Review of The Unmodern Crisis of the Modern University

What is this book?^{1 Is it a report, a chronicle, an analysis of the present situation; is it a symptomatologic compendium, an evaluation or a diagnostic; a transcendental reflection, a stitching together of fragments, a video clip? Some disconcerted reader may think that it is a little bit of all of these things. That would make this book a potpourri, an unmistakable patchwork. Although this impression could serve as a base, I admit it would be superficial. It is a book with multiple entries. But it is not docile to diverse readings. It is inhabited by a fundamental reticence. The evasive character of its writing style and thought are a testimony to this reticence. And this is how it retains for itself a single reading, a single interpretation that hits upon the truth of the text. It seems odd, in a work that stands out by disarranging the signs of an all-encompassing and overwhelming crisis of the truth: signs of the debacle of the conceivable universal and of an undeniable univocality. But, in the end, it is not so odd. This is a philosophy book, radically so; its only concern is truth. It talks about the university because the university has been in Western history the privileged space of the truth, where it has been taught and sought, the socially consecrated space of its cultivation. If it is valid to claim—as it is done with excessive insistence—that today, everywhere, the university is in crisis, it is not enough to limit oneself to the administrative and organizational aspects, in the problems of management that the university authorities deal with, more or less blindly. It is also not enough to limit oneself to the challenges and demands of societies that are on the eve of the third millennium, or to the immanent problems that are posed by the dynamic of knowledge and technical innovation. Rigorous consideration demands that one take into account what this crisis means for truth. Thayer considers that, in some way, it means everything.}

^{Hence the apocalyptic tone that at times becomes dominant, equivocally dominant in the book. An improvident reading will think it recognizes a radical despondency: “The despondency of those asymptomatic diseases that debilitate us over time; and by the time we notice their existence, they have weakened us to the point that we no longer have the morale to face them” (Thayer 1996, 169). As a confession of an insurmountable impasse of enervation and weakness (let us maintain that word), The Unmodern Crisis contributes its own corresponding dose to the narcotic that a good part of the end of the century intelligentsia, along with our own, drugs itself with. (And, in passing, it does not matter if its pose is that of a dismembered bitterness or a youthful freshness; like the being, the reluctance is spoken, and is dressed, in many forms.) But the apocalypse is a kind of truth. This book makes one feel it vigorously.}

^{The reference to the apocalyptic is not justified simply as a rhetorical move or because the text explicitly turns to this concept, which stands out for the last time as an overwhelming gesture of confession in the epilogue of this Epilogue. This reference is also a wink directed toward the work of Jacques Derrida, author of an opuscule with the title (of Kantian lineage) D’un ton apocalyptique adopté naguère en philosophie (1983) and a few works (not only speculative) about the university, with which this essay visibly connects. The reference to the apocalyptic as the most emphatic concept of truth at hand talks about the truth of the present body and wants to lead us to the understanding that we are present, even without knowing or realizing it, at the final apocalypse, the impossibility of all apocalypse: “Apocalyptic thought can no longer resignify itself through any final representation&#8221...}