/lit/ - Literature

Does the university need to become a pluriversity?


In his 1983 inaugural lecture as visiting chair at Cornell University (New York), Derrida put into question the reason of the university: What is the reason for being of the university - with a view to what?

Along with Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger... JD agreed the essential feature of academic responsibility must not be professional education. The particular characteristics of today's predicament, is the professionalization opening the university to the laws of the market and technical competency; and the university's entanglement with international military-industrial complexes, techno-science. These issues were the "abysses and the gorges", "the bridges and the barriers" Derrida cautioned for while advocating "a new university Enlightenment".

Today, the developing notion of pluriversity this rethinking of the raison d'être of the university? Among the header decolonization we find in de Sousa or Dussel, followed by Mbembe, for example, the call to pluralize the university, to make pluriversites. Authors like these propose an ontological 'leveling', the need to overcome overcomes anthropocentrism, humanism, nature/culture distinction. A pluriversity is a site open to "epistemic diversity".

This seems to nourish a relativism which reifies west / non-west binary; or carves out a 'people-of-colour only space'; and romanticizes certain knowledge systems, blocking critical inquiry as epistemic violence. And what about theology? The 'ontological turn' and 'epistemic diversity' legitimates theology back into the university: Why should this be desirable?