Beyond the Institutional Shell. An Archaeology of the University as a Form of Life

The university has been under critical scrutiny from its intellectual offspring starting with Kant and continuing on with H. Giroux’s criticism of the contemporary neoliberal university. But, how do we know that Kant, Lyotard, or Giroux were speaking of the same thing? “University” means different things throughout the ages because of the changes in institutional form. My aim is to challenge the prevailing idea of the university as institution and propose an alternative: the university as a form of life upon which institutional structures are added historically. This approach uses Agamben’s definition of the form-of-life as that life which cannot be separated from its form, thus becoming ungovernable, removed from the sovereign’s power to decide over the bare-life of its subjects. For Agamben forms-of-life are always public, community based, and involve some sort of intellectual operations. Could we then re-conceptualise the university as a form-of-life? I will try to show in what ways an affirmative answer makes sense by describing first the specific university operations (such as gatherings around the text and thinking collectively as enacted in the lecture and the seminar), and secondly by relating these operations to the specific features of the form-of-life as described by Agamben.status: publishe