* SEND-OFF

Derrida, when speaking about “sendoffs” in Eyes of the University, thinks through the scheme of destination as rhythms, accents, phases, “points of pause” named as, “those signs destined less to mark the measure than to suspend it on a note whose duration may vary.” In a precursory paper to “Sendoffs” delivered at Cornell University in 1983, Derrida speaks of a “double gesture” similar to the paradox in “Sendoffs”, which asks us to act “as if” no object of study is out of the question, is ‘off limits’ so to speak, which Derrida suggests transforms the contract itself into a pretence for the regulating idea of the university:

There is a double gesture here, a double postulation: to ensure professional competence and the most serious tradition of the university even while going as far as possible, theoretically and practically, in the most directly underground thinking about the abyss beneath the university.

This double gesture both opens the university to the outside, “the bottomless” depths of what is not yet ‘knowledge’, and in doing so closes the university in on itself as it strives for “still not legitimated path-breakings” that attempt to situate what is “unsituatable.” Derrida refers here to Cornell’s landscape, famously built high along the rim of several deep gorges. Cornell University is: “the campus on the heights, the bridges, and if necessary the barriers above the abyss – and the abyss itself.” (In noting the barriers on campus, Derrida also refers to suicide, a myth that persists at Cornell to this day, especially around exam time, when the temptation to jump into the gorge, and into the vast unknown, is all the more real). We base our grounds for our research upon a gorge; “—by which we mean on a grounds, whose own grounding remains invisible and unthought.” (Sarah Pierce, 2010)