Article Title：Thinking the outside: Foucault, Derrida and negative theology
Abstract：
In this article, I compare Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida's readings of negative theology. I begin by noting a number of parallels between Foucault and Derrida's critiques of the via negative in their early work. The two thinkers both criticize negative theology as a thought from the inside that can be opposed to their own respective thoughts from the outside. But the article goes on to show that Foucault and Derrida's understanding of negative theology remains fundamentally different by examining their famous debate on Descartes. They have, I argue, totally opposing ideas about the relationship between the thought from the outside and the thought from the inside. Whereas Foucault offers a historicist account in which the difference between the two develops at a particular historical point, Derrida prefers a quasi-transcendental reading in which the outside is already inside. This fundamental difference enables the article to develop a more constructive account of the relationship between archaeology, deconstruction and negative theology. Foucault and Derrida may not be negative theologians but there is a structural, as opposed to a thematic or doctrinal, relationship between their work and the vis negativa. In conclusion, the article argues that in both cases the thought from the outside has a tendency to turn into the thought from the inside, and that this situation has implications for our understanding of the relationship between Foucault, Derrida and negative theology.
Keywords: Foucault; Derrida; archaeology; deconstruction; negative theology
DOI: 10.1080/09502360110103694
Source：TEXTUAL PRACTICE
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