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The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Poststructuralism pp 383–398Cite as

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Abstract

Closely following Jacques Derrida’s reading of Immanuel Kant’s The Conflict of the Faculties, the chapter shows how Kant’s effort to conceptualize and negotiate a space where freedom of thinking would be possible provides a useful tool for the examination of the institutional politics that have defined the university up to the present.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Most of these texts are collected in Jacques Derrida, Du Droit à La Philosophie, Galilée (Paris, 1990), translated into English as Who’s Afraid of Philosophy?: Right to Philosophy 1, trans. Jan Plug (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002) and Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, trans. Jan Plug (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004).

  2. 2.

    See Simon Wortham, Counter-Institutions: Jacques Derrida and the Question of the University (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006); Michael A. Peters and Gert Biesta, Derrida, Deconstruction, and the Politics of Pedagogy (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2009); Peter Pericles Trifonas and Michael A. Peters (eds.), Derrida, Deconstruction and Education: Ethics of Pedagogy and Research (Oxford: Wiley, 2004); Richard Rand (ed.), Logomachia: The Conflict of the Faculties (Lincoln, NA: University of Nebraska Press, 1992).

  3. 3.

    See Wortham, Counter-Institutions, 1-24; Benoît Peeters, “In Support of Philosophy,” in Derrida: A Biography, trans. Andrew Brown (Malden, MA and Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 267–87.

  4. 4.

    Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties/ Der Streit Der Fakultäten, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1979).

  5. 5.

    Immanuel Kant, “From J. E. Biester, December 17. 1794,” in Philosophical Correspondence, 1759-1799 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 220.

  6. 6.

    Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, On University Studies, trans. E. S. Morgan (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1966), 79; see also Jacques Derrida, “Vacant Chair: Censorship, Mastery, Magisteriality,” in Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, ed. Werner Hamacher and David E. Wellbery (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 63.

  7. 7.

    Richard Rand, ed., “Preface,” in Logomachia: The Conflict of the Faculties (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), vii.

  8. 8.

    Howard Caygill, “Kant and the ‘Age of Criticism,’” in A Kant Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1995), 7–8.

  9. 9.

    In addition to these works, Derrida mentions The Conflict of the Faculties in Jacques Derrida, “Theology of Translation,” in Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, ed. Werner Hamacher and David E. Wellbery (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 64–80; Jacques Derrida, “Titles (for the Collège International de Philosophie) (1882),” in Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, ed. Werner Hamacher and David E. Wellbery (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 195–215; Jacques Derrida, “Privilege: Justificatory Title and Introductory Remarks,” in Who’s Afraid of Philosophy: Right to Philosophy 1, trans. Jan Plug (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 1–66. See also Jacques Derrida and Richard Rand, “Canons and Metonymies: An Interview Jacques Derrida,” in Logomachia: The Conflict of the Faculties, ed. Richard Rand (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 195–218; Jacques Derrida, “The ‘World’ Of the Enlightenment to Come (Exception, Calculation, Sovereignty),” trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, Research in Phenomenology 33 (2003): 9–52; Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe (Indiana University Press, 1992).

  10. 10.

    Derrida, “Vacant Chair: Censorship, Mastery, Magisteriality,” 55.

  11. 11.

    Derrida, 43.

  12. 12.

    Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What Is Enlightenment?,’” in Kant: Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What Is Enlightenment?,’” in Kant: Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, 2nd ed. (Cambridge (NY): Cambridge University Press, 1991), 58.

  13. 13.

    Mary J. Gregor, “Translator’s Introduction,” in The Conflict of the Faculties/ Der Streit Der Fakultäten (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), ix.

  14. 14.

    Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties/ Der Streit Der Fakultäten, 11.

  15. 15.

    See Gregor, “Translator’s Introduction”; Caygill, “Kant and the ‘Age of Criticism’”; Derrida, “Vacant Chair: Censorship, Mastery, Magisteriality,” 44.

  16. 16.

    Howard Caygill, A Kant Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1995), 346–50.

  17. 17.

    Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What Is Enlightenment?’” 58.

  18. 18.

    For instance, Howard Caygill agrees with Biester’s evaluation and considers the argumentation Kant developed in his late work to be ‘self-destructive.’ Caygill, “Kant and the ‘Age of Criticism,’” 8–11.

  19. 19.

    John Mowitt, “The Humanities and the University in Ruin,” Lateral, no. 1 (2012), https://doi.org/10.25158/L1.1.13.

  20. 20.

