This paper examines the "place of the other" in Michel de Certeau's historiography, highlighting its structural and simultaneously aporetic role within his epistemological framework. Starting with the reflections proposed in Faire de l'histoire (1970) and the critical dialogue with Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida on the so-called querelle de la folie, the presentation focuses on the relationship between historical discourse and alterity. The paper demonstrates how the question of the inaccessible nature of the other's discourse—whether of the mad, the mystic, the sorcerer, or the possessed—constitutes an essential epistemological premise for Certeau, shaping his entire historiographical approach. This trajectory is traced from his critique of Robert Mandrou and popular culture studies to his later works of the 1980s. For Certeau, the "place of the other" goes beyond the socially or culturally excluded, emerging instead as an absent and elusive referent—constitutive yet unattainable—that structures historiographical discourse. This theoretical knot generates a double tension: on the one hand, alterity enables the scientific nature of history; on the other, it exposes history's intrinsic limits, revealing the inevitable violence in appropriating the other's discourse. The paper concludes by showing how this perspective culminates in a vision of history as a "madness that expresses science" (L'écriture de l'histoire, 1975) where the historian's time and "place" are inextricably intertwined with the unreachable dimension of the past.