(2:55 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

The Idea of the University Without Condition

Derrida’s essay on “The University Without Condition” was initially delivered in lecture form at Stanford University in 1999, with an introduction by Richard Rorty. In the context of a course on literary theory, I heard Derrida deliver virtually the same lecture at the University of Chicago in 2000, proving that Slavoj Žižek is not the only person who repeats himself. This lecture, together with the essay “Signature Event Context,” which Anna Street provided to our class as preparation for attending the lecture, has long held a special place in my heart and in my own understanding of Derrida. It is, of course, the inspiration behind the University Without Condition blog, which is still in the process of formation.

Derrida begins the essay by declaring that it will be “like a profession of faith: the profession of faith of a professor who would act as if he were nevertheless asking your permission to be unfaithful or a traitor to his habitual practice.” The essay that follows is in fact uncharacteristically straightforward and prescriptive. It is a profession of “faith in the university and, within the university, faith in the Humanities of tomorrow.” It is remarkably frank in insisting on a central role for deconstruction in the Humanities of tomorrow and in articulating the task of the Humanities in the political terms of mondialization or worldwide-ization, which he takes to be a continuation of the Enlightenment project. The responsibility of the university of tomorrow is to insist on the principle of unconditional resistance, which is (forgive the very long quote)

a right that the university itself should at the same time reflect, invent, and post, whether it does so through its law faculties or in the new Humanities capable of working on these questions of right and of law—in other words, and again why not say it without detour, the Humanities capable of taking on the tasks of deconstruction, beginning with the deconstruction of their own history and their own axioms.

Consequence of this thesis: such an unconditional resistance could oppose the university to a great number of powers, for example, to state powers..., to economic powers..., to the powers of media, ideological, religious and cultural powers, and so forth—in short, to all the powers that limit democracy to come.

The university should thus also be the place in which nothing is beyond question, not even the current and determined figure of democracy, not even the traditional idea of critique, meaning theoretical critique, and not even the authority of the “question” form, of thinking as “questioning.” That is why I spoke without delay and without disguise of deconstruction.

The bulk of the essay is taken up with a complex meditation on the philosophical and theological resonances of the concepts of work (French: travail) and profession, with constant reference to the concrete economic conditions inside and outside of the university. Derrida is not explicitly a political economist, but it is clear that freedom of speech is not merely a matter of juxtaposing words, but carries instead a political-economic charge.

He concludes with seven “thematic and programmatic theses”:

1. The new Humanities would engage in a deconstructive analysis of the key oppositions by which “man” has been defined in the modern age: man/animal, man/woman, etc.
   
2. The new Humanities would study the history of democracy and the idea of sovereignty.
   
3. The new Humanities would study the history of work, intellectual and otherwise, try to find the conditions to dissociate democracy from citizenship and indivisible sovereignty.
   
4. The new Humanities would study the modern concept and institution of literature.
   
5. The new Humanities would study the history of the professoriat and the faith which the professor professes.
   
6. The new Humanities would study the history of the “as if” and of the distinction between constative and performative acts. (Yes, really.)
   
7. Finally, making reference to the seventh day, Derrida says that the new Humanities must be open to the event, the arrivant that “by taking place or having place, revolutionizes, overturns, and puts to rout the very authority that is attached, in the university, in the Humanities,
   
   
   • to knowledge (or at least to its model of constative language),
     
   • to the profession or to the profession of faith (or at least to the performative language),
     
   • to the mise en oeuvre, the putting to work, at least to the performative putting to work of the ‘as if.’”

One thinks in the Humanities the irreducibility of their outside and of their future. One thinks in the Humanities that one cannot and must not let oneself be enclosed within the inside of the Humanities. But for this thinking to be strong and consistent requires the Humanities. To think this is not an academic, theoretical, or theoretical operation. Nor a neutral utopia. No more than saying it is a simple enunciation. It is at this always divisible limit that what arrives arrives. It is this limit that is affected by the arriving and that changes. It is this limit that, because it is divisible, has a history.

Of particular interest to participants in our University Without Condition is his extended comment on the potential of the Internet to propagate the university throughout the rest of society—to keep it from being a closed-off entity unto itself—and of the possibility of university-like activities taking place outside the walls of the traditional university. Certainly he would encourage us to pursue an ever greater rigor and creativity, but hopefully he would not completely disapprove of the efforts taking place under the title he coined:

The university without conditions is not situated necessarily or exclusively within the walls of what is today called the university. It is not necessarily, exclusively, exemplarily represented in the figure of the professor. It takes place, it seems its place wherever this unconditionality can take shape. Everywhere that it, perhaps, gives one (itself) to think.

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