Article

The Humanities without

condition: Derrida and
the singular oeuvre

Arts & Humanities in Higher Education

2014, Vol. 13(12) 5461
! The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/1474022213514795
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Derek Attridge
Department of English and Related Literature,
University of York, UK

Abstract
In an important lecture on the function of the Humanities, The University without
Condition, Jacques Derrida asks what it means to profess the truth and advocates a
commitment to the oeuvre the work that constitutes an event rather than just a
contribution to knowledge. I examine a few phrases from the lecture, focusing on
questions of the unconditional, the as if, singularity, the future, and the impossible.
Keywords
affirmative, Derrida, event, impossible, performative, oeuvre, singularity, unconditional,
university

Jacques Derridas prose possesses a certain notoriety, and not without cause: constantly operating at the edge of what can be said in language, it strains and
stretches its sentences, makes paradoxical assertions, invents lexical items, and
inserts parentheses within parentheses. When these challenges to the reader are
transferred from French to English by a heroic translator, the problems are
often intensied. This, no doubt, is one reason why his thinking on the university
its state and status, its operations and responsibilities, its past and its future has
not had the wide dissemination it deserves. He addressed these and related questions in many texts, some of which are collected in the volume Eyes of the
University (Derrida, 2004). My favourite in this group is The Principle of Reason:
The University in the Eyes of its Pupils, rst given in 1983 as the inaugural lecture on
his appointment to a visiting chair at Cornell University. But the work I want to
focus on here is The University without Condition, originally written for the
Corresponding author:
Derek Attridge, Department of English and Related Literature, University of York, Heslington, York Y010
5DD, UK.
Email: derek.attridge@york.ac.uk

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Presidential Lecture Series at Stanford University in 1999. Rather than attempt a

summary of this long essay (published in French as a book; Derrida, 2001), I want to
excerpt a few sentences for extended commentary. The rationale for this slightly odd
way of proceeding will, I trust, become evident as we proceed.
Derrida begins with what sounds like a traditional view of the task of the university or what he refers to as the modern university, the university in states of a
democratic type that has evolved over the last two centuries out of the medieval
European model:
This university demands and ought to be granted in principle, besides what is called
academic freedom, an unconditional freedom to question and to assert, or even, going
still further, the right to say publicly all that is required by research, knowledge, and
thought concerning the truth . . . . The university professes the truth, and that is its
profession. It declares and promises an unlimited commitment to the truth. (Derrida,
2002: 202)

From the start, Derrida implies that the university is engaged not only in the search
for truth but also with the question of truth itself: what counts as truth?, where do
our ideas of the true come from?, what power relations are sustained by dierent
conceptions of the truth?, and so on. And it quickly becomes clear that the place
where these questions should be asked most urgently and consistently is the
Humanities. (Derrida consistently gives the word an upper-case letter, and I shall
follow suit.) Derrida asserts:
Everything that concerns the question and the history of truth, in its relation to the
question of man, of what is proper to man, of human rights, of crimes against humanity, and so forth, all of this must in principle nd its space of unconditional discussion
and, without presupposition, its legitimate space of research and reelaboration, in the
university and, within the university, above all in the Humanities. (2002: 203)

In both these comments, Derrida refers to the term also highlighted in his title: the
unconditional nature of the universitys freedom to question; and on both occasions, he qualies this notion with the phrase in principle. In practice, as he is well
aware, things are rather dierent:
This university without conditions does not, in fact, exist, as we know only too well.
Nevertheless, in principle and in conformity to its declared vocation, its professed
essence, it should remain an ultimate place of critical resistance and more than
critical to all the powers of dogmatic and unjust appropriation. (2002: 204)

What could be more than critical resistance?, we might ask. Derrida explains:
When I say more than critical, I have in mind deconstructive. (Why not just say it
directly and without wasting time?) I am referring to the right to deconstruction as an

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unconditional right to ask critical questions not only about the history of the concept
of man, but about the history even of the notion of critique, about the form and the
authority of the question, about the interrogative form of thought. (2002: 204)

