Paper short abstract:

This contribution wants to discuss the relevance that the text The University without Condition (2002) by Jacques Derrida still offers to the deconstruction of academia. It also wants to propose more recent deconstructive practices coming, especially, from the radical philosophies of 'black study'.

Paper long abstract:

I would like to enjoy the chance offered by the panel to share – and possibly, move beyond – the deconstruction of the academia offered by J. Derrida in his 2001 text, L'université sans condition, that he describes as a 'declarative engagement', a credo, a proposition to be discussed in res publica. Under scrutiny might be his advocation of the profession of faith in the Humanities, that reads as 'we all know that the university is conditioned but we should behave 'as if' it were unconditional'. In my experience, the deconstructive 'as if' has always proved foundational to a pedagogy of teaching that opens itself to creativity and artivism (see Derrida's insistence on the academic production of oeuvres), allowing the freedom and the invention of the independent and resistant questioning of the conditions and constrains experienced nowadays in the state of global, neo-liberal, western modern model of the academia. Time, however, is exposing this Derridean interpretation to the challenge of new visions and practices, coming especially from the de-colonial and postcolonial theories, at the time offered by Gayatri C. Spivak, in Death of a Discipline (2002), and more recently, and with great strength, by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013) and All incomplete ( 2021). My contribution would like to assess the legacy of the Derridean text, also for the African contest, by opening it up to the provocations of black radical thinking.