Counter-Institutions: Jacques Derrida and the Question of the University

Chapter 3: “The Fidelity of a Guardian”: The “Double Keeping” of Jacques Derrida

68 “The Fidelity of a Guardian”: The “Double Keeping” of Jacques Derrida View of the University “The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of Its Pupils”— perhaps one of Derrida’s best known and most influential texts on the question of the university institution—was first presented, in English , in 1983, as the inaugural lecture for the Andrew D. White Professor -at-Large Chair at Cornell University.1 As Derrida notes in his paper, this was a time when he was closely involved in a complicated planning process that would eventually lead, that same year, to the establishment of the International College of Philosophy in Paris.2 As we have already said, the political context for such an initiative was the election of a Socialist government in France in 1981, on a platform that included the proposals by Greph to maintain and extend the teaching of philosophy in the French educational system. These proposals emerged in the wake of a groundswell of resistance to the so-called Haby reforms, which prompted the Estates General of Philosophy , held at the Sorbonne in June 1979. The activism of Greph and the Estates General helped obstruct and reverse the proposed Haby reforms, and furthermore, a government committee was set up to explore the possibility of an international college of philosophy in France. “The Principle of Reason” must therefore be situated and read in terms of this “background”—one in which the discipline of philosophy and the institution of the university raise questions that, 3 “The Fidelity of a Guardian” ■ 69 for Derrida, demand both philosophical investigation and practical action. Indeed, in the various texts by Derrida associated with this period, the interrelationship between a series of well-rehearsed binaries —theory and practice, thought and deed, philosophy and activism , “basic” and “end-oriented” research—is subjected to an unremitting deconstructive interrogation. Here, Derrida repeatedly calls for strategic yet singular negotiations that recognize the heteronomous interdependency and supplementarity of such supposed “pairs” of opposites, notably in the interests of a more astute “politics” (as we shall see). “The Principle of Reason” pursues such questions and issues, then, in view of the singular setting of Cornell University. Among a series of wordplays linked to the topology or scenography of Cornell as a campus university with its own architectural and geographical landscape and its own institutional discourse and history (or “topolitics ”), Derrida links the question of the university’s raison d’etre to that of the foundation of the university “with a view to what?” The question of the view from Cornell is therefore set in play by the importance it acquires in the very setting up of the institution. Derrida tells how Cornell’s first president, Andrew Dickson White (in whose name Derrida comes to be sponsored and to speak as a professor-atlarge ), persuaded the university’s trustees to reject the idea of a site “closer to town” in favor of another “at the top of East Hill,” on the twofold grounds of an inspiring panorama and the practical consideration of room for future expansion of the university (133). Here, then, the view from Cornell is linked both to the university’s “point of view,” its mission, ethos, inspiration, as well as its carefully calculated economic rationale; and its founding “in view of,” its reason for being . Indeed, for Derrida, the question “why the university?” verges on another: “with a view to what?”—where the verge itself reconstitutes the complex interaction between the philosophy that might be found at the university’s origins and the landscape (“topolitical” as much as “natural”) that establishes its institutional setting and setup (130). And since the view from Cornell’s heights is sharply vertiginous, this landscape is characterized by the “alternatives” of “expansion” (motivated by the expansive view of the “gorge” below) and “enclosure” (prompting proposals for the erection of protective barriers “to check thoughts of suicide inspired by the view”), which, in turn, translate the intense life-death relation which typifies the Romantic sublime (itself not unconnected to the histories of the modern university’s “reason for being”) (133–34). 70 ■ Counter-Institutions If from the outset the idea of closing off the view provoked strong reaction from Cornellians, on the grounds that the university’s very inspiration somehow inhered in the magnificent panorama it afforded , nevertheless the question of precisely what might be seen from its (point of) view (or...