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Textual Practice
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Thinking the outside:

Foucault, Derrida and
negative theology
Arthur Bradley
Published online: 05 Nov 2010.

To cite this article: Arthur Bradley (2002) Thinking the outside:

Foucault, Derrida and negative theology, Textual Practice, 16:1, 57-74,
DOI: 10.1080/09502360110103694
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Textual Practice 16(1), 2002, 5774

Arthur Bradley

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Thinking the outside: Foucault, Derrida and negative theology

In his essay Maurice Blanchot: the thought from the outside (1966),
Michel Foucault ponders whether Blanchots thought is a new form of
negative theology: [o]ne might assume that it was born of the mystical
thinking that has prowled the con nes of Christianity since the texts of the
Pseudo-Dionysius. 1 Negative theology is a recurring theme in continental thought. Foucault, Derrida, Irigaray and other philosophers have all
written about this relatively obscure Christian tradition at some point
in their careers. The relationship between modern thinkers like Foucault
and Derrida and mystic theologians like Dionysius and Eckhart has also
been the subject of a number of recent, ground-breaking studies. This
theological turn in continental philosophy is perhaps best exempli ed
by the fact that today it is no longer thought ridiculous to talk about the
faith, the religion, and even the prayers and tears of thinkers who were
or are self-confessed atheists. If Foucault and Derridas interest in negative
theology is beyond question, the relationship between their readings of the
mystical tradition has not been explored in much detail before. There are a
number of parallels between Foucault and Derridas work in this area which
shed new light on the theological implications of their thought. They ask
very similar questions about the mystical thinking that has prowled the
con nes of Christianity since the texts of the Pseudo-Dionysius, but come
up with quite different answers. What do they mean by the thought from
the outside? How does it differ from that thought from the inside called
negative theology? And, perhaps most importantly of all, can the distinction
between outside and inside be maintained? In this article, I would like to
compare Foucault and Derridas readings of the via negativa.

Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/0950236011010369 4

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Foucault, Derrida and negative theology

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In the remainder of the passage from The thought from the outside quoted
above, Foucault quickly goes on to dismiss the idea that there is any
relationship between Blanchots thought and mystical theology:
One might assume that it was born of the mystical thinking that has
prowled the con nes of Christianity since the texts of the PseudoDionysius: perhaps it survived for a millennium or so in the various
forms of negative theology. Yet nothing is less certain: although this
experience involves going outside of oneself, this is done ultimately
in order to nd oneself, to wrap and gather oneself in the dazzling
interiority of a thought that is rightfully Being and Speech, in other
words, Discourse, even if it is the silence beyond all language and the
nothingness beyond all being.
(FB, p. 16)
Foucaults critique of mystical thinking is very clear. Negative theology,
he argues, goes outside itself only in order to nd itself. It denies being,
speech and the interiority of the subject so as to better af rm them. The
via negativa is not ultimately negative at all because it is always concerned
with reappropriating its negations into a higher positivity. In other words,
Foucault is criticizing negative theology because it is a dialectical economy.2
This is why despite certain super cial similarities it could not be more
different from Blanchots thought from the outside:
Despite several con uences, we are quite far from the experience
through which some are wont to lose themselves in order to nd
themselves. The characteristic movement of mysticism is to attempt
to join even if it means crossing the night the positivity of an
existence by opening a dif cult line of communication with it. . . .
The experience of the outside has nothing to do with that. The
movement of attraction and the withdrawal of the companion lay bare
what precedes all speech, what underlies all silence: the continuous
streaming of language. A language spoken by no-one: any subject it
may have is no more than a grammatical fold.
(FB, pp. 534)
Foucault develops his de nition of the thought of the outside in contradistinction to his critique of negative theology. Dionysius thought has
survived for two millennia, but Blanchots is still in the process of being
born. Dionysius con rms the silent interiority of a subject, while Blanchots
is the subjectless and objectless anonymity of the continuous streaming of

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language. Dionysius negative theology dialectically converts negativity into

positivity, whereas Blanchots is a negativity without reserve. The two forms
of thought are linguistically, philosophically and historically opposed to
one another. The precise nature of this opposition will be examined below,
but Foucaults basic critique of the negative way is obvious. In Foucaults
terminology, negative theology would be designated a thought from the
inside rather than the outside.3
Compare this with Derridas critique of negative theology. In From
restricted to general economy: a Hegelianism without reserve (1967), his
well-known reading of Bataille, Derrida also goes to great pains to distinguish Batailles atheological thought from negative theology:
Even in its discourse, which already must be distinguished from
sovereign af rmation, this atheology does not, however, proceed along
the lines of negative theology; lines that could not fail to fascinate
Bataille, but which, perhaps, still reserved, beyond all the rejected
predicates, and even beyond being, a superessentiality; beyond
the categories of beings, a supreme being and an indestructible
meaning.4
Derridas analysis of the via negativa is equally uncompromising. Negative
theology is merely a phase of positive ontotheology. It refuses God the
predicates of being only in order to better af rm the pre-eminent nature
of that being. The negative way is merely a closet negativity which negates
positive theology so as to better con rm it. In other words, negative
theology is again a form of dialectic or what in this context Derrida calls
a restricted economy. This is why despite a certain con uence it must
be distinguished from the unreserved negativity of Batailles atheology and
Derridas diffrance:
And yet those aspects of diffrance which are thereby delineated are
not theological, not even in the order of the most negative of negative
theologies, which as one knows are always concerned with disengaging
a superessentiality beyond the nite categories of essence and existence, that is, of presence, and always hastening to recall that God is
refused the predicate of existence, only in order to acknowledge his
superior, inconceivable, and ineffable mode of being.5
In Diffrance (1968), Derrida is more concerned with distinguishing
negative theology from deconstruction. The difference between diffrance
and negative theology is the difference between a restricted and a general
negativity. Pseudo-Dionysius refuses all the categories of existence and
essence because the God whom he addresses is not an essential being but

