Cogito and the History of Madness The collection contains the essay
Cogito and the History of Madness, a critique of
Michel Foucault. It was first given as a lecture on March 4, 1963, at a conference at the
Collège philosophique, which Foucault attended, and caused a rift between the two, possibly prompting Foucault to write
The Order of Things (1966) and
The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969).
Violence and Metaphysics In "Violence and Metaphysics," Derrida comments on the writings of
Emmanuel Levinas. He honors Levinas for his ethical philosophy of openness to the
Other. Indeed, he goes along with the idea that to live for the Other is the highest good. But he challenges the idea that only
face-to-face interaction can be ethical. Whereas Levinas sees written communication as dead and unresponsive, Derrida argues that writing can be just as valuable a space for ethical encounter. He writes, in characteristic support for writing: "Is it not possible to invert all of Levinas’s statements on this point? By showing, for example, that writing can assist itself, for it has time and freedom, escaping better than speech from empirical urgencies."
The Structuralist Controversy Included in the collection is his 1966 lecture at
Johns Hopkins University, which changed the course of the conference leading it to be renamed
The Structuralist Controversy, and caused Derrida to receive his first major attention outside France. The lecture is titled
Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences. ==References==