hegel (and paved by Kojève). 'Introduction: Hegel before Derrida', in Hegel After Derrida (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 1-38, p. 23.
15. Michel Foucault, 'My body, this paper, this . re' (trans.) Geoff Bennington, Oxford Literary Review, 4: 1 (1979), pp. 5-28, p. 28.
16. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (trans.) A.M. Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge, 1972), hereafter abbreviated in the text as (AK ).
17. In his essay 'Demanding history', Geoffrey Bennington employs a related argument against the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson's famous injunction to 'Always historicize!': 'You can't historicize the prescription which demands that you always historicize. This limitation seems to be a necessary qualifi- cation of any apparently radical historicizing position, if in. nite regress is to be avoided.' Geoffrey Bennington, 'Demanding history', in Legislations: The Politics of Deconstruction (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 61-74, p. 66.
18. Jacques Derrida, 'Sauf le nom: Postscriptum' (trans.) John P. Leavey, Jr., in On the Name (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 35-89, p. 69.
19. John D. Caputo, 'Apostles of the impossible: on God and the gift in Derrida and Marion', in John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (eds.) God, the Gift and Post-Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 185-223, p. 197, hereafter abbreviated in the text as (GP ).
20. In all his work on negative theology Derrida stresses that this apparently recondite, ethereal theological mode also has an institutional, political dimension. See my 'Without politics: deconstruction and the politics of negative theology', Heythrop Journal, 42: 2 (2001), pp. 133-47.