[2] Foucault responded directly to Derrida in an appendix added to the 1972 edition of the History of Madness titled "My body, this paper, this fire."
The exchange between Derrida and Foucault was sometimes acrimonious, and Khalfa has claimed that "the two writers stopped communicating for ten years.
"[3] Commentators on the exchange include Shoshana Felman, Gayatri Spivak, Geoffrey Bennington, Slavoj Žižek,[4] Edward Saïd, Rémi Brague, Manfred Frank, and Christopher Norris.
"[7] Derrida states that his point of departure for "Cogito and the History of Madness" is Foucault's 1961 book Folie et déraison.
The abridged 1964 edition removed the pages concerning Descartes on which Derrida had explicitly based his argument in "Cogito and the History of Madness."
Derrida makes an allusion to the master–slave dialectic in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in the opening pages of "Cogito and the History of Madness."
But even the latter are attacked, with the use of the further objection that, in addition to sensible perceptions, also certainties and rational reasons are nothing more than a deception on the part of an evil demon.
Derrida argues that Descartes includes the possibility of his own madness when he hypothesises that an evil demon could corrupt even the most assured and reasonable judgements he can make, such as those of basic arithmetic.