Derrida and the Future of the Liberal Arts

Professions of Faith

Mary Caputi, Vincent J. Del Casino, Jr., Mary Caputi, Vincent J. Del Casino, Jr.

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781472589286
• eBook ISBN:
  9781441157621
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Dekonstruktion in der Philosophie

Derrida and the Future of the Liberal Arts highlights the Derridean assertion that the university must exist 'without condition' - as a bastion of intellectual freedom and oppositional activity whose job it is to question mainstream society. Derrida argued that only if the life of the mind is kept free from excessive corporate influence and political control can we be certain that the basic tenets of democracy are being respected within the very societies that claim to defend democratic principles.

This collection contains eleven essays drawn from international scholars working in both the humanities and social sciences, and makes a well-grounded and comprehensive case for the importance of Derridean thought within the liberal arts today. Written by specialists in the fields of philosophy, literature, history, sociology, geography, political science, animal studies, and gender studies, each essay traces deconstruction's contribution to their discipline, explaining how it helps keep alive the 'unconditional', contrapuntal mission of the university. The book offers a forceful and persuasive corrective to the current assault on the liberal arts.

Part One

This section consists of two chapters. The first chapter examines the university in relation to Derrida’s contribution to thinking about these institutions, the challenges that Derrida has posed to them, and how social theorists have responded to those challenges and to the wider project of deconstruction in the university. The second chapter is a republication of Simon Critchley’s “What Is the Institutional Form of Thinking?,” which lays out how we might better imagine what Derrida called the “unconditional university.”

1

Derrida, Deconstruction, and the University

Mary Caputi, Vincent J. Del Casino Jr, and Keith Woodward

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 seeks its place wherever this unconditionality can take shape. Everywhere that is, perhaps, given one (itself) to think. Sometimes even beyond, no doubt, a logic or a lexicon of the “condition.”

Jacques Derrida, 2002.¹

Jacques Derrida was committed to a “university without condition,” a space of engagement, of questioning, of political contestation. In seeking that uncondition, he found himself calling for a university as a “place in which nothing is beyond question.”² The university without condition has, we could argue, been under assault by the instrumentalist logic of the market, which pushes higher education each day toward a mythical “applied knowledge” that is somehow magically situated against a “theoretical” body of knowledge. Derrida, of course, rejects such binary logics, which fail to fully engage the “trace” of the other that is always present in the utterance of one phrase—the applied—as that phrase must call upon its other—the theoretical—for its meaning. Derrida was thus committed to the university as a space of open engagement and political dialogue, one that rejected the binary logics of “application” and “theory” and instead sought to question the question—what does it mean to profess and where might that take place?

This is why the contributors to this book believe that Derrida can help us with the challenge before us, for he confronted similar concerns during his lifetime. He did more than simply write about the traditional structure and disciplines of the academy: he actively engaged with like-minded academics in an effort to challenge conservative policies aggressively seeking to marginalize the study of philosophy in French high schools and universities. Opposing the effort to make education more outcomes-oriented and committed to the so-called “practical skills,” Derrida argues that the liberal arts, and especially philosophy, play a crucial role in democratic societies. Of course, Derrida was not without his critics, from conservative scholars who thought his work to be trivial, inconsequential, and sometimes dangerous, to those more liberal scholars who questioned deconstruction as either an ethics or a methodology. In this section of the book, we examine Derrida’s life as an engaged academic and those scholars who present a theoretical challenge to the wider project Derrida sought to produce: “the right to deconstruction as an unconditional right to ask critical questions not only about the history of the concept of man, but about the history even of the notion of critique, about the form and the authority of the question, about the interrogative form of thought.”³

The remainder of this section examines Derrida’s own activism and his work in the founding of GREPH (Le Groupe des Recherches sur l’Enseignement Philosophique) and his theorization of the unconditional university. It follows this with an examination of those scholars who have relied on and challenged, to varying degrees, Derrida’s theoretical assertions. The section ends with a discussion of how these Derridean insights can influence and affirm the future of the liberal arts, understood as a crucial space of critical inquiry within a democratic society and academy.

