PROLEGOMENA TO A NEW ACADEMIC RESPONSIBILITY: WHAT IT MEANS TO KNOW AND THE UNIVERSITY

Abstract

AbstractIn this essay, Peter Trifonas tries to show that there is no overcoming of the techno‐philosophical grounding of intellectual freedom and academic responsibility or research action within the speculum of an all‐seeing, all‐knowing university. Instead, he argues that through Derrida's notion of an open “community of the question,” deconstruction has the promise to infuse the university and its teaching body with the play of difference in interpretation and invention that will produce new forms of knowledge and an altered academic responsibility. This new academic responsibility born of a deconstruction of the university and its closed system of disciplinary logic is worked out as a performative intelligibility or an inkling of purpose “yet‐to‐come” (avenir). The call for an open community of research around questions and not disciplines displays the ethical undercurrent of a new kind of academic responsibility—a responsibility negotiated both within the extant community and between that community and those to whom the highly problematic “we” of “higher” education are more or less ultimately accountable: the State and the political constituency of public society.