Towards a Fatal University: Temporal (In)determinacies in Heisenberg and Derrida

Abstract

Many lament the poor state of the university as an effect of neo-liberalisation. The university, these critics say, has strayed from its ‘pure’ pursuit of knowledge, justice, and truth. This paper takes issue with this explanation. It suggests instead that this state signals a reversal of the principle of causality, which points towards the aporetic endeavour of certain ideals of academic research since their inception. What is more, it claims that the contemporary acceleration of this aporia through cybernetics has led to a situation in which especially the hard sciences start to deconstruct themselves. It will substantiate this argument by reading Jacques Derrida’s Psyche together with Werner Heisenberg’s Physics and Philosophy, and point out that Heisenberg’s defence of an uncertainty principle in quantum physics, marks the return of the auto-immunity of the university project and its embodiment in the conception of linear time, eventually calling for a ‘fatal’ university instead.