Recently, Derrida has pointed to the university to come and the future of the professions within a place of resistance, and yet maintained the historical link to two ideas that mediate and condition both the humanities and the performative structure of acts of profession: human rights and crimes against humanity. Derrida maintains that the ‘modern university should be unconditional’, by which he means that it should have the ‘freedom’ to assert, to question, to profess, and to ‘say everything’ in the (...) manner of a literary fiction. This article reviews what Derrida calls ‘the future of the profession or the university without conditions’. Second, it focuses on a series of criticisms raised by Richard Rorty against Derrida’s concept of literature and on Derrida’s status as a ‘private ironist’. Third, the article examines Derrida in relation to the ends of literature and the university, under the impact of globalization and new technologies of communication. Finally, in a postscript the article returns to the concept of the university and its postcolonial possibilities. (shrink)

The article presents the author's response to Eliyahu Rosenow's review of "Nietzsche's Legacy for Education: Past and Present Values." Rosenow begins his review by relating our collection to Anglo-American philosophy of education and the twin claims made for its uniqueness by the editors: the collection comprises work by a group of scholars from three different locations working from original texts, linking "Nietzsch's "oeuvre" to contemporary scholarship and particularly the work of the French poststructuralists." I do not think that Rosenow makes (...) enough of the second claim for most of the papers included in the volume relate Nietzsche to poststructuralism either by working from poststructuralist readings of the so-called "new Nietzsche" or by exploring the significance of Nietzsche directly for a poststructuralist approach in education. (shrink)