More than twenty-five years ago, and well before the celebrated Heidegger controversy, Gérard Granel wrote an essay titled “A Call to All Those Having to Do with the University (in Order to Prepare Another).”¹ I understood this extraordinary text (playful, but also highly serious) to be a subversive repetition of Heidegger’s proposals in his infamous “Rectorial Address”—an uncompromising deconstruction of Heidegger, in other words, but also a reappropriation of some of the genuinely critical and transformative elements of his thinking. When the controversy ensued, about a decade later, it seemed to me time to repeat the call, in an...

I turn here to Derrida’s extensive writings on the institution of philosophy,¹ specifically to two essays that issued from his efforts to help create and set underway the Collège International de Philosophie—two founding documents for an institution that helped shape philosophical work in France through the 1990s. I read these essays, “Titres” and “Envois,” as companion pieces, though the first, an exposition of the historical and philosophical exigencies to which the Collège would respond, is in many ways preparatory for the statement—the invitation, let us say—that Derrida advances in the second. By reading them together, however, we...

How can we speak for the humanities today? Can we speak in their name to evoke a necessary task for thought?

I raise the Wrst question largely in the context of academic and public policy and from experiences of institutional decline. As an administrator and faculty member seeking to address the health of the humanities in a public university, I have discovered that requests for significant resources are not merely discounted in light of other priorities—they frequently meet uncomprehending or indifferent ears.¹ It is becoming clear that the very existence of the humanities in many universities—or anything more...