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a superessential one, whereas Derrida refuses all these categories because

the diffrance he addresses is not even a superessential being: diffrance
is not . Diffrance is not a being of any kind because it precedes being as
the self-differing and deferring condition of its possibility: it includes
ontotheology, inscribing it and exceeding it without return (MP, p. 6).
In Derridas terms, negative theology remains inside the orbit of being,
logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence.6
What, then, is the relationship between Foucault and Derridas
critiques of negative theology? The parallels between their reading are
remarkable. Both see negative theology as a restricted economy. Both
associate it with dialectics and disassociate it from supposedly nondialectical discourses by Bataille, Blanchot, Sollers and so on. Both also seek
to distance it from their own discourses of archaeology and deconstruction
respectively. Foucault sees negative theology as belonging to a particular
theologico-political episteme which, in subsequent texts like The History
of Sexuality (198184), is seen to formulate the subject as individual and
ultimately confessional. Derrida sees negative theology as always attempting to disengage a superessentiality beyond being, and so belonging to
the sphere of ontotheology and the metaphysics of presence. Whereas,
crudely speaking, Foucault chooses to focus on the subject (the mystic)
and Derrida on the object (the mystical God), the larger target of their
critique here clearly remains the same: the dazzling interiority of a thought
that is rightfully Being and Speech (Foucault) and a supreme being and an
indestructible meaning (Derrida).
Yet Foucault and Derridas readings of negative theology remain
fundamentally different. The crucial difference between them may be seen
in their different concepts of the thought from the outside. They have, as
we will see below, very different ideas about the philosophical status of the
outside, the relationship between it and the inside, and how best to characterize that relationship. Their very different answers to these questions make
possible a new and more constructive account of the relationship between
their projects and negative theology. Foucault and Derrida are not negative
theologians, nor is their critique of negative theology in any way invalid,
but the relationship between their work and the via negativa is more
complex than has hitherto been suggested.
Foucaults thought from the outside has already been brought into
view. It stands in linguistic, philosophical and historical opposition to a
dialectical thought from the inside that includes negative theology. There
is, however, an interesting oscillation in Foucaults analysis of the inside
and the outside which has a signi cant bearing upon his relation to the via
negativa. On the one hand, the relationship between the inside and the
outside is usually de ned historically, and the difference between the two
appears at a determinate historical moment. Sollers thought is outside the

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Arthur Bradley Thinking the outside

old categories of spirituality, mysticism. It is newer than dialectics

(RC, p. 74). Blanchots thought is a breakthrough which is now being
heralded at diverse points of culture (FB, p. 15). The thought from the
outside is the contemporary, the new and futural which breaks out of
the inside at a speci c historical moment and renders everything which
precedes that moment almost obsolete. On the other hand, however, the
relationship between the inside and the outside resists such precise historical
determination and the difference between the two can only be maintained
with great dif culty. The new never quite escapes the old. The promised
breakthrough never totally breaks through. Interestingly, Foucault himself
confesses that it is extremely dif cult to nd a language faithful to this
thought which does not risk leading the experience of the outside back to
the dimension of interiority (FB, p. 21), and it is true that his attempt to
distance Blanchot et al. from dialectics is endangered by what still looks
to me, at least, like a very Hegelian model of history as dialectical transgression. Foucault seems to see this danger in empirical terms, as if it were
simply a question of imprecise use of language, but it does seem to encroach
upon his work with a frequency that seems more than accidental. The result
is that Foucault is compelled to maintain a permanent vigilance against an
a-historical thought from the inside that is always threatening to impinge
upon his cherished outside at any moment. This oscillation between the
historical and the a-historical in Foucault is the subject of Derridas famous
critique of Foucaults work on madness.
Derrida advances a different kind of thought from the outside.
Derridas thought calls Foucaults opposition between the outside and the
inside into question by exposing it to an outside so absolute that it can
no longer be called by that name. The Derridaean approach sees the
tensions in Foucaults historicist philosophy less as empirical dif culties to
be admitted and resolved and more as structural necessities. This complex
relationship between the outside and the inside in Foucault and Derrida
has, I believe, potentially important implications for our understanding
of the relationship between their work and negative theology. Foucault
fends off negative theology as a thought from the inside which is linguistically, philosophically and historically opposed to his own thought from the
outside. In the next section, however, I want to show how Derrida argues
that Foucaults thought from the outside is always already inside.7