    Jacques Derrida, “The Future of the Professor or University without Condition (Thanks to the ‘Humanities,’ What Could Take Place Tomorrow),” in Jacques Derrida and the Humanities, ed. Tom Cohen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 27.

  21. 21.

    In my interpretation, this, however, does not imply that “there is no need to deconstruct Kant” as for instance Peter Gilgen argues in Peter Gilgen, “Structures, But in Ruins Only: On Kant’s History of Reason and the University,” CR: The New Centennial Review 9, no. 2 (2009): 190.

  22. 22.

    Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties/ Der Streit Der Fakultäten, 59.

  23. 23.

    Jacques Derrida, “The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of Its Pupils,” trans. Catherine Porter and Edward P. Morris, Diacritics 13, no. 3 (1983): 18, https://doi.org/10.2307/464997.

  24. 24.

    J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words: Second Edition - John Langshaw Austin, J. L. Austin - Google Books, 2nd ed. (Cambridge (MA), 1975), 13.

  25. 25.

    Austin, 94.

  26. 26.

    See J. Hillis Miller, “Performativity as Performance Performativity as Speech Act: Derrida’s Special Theory of Performativity,” South Atlantic Quarterly 106, no. 2 (April 1, 2007): 219–35, https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-2006-022.

  27. 27.

    See Derrida, The Other Heading; Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship (Verso, 2005); Derrida, “The Future of the Professor or University without Condition (Thanks to the ‘Humanities,’ What Could Take Place Tomorrow).”

  28. 28.

    Jacques Derrida, “Mochlos, or The Conflict of the Faculties,” in Logomachia: The Conflict of the Faculties, ed. Richard Rand (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 11.

  29. 29.

    Derrida, “Vacant Chair: Censorship, Mastery, Magisteriality,” 46–47.

  30. 30.

    Derrida, “The Future of the Professor or University without Condition (Thanks to the ‘Humanities,’ What Could Take Place Tomorrow),” 26.

  31. 31.

    Derrida, “The Principle of Reason,” 5.

  32. 32.

    I closely examine Derrida’s text “Vacant Chair,” where I show how Kant’s paradoxical layout of the university is grounded upon and animated by phallogocentrism in Lenka Vráblíková, “Reading the Sexual Economy of Academic Freedom with Sarah Kofman and Jacques Derrida: A Feminist Deconstruction of Kant’s Concept of the University,” Australian Feminist Studies 35, no. 103 (2020): 54–69, https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2019.1698285.

  33. 33.

    For a more detailed critique of the rhetoric of crisis that has dominated the scholarship on the university, see Samuel Weber, “Ambivalence, the Humanities and the Study of Literature,” Diacritics 15, no. 2 (1985): 11–25; Samuel Weber, “The Limits of Professionalism,” Oxford Literary Review 5, no. 1/2 (1982): 59–79; Dominick LaCapra, “The University in Ruins?,” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 1 (1998): 32–55; Adam Sitze, “Response to ‘The Humanities and the University in Ruin,’” Lateral, 2012.

  34. 34.

    Derrida, “Mochlos, or The Conflict of the Faculties,” 12.

  35. 35.

    Derrida, “The Future of the Professor or University without Condition (Thanks to the ‘Humanities,’ What Could Take Place Tomorrow),” 54.

  36. 36.

    Jacques Derrida, “Performative Powerlessness: A Response to Simon Critchley,” Constellations 7, no. 4 (2000): 467.

  37. 37.

    Derrida, “The Future of the Professor or University without Condition (Thanks to the ‘Humanities,’ What Could Take Place Tomorrow),” 53.

  38. 38.

    Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi, ed. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford University Press, 2002), 301.

  39. 39.

    Derrida, “The Principle of Reason,” 20.

  40. 40.

    Derrida, “Mochlos, or The Conflict of the Faculties,” 26–28.

  41. 41.

    Ibid., 1.

  42. 42.

    Derrida and Rand, “Canons and Metonymies: An Interview Jacques Derrida,” 198.

  43. 43.

    Derrida, “The Principle of Reason,” 5.

  44. 44.

    Derrida, “Mochlos, or The Conflict of the Faculties,” 30–31.

  45. 45.

    For a more detailed critique of this prevailing approach, see John Mowitt, “On the One Hand, and the Other,” College Literature 42, no. 2 (2015): 311–36, https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2015.0023; Robert Young, “The Idea of a Chrestomathic University,” in Logomachia: The Conflict of the Faculties, ed. Richard Rand (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 97–126.

  46. 46.

    Mowitt, “On the One Hand, and the Other,” 311–12.

