Tonight. Below I go over the debate between Foucault and Derrida after a whole semester in which I taught their texts on crime and punishment, but not this particular debate. It’s been a great class. And obviously, anything below is a trying out of certain ideas.

Final Lecture: Differences of Method

This will have been an act of madness: to wait until the last class, in its final hours, to redescribe the relation between Foucault and Derrida in terms of their quite critical debates across 30 years of a limited number of writings. To have read them thus far, side by side, not even concerning the very issues confronting them in those debates (most particularly a few short passages in the opening paragraphs of Descartes Meditations), but instead spending a semester on crime and punishment and the abyssal relation between the two. All then to pass it off to…