And here we move onto less well-trodden ground. Derrida is clearly aware that to
bring the word deconstruction into his lecture is to risk losing some of his listeners,
those whose prejudices will interfere with their attention. But there is no need to fear
a lurch into inscrutable and indigestible philosophizing: Derrida immediately
explains what he means a deconstructive approach is, fundamentally, a willingness
to interrogate even the modes of questioning that have characterized university
research, taking nothing for granted in the tools employed for analysis and critique.
If this means questioning the protocols of rationality as we have inherited them from
the Enlightenment, there should be no holding back. (The essay I mentioned earlier,
The Principle of Reason, is partly dedicated to just such questioning.)
The sentence that follows, expanding on the notion of a deconstructive spirit in
enquiry, introduces some of the key terms in Derridas argument, and it will be
helpful to spend a little time considering a number of these terms:
For this implies the right to do it armatively and performatively, that is, by producing events (for example, by writing) and by giving rise to singular oeuvres (which up
to now has not been the purview of either the classical or the modern Humanities).
(2002: 204)

Ill take some of the important phrases in these sentences one by one.
1. For this implies the right to do it armatively and performatively: The resistance to all the powers of dogmatic and unjust appropriation that Derrida is
promoting as central to the activity of the university is not purely negative, then,
but an armation. It would be possible to draw on Derridas other writings to
show that what is being armed in this case is the unpredictability of the future,
that which arrives without having been invited armation, in other words,
being a form of unconditional hospitality to the other. One resists not only by
critique but also by opening up new possibilities for thought, accepting that this
is always a risky business since one cannot be sure of the value or virtue of what
will emerge. Throughout the essay, Derrida worries away at what it might mean
to profess a university discipline, an act which he takes to be something like
making a profession of faith including faith in the future arrival, itself a kind
of armation. Linked with armation is performativity, the characteristic of
discourses that produce the event of which they speak, as Derrida denes it
(2002: 209). Drawing on JL Austins famous distinction between constative and
performative uses of language, Derrida want to stress that the work he is speaking of is not only a matter of producing knowledge but also, and more importantly, of making something happen (which may well include what we have
learned to call impact).1

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2. that is, by producing events: The term event is another one that plays an
important part in the discussion of the university (and, indeed, in much of
Derridas work). An event, in the precise sense in which Derrida uses it, is an
occurrence that exceeds any prior calculation or prediction; it takes an individual or a community or the world by surprise. If Humanities professors produce
events, they do so is not entirely by the accumulation of information or the
operation of logic; though these are essential, they do not themselves culminate
in the kind of breakthrough that no one could have foreseen. Armation and
performativity are inseparable from the event: an event in thought happens
because the new has been armed, and the process of arming the new in an
event is a performative one.
3. (for example, by writing): To write, in this sense, is not simply to record results
but to create a work that has to be read and re-read in order to be fully engaged
with, a work in which the unfolding of information, the shaping of sentences, the
dance of the intellect as it brings together diverse sources, are all signicant
elements. Writing is only one example of the various modalities of the event;
it can happen in speech the best teaching is a performative event or in visual
art or music or dance.
4. and by giving rise to singular oeuvres (which up to now has not been the purview of either the classical or the modern Humanities): Derrida claims that in
resisting what he has called the powers of dogmatic and unjust appropriation
and in pursuing truth and reason as questions a deconstructive approach will
give rise to products that do not normally gure within the outputs of research
recognized in the Humanities, and that these may be called oeuvres, a word
which strongly suggest artistic or literary productions. Peggy Kamuf has decided
not to translate oeuvre by the obvious English equivalent work, partly no doubt
because the English term is less precise than the French and partly because
Derrida is using the term in a somewhat technical sense, usually signalled in
his text by italics. (Derrida will later devote part of the discussion to travail,
another word often translated as work.) Further on in the essay, Derrida takes
up the phrase as if, and his comments here help explain his focus on the oeuvre:
Does not a certain as if mark, in thousands of ways, the structure and the mode of
being of all objects belonging to the academic eld called the Humanities, whether
they be the Humanities of yesterday or today or tomorrow? . . . Couldnt one say that
the modality of the as if appears appropriate to what are called oeuvres, singularly
oeuvres dart, the ne arts . . . but also, to complex degrees and according to complex
stratications, all the discursive idealities, all the symbolic or cultural productions that
dene, in the general eld of the university, the disciplines said to be in the
Humanities and even the juridical disciplines and the production of laws, and
even a certain structure of scientic objects in general? (2002: 212)

