Derrida's and Foucault's opposite approaches

There is a stark contrast between Foucault’s and Derrida’s treatment of concepts. In the Preface to Las Meninas Foucault is concerned largely with –topias, be they utopias or heterotopias, which he defines as “operating tables” upon which we can manipulate, examine, and compare concepts in a consistent and valid way. In this sense, Foucault’s perspective is holistic. He is explicitly concerned with the reduction of a certain uneasiness and the achievement of a wide understanding.

On the other hand, in Signature, Event, Context, Derrida tries to demonstrate the essential independence of concepts or utterances and their removal from the people who originate them. I’ve only got a sliver of an idea why he wants to perform this operation of absolute reduction and isolation (and I am sure he has an agenda). But at the end of his piece he summarizes several inversions he has executed: First, that “writing” is “not the means of transference of meaning” but a “historical expansion of a general writing” which includes consciousness among its consequences—in other words, writing is not the product of the author but the other way around. Second, that writing is not the locus of meaning but rather that which is read. Third, that all oppositions of metaphysical concepts constitute a hierarchy which may be disturbed through an operation of identification and inversion called “deconstruction”

While Foucault is searching for truth in modernity, a quest which necessarily involves the disentanglement of contradictory concepts, he maintains an approach grounded in the aesthetic or holistic. Las Meninas is centered on a text designed with aesthetic perception in mind which also happens to constitute a locus of Classical thought. He also explicitly tries to decode “the Same,” an extremely inclusive topic. Derrida, on the other hand, tries to disentangle the same culture with a divisive, quantum approach. Rather than trying to understand culture as a whole Derrida looks for wedges he can strengthen between people and words.

I’ve struggled to understand why he does this when another esteemed philosopher takes a diametrically opposed approach. My conclusions so far are that both are trying to tie everything together. Foucault is willing to deal with the uncertainty of a large field of view. Derrida, uncomfortable with the lapse in “rigor” that approach necessitates, prefers to split and divide all concepts, thus leveling the structures of thought to rubble and building them anew. But he neglects the aesthetic or holistic point of view. Operating strictly on ideas tends to introduce strange inconsistencies with reality, and Derrida’s approach is no exception…