‘Who Announces the Nonrecourse?’: The fort/da in ‘To do Justice to Freud’ and in the Derrida/Foucault debate

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.