Derrida and the unconditional university

In Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, Derrida asserts that “we must sometimes, in the name of reason, be suspicious of rationalizations.”⁴ Thus, in the mid-1970s, Derrida played a key role in founding GREPH, whose mission it was to safeguard the study of philosophy. This new organizational unit was

formed in order to offer resistance to an attempt on the part of a post-1968 conservative French government that was bent on diminishing the role of philosophy in French culture . . . GREPH mobilized in particular against the government’s program of curtailing the teaching of philosophy in the Lycée . . . Such curtailment would have weakened the ‘critical’ component in lycée education, and, needless to say, would have been felt in the universities, too, where the need to train such teachers would have been correspondingly eliminated. To limit the teaching of philosophy, even and especially on the high school level, is to limit the unlimited right to question, to nip thinking in the bud.⁵

The emergence of new organizational formations such as GREPH suggests that Derrida’s intellectual project—which challenges the sedimented formation of a singular truth and thus makes possible unimagined, unrealized alternatives—translates to a much wider academic project: that of maintaining the university as an unconditional space of différance—of realities that are different and deferred, thanks to the residual power of the intellect and imagination. Bearing this in mind, we consider how we might move forward while working through and against the wider sociopolitical challenges facing higher education today. Using the insights of deconstruction, we seek to counter the inroads of a more goal-oriented restructuring of education as we affirm the essential value of a liberal arts education within a democracy. The contributors to this book thus acknowledge Derrida’s defense of a liberal arts education. Subsequently, we agree with Readings’ central claim that the role of the university today is to promote the love of learning in ways that encourage students to hold open social values, to think oppositionally about politics, and to value the role of a contrapuntal mindset that actively analyzes rather than passively consumes.⁶ For, indeed, a successful liberal arts education trains students to develop a critical awareness of the world around them, arming them with the ability to discern fact from value, a given empirical statement from a normative claim, in ways that allow evaluative considerations that are vital to a democratic society.

This brings us to the topic not just of structural reform but also of the ethos of the university and the Weltanschauung that we wish to promote. We are eager to keep alive the notion that learning is worthwhile, that training the mind is an activity that does not lend itself to strict methods of assessment, and that the life of the mind to some degree remains opaque to the instrumental rationality that governs balance sheets and management’s economies of return. “Education isn’t accountable in accordance with any calculative way of thinking,”⁷ writes Critchley, and we tend to agree. Moreover, as this book demonstrates, we believe that the intellectual skills honed by liberal arts training are particularly useful in countering the shortcomings of a calculative intellect when that intellect mistakes calculation for thinking itself. Throughout its pages, we seek to “save the honor of reason,”⁸ as Derrida writes, by disallowing “reason” to become synonymous with bottom-line, common-sensical “facts.”

In asking how to preserve the ethos of learning in our shifting institutions, the authors of this text critically interrogate their disciplinary positionings in relation to the role that Derrida has played within each field. We rethink our own academic disciplines from within in ways that hold open the values that animate society and disallow intellectual activity from losing its critical, investigative edge. Instead of bemoaning the fact that the practices upheld by the liberal arts no longer serve as society’s cultural referent, the authors of this book find it necessary to think beyond the current impasse and use that “dereferentialization” as a call to action. As we rethink our disciplines, we must simultaneously revisit our larger raison d’être and use this opportunity to reframe questions about the conceptual terrains of democracy, society, and education. In Readings’ words, “we need to recognize that the dereferentialization of the University’s function opens a space in which we can think the notions of community and communication differently.”⁹ If approached in this way, transformation from within need not signal the ultimate demise of the university’s critical edge, but can allow the importance of a liberal arts education to emerge: the latter trains the mind to evaluate, and not merely consume, society’s meanings.

