‘Derrida on Restructuring the University’
Samir Haddad (Philosophy, Fordham)

a special session of 
‘On Truth and Lies in the Extramoral University’

CPCT Research Seminar 2024-25

Time: Wednesday, 30 April 2025, 4:00-6:00 pm UK time.
Venue: RHB 138 and online

Zoom registration: https://gold-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/m-qsXjg-SrG5HmiIdhzcNA 

Readings

René Haby, “Pour une modernisation du système éducatif” (esp. pp.1-10) [PDF]; Jacques Derrida, “Divided Bodies: Responses to La Nouvelle Critique” [PDF]; Jacques Derrida, “The Age of Hegel” [PDF]; Jacques Derrida, Jacques Bouveresse, Catherine Malabou, et al., “Report of the Committee on Philosophy and Epistemology (1990)” [PDF]

About the session

In the 1970s and 1980s, Derrida was heavily involved in debates on the place of philosophy in education in France. In this seminar we will read a selection of texts related to two of Derrida’s interventions in this period, with an eye to how they might speak to challenges we now face, several decades later and in different national contexts. The first intervention was precipitated by proposals made in 1974 by the French Minister of Education, René Haby, who sought to “modernize” the curriculum in the lycée. Among Haby’s proposals were calls for more emphasis on the sciences and social sciences over the humanities, greater interdisciplinarity, and the need to better train future workers in the face of rapidly changing technology and systems of communication. In response, Derrida and others sought to rethink the role that philosophy should play in a student’s education, and made various counter-proposals for reform of their own. The second intervention dates to 1989, when Derrida was asked by Pierre Bourdieu and François Gros, themselves charged by the Minister of Education at that time, to co-chair with Jacques Bouveresse a Committee on Philosophy and Epistemology as a part of a larger project aiming to reform French education as a whole. The resulting report develops further the ideas first raised in the 1970s, and constitutes Derrida’s most detailed vision for transforming the teaching of philosophy in France.

About the session leader

Samir Haddad is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University. He specializes in 20th century and contemporary continental philosophy, particularly French philosophy and deconstruction, and in the philosophy of education. He is the author of Derrida and the Inheritance of Democracy (Indiana, 2013) and is currently working on two research projects, one focused on Derrida’s work on education, and the other on the roles that translation and multilingualism might play in philosophical pedagogy.  


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About the seminar

CPCT’s annual research seminar meets on a regular basis and is open to centre members, graduate affiliates, and other interested staff and students at Goldsmiths and beyond. It aims to serve as a forum for philosophical work and critical conversation at Goldsmiths.

Taking its inspiration from the title of the famous essay by Friedrich Nietzsche, our research seminar this year poses the following question: what is the contemporary university for? By definition “extramoral” in the sense that it is premised on the pursuit of knowledge without the interference of power and authority—the classical loci of which were Church and State—the modern university nevertheless exists in a world driven by profit, riddled with war, and beset with an ever-unfolding polycrisis of environmental, racial, economic, technological, and geopolitical dimensions. What, then, is the role of the university vis-à-vis its extramorality or, indeed, its moral purpose? We wish in particular to interrogate the university’s role in truth-telling and truth-making, inter alia in relation to the era of post-truth, alt-facts, and now AI technologies that seem to have deeply unsettled classical definitions of knowing, certainty, and consciousness, and to questions of whose truth, when and where truth is that emergent pluricentric views of the world have opened up. “Extramoral” is, of course, also a play on the word “extramural,” and we wish to recall the 2010 student-led debates on the university’s purpose when tuition fees were first introduced. 

Convened by Julia Ng (j.ng[at]gold.ac.uk), Svenja Bromberg (s.bromberg[at]gold.ac.uk), and Sultan Doughan (s.doughan[at]gold.ac.uk).

This year’s sessions will be hybrid; to participate online, please register at the links below each session on the detailed session plan, where you will also find links to the readings. Free and open to the public.