The as if is related to the perhaps in Derridas thought: the task of the

Humanities and perhaps other parts of the university too is to imagine

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alternative possibilities to those imposed on us, to search out the cracks in the
edices of power where a handhold might allow a dierent view of past and
future, and to take the risk of uncertainty and speculation. Elaborating on his
comment, Derrida says later:
The rst examples of oeuvres that come to mind are oeuvres dart (visual, musical, or
discursive, a painting, a concerto, a poem, a novel). But since we are interrogating the
enigma of the concept of oeuvre, we would have to extend this eld as soon as we tried
to discern the type of work proper to the university and especially to the Humanities.
(2002: 217)

The traditional view of university research is that its products are not oeuvres,
even though, Derrida remarks, the traditional notion of professing implies promising to take a responsibility that is not exhausted in the act of knowing or
teaching (2002: 217). To be a professor is to acknowledge ones responsibility
to the future and for the future a future that is not simply a repetition of the past.
We should also note the word singular giving rise to singular oeuvres
since it is another important aspect of the kind of university work Derrida is
promoting. The work as event, as, for instance, the writing of an essay or a book
that calls for re-reading, that eects a change in its readers, and that opens new
ground for other writers, is a singular work, a work that is unlike any other not
because it has a unique and unchanging substance but because it deploys the
shared resources of thought and language to introduce the hitherto unknown
and unimaginable into the eld of the known and imaginable.2
The sentence I have been glossing is followed by another one that restates
Derridas central point:
With the event of thought constituted by such oeuvres, it would be a matter of making
something happen to, without necessarily betraying, this concept of truth or of
humanity that forms the charter and the profession of faith of all universities.
(2002: 204)3

As we saw in the rst statement I quoted, Derrida is taking very seriously here the
traditional idea that to undertake university research is to profess the truth, to
promise an unlimited commitment to truth. But such a commitment means not
merely seeking for the truth as it is recognized in ones eld but in questioning the
very concept of truth to which one is committed. And the notion of humanity
that which is at the centre of the Humanities is also not given but a question to be
explored. What Derrida is trying to do is detach the idea of university research
from the idea of the production of knowledge not that he undervalues this activity, but that he sees the task of the university as more than the accumulation of
facts. And it is the Humanities that are able to give (and, implicitly, have for some
time given) the lead in this wider responsibility. An important part of what we
produce in Humanities departments has anities to the work of art, in that it arises

