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‘The fidelity of a guardian’: the ‘double keeping’ of Jacques Derrida

‘The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of Its Pupils’ was first presented, in English, in 1983, as the inaugural lecture for the Andrew D. White Professor-atlarge chair at Cornell University. As Derrida notes in his paper, this was a time when he was closely involved in a complicated planning process which would eventually lead, that same year, to the establishment of the International College of Philosophy in Paris. The political context for such an initiative was the election of a Socialist government in France in 1981, on a platform which included proposals by the Greph (Research Group on the Teaching of Philosophy) to maintain and extend the teaching of philosophy in the French educational system. Greph was the name assigned to a disparate and diffuse activist grouping, whose members engaged in the theoretical analysis of institutional conditions while also operating as a pressure group. Derrida was a leading figure in the Greph, and as such he helped to organize resistance to the previous government’s proposals to limit philosophy teaching (the so-called Haby reforms). This resistance included an Estates General of Philosophy, held at the Sorbonne on June 16–17, 1979, which brought together more than 1,200 individuals from a variety of backgrounds both inside and outside the university and the French educational system. The activism of the Greph and the Estates General helped obstruct and reverse the proposed Haby reforms; and, while Mitterand’s presidency was ushered in alongside a promise – which never materialized – to extend philosophy teaching within the curriculum, the new government minister of research was mandated to establish a committee whose intention was to explore the possibility of an international college of philosophy. ‘The Principle of Reason’ must therefore be situated and read in terms of this ‘background’ – one in which the discipline of philosophy and the institution of the university raise questions which, for Derrida, demand both philosophical investigation and practical action. Indeed, in the various texts by Derrida associated with this period, the interrelationship between a series of well-rehearsed binaries – theory and practice, thought and deed, philosophy and activism, ‘basic’ and ‘end-oriented’ research – is subjected to an unremitting deconstructive interrogation. Here, Derrida repeatedly calls for strategic yet singular negotiations which recognize the heteronomous interdependency and supplementarity of such supposed ‘pairs’ of opposites, notably in the interests of a more astute ‘politics’ (as we shall see). parallax, 2006, vol. 12, no. 3, 85–98