Madness and negative theology

In his book Folie et draison: Histoire de la folie lge classique (1961),

Foucault famously attempts to write a history of madness itself, or to be
more precise, a history of the exclusion or incarceration of madness by

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reason.8 Foucault usually but not, as we will see, consistently dates

this rational exclusion of madness to the seventeenth century, or what he
calls the classical age. Post-Enlightenment discourse historically de nes
la folie (madness) as draison (unreason); in other words, merely the absence
or opposite of reason. In the conclusion to the book, Foucault describes how
this process reaches its apotheosis with the great con nement of 1657
when the destitute and insane of Paris were incarcerated in the new Hpital
Gnrale. Now neither Foucaults book nor Derridas response to it refer to
negative theology at all, but, as we will see, the debate between them still
signi cantly clari es their different approaches to the via negativa.
Derridas critique of Foucaults book is well known. In Cogito and
the history of madness (1967), Derrida argues that Foucaults attempt to
write a history of reasons exclusion of madness is impossible. He begins
with the relatively basic point that it is impossible to write a history of reason
because reason itself must be presupposed in such a project. He goes on
to note a series of inconsistencies in Foucaults argument that problematize
his historical account of the relationship between reason and madness. If
Foucault wants to write a history of reasons exclusion of madness, Derrida
argues, then he must retrace the relationship between the two to a zero point
where this division rst comes into effect. When exactly was madness rst
excluded by reason?
The interesting oscillation between historical and a-historical analyses
which we noted in the discussion of negative theology recurs in this text
as well. On the one hand, Foucault dates the exclusion of madness quite
speci cally to the classical age, stressing the importance of Descartes
Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) as part of this movement. On the
other hand, Foucault also suggests that the exclusion of madness pre-dates
the classical era by making sceptical references to Socrates (WD, pp. 3940)
and, anyway, as Derrida shows in an analysis of the Cartesian Evil Genius,
Descartes Cogito does not actually possess the historical signi cance
Foucault attributes to it. This contradiction is exacerbated by Foucaults
claim that the historic point at which the exclusion of madness by reason
happens is also the point at which the possibility of history begins (WD,
p. 42). If reasons exclusion of madness makes history possible, however, then
clearly that exclusion cannot be an event that occurs at a speci c moment
in history. To say that the possibility of history begins at a speci c historical
point is to put the historical cart before the horse. In other words, Derridas
problem with Foucault is that he reduces a transcendental condition of
reason in general to a particular historical event.
Derrida goes on to substitute Foucaults historicist account of the
relationship between reason and madness for a quasi-transcendental
one based on the famous logic of originary undecidability which he elsewhere nicknames diffrance or archi-criture. If Foucault tries to trace

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a historical point when the difference between reason and madness rst
arose, Derrida goes back even further to trace a point before the historical
difference between the two comes into being. He locates a point of origin
at which all determined contradictions, in the form of given, factual
historical structures can appear . . . as relative to this zero point at which
determined meaning and non-meaning come together in their common
origin (WD, p. 56). The account of a non-historical common origin of
reason and madness advanced by Derrida inevitably comes into con ict
with Foucaults stress on their historic oppositionality and begins to call that
oppositionality into question. This zero point is neither rational nor mad,
a historical event nor a transcendental condition of history, but a quasitranscendental 9 undecidability that undermines all the philosophical
oppositions which animate Foucaults discourse. In Derridas account,
reason and madness are already inside each other.
Derridas account of originary undecidability enables us to see
Foucaults strange oscillation between historical and a-historical analyses
in his accounts of madness, negative theology and so on in a different
light. The discussion of the supposedly non-dialectical thought of Blanchot
takes place, as we saw above, within a Hegelian framework of dialectical
transgression and novelty. The history of reason does not recognize its
own complicity in the rationality it seeks to historicize, and ends up only
perpetuating its violence. The attempts to historicize the violence of the old
transcendental categories end up only reproducing that violence in different
forms: this reduction to intraworldliness is the origin and very meaning
of what is called violence, making possible all straitjackets (WD, p. 57).
In other words, Foucaults entirely commendable attempts to negotiate
a thought from the outside constantly fall back into a thought from the
inside. This constant slippage from the inside to the outside and back again
is not necessarily due to any empirical error by Foucault, but pace Derrida
is rather a sign that the outside and the inside are in a structural relation
of undecidability.
What, though, are the theological implications of Derridas critique?
The impact of the Foucault/Derrida debate upon the then current
(post-)structuralist controversy has been discussed ad nauseum, but the
theological dimensions of their argument have not yet been properly
addressed.10 This debate does not, of course, address negative theology
at all but, as Derrida points out, Foucaults scepticism about psychiatry
forces him to rely on popular de nitions of madness that overlap with
everything that can be put under the rubric of negativity, including,
logically, the via negativa (WD, p. 41). Their fundamentally different
positions on the question of negativity even take them, as we will see below,
to the point where each accuses the other of adopting positions they had
originally criticized as negative theological. Foucault and Derrida both

