One of Foucault's earliest works focused on the history of mental illness in modernity (Madness and Civilization, 1961; translated 1965). He argued, in language reminiscent of Derrida's critique of logocentrism, that “the language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of reason about madness, has been established only on the basis of … a silence. I have not tried to write the history of that language but rather the archaeology of that silence.”17 The lack of a common language between Reason and Madness had created an inarticulate, but always already present, silence (the silence of the repressed patients in asylums). The task of the historian then was to realize and articulate the terms of this silence and the discursive formation that instituted it. Knowledge itself was a particular kind of discourse situated within structures of power and desire. The essential relationship between power and knowledge became a fundamental principle for Foucault and indeed for many historians.