In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Rethinking the University: Leverage and Deconstruction
  • Christopher Fynsk
Simon Wortham. Rethinking the University: Leverage and Deconstruction. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 1999. 179 pp.

In Rethinking the University: Leverage and Deconstruction, Simon Wortham attempts to carry forward contemporary writing on the university with a set of deconstructive analyses that enact what he terms a form of “survival” in the field of interdisciplinary theory. Following the work of Jacques Derrida, Bill Readings, and Peggy Kamuf, he takes the question of the university as a point of thematic focus, but does so only long enough to trace what he takes to be the margins of discursive formations in the academy. From there, he seeks to perform a deconstructive practice that renews the question of discursive responsibility.

Readers who are not already professionally affiliated with the deconstructive project will probably find the structure and rhetoric of this work maddeningly symptomatic of the crisis in academic institutions (particularly the humanities) that necessitates talk of “survival.” And indeed, it is hard to see how the critical practice performed in this book does not presuppose the institutional structure within which deconstruction has flourished. This study can only survive in the university apparatuses it seeks to “rethink.” In this respect, one could easily fault Simon Wortham for not tarrying long enough with the implications of Bill Readings’s The University in Ruins, and thus failing to take the full measure of the forces that have given this kind of meta-critical work such a ghostly form.

But Wortham’s analyses are consistently forceful and often quite shrewd. The reader will gain precious insights into the theoretical underpinnings (and blindspots) of new historicism and cultural studies, and will find throughout a consistently rigorous reading of the work of Jacques Derrida. The concluding chapters on the topic of economy and the gift also begin to point toward the necessity of a form of discursive practice that could no longer be described as theoretical or meta-critical—a discourse, that is, that truly responds to the aporias in what Derrida described, after Heidegger, as “the gift of death.”

The rigor with which Wortham recognizes the need for disrupting the traditional presentation of a “topic” or problematic (in this case, “the university”), and the force of his attempt to “reorient” his reader through the “disorientations” of contemporary critical work, make this exercise a valuable one. The strongest moments of this project also indicate clearly the need for a discursive practice that no longer takes the “deconstruction” of critical methodologies and practices as sufficient unto itself. Rethinking the “gift” in the context of the future of the university in a way that answers Derrida’s own meditation on “destination” in his founding essays for the Collège International might well constitute an important step toward finding new ways for dwelling honorably in the “ruins” of the university.

Christopher Fynsk
Binghamton University
...

Share