Abstract:
This article consists of a commentary on Derrida’s essay “To do Justice to Freud: The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis”, with the aim of tracing what cannot be re-appropriated by the presuppositions of the Derrida/Foucault debate. By analysing the question “who announces the nonrecourse?”, I will explore the way in which Derrida’s writing is affected by the necessity and impossibility of not repressing unreason. I will defend that Derrida compulsively writes the effects of his own resistance to repress unreason by reproducing the Foucauldian quest for a “beyond of reason”. This repetition compulsion not only keeps re-opening the debate, but more importantly, it triggers the return of unreason as a disarrangement of the principles of identity and linear time which destabilizes any authorial ground for a history of madness in general and for any of its critiques. This article will read the exchanges between Derrida and Foucault by deconstructing the premises of any debate in general.
Keywords:
Fort/da; Madness; Psychoanalysis; Deconstruction; Transference