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go to great lengths to deny any thematic or doctrinal connection between

archaeology, deconstruction and negative theology, but my contention is
that their debate brings into view a structural relation between their projects
and the negative way.
Derridas critique of Foucaults account of negativity helps to unravel
these questions. In an important footnote to Cogito and the history of
madness, for example, he places the debate on madness into the context
of negativity more generally:
And if there is no history, except of rationality and meaning in general,
this means that philosophical language, as soon as it speaks, reappropriates negativity or forgets it, which is the same thing even when
it allegedly af rms or recognises negativity. More surely then, perhaps.
The history of truth is therefore the history of this economy of the
negative.
(WD, p. 308n)
If there is no history outside reason, Foucaults attempts to write the
history of reasons exclusion of madness inevitably recruits madness into the
service of reason. He de nes madness as simply the reassuring negative of
reason that can be dialectically converted into a positivity. The history
of madness is what Derrida pace Bataille calls a restricted economy.11
This is not a problem that arises in Derridas case because, unlike Foucault,
he never proposes an opposition between positivity and negativity. Derrida
locates an undecidability at the heart of that opposition which calls for a
rethinking of its oppositionality: [i]n question then would be a negativity
so negative that it could not even be called such any longer (WD, p. 308n).
But Foucaults tendency to dialecticize negativity does suggest that there
is a closer link than we might otherwise think between his work and that
branch of dialectics he calls negative theology. Foucault himself argued,
remember, that the characteristic movement of mysticism is an attempt to
join even if it means crossing the night the positivity of an existence.
This brings us to the inevitable question: What is the difference between
negative theologys approach to existence and Foucaults approach to
madness? Both negate in order to af rm and lose themselves in order to
nd themselves. Both cross the night to join the positivity of existence. Both
are restricted economies. None of this means that Foucault is some sort
of mystic manqu, of course, or that his mode of historical archaeology
is really negative theology. Archaeology and negative theology remain
philosophically and historically opposed, but post-Derrida it is possible
to wonder whether this opposition conceals a structural undecidability.
In other words, Derrida shows that Foucaults discourse contains all the
things that Foucault himself criticizes as negative theological.

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Foucault responded to Derridas criticism in a famous essay appended

to a new edition of the Histoire. In My body, this paper, this re (1972),
he can be seen to turn the tables on Derrida and accuse him of being the
closet transcendentalist: I will not say that it is a metaphysics, metaphysics
itself or its closure which is hiding in this textualisation of discursive
practices, he somewhat rhetorically writes of deconstruction.12 Derrida has
never responded directly to this attack but it is possible to construct the
basis of a response from a reading of subsequent texts.13 It certainly seems
clear that Foucault misreads Derridas critique on a number of counts. The
central accusation is based on a misreading of Derridas claim that there is
nothing outside the text (OG, pp. 1578) as advocating a position of
a-historical idealism. Foucaults still common misinterpretation ies in the
face of Derridas numerous attempts to distinguish what he calls the general
text from language, the quasi-transcendental from the transcendental and
so on. Derrida is precisely not criticizing Foucaults intraworldliness from
some transcendental vantage point I am not invoking an other world,
an alibi or an evasive transcendence (WD, p. 57) but, as we have seen,
from a point of quasi-transcendental undecidability between the historical
and the transcendental. Now this structural undecidability does in fact make
possible a relation between deconstruction and negative theology, as we will
see, but that relation is very different from the out-and-out idealism
Foucault accuses Derrida of practising here. This is not to assert, again, that
deconstruction is negative theology but to note a structural af nity between
the two discourses. Foucault cannot make the charge of transcendentalism
stick but this does not mean that there is no relationship between Derrida
and negative theology.
In summary, then, it is clear that Foucault and Derridas different
thoughts from the outside can be read theologically. Foucault sees the difference between the inside and the outside in historicist terms as the product
of a determinate empirical event within history. Derrida sees the difference
between the inside and the outside as the product of a quasi-transcendental
undecidability that exceeds the distinction between the historical and
the transcendental. The historical opposition that Foucault sets up between
the inside and the outside is called into question by Derridas quasitranscendental undecidability. This rival version of the outside is not just
the reassuring other side of the inside but an absolute outside that could
not even be called such any longer. Now, as I have suggested, Derridas
critique of Foucault also has important implications for their respective
attempts to distance their own projects from the thought of the inside called
negative theology. If the relationship between the outside and the inside is
in question, then this will clearly impact upon any attempt to distinguish
between negative theology, archaeology and deconstruction along such
lines. Foucaults attempts to distinguish archaeology from negative theology

