System and Breaks

One of the most radical philosophers of the twentieth century reflects on Foucault and Derrida.

In this lecture course, Reiner Schürmann aims for a confrontation between Michel Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge and Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of truth. He argues that archaeology and deconstruction are versions of transcendental philosophy separated from human subjectivity: discourse and arche-writing are made possible under the hypothesis of an epochal closure in metaphysics. Such a closure enables Foucault and Derrida to move beyond the causal explanation of epistemology and the sympathetic understanding of hermeneutics. Although archaeology and deconstruction are said to be “post-structuralist,” both make use of “systems” and “breaks,” transforming philosophy into a text, an epochal fabric which undergoes folds, mutations, reversals. Archaeology shows these continuities and discontinuities from within the text of philosophy, while deconstruction attacks that text from the margins, going one step further. To both strategies, Schürmann raises the question of identity and difference: if these ruptures are utterly contingent breaks without any continuity, one cannot think of them as breaks; if they are modulations of a continuous process, we are back to the architectonic of Hegel. Between the Scylla of the noumenal in-itself and the Charybdis of the phenomenal manifold, Schürmann’s middle road is the categorial: the traits which hold together the systems and breaks, making the successive epistemic fields comparable.