By “unconditional,” Derrida intends that the university must always and without reservation be a locus of interrogation and critical scrutiny, a place where cultural values, intellectual positions, and the practices of society are held open to questioning. It is the right and political obligation of academe within a democracy to challenge societal convention and to defend speech that allows for creative, contrapuntal, and even subversive forces existing alongside the cultural mainstream whose social predominance risks delivering a troubling complacency to the unthinking, unreflective consumer. In this way, thanks to the dialectics generated by such constant interrogation, the university allows an informed, dynamic reasoning to counterpose the myriad offerings of the marketplace. Within the university, “reason” designates a more refined form of thinking that forever holds out different, differing possibilities as opposed to an end product whose value emanates from market-driven forces. By always encouraging further reflection and further investigation, the university embraces the aporia of différance. Derrida writes: “This university claims and ought to be granted in principle, besides what is called academic freedom, an unconditional freedom to question and to assert, or even the right to say publicly all this is required by research, knowledge, and thought concerning the truth.”¹⁰ Any institution is entitled to such unconditional freedom, even when the geotopolitics of its specific incarnation are quite idiosyncratic: in any time or place, the university must enjoy some measure of freedom from tendentious influence. This commitment to unconditional freedom, to the quest for knowledge unfettered by the demands of capital, is what affords scholars the ability to think freely and creatively in ways that keep alive the larger mission of the university.

The Collège Internationale de Philosophie serves as a further example. Founded in 1983, Derrida became its first elected director. Though eager to prove its intellectual and institutional legitimacy, the Collège avoided doing so at the cost of simply reproducing the disciplinary, scholarly, and organizational structures of other academic institutions. The founders argued, in fact, that “[i]t must be so structured as to bring together scholars and researchers in such an open-ended way as precisely to resist any ‘stable hierarchy,’ to provide for a free and autonomous association that preserves maximum mobility as regards both the themes that are studied there and the scholars and researchers who teach there.”¹¹ Indeed, Derrida and his colleagues sought an unconditional university, one that maximized the autonomy and freedom to engage an oppositional “truth,” allowing scholars to “organize research on objects – themes, which are not sufficiently represented in existing institutions in France or outside France. Objects and themes which are marginalized or repressed or not sufficiently studied in other institutions . . . .”¹² The Collège thus represents a space of intellectual and political engagement that refuses to capitulate to outside social, political, and economic pressures. Within this new space of engagement, Derrida and his colleagues worked against the hierarchical nature of the university as traditionally conceived.

The Collège will thus have no tenure chairs, no academic ‘ranks,’ no fixed or core curriculum, no grades or standard degrees . . . The sole criterion for teaching or doing research there is whether one can propose an object for research that has been ‘marginalized or excluded or disqualified in other institutions’ . . . ‘insufficiently “legitimated” ’ . . . and that promises to repay study, since not every bizarre, unusual, or illegitimate idea is a good one.¹³

This last point forcefully counters the frequently heard claim that deconstruction leads to nihilistic navel gazing and fruitlessly clever academic interrogations. On the contrary, Derrida was committed to the use of deconstruction in order to meaningfully rethink existing channels of authority while giving place to what traditionally has been silenced. His project is an ethical and political one that engages “distant strangers” in a dialogic process of conversation that constructs hospitable, dynamic new spaces within higher education that are essential to a thriving democracy.

At a practical level, then, the broader vision of the Collège contains a challenge to the organization of the “the university” in general and the departmentalization of “philosophy” in particular, processes that go back to the founding of the University of Berlin in 1810. It is the thematic formation of academic departments, and in particular departments of philosophy, which has led to the heightened sense of philosophy’s position as the premier discipline among the humanities, as well as its own marginalization as a growingly esoteric practice on the other. This conceptualization of the “philosophy department” writ large arises out of the purchase that Kant’s critical formulation of philosophy in particular has on the academy and on the positioning of philosophy as the practice that sits in judgment over the conditions for thought, morality, deliberation, and critique. “Philosophy alone has the right to demand from the State an unconditional freedom,” Derrida asserts.¹⁴ For Derrida, as for the goals of this book, we have to appreciate that “[t]o resist that idea of philosophy and that institutional framing of philosophy is the reason deconstruction has come into the world. Such resistance would be its mission, if deconstruction did not resist the idea of having a mission. The Collège set out to disturb the pyramid and to effect a more horizontal – and hospitable – arrangement.”¹⁵ Such a hospitable, nonhierarchical arrangement arrives not only through interdisciplinarity (an “already well-legitimated practice within existing institutions”¹⁶) but also through a focus on new ideas, concepts, and objects that had either not yet been taken...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Contributors
• Introduction: Derrida and the Future of the Liberal Arts
• Part 1
• Part 2
• An Afterward: In Brief
• Bibliography
• Index