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in texts like The Archaeology of Knowledge become increasingly dif cult to

maintain. Derridas claim that diffrance or deconstruction is not a mode
of negative theology is subject to certain quali cations in his more recent
texts on the subject. Yet there is one last de ning difference between the two
thinkers on this question. Foucault is, in my view, unable or unwilling
to fully recognize his own dependence on the transcendental and so it
remains an unthought element in his text. Derrida, by contrast, can explicitly thematize this dependence under such concepts as the transcendental
contraband in Glas (1974):
[E]ach time a discourse contra the transcendental is held, a matrix
the (con)striction itself constrains the discourse to place the nontranscendental, the outside of the transcendental eld, the excluded,
in the structuring position.
(G, p. 44a)
Transcendental contraband signi es a common metaphysical situation
whereby discourses that seek to exclude the transcendental end up smuggling it back in again under some non-transcendental name or guise.
Marxism, for instance, seeks to reduce the transcendental impetus of
religion to a set of material conditions, but in so doing elevates materialism
itself to the status of an unimpeachable transcendental law. Perhaps discourses which seek to disassociate themselves from negative theology can
also be seen to readmit it by the back door as transcendental contraband.
In the next section, then, I want to consider the ways in which Foucault and
Derridas thoughts from the outside are still inside the negative way.

Archaeology, deconstruction and negative theology

In The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), Foucault provides his most painstaking attempt to formulate the archaeological project begun in Folie et
draison.14 Interestingly, the rst phase of de ning this project is a negative
one. The kind of neither . . . nor formulations favoured by Dionysius
abound. Discourse, Foucault insists, is neither history nor anthropology
(AK, pp. 2130), a word nor a thing (AK, pp. 409), the property of a
transcendental nor an empirical subject (AK, pp. 505) and so on. Similar
negations occur in the discussions of the nonc, the historical a priori, the
archive and archaeology itself. This approach has led many critics most
notably Maurice Blanchot to draw stylistic or methodological comparisons between archaeology and negative theology, but at a crucial point in
the text these parallels tend to fall away.15 If archaeology is negative, this
negativity is intended to clear the space for the analysis of discourse rather

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than the praise of God. In a famous passage, Foucault de nes archaeology

as the analysis of subjects and objects as effects of the eld of discourse:

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To substitute for the enigmatic treasure of things anterior to

discourse, the regular formation of objects that emerge only in
discourse. To de ne these objects without reference to the ground, the
foundation of things, but by relating them to the body of rules that
enable them to form as objects of a discourse and thus constitute the
conditions of their historical appearance.
(AK, pp. 478)
Foucault again seems to be de ning his project in contradistinction to
negative theology. James Bernauer, Jeremy R. Carrette and other critics
support Foucaults own analysis that, despite certain similarities, archaeology and mysticism are so diametrically opposed as to offer in each form
a negation of the other! (FR, p. 94). The difference again seems to be that
negative theology is a dialectical negativity which seeks to reappropriate its
negations into some higher transcendental positivity, while archaeology is
an unreserved negativity which calls the very existence of that transcendental into question. Negative theology negates in order to af rm the
authority of the transcendental over discourse, whereas archaeology negates
in order to af rm the authority of discourse over the transcendental. In
Foucaults admirably clear terms, negative theology seeks to renounce
words, whereas what we wish to do is to dispense with things (AK, p. 47).
Yet there is still, I would argue, a structural undecidability between
historical archaeology and negative theology which exceeds questions of
style or methodology. Take, for example, Foucaults well-known account
of the historical a priori. Foucault again tries to distinguish this term
from any implication of transcendentalism and particularly Kantian
transcendentalism but the historical a priori is, in my view, the logical
culmination of that contradictory oscillation between the historical and
the transcendental which we have already observed in his texts. On the
one hand, the historical a priori is a matter of freeing the conditions of
emergence of statements, the law of their coexistence with others and the
principles according to which they survive. On the other hand, it is a matter
of recognizing that the dispersion of statements is neither uni able nor
deductible but belongs to a speci c history that does not refer it back to
the laws of an alien development (AK, p. 127). Foucault seems to oscillate
between saying that every discourse is the product of a speci c history that
pertains only to itself and saying that every discourse is the product of a
body of apparently a-historical rules that make possible its relation to other
discourses. The objection to this strategy will hopefully be familiar by now.
Either the historical a priori is historical, in which case it cannot be a priori,

