Reason at the Limit: A Lesson in Deconstructive Reading
Roy´s Derrida & Foucault. AI image Introduction: Beyond a Philosophical Dispute Jacques Derrida’s “Cogito and the History of Madness” (1963) is often remembered primarily as a polemical intervention in Michel Foucault’s History of Madness . Read in that way, the essay appears to revolve around a disagreement concerning Descartes, historical method, and the possibility of giving voice to madness. Yet such a framing risks obscuring what is philosophically most instructive in Derrida’s text. Rather than functioning merely as a rebuttal, Cogito and the History of Madness operates as a demonstration of deconstructive reading itself. Derrida shows how a foundational philosophical opposition— reason versus madness —depends on language, unsettles its own hierarchy, and ultimately reveals that reason can only constitute itself by passing through what it seeks to exclude. The essay is less concerned with adjudicating historical claims than with exposing how a conceptu...