  47. 47.

    Derrida, “The Principle of Reason,” 18.

  48. 48.

    Jacques Derrida, “Remarks on Pragmatism and Deconstruction,” in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, ed. Simon Critchley and Chantal Mouffe (Routledge, 1996), 79–90.

  49. 49.

    Derrida, “Mochlos, or The Conflict of the Faculties,” 3.

  50. 50.

    See for example Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (University of Chicago Press, 1996); Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question (University of Chicago Press, 1989); Derrida, The Other Heading.

  51. 51.

    Derrida and Rand, “Canons and Metonymies: An Interview Jacques Derrida,” 204.

  52. 52.

    Derrida, “The Principle of Reason,” 16.

  53. 53.

    Derrida, “Mochlos, or The Conflict of the Faculties,” 1. I closely examine this opening passage of Derrida’s essay in relation to feminist ethics in Lenka Vráblíková, “From Performativity to Aporia: Taking ‘Tremendous Responsibility’ toward Feminism and the University,” Gender and Education 28, no. 3 (2016): 359–71, https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2016.1169250.

  54. 54.

    Derrida, “The Principle of Reason,” 3.

  55. 55.

    Derrida, “Mochlos, or The Conflict of the Faculties,” 22–23.

  56. 56.

    Derrida, “The Future of the Professor or University without Condition (Thanks to the ‘Humanities,’ What Could Take Place Tomorrow),” 50–52.

  57. 57.

    Ibid., 50.

  58. 58.

    Ibid., 38.

  59. 59.

    Derrida, “Remarks on Pragmatism and Deconstruction,” 82.

  60. 60.

    Derrida, “The Future of the Professor or University without Condition (Thanks to the ‘Humanities,’ What Could Take Place Tomorrow),” 27. For a more detailed discussion of the relationship between Derrida’s conceptualization of literature, democracy and the university, see J. Hillis Miller, “A Profession of Faith,” in For Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009).

  61. 61.

    Derrida, Without Alibi, 236.

  62. 62.

    Peggy Kamuf, “The University in the World It Is Attempting To Think,” Culture Machine, no. 6 (2004).

  63. 63.

    Caygill, “Kant and the ‘Age of Criticism,’” 7–8.

  64. 64.

    I am thus in agreement with those who have already mobilized this body of work in their examinations of university’s potential to help contest the effects of racial capitalism, cis-heteropatriarchy, ableism and what has become to be known as the Anthropocene. See for example Tuija Pulkkinen, “Identity and Intervention: Disciplinarity as Transdisciplinarity in Gender Studies,” Theory, Culture & Society 32, no. 5–6 (September 1, 2015): 183–205; Ewa Płonowska Ziarek, “Reframing the Law: Derrida, Women’s Studies, Intersectionality,” PhiloSOPHIA 7, no. 1 (2017): 79–89; Rauna Kuokkanen, Reshaping the University: Responsibility, Indigenous Epistemes, and the Logic of the Gift (UBC Press, 2011); Premesh Lalu, “Apartheid’s University: Notes on the Renewal of the Enlightenment,” Journal of Higher Education in Africa / Revue de l’enseignement Supérieur En Afrique 5, no. 1 (2007): 45–60; Premesh Lalu, “What Is the University For?,” Critical Times 2, no. 1 (April 1, 2019): 39–58; Alan Hodkinson, “The Unseeing Eye: Disability and the Hauntology of Derrida’s Ghost—An Analysis in Three Parts"; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Thinking Academic Freedom in Gendered Post-Coloniality (Cape Town: University of Cape Town, 1992),; Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2012); Sara Ahmed, What’s the Use?: On the Uses of Use (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).

  65. 65.

    As Spivak explains, focusing on the word ab-use, which she gives with a hyphen and parenthesis, the Latin prefix ‘ab’ means ‘below’ but it also indicates a ‘motion a way’, ‘agency, point of origin’, ‘supporting’, as well as ‘the duties of slaves.’ Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Harvard University Press, 2013), 3–4.

  66. 66.

    Ahmed, What’s the Use?, 228–29.

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  1. Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK

    Lenka Vráblíková

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  1. Lenka Vráblíková
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Correspondence to Lenka Vráblíková .

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  1. Centre for Theory and Criticism, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada

    Tilottama Rajan

  2. Department of Philosophy, Royal Holloway, University of London, London, UK

    Daniel Whistler

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Vráblíková, L. (2023). The University. In: Rajan, T., Whistler, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Poststructuralism. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27345-2_18

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