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or it is a priori in which case it cannot be historical. Foucault wants to have

his transcendental cake and eat it. This is, crudely speaking, the criticism
Derrida levels at the Histoire de la folie but it cannot be applied to the
Archaeology before taking into account Foucaults own response to the
objection that his work depends on transcendental contraband. In the latter
text, Foucault tackles the transcendental reading of the historical a priori
head-on:
Moreover, this a priori does not elude historicity: it does not
constitute, above events, and in an unmoving heaven, an atemporal
structure; it is de ned as the group of rules that characterise a
discursive practice: but these rules are not imposed from the outside
on the elements that they relate together; they are caught up in the
very things that they connect; and if they are not modi ed with the
least of them, they modify them, and are transformed with them into
certain decisive thresholds.
(AK, p. 127)
What is Foucaults response to the charge that his work relies on an illicit
transcendentalism? Foucault argues that the a priori rules that govern
the history of discourse are not actually a-historical at all. They do not
constitute an a-temporal structure above events but rather are subject to the
same historical shifts they organize and relate. There are already signs of the
famous turn from archaeology to genealogy that so de nes Foucaults later
work here. This argument seems, in other words, to mark the point where
Foucault nally stops tacking between the historical and the transcendental
and comes down squarely on the historical side of the equation. In the
Archaeology, then, Foucault tries to historicize the remaining transcendental
implications of his own project.
This is clearly a decisive move by Foucault but the suspicion remains
that his historicism is not historical all the way down. The problem is
that the attempt to archaeologize history remains beholden to the
same transcendental assumptions that guide the archaeologies of madness,
illness and so on. Foucault may be willing to historicize the rules of the
historical a priori, but there is still something in his account which eludes
historicization and this is what in the above passage he calls historicity
itself. The historical a priori remains part of the historical processes it tries
to account for because even it does not elude historicity, Foucault writes.
This is again to raise the inevitable question. What is the historical status
of historicity? How has it managed to acquire this privileged position?
Why is it not subject to the same historical analysis as the historical a priori?
The dif culty, then, is that Foucaults attempt to historicize any lingering
transcendentalism in his archaeological project is still carried out under the

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auspices of a concept historicity that is not apparently historical. This

concept ensures that Foucaults project is subject to the historical forces it
tries to thematize but, crucially, historicity itself can never be subject to those
forces without setting in motion an in nite regress which calls into question
the entirety of Foucaults analysis. Historicity historicizes everything except
itself. The historical a priori may be a Kantian unmoving heaven after all.
This inability to historicize his own appeal to history vindicates Derridas
transcendental contraband argument that any discourse against the transcendental ends up elevating some nominally non-transcendental concept
into a transcendental position. Foucaults most rigorous critique of the
transcendental implications of archaeology is still carried out in the name
of a totally transcendental concept.16
The damaging consequences of criticisms like these for Foucaults
structuralism are once again well-documented, but the theological impact
of this problematic is less clear. Foucaults reliance on transcendental contraband necessitates a complete rethinking of the relationship between
archaeology and theology but what I want to focus on here is still the
relatively speci c question of negative theology. There is a certain irony in
Foucault criticizing negative theology for losing itself only in order to nd
itself when his own attempt to lose myself (AK, p. 17) ends up with our
nding him in a position of similar metaphysical privilege. Foucaults
attempt to distinguish his own project from negative theology thus becomes
more dif cult to uphold and a new account of the relationship between
them is called for.
What, then, is the relationship between archaeology and negative
theology? Both negate the transcendental. Both, in very different senses,
could even be described as discourses contra the transcendental. Archaeology
is against the transcendental because it thinks there is no transcendental.
Negative theology is anti-transcendental but only insofar as the transcendental it addresses absolutely exceeds its ability to describe it. Both, more
importantly, remain beholden to the transcendental even in the act of
negating it. Archaeology negates the transcendental but reaffirms it as
transcendental contraband. Negative theology negates the transcendental
only in order to reaf rm it as the genuine transcendental article and not just
idolatry. And both, ultimately, are discourses of the transcendental which,
again for very different reasons, cannot think the transcendental that grounds
them. Archaeology cannot think its grounding transcendental because
it does not believe in it. Negative theology cannot think its transcendental
because it believes it transcends thought. In summary, the opposition
between historical archaeology and negative theology conceals a structural
or economic undecidability.
Foucault is not a mystic. He opposes negative theology at every turn.
Neither the sincerity nor the philosophical integrity of this opposition is in

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doubt. The question is whether it is possible to have a philosophical

