Non-Modern Crisis of the Modern University

Willy Thayer is a professor of philosophy at Universidad Metropolitana de Ciencias de la EducaciÓn in Santiago, where he founded the Program in Critical Thought and directs Ediciones Macul. His many books include Tecnologias de la crÍtica (2009; translated as Technologies of Critique in 2020). D. Bret Leraul is an assistant professor of comparative humanities and affiliate faculty in Latin American studies at Bucknell University.

• Untimely, Uneven, Combined: Translator’s Introduction I. The Non-Modern Crisis of the Modern University 1. A Few Things that Must Be Stated 2. From the Epic to Kitsch, From Enthusiasm to Boredom 3. “Our” Actual Faculties of Philosophy II. University, Universality, and Languages 4. Trascendens, the Medieval University, and the Missionary Structure of the University (A Sketch)  5. The Modern Franco-Cartesian-Napoleanic-Comtean University 6. The University of Berlin: The Modern, Philosophical, German University  7. Kant’s Architectonics  8. Nietzsche: From the Faculty of Philosophy to the Faculty of Genealogy III. The Non-Modern Transition of the Modern University  9.  Transition from State to Market 10. The Categorial Crisis of the University  IV. Pinochet’s Signature  Epilogue to the Second Edition NotesBibliography

“Originally published in the wake of Chile’s brutal dictatorship and during the questionable transition to democracy, this deft translation of Thayer’s work for a new reading public is unexpectedly timely. The university is (again, still) in crisis, and we in the so-called Global North need to read and listen to our colleagues in the Global South, whose geopolitical realities often anticipate fissures that may have been latent or eclipsed but that are exerting ever more pressure as they come to the surface."—Erin Graff Zivin, author of Anarchaeologies: Reading as Misreading“Willy Thayer turns the Kantian project against itself, showing that the epochal crisis of the contemporary university happens through the terminal deployment of its hidden logic, not through its interruption.”—Alberto Moreiras, Texas AM University, author of The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies