1001Philosophers

Jacques Derrida vs Michel Foucault

Derrida and Foucault are the two most influential figures of late twentieth-century French philosophy, often grouped together as post-structuralists but in fact representing very different philosophical orientations. Their public disagreement over Foucault's reading of Descartes in Madness and Civilization framed several decades of French philosophical debate.

At a glance

Jacques DerridaMichel Foucault
Dates1930 – 20041926 – 1984
NationalityFrenchFrench
EraContemporaryContemporary
Movements Post-Structuralism, Continental Philosophy Continental Philosophy, Post-Structuralism
Profile Jacques Derrida → Michel Foucault →

Where they agree

Both held that the Western philosophical tradition has been organized around exclusions and oppositions that need critical analysis, both rejected the philosophical centrality of the autonomous subject, and both treated the history of thought as inseparable from the history of institutions, practices, and discourses.

Where they disagree

Foucault analyzed power-knowledge complexes through historical-genealogical investigations of specific institutions and discourses — madness, punishment, sexuality. Derrida analyzed the textual and conceptual operations through which Western philosophy constitutes itself, with deconstruction as the technique for showing the dependence of privileged terms on what they exclude. Where Foucault's diagnoses are historical and institutional, Derrida's are textual and conceptual; where Foucault charts the formation of subjectivity in disciplinary regimes, Derrida tracks the play of meaning in the philosophical text.

Representative quotes

Jacques Derrida

  • “There is nothing outside of the text.”

    Il n'y a pas de hors-texte.

  • “Il n'y a pas de hors-texte.”

    Of Grammatology (1967). G. Spivak translated this as "There is nothing outside the text," which Derrida opponents have characterized to mean that nothing exists but language. Later scholarship has translated it as "There is no outside-of-text" or "There is nothing free of context," i.e. all experience is mediated by interpretation.

  • “At the end of Being and Nothingness , ... Being in-itself and Being for-itself were of Being ; and this totality of beings, in which they were effected, itself was linked up to itself, relating and appearing to itself, by means of the essential project of human-reality. What was named in this way, in an allegedly neutral and undetermined way, was nothing other than the metaphysical unity of man and God, the relation of man to God, the project of becoming God as the project constituting human-reality. Atheism changes nothing in this fundamental structure.”

    The Ends of Man," Margins of Philosophy , tr. w/ notes by Alan Bass. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago, 1982. (original French published in Paris, 1972, as Marges de la philosophie ). p. 116

Michel Foucault

  • “I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am.”

    Truth, Power, Self : An Interview with Michel Foucault (25 October 1982)

  • “Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are.”

    p. 785

  • “The soul is the prison of the body.”

    [L]'âme, prison du corps.

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