discourse that positions itself absolutely outside the transcendental. Derrida
casts doubt on this possibility. He argues that the distinction between the
historical and the transcendental cannot be upheld. The reason Derrida
gives for this is that every discourse which tries to knock down the transcendental always throws up another transcendental concept in its place
without realizing it. Foucaults historicization of the transcendental cannot
historicize its own appeal to historicity without licensing an in nite regress
and so surreptitiously sets history up as a transcendental contraband. Nor,
I would argue, is this reliance on the transcendental restricted to the archaeological phase of Foucaults career: the transcendentalizing of supposedly
non-transcendental concepts like history, the body and so on is a distinctive
feature of the genealogies as well. Foucaults dependence on a transcendental
contraband is obviously not enough in itself to justify the comparisons
between archaeology and negative theology. Not every transcendental has
to be theological nor every theology transcendental. But the persistent
identi cation of the transcendental with negative theology by Foucault
himself is enough to suggest at the very least an ironic point of comparison
here. If negative theology is one of the transcendentals that Foucault
most frequently outlaws from his texts, then there is a certain aptness
in identifying it as the concept that puts the transcendental backbone into
supposedly historical projects like archaeology. The identi cation of
negative theology as the transcendental contraband that makes Foucaults
archaeology work is con rmed by the similarities between the two that we
have noted throughout this article. This is emphatically not to argue that
Foucault was really a negative theologian but rather that his negation of the
transcendental in favour of the historical leads to an unwitting reaf rmation
of the transcendental by the back door in a structure akin to negative
theology. Archaeology is structured like a negative theology.
Compare this scenario with Derridas recent texts on the via negativa.
In Sauf le nom: Postscriptum (1992), Derrida still insists that deconstruction is not negative theology, but, in contrast to Foucault, he is happy to
admit that there is a relationship between the two discourses:
I trust no text that is not in some way contaminated with negative
theology and even among those texts that apparently do not have,
want or believe they have any relation with theology in general.
Negative theology is everywhere, but it is never by itself.17
If Foucault and Derridas readings of negative theology had once seemed
identical, it now appears that they could not be further apart. Kevin Hart,
John D. Caputo and other Derrida critics have also located a structural
connection between the speci c role of negative theology as a discourse on

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the otherness of God and the general role of deconstruction as a discourse

on the other as absolutely other: deconstruction is a generalised form
of, and a repetition of, what is going on in religion.18 The obvious contrast
between Foucault and Derrida can, I think, partly be explained by their
different takes on the relationship between the historical and the transcendental. Derrida is able to admit his indebtedness to negative theology in
a way that Foucault cannot because, unlike Foucault, Derrida recognizes
the impossibility of writing a discourse that does not negotiate the transcendental. This is not to argue that Derrida is a negative theologian
either, or even a covert transcendental idealist, as Foucault claims, but rather
that there is an explicit structural undecidability between deconstruction
and negative theology just as there is an implicit one between archaeology
and the negative way. Negative theology is transcendental contraband in
Foucault but declared goods in Derrida. Deconstruction is also structured
like a negative theology (GP, p. 4).
Conclusion

Foucault and Derridas respective attempts to think a space outside negative

theology have to be rethought. Foucaults historicizations of the transcendental in general and negative theology in particular end up elevating the
historical to a position of transcendental privilege. This leaves his texts in
the impossible position of absolutely excluding the transcendental as a point
of principle and at the same time including it as an organizing principle.
They are contaminated by something that they of cially do not believe in
and thus cannot imagine. Derridas deconstruction of negative theology,
in contrast, is accomplished from a position which is neither historical
nor transcendental but which recognizes a structural undecidability
between the two. This means that the impossibility of absolutely excluding
the transcendental (or, for that matter, of absolutely including it, of being
absolutely transcendental)19 becomes a persistent theme in Derridas texts
on negative theology. They are contaminated by something they do not
necessarily believe in either but the difference is that deconstruction is
nothing less than the impossible attempt to think through the relationship
to the other that this contamination implies. In both Foucault and Derridas
texts, then, the historical, archaeological and atheistic slips undecidably into
the transcendental, theological and theistic. The thought from the outside
becomes impossible to tell apart from the thought from the inside.
Chester College of Higher Education

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Notes
1 Michel Foucault, Maurice Blanchot: the thought from the outside, in
Foucault/Blanchot (trans.) Jeffrey Mehlman and Brian Massumi (New York:
Zone Books, 1987), pp. 760, p. 16, hereafter abbreviated in the text as (FB ).
2 In a 1964 debate with Philippe Sollers and the Tel Quel group, Foucault
defends Sollers against the charge of mysticism precisely because that term
implies a dialectical element which is absent from Sollers work: That is why
the categories of spirituality, mysticism etc., do not appear to hold up. There is
an ongoing effort, fraught with dif culty (even, and especially, in philosophy),
to determine what thought is without applying the old categories, by
attempting to bypass this dialectic of mind once de ned by Hegel. Using
dialectical thought to conceive of something that is newer than dialectics seems
to me to be a completely inadequate analytical approach for what you [Sollers]
are doing. Michel Foucault, The debate on the novel (1964), in Jeremy
R. Carrette (ed.) Religion and Culture by Michel Foucault (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 724, p. 74, hereafter abbreviated in
the text as (RC ).
3 See James W. Bernauer, Michel Foucaults Force of Flight: Towards an Ethics for
Thought (London: Humanities, 1990), hereafter abbreviated in the text as
(MF ); Jeremy R. Carrette, Foucault and Religion: Spiritual Corporality and
Political Spirituality (London: Routledge, 2000), hereafter abbreviated in the
text as (FR ), for fuller discussion of Foucaults reading of negative theology.
I remain indebted to Bernauer and Carrettes work despite the differences of
emphasis and interpretation set out below.
4 Jacques Derrida, From restricted to general economy: a Hegelianism without
reserve, in Writing and Difference (trans.) Alan Bass (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 271, hereafter abbreviated in the text as (WD).
5 Jacques Derrida, Diffrance , in Margins of Philosophy (trans.) Alan Bass
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 129, p. 6, hereafter
abbreviated in the text as (MP ). Translation modi ed slightly.
6 See Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology and Philosophy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); John D. Caputo, The Prayers
and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1997) for fuller discussion of Derridas reading of negative
theology. Caputos book is the most complete survey of Derridas readings of
religion.
7 Jacques Derrida, The outside is the inside, in Of Grammatology (trans.)
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1976), pp. 4465 and passim, hereafter abbreviated in the
text as (OG ).
8 Michel Foucault, Folie et draison: Histoire de la folie lge classique (Paris:
Plon, 1961). The Histoire was republished in a much abridged form in 1964
and this abridged version was translated by Richard Howard as Madness and
Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Random
House, 1965). Foucault reprinted the original version of the book in 1972 and
added the essay Mon corps, ce papier, ce feu as an appendix.
9 See Jacques Derrida, Glas (trans.) John P. Leavey, Jr. and Richard Rand
(Lincoln and London: Nebraska University Press, 1986), pp. 15162a,
hereafter abbreviated in the text as (G ), for a fuller account of the quasitranscendental in deconstruction.

