Deconstruction Is/In America. Anselm Haverkamp

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ doing that, and doing it methodically, it would be a matter for deconstruction of measuring itself against the historical experience—and this is history itself—against the experience of that which in the “is,” in time or in the present time of the “is,” remains precisely “out of joint.”

      I will come back to this later while insisting on what Hamlet says to me today in America when he pronounces in English “The time is out of joint.” And I will say why I cannot separate this extraordinary sentence from the one that, modestly, is murmuring, far from the stage and the theater: “Deconstruction is/in America.”

      Concerning this latter sentence, one of the two quotations therefore, forgive me if I recall, still in a preliminary fashion, that I in fact pronounced it but without assuming it, without subscribing to it, without ever believing it. It was in 1984; in America, at the University of California, Irvine, where I had not yet begun to teach regularly. At that time, and for some time yet to come, I remained more of an East-coast American since I was teaching every year for several weeks at Yale after having done the same thing at Johns Hopkins. In 1984, then, I had been invited to give the Wellek Lectures at Irvine. David Carroll and Suzanne Gearhart had suggested that I speak—this was ten years ago—on what already for some time had been called “Deconstruction in America.” This was also the title of a book published in 1983 at University of Minnesota Press, The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America. I had explained the reasons—there were four of them—for which I thought I had to renounce, as I must also do this evening, talking about “Deconstruction in America.” I will not recall these reasons because all this has since been published in Mémoires for Paul de Man. But permit me to say, in the most neutral fashion possible, that these reasons seem to me still to withstand all the considerable transformations that have occurred in the last ten years and, however presumptuous this may sound, I would not change a word of what I said then on the subject.

      Having arrived at the fourth of these reasons, I risked putting forth an hypothesis according to which, if it is impossible to talk about deconstruction in America, this is because “America is deconstruction [l’Amérique, mais c’est la déconstruction].”

      I had tried, then, to explain why it was impossible and illegitimate to speak about “Deconstruction in America,” but also and above all that, in marking one of the reasons not to speak about “Deconstruction in America,” the sentence “Deconstruction is America” formulated merely an hypothesis. Better yet, it formulated an hypothesis that I finally relinquished and to which, however seductive it may remain, I would not in any case subscribe.

      This abandoned hypothesis was not merely what I called then a “fiction of truth.” We must recognize in the two open sets, in the “allegorico-metonymical figure” that they describe, the power to dislocate and destabilize the “is” as well as the “in.”

This is what puts into deconstruction the very thing that confers its title on the present conference. The history of deconstruction or the deconstruction of history perhaps roams around the disjointed pivot of this copula “is,” this clause of inclusion “in,” or this conjunction “and” by which one seeks at the same time to couple, enclose, or conjoin a subject and a predicate. For example here,” Deconstruction and (in, is, as) America.”²

      Instead of prolonging these preliminary precautions that could go on infinitely, I am not going to delay jumping to the second quotation, “The time is out of joint.” It will help me to say something about what is happening today, ten years later, for me, for me at least, with deconstruction in America.

      Before making the jump, however, allow me a few steps by way of take-off. Four little steps the last of which will lead me to speak in English.

      1. First step. The first step passes by way of the passage, namely translation. It is not merely for the sake of facility that I decided to speak several languages this evening, yours and mine, and then to announce in Shakespeare’s English that I was going to speak French. I do it for at least three reasons:

      a) Deconstruction, as we know it, will have been first of all a translation or a transference between French and American (which is to say also, as Freud has reminded us about transference, a love story, which never excludes hatred, as we know).

      b) In the passage from Mémoires for Paul de Man that turns around Deconstruction in America, is the only definition that I have ever in my life dared to give of deconstruction: “more than one language” (p. 15). But I insisted then on an obvious point that had to be taken into account: “more than one language” does not constitute a sentence, it is not a proposition of the kind S is P. In the sense in which Austin understands meaning, therefore, this phrase does not have a meaning. It was then necessary for me to underscore that, contrary to what is often thought, deconstruction is not exported from Europe to America. It has in this country several original configurations that in their turn produce singular effects. I said that this American radiation or hegemony must be interrogated, which sometimes means contested, in all its dimensions (political, technical, economic, linguistic, academic, editorial). Deconstruction is often perceived in Europe as an American brand of theorems, a discourse, or a school.

      Is there an irreplaceable place and a proper history for this thing, deconstruction? Is there anything else in it but transference in all the senses this word assumes in more than one language, and first of all in the sense of transference among languages? Allow me once again this quotation: “If I had to risk a single definition of deconstruction, one as brief, elliptical, and economical as a password, I would say simply and without overstatement: plus d’une langue—both more than one language and no more of just one language. In fact it is neither a statement nor a sentence. It is sententious, it makes no sense if, at least as Austin would have it, words in isolation have no meaning. What makes sense is the sentence. How many sentences can be made with ‘deconstruction’?” (ibid; trans, modified).

      2. Second step. This translativity of deconstruction destines it to erring and voyage, which is to say, to a destination and destinerrance. Now, when I discovered with some surprise the title of this colloquium, the title such as is it was chosen not by me but by Tom Bishop and Anselm Haverkamp, I let myself dream about all the readings one could give of it. I read it suddenly as if in a newspaper, a travel diary, or a press release: Hey, deconstruction, on this date, finds itself here these days, it is in America, it landed yesterday at JFK and is just passing through, more or less incognito and for a little while. Today, deconstruction is, happens to be; it turns out that it is in America. Where was it yesterday? Where will it be tomorrow? etc. With that slash in the middle (is/in America) which interrupts the reverie and gives us a start by marking clearly with an implacable injunction that we have to choose: either is or else in.

      Here then again the difference of a single letter, n or s. It marks for us very well, in the first place, that if deconstruction is in America, “in” can indicate inclusion as well as provisional passage, the being-in-transit of the visitor (Deconstruction is just visiting—and from visitation one passes quickly to the visor, to the visor and haunting effect in Hamlet—return to Hamlet’s father.) If, then, Deconstruction is in America, that means also, in the second place, that it is not America. If D is in A, it is not A; if D is A, it is not in, etc. The slash indeed inscribes or incises a disjunction in the copula “is,” in the coupling of the present that interests me here. How can the is itself be disjoined from itself, out of joint?

      When Hamlet says “The time is out of joint,” he says, to be sure, many things (we will come back to that); but he says at least and first of all this, by folding the proposition back on itself in advance: that time itself, the present indicative of the verb to be in the third person singular, the “is” that says what time is, this tense of time is out of joint, itself and by СКАЧАТЬ