On the uses of discourse and ideas of "theory" in Derrida and Foucault

Derrida turned dialectical aporias into endless and irresolvable ambiguities. If he "never escaped Hegel," that is why. The reader has the sense that his philosophical voice never frees itself of anything that is figured semantically. Nietzsche does not seem to have that problem, and Foucault does not because he reads the discourses and rhetoric of texts as providing insight into social and historical processes, even if the latter are also in some important sense constituted by them, and what for him is effective in and through these texts and discourses is something more than what is intrinsic in their own rhetoric and logic, whereas for Derrida that seems not to be the case. Derrida worries about a discourse itself and what it intrinsically implies, means, and makes possible, while Foucault worries about its uses. This makes Foucault something of a "sociologist," while Derrida cannot be called that. Derrida is content to find the problems and possibilities in what someone is saying, while Foucault is interested in what the things people say are being used to do. This has various practical consequences, including the fact that Derrideans often make use of to quoque arguments ("you yourself say that...") while Foucaultians do not. The to quoque argument, or that of performative contradiction, is conservative; it says: this is how it is, and your very denial or doubt confirms that as it only can; it is similar to saying that he who accuses another is a hypocrite, or all statements about intentional objects project an introjected content. This is why Foucault is often referenced by social scientists and historians, and has inspired many working in these fields, while Derrida's influence outside philosophy was largely on literary criticism, especially in America. Another interesting about Derrida is that his style of writing philosophy is similar to a method that is often used in French philosophy written exams, which is to very closely analyze the words used in the prompt, question, or text under discussion. Anyone familiar with the kind of written exams that are central to the French educational system, and utterly foreign to the British and American ones, will recognize in Derrida's writing a taking of this method or style to an extreme. Foucault's style by contrast is conceptually very rich, with sentence after sentence mixing historical facts with a precise description of their apparent meaning in a kind of one-sentence theoretical modeling, but without then carefully unfolding the possible variant meanings that can be developed from these semantemes. Derrida often seems to do this tirelessly, as if he must continue writing until they have all been spelled out and tried out, considered in every variant and implication that the imagination might suggest. And in fact, we can now see that you could do much of this with AI, while Foucault's writing is highly dependent on not textual analysis or such a philosophical poetics but on data obtained from archival research, looking not at the writer's own text and its elements but at the documents being studied, in order to find out how a way of using language and thinking is developed over time and in some set of related places through the uses and possibilities revealed in those documents and what they seem to tell us about what the people using them were doing. Foucault is a certain kind of social historian, Derrida gives us a certain kind of poetics. It is a rigorous in a way that is self-representingly immanent. Derrida's writing style is a useful guide to one method among others that is valuable in writing in an analytically critical way about a topic that is essentially verbal and conceptual. He does give us a certain philosophical style. It is a way of articulating and analyzing concepts, if not of their invention. If, as is true of many great philosophers, a philosophy partly is the unique style of writing and thinking that is involved in its presentation, then Derrida is, like Plato, Descartes, Wittgenstein, and Hegel perhaps, the author of an important philosophy because it invents not a set of concepts but a way of using words. Doubtless none of these can exactly be proven, as a scientific model can be.