Altering the Material Conditions of Access to the Humanities

Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) This chapter enters this book through a side door, parenthetically left ajar by Derrida in his contribution to this collection – “(Although I must leave this aside…) ” – as if space and time did not permit him to open the issue more than a crack, even as he names it, “one of the most serious questions that is posed, and posed here, between the university and the politico-economic outside of its public space ” (p. 234). This questionable space is, for Derrida, “the marketplace in publishing and the role it plays in archivisation, evaluation, legitimation of academic research,” and it lies for him, in this case at least, entirely within closed brackets (pp. 234-5). Here, it will be otherwise. The main and open body of this chapter is concerned with the rude mechanics and marketplace of journal publishing, as a prominent channel of production in the scholarly mills of academic work. It is about current efforts “to find the best access to a new public space, ” as Derrida puts it just prior to his parenthetically setting this question aside, as that public space is “transformed by new techniques of communication, information, and archivisation and knowledge production ” (p. 234). This chapter supplements Derrida’s aside. It appends a means of finding at least a better, if not the best, form of access to a new public space, in the name of a Humanities unconditional in its resistance and persistence. It is concerned with improving one aspect in the material conditions of access to the work of the university, for those conditions determine the relation that Derrida asks us to consider, between university and politico-economic world.1 That aspect is access to scholarly journals. For his part, Derrida has 1 Marx: “My inquiry led me to the conclusion that neither legal relations nor political forms could be comprehended whether by themselves or on the basis of a so-called general development of the human mind, but that on th