Vincennes: Heurs et malheurs de l’université de tous les possibles By François Dosse

Gilles Deleuze arriving to a packed classroom every Tuesday morning, with careful notes he never looks at, to work through the development of an idea, and at the height of that effort comes a moment, a few seconds, of collective suspense, where everyone holds their breath, the transmission, not just of knowledge, but of thought. Yves Lacoste publishing La Géographie ça sert d’abord à faire la guerre, reinventing a discipline, in a Geography Department where students are taken on field trips to Larzac to work out what land should be purchased to hinder the extension of the military camp, learning to choose to be at the heart of a social struggle. Consider that many of both Deleuze’s and Lacoste’s students never finished secondary school, are part-time students working full-time jobs, have fled the world’s various oppressive regimes and been accepted to study here, or are single mothers only able to attend because this university, exceptionally, has a working crèche, and you have something of the spirit of l’Université de Vincennes. You also have some sense of why the Minister for Universities under Giscard-d’Estaing, Alice Saunier-Seïté, hated everything the place stood for and literally razed it to the ground over the course of one night, and even re-landscaped the place where the university had been, so that no trace would remain of a dangerous enemy.