The University Without Condition 2
Derrida’s Insights for Today’s World
Here is the second reading post on L’université sans condition (2001), translated into English in 2002 as The University Without Condition.
The first one has been gathered with my other Substack writings on Derrida, which you can find here: Derrida.
The text The University Without Condition is a call for intellectual freedom. However, such freedom depends on many factors, such as the degree to which a university is independent from political, religious, and economic powers. It is here that a doubt arises, which quickly turns into a major question:
[C]an the university (and if so, how?) assert unconditional independence, claim a kind of sovereignty, a very original, exceptional kind of sovereignty, without ever risking the worst, namely having to surrender and capitulate unconditionally, allowing itself to be taken or bought at any price, due to the impossible abstraction of this sovereign independence? (Derrida, 2001, p. 19, my translation)
According to Derrida, the difficulty is that the concept of sovereignty is being deconstructed. The risk is that the independence of the university will be jeopardized in this process. If sovereignty, such as state sovereignty, is seen as an obsolete notion, how can we conceive of the sovereignty of any institution, including the university? The consequence is straightforward: universities will require a new kind of sovereignty.
However, deconstruction has a natural place in academia, especially in the humanities. Here, civil disobedience and even dissidence should be considered a necessity (p. 21) — something required for a new kind of humanities.
For Derrida, the supreme ingredient to facilitate this dissidence is thought (pensée) itself. It should serve as the compass of both justice and deconstruction. Thought is exploratory. It embodies freedom. Thought is more than having representations, ideas, or values about something. Thought consists of examining a topic from every necessary angle, including the unusual, unexpected, and unpleasant ones.
To achieve this, we will need to broaden and rework the concept of the Humanities. In my mind, it is no longer just the conservative and humanistic concept most often associated with the Humanities and their ancient canons — which I nevertheless believe must be protected at all costs. This new concept of the Humanities, while remaining faithful to its tradition, should include law, translation theories, and what is known in Anglo-Saxon culture, where it originated, as “theory” (…), but also, of course, in all these areas, deconstructive practices. (Derrida, 2001, p. 22)
For such an endeavor, Derrida emphasizes the importance of connecting knowledge and faith — or, in other words, having faith in knowledge. By associating faith with knowledge, performative and theoretical movements are combined. It is essential because a commitment to an unconditional university requires performative discourse that produces the event it describes, rather than merely discourse about knowledge.
Readers of philosophy, especially those familiar with English-speaking philosophy, are probably triggered by Derrida’s use of the word “performative,” which gained philosophical significance thanks to John Langshaw Austin. In fact, Jacques Derrida — who was French and came from a different tradition — was also a reader of English works, including those of Austin.
In The University Without Condition, he writes:
I will therefore often and for a long time rely on Austin’s now classic distinction between performative speech acts and constative speech acts. This distinction has been a major event of this century — and it was first and foremost an academic event. (…) While recognizing the power, legitimacy, and necessity of this distinction between constative and performative, I have often found myself, at a certain point, not questioning it but analyzing its presuppositions and complicating it. Today, once again, but this time from a different perspective, after giving considerable thought to this pair of concepts, I will conclude by identifying a place where it fails — and must fail. (Derrida, 2001, p. 24)
According to Derrida, Austin’s distinction between performative and constative utterances falls short when applied to the event itself. Events exceed linguistic determination. Whether driven by internal or external forces, what occurs does not originate solely in speech acts and cannot be fully understood based on Austin’s notion of performativity.
Thus, Derrida argues that the occurrences and capacities of the humanities cannot be reduced to performative utterances. Transformative events in this field often transcend the intentional structure and limits of language. Instead, they emerge from the intersection of meaning, institutions, and history, which is unpredictable.
Moreover, events take place. This led Derrida to the following conclusive remark:
This place will be precisely what happens, what we arrive at or what happens to us, the event, the place of having-place — which mocks the performative, performative power, as well as the constative. And this can happen in and through the humanities. (Derrida, 2001, p. 24)
Next time, we will start reading the first chapter of the text together. Your sponsorship means everything. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber. You will get access to all my paywalled articles and support my Substack.