Who Gets a Hearing? Academic Freedom and Critique in Derrida’s Reading of Kant

Abstract

Today’s debates about academic freedom in the US and the UK often echo arguments and counterarguments made by Immanuel Kant and the sovereign who censored him around the time when the modern Humboldtian university would be founded on the twin principles of critique and institutional autonomy. This article considers the limits of the criticist account by reading Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive engagement with Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties in the context of recent legislative developments and political interference which imperil these foundations. To do so, it makes a turn to the ear and to the multiple senses of ‘hearing’ as auditory perception, responsiveness and judgement to explore an alternative basis for defending academic freedom that radicalizes Kant’s position and liberates scholarly inquiry from its closures.