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not only out of the discovery of new knowledge but also from the emergence of
unpredictable, unforeseen insights, and in that it is embodied not in sets of facts but
in writing or other modes of signication which exceed the communication of the
merely factual.
That rst quotation, like the title of the essay, stresses the unconditional nature
of the universitys freedom to question every truth, to resist every power that
would limit its eld of operations; but, as we have seen, Derrida acknowledges
that in practice many conditions are placed on actual institutions. It might seem
that the notion of unconditional freedom operates as an ideal to which universities
should aspire; however, if we turn to a number of other topics where Derrida has
detected a similar contrast between the unconditional and the conditional or conditioned, we nd a more intimate relation between the two, albeit a relation that
tests the capacities of the language in which it has to be described. Unconditional
hospitality, for instance, enters into the conditional hospitality that takes place in
the real world; acts of giving and forgiving are informed by their unconditional
twins; the operation of law is only just if it takes place in the context of unconditional justice.
Derrida ends his essay with seven theses, seven propositions, or seven professions of faith, six of which are designed to recapitulate his arguments and the
seventh to attempt a step beyond the six others towards a dimension of the
event and of the taking place that I have yet to speak of (2002: 230). The seventh
point broaches the subject of the impossible, a subject Derrida treated in many
places. (Deconstruction is the experience of the impossible was one of his favourite maxims.) As long as it deals only with the possible, that is, the university is
limited to the accumulation of knowledge and the elaboration of theories; to bring
oeuvres into being, to encourage events to take place, it has to open itself to the
impossible, that which is not accessible or conceptualizable within the possible.
This can only happen if its work is inspired by, underwritten by, impelled by my
language begins to break down here, as Derridas does at similar moments the
force of the unconditional, the power of thought that recognizes no bounds.
Derrida reveals a degree of optimism about the direction in which universities
are going there are many signs that this work has already begun, he says (2002:
230). Yet the evidence all around us points in the opposite direction. Every year the
Humanities are pressed more and more insistently into a shape borrowed from the
sciences and not the sciences as Derrida envisages them, fostering the emergence
of the oeuvre, but as the domain of the production of knowledge by the accumulation of information. To make matters worse, instead of a risky opening to the
future, to what Derrida calls the as if and the perhaps, research in the
Humanities, as elsewhere, is understood as having value only if it is economic
value. But perhaps there are grounds for some optimism: in spite of these unpropitious conditions, creativity continues to ourish, and academics in the
Humanities and not only in the Humanities continue to write, in Derridas
sense of the word, rather than merely report facts. Derrida himself was, of course,
an outstanding example of such a writer, and this essay is surely an example of

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an oeuvre. Whether or not it is, Derrida would insist, whether or not it makes
something happen, is in the hands of its readers. At the very end of the lecture,
he poses a series of questions:
I especially do not know the status, genre, or legitimacy of the discourse that I have
just addressed to you. Is it academic? Is it a discourse of knowledge in the Humanities
or on the subject of the Humanities? Is it knowledge only? Only a performative profession of faith? Does it belong to the inside of the university? Is it philosophy, or
literature, or theater? Is it a work, une oeuvre, or a course, or a kind of seminar?
(2002: 237)

By focusing on just a few of the many resonant sentences in this essay, I have tried
to do justice to one or two strands in the weave, one or two moves in the dance,
that contribute to what I certainly experience, each time I read it, as an event, an
oeuvre, a welcoming of the future and the impossible.
Notes
1. A classic example of a performative utterance is the prince who says I name this ship . . ..
Later in the essay, Derrida scrutinizes the concept of the performative, detaching it from
an association with an idea of sovereignty; that is, he finds that the accepted concept,
with its picture of a sovereign subject in command of what he produces, fails to account
for the uncontrollability of the event (for which see phrase (2)).
2. I have attempted to elaborate on this point in The Singularity of Literature (Attridge,
2004). The work of art and this need not be limited to works that fall under the
conventional definition of art is created when the artist finds a way of articulating
what has until then been unarticulable because unthinkable and unimaginable, and doing
so not as new knowledge but as a work that is open to a future of readings (or viewings or
hearings). When a work lasts, it is because those who engage with it later experience it as
an event that introduces into their familiar world of thought and feeling an otherness
that, in some way, small or large, changes them. What Derrida in this essay is calling an
oeuvre is a singular creation of this sort.
3. Translation slightly modified in the interests of clarity.

References
Attridge D (2004) The Singularity of Literature. London: Routledge.
Derrida J (2001) LUniversite sans condition. Paris: Galilee.
Derrida J (2002) The university without condition. In: Kamuf P (ed and transl) Without
Alibi. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp.202237.
Derrida J (2004) Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2 (transl Plug J, et al.) Stanford:
Stanford University Press.

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Author biography
Derek Attridges books include Peculiar Language: Literature as Dierence from
the Renaissance to James Joyce, The Singularity of Literature, J. M. Coetzee and the
Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event, Reading and Responsibility:
Deconstructions Traces, and, most recently, Moving Words: Forms of English
Poetry. Among his edited or co-edited volumes are Acts of Literature (a collection
of essays by Jacques Derrida), The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, Theory
after Theory, and The Cambridge History of South African Literature. He is a
Professor in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of
York and a Fellow of the British Academy.

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