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On page 18 of Derrida's brilliant "Future of the Profession" in this volume is a dig at Cultural Studies: "These Humanities to come will cross disciplinary borders without dissolving the specificity of each discipline into what is called, often in a very confused way, interdisciplinarity, or into what is lumped with another good-for-everything concept, "cultural studies." "This is now a common gesture among serious deconstructive Europeanist Comparative Literature academics. I think it might be more advisable to try to mend Cultural Studies than to think that a better model of interdisciplinarity will spring up in the general field called Humanities at the U.S. university. The U.S. university was of course originally based on a European model, but now it has developed distinct twists and turns, which are in turn copied by the Europeans. In the United States, Humanities are literature and philosophy. History is institutionally a 'social science" Philosophy is not noticeably an interdisciplinarity subject. And it is in literature departments that the suspect interdisciplinarity of Cultural Studies finds a home. If by Humanities is meant the French Human Sciences—Anthro, Poli Sci, History—and this French conception provides the model for 'specificity of disciplinary borders," which Derrida wants to maintain, then Cultural Studies, properly reconceived, brings something to the table.

DOI: 10.1057/9781403980649_10

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