Foucault’s Glove and Derrida’s Shoes: Thinking at the Threshold
I. The Problem of the Outside What happens when a philosophical problem becomes an object? Philosophy has always made use of images, analogies, diagrams, and things. Plato gives us a cave, Descartes a piece of wax, Wittgenstein a beetle in a box. Such devices are often treated as aids to understanding, ways of giving an abstract argument a concrete form. Yet some philosophical images do more than illustrate: they put a problem into a form that makes the distinction itself difficult to maintain. This becomes particularly striking when the problem concerns an inside and an outside. Philosophy has repeatedly sought a position from which what is ordinarily taken for granted can be examined. To understand a system, one might imagine that one must somehow step outside it; to identify the conditions governing thought, one might seem to require a standpoint not governed by those same conditions. But what if the thinker is already situated within the language, history, culture, or c...
