De l’histoire de la folie à la folie de l’histoire. Michel de Certeau, le lieu de l’historien et le lieu de l’autre

This article examines the notion of “place of the other” in Michel de Certeau’s historiography, where it plays both a fundamental and aporetic role. Drawing on Faire de l’histoire (1970) and Certeau’s critical dialogue with the École des Annales, Foucault, and Derrida, it analyzes how the inaccessibility of the other’s discourse – whether that of the madman, the mystic, the sorcerer, or the possessed – forms the epistemological foundation of Certeau’s approach, from his critique of Mandrou to his work in the 1980s. For Certeau, the “place of the other” goes beyond the mere figure of the excluded: it is the absent yet constitutive referent of historical discourse. This position generates a dual tension: it enables a specific form of historical epistemology while simultaneously revealing the discipline’s limits and the inherent violence in appropriating the other’s discourse. History thus appears as a “madness that speaks science” (L’écriture de l’histoire, 1975), in which the historian’s time and place are inextricably intertwined with a past that, though irreducible, must still be narrated.