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10 See Peter Flaherty, (Con)textual contest: Derrida and Foucault on madness

and the Cartesian subject, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 16 (1986), pp.
15775; Bernard Flynn, Foucault and Derrida: madness and writing, in
Hugh J. Silverman (ed.) Continental Philosophy 2: Derrida and Deconstruction
(New York and London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 20118, and Roy Boyne,
Foucault and Derrida: The Other Side of Reason (London: Unwin Hyman,
1990) for readings of the Foucault/Derrida debate.
11 In the Introduction to his edited collection on Hegel, Stuart Barnett argues
that Foucaults entire historical project is an unwitting reproduction of
Kojves reading of Hegels master/slave dialectic: all of Foucaults work can
be read as a history of the consciousness of the slave. He presents narratives of
historical moments in which consciousness was a means of enforcing and
maintaining subjection. Despite his own warning [that to be anti-Hegelian is
to be totally Hegelian], then, Foucault would seem to be travelling down a
road mapped out by Hegel (and paved by Kojve). Introduction: Hegel before
Derrida, in Hegel After Derrida (London and New York: Routledge, 1998),
pp. 138, p. 23.
12 Michel Foucault, My body, this paper, this re (trans.) Geoff Bennington,
Oxford Literary Review, 4: 1 (1979), pp. 528, p. 28.
13 In his 1991 essay on Foucault To do justice to Freud: the history of madness
in the age of psychoanalysis, Derrida explicitly states that it is not his desire to
continue their debate, but none the less reasserts his original argument that the
exclusion of madness cannot be a determined historical event because the
threat posed by the Evil Genius is perpetual. Jacques Derrida, To do justice
to Freud: the history of madness in the age of psychoanalysis (trans.) Michael
B. Naas, in Resistances of Psychoanalysis (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1998), pp. 70128.
14 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (trans.) A.M. Sheridan Smith
(London: Routledge, 1972), hereafter abbreviated in the text as (AK ).
15 In his essay, Michel Foucault as I imagine him (1986), Maurice Blanchot
advises readers of Foucault to re-read The Archaeology of Knowledge . . . and
you will be surprised to discover in it many a formula from negative theology
(FB, p. 74). James Bernauer SJ draws a parallel between archaeologys
negations of the concept of Man and negative theologys negations of concepts
of God, but he is at pains to stress that the two discourses do not share a
structural identity (MF, p. 178). Foucault himself agreed that his work could
be compared to negative theology insofar as it applied to the human rather
than the divine sciences in a private meeting with Bernauer in 1980. Carrette
sees a number of stylistic and methodological similarities between archaeology
and negative theology but also tries to correct what he calls the misleading
assumption that there is a mystical discourse within Foucault work (FR,
p. 85).
16 In his essay Demanding history, Geoffrey Bennington employs a related
argument against the Marxist critic Fredric Jamesons famous injunction to
Always historicize!: You cant historicize the prescription which demands
that you always historicize. This limitation seems to be a necessary quali cation of any apparently radical historicizing position, if in nite regress is to be
avoided. Geoffrey Bennington, Demanding history, in Legislations: The
Politics of Deconstruction (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 6174, p. 66.
17 Jacques Derrida, Sauf le nom: Postscriptum (trans.) John P. Leavey, Jr., in On
the Name (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 3589, p. 69.

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18 John D. Caputo, Apostles of the impossible: on God and the gift in Derrida
and Marion, in John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (eds.) God, the Gift
and Post-Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), pp.
185223, p. 197, hereafter abbreviated in the text as (GP ).
19 In all his work on negative theology Derrida stresses that this apparently
recondite, ethereal theological mode also has an institutional, political
dimension. See my Without politics: deconstruction and the politics of
negative theology, Heythrop Journal, 42: 2 (2001), pp. 13347.

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