Autumn 1999
Volume 26, Number 1

The crucial issue in all of this is that of address. Seemingly knowing about where hyperbole begins and ends and about how to write nonhyperbolically, LaCapra's essay also seems to know to whom it is speaking. What The University in Ruins enacts above all, perhaps, is a sense that it does not, cannot, indeed must not know to whom it is addressed. This is not a merely "stylistic" question but is integral to the way in which Readings conceives of knowledge, teaching, and thinking. In this respect Readings's book is exploring what Peggy Kamuf has more recently referred to, in an astute reading of the concept of the public in relation to the university, as "the absence of any figure who can stand in for the final destination of public discourse."13The University in Ruins explores this disconcerting logic on numerous fronts, but two examples may here suffice. First, as regards the concepts of nation, national identity, and nationalism: LaCapra accuses Readings's book of oversimplifying matters. He does not think the nation-state is "as evacuated or obsolete as Readings believes" (p. 39). In foregrounding this allegedly hyperbolic aspect of Readings's account, LaCapra understates the kernel of what The University in Ruins is getting at, namely that "real responsibility, ethical probity, is simply not commensurate with the grand narrative of nationalism that has up to now underpinned accounts of the social action of University research and teaching" (UR, p. 192). The University in Ruins is not only addressed to U.S. academics; it is engaged, in its "own voice," with what exceeds and dislocates such nation-centered and identitarian thinking. LaCapra's essay, by contrast, is insidiously but pervasively U.S.-centered. His account ends up tacitly U.S.-focused even as it raises and supposedly wants to keep open the issue of nationalism and/in the university. The fact that his remarks are addressed to the idea of "occupational preprofessionalism, academic preprofessionalism, and the specialization in generalities" specifically in the context of the United States is not itself made plain, let alone opened to critical reflection (pp. 53-54). In a bland tone of intra-U.S. collegiality, LaCapra's essay concludes by affirming "a certain idea of the university as a locus of discussion and debate" while in the process appropriating Readings's work as that of fellow critical intellectual citizen (p. 54). Readings's book, however, is not commensurable with this account.