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PARTISAN REVIEW
rather with how concepts of truth have operated in social practice.
That is, Foucault is concerned not with the philosophical problem of
truth but with the institutionalization of truth, with the way concepts
of truth are
used
or
misused
in particular social contexts.
Elsewhere, however, Foucault seemingly attacks not the misuse
of truth but the concept of truth itself. In a sympathetic essay on
Nietzsche ("Nietzsche, Geneaology, History"), Foucault suggests
that truth may be no more than "an error we call truth"; for histori–
cal analysis allegedly "reveals that all knowledge rests upon injustice
(that there is no right, not
In
even the act of knowing, to truth or a
foundation for truth) and that the instinct for knowledge is malicious
(something murderous, opposed to the happiness of man–
kind) .... "
If
truth is a "murderous" error, there follows a difficult
problem: From what standpoint can this error be recognized
as
an
error? Isn't Foucault ' s detection of the error compromised along
with the error itself?
This very question was posed to Foucault by Derrida in an
essay in
Writing and Difference.
Derrida there noted that Foucault, in
Madness and Civilization,
seeks to write about the mad without impos–
ing on them the exclusionary concepts of Western reason. Yet
Foucault doesn't succeed in his project, Derrida thinks. He fails to
escape what Derrida calls" the trap of objectivist naivete," by which
I take Derrida to mean the implicit claim of objectivity to which our
speech acts commit us. To be sure, Derrida himself calls this claim a
form of "compli city," of "historical guilt," of "crime," and he
labels it "naive." Yet if the complicity, guilt, crime, and naivete are
unavoidable, as Derrida implies, then calling t-hem by these deroga–
tory names seems little more than a useless gesture of self-recrimina–
tion. Evidently, for Derrida the only way one could establish one's
innocence would be to make no claims whatsoever. Recognizing ,
however, that intelligibility requires making claims, Derrida settles
for the next best thing, which is to confess while making them that
one's claims are complicitous.
If
the business of making sense impli–
cates Derrida in claiming to be right about something, he can at
least deflect some of the shame of this commitment by acknowledg–
ing that his standard of what counts as right is coercive, or at the
least illusory. But from what standpoint can anyone so pronounce on
the standards of sense making?
*
• This question has been incisively posed by Frederic Jameson in his recent book,
The Political Unconscious.
Jameson , whose Marxism disposes him to rescue the con-
