For several centuries now the West has lived under the illusion that critique was a human right, that it was alright to exercise it, that it was the very foundation of the life of the mind.  But the present clusterfuck may be bringing that illusion to an end.  “This university will not protect you:” that has become an insistent mantra that we hear from administrators supposed to be in the know.  If you screw it up, you are done.  And it is on you.  It was bad enough to be subjected to the rigors of cancel culture from the left, which turned all of us into members of a negative community, understood as a community from which you did not want to be excluded even if you thought that inclusion was inane.  Now the stakes have gone up and the risk of condemnation to social death has skyrocketed.  Critique is now subversive, and it can always be condemned as terrorist.  I am not sure how those same administrators understand the task of teaching nowadays, but I tend to believe that teaching and publicity and propaganda serving the interests of the status quo have now become the same thing, at least tendentially.  If you step out of that box, you run the risk that some student will complain to a state senator that you are disagreeing with the religion of a number of them, and then you are done for. 

                  Jean Vioulac’s La logique totalitaire includes a footnote in pages 494-95 that deserves a comment.   Vioulac quotes a fellow named Laurence Parisot, the spokesman from some corporate association, saying: “life, health, love are precarious, why would work escape that very law?”  Indeed.  Post-tenure review was bad enough.  Now the very possibility of ever being hired, particularly if you were born elsewhere, is questionable.  Vioulac defines terror in that footnote as “the exercise of the power of the Universal over the particular—a power that wants to abolish particularity.”  It is only a partial definition, surely, but it suffices to make us realize that any form of critical singularity makes us automatic suspects insofar as we become inadequate to the Universal.  And the suspect is eminently precarious and must spend her or his life in a precarious condition.  Critics have become losers and losers are doomed to depression: “depression is the subjective experience proper to an individual who does not judge itself in relation to the law, in terms of a fault, but in relation to the norm, in terms of insufficiency.  If political terror gives the individual the status of a suspect, threatens her or him with execution, and dissolves the very interiority of the subject through the fear of death, economic terror gives the individual a status of precarity, threatens her or him constantly with exclusion and dissolves the interiority of the subject through depression—an insidious and diffuse form of terror, a low-intensity terror nevertheless, whose efficacity hangs on norms disseminated through the entire social body.”  But what are the norms?  We cannot make them explicit.  Precariousness rises because we can no longer be sure about what it is that we can or cannot say in our classrooms.  Religion will not help.  And university discourse, long viewed as a form of conformity, as a form of non-thought despite its pretensions, has all of a sudden also failed us.  “This university will not protect you,” do not forget it.