International performance research pedagogies: Towards an unconditional discipline?

Abstract

In his lecture entitled ‘The University without Condition’(2002), Jacques Derrida puts forward the claim that the public university, and within it the Humanities, must remain unconditional in their autonomy, free of any national, ideological or economic affiliations, able to profess and set free any thought. Rather than being understood as safeguarding a privilege or entitlement, this unconditionality is formulated as a pledge of responsibility, a status that is affirmed and maintained by a profession of faith. Derrida evokes in this essay three notions that are of central importance to this volume: the critical role of the Humanities in the organization of what he terms mondialisation or worldwide-ization; the performative, embodied nature of knowledge production; and the order of the ‘as if’, the training of the imagination not only to make sense of the present, but also to generate the ferment from.