Speaker: Erin Graff Zivin, University of Southern California
 
“If we could say we […],” writes Jacques Derrida, “we might perhaps ask ourselves: where are we? And who are we in the university where apparently we are? What do we represent? Whom do we represent? Are we responsible? For what and to whom?” (3).  These are the words that open “Mochlos; or, The Conflict of the Faculties,” a lecture delivered on April 17, 1980, on the occasion of the centenary of the founding of the Graduate School of Columbia University. Is it possible to ask today, in 2017, after a new type of university responsibility?  “Towards a Passive University” argues in favor of a university (un)grounded in interdisciplinary and indisciplinary exposure, a task that would at once expose the wounded quality of political sovereignty as well as the sovereignty of disciplines themselves.  After reviewing the concepts of responsibility, passivity, sovereignty, and decision in Kant, Levinas, and Derrida, we consider the possibility of exposure—between genres, subjects, disciplines—through a close reading of two recent works of fiction by Argentinian writer César Aira. 
 
Professor Erin Graff Zivin is author of Figurative Inquisitions: Conversion, Torture, and Truth in the Luso-Hispanic Atlantic (Northwestern UP, 2014, winner of the 2015 Award for Best Book, Latin American Jewish Studies Association)—translated into Spanish and published in 2017 by Ediciones La Cebra in Buenos Aires—and The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary (Duke UP, 2008), and the editor of The Ethics of Latin American Literary Criticism: Reading Otherwise (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and The Marrano Specter: Derrida and Hispanism (Fordham UP, forthcoming 2017). Currently, she is completing a book-length manuscript tentatively entitled “Anarchaeologies: Ethical and Political Thinking after Literature.”