Introduction: Memorial to Drucilla Cornell (1950–2022)

Abstract

This is the introduction to the collection of memorial papers for Drucilla Cornell.

Convention dictates a certain formality in academic memorializing. When reading a tribute to a departed colleague, we are likely to find a narrative organized around the highlights in the life of a professional scholar: her education, her tenured posts, her published books, and so on. But, as the contributions to this memorial issue attest, Drucilla Cornell was no conventional academic. Of course, no person’s life can really be captured by such an inventory of professional highlights; however, readers who knew Drucilla personally will know that these sorts of ‘highlights’ mattered to her less than to most. Quite frankly, they were some of the least important things to her. Drucilla was, after all, a militantly anti-elitist and anti-hierarchical woman whose entire life was devoted to defying conventions, to turning limits from barriers into thresholds where other ways of thinking and being might be possible.

To introduce our memorial issue to Drucilla, then, we wish to pay tribute to her life by remarking on some of the things that would never find their way into a conventional academic memorial, things that Drucilla herself often identified as the highlights of her life’s work. She would want us to begin by stressing that she was never formally trained as an academic, completing her undergraduate degree in mathematics by correspondence after being expelled from Stanford for breaking windows during a campus anti-war protest and then being trained as a union lawyer. She would want us to mention that she considered her first academic job her stint as a telephone operator at Columbia University, a job from which she was fired for union organizing in a labour dispute that went all the way to the Supreme Court. She would want it noted that her first tenure-track job came as part of an affirmative action mandate at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and that she was later denied tenure for being too radical by a committee that included Elizabeth Warren.

While famous for her technical interventions into feminist legal theory, she was proudest of the fact that when she decided to wade into the vitriolic feminist debates over pornography (in The Imaginary Domain) she went and found a porn actress who told her that if she really wanted to develop a feminist approach to porn then she should accompany the actress as they went to a porn set that refused to use condoms and smashed the windows to disrupt the shoot. (Broken windows seem to be a recurring theme in Drucilla’s life; these are not the only two examples.) Famous, likewise, for her novel contributions to deconstructive theory, she was prouder of the fact that she told her friend Jacques (Derrida) that there is no way he could call the conference at Cardozo, at which he was to make his first major statement about law and justice, ‘Deconstruction and the Impossibility of Justice’ (for Drucilla, deconstruction was always a philosophy of possibility), and that she boldly renamed his thought ‘the philosophy of the limit’ because she thought ‘deconstruction’ sounded too negative.

Drucilla would certainly want us to note the highlights of her two decades of work in South Africa, a place she first went to give a series of prestigious lectures and became enraptured with the burning issues of law and justice being raised in the wake of the revolutionary overthrow of the apartheid government. Returning shortly thereafter as a visiting professor, she became interested in the African philosophy of ubuntu and, when the white professors told her that it was not real philosophy, she recruited three Black employees from a local coffee shop to take her into the townships and teach her. This ad hoc research group became the Ubuntu Project, which over the next 20 years, worked closely with the justices on the Constitutional Court to establish ubuntu as a justiciable principle in the post-apartheid dispensation.

Drucilla summed up her entire approach to philosophy as ‘thinking like an activist’, which was to be the title of a memoir that she, sadly, did not live to write. In this respect, one of the most remarkable aspects of her life as a professional academic was the collaborative way in which she worked. For her, thinking and writing were never activities of the solitary mind. From beginning to end, her bibliography is full of co-authored books and articles, with the works she wrote with students being among her most prized. But perhaps the authorial achievement of which she was proudest was her work as a playwright. Her adaptation of Finnegan’s Wake is still presented on Bloomsday by a feminist troupe in Dublin.

The reflections and tributes gathered together for this special section are by close friends, associates, ex-students, co-authors, and fellow intellectual travellers in the academy, and were originally delivered variously at memorial sessions during 2023 and 2024 at the Modern Language Association, the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, and the Cardozo School of Law. Their tenor is variegated, both personal and intellectual, as befits Drucilla, whose commitment to friendship, sociality, and political struggle was never at any distance from her academic engagements. Taken together, they testify to the range of Drucilla’s thought and to the range of ways she impacted the lives of her students, colleagues, and friends – an extraordinary range, in both respects. And one that is especially impervious to memorialization by way of conventional academic achievements.

At the time of her passing in December 2022, just two months after publishing her 15th and final monograph (Today’s Struggles, Tomorrow’s Revolutions), she held the title of Professor Extraordinaire in the School of Law at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. Of the many professional titles she held throughout her career, this is probably the only one truly befitting of this extraordinary woman, who Cornel West once described as ‘the last grand critical theorist of our time’.