Deconstruction Is/In America. Anselm Haverkamp

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СКАЧАТЬ of disjointment itself, the possibility of any disjunction. Since I am speaking in my language, I underscore here that “disjoncter,” in a kind of modern slang, can also mean “délirer,” to become mad or deranged. Whether Hamlet played or lived his madness, whether he was able to mimic it only in order to think it (in view of thinking it and because already he thought of himself on the basis of madness), the one who said “The time is out of joint” knew in any case, as nearly as possible, what “disjoncter” means. What happens if time is mad? And what if what time gives is first of all the measurelessness of all madness?

      To be hors de ses gonds, off one’s hinges, may be translated by “out of joint.” “The time is out of joint”: this is the mad thinking that I will often speak about this evening.

      I ought to begin by rereading a passage that you all know by heart:

      Hamlet: .... Swear

      Ghost [beneath]: Swear

      [They swear]

      Hamlet: Rest, rest perturbed Spirit! So Gentlemen,

      With all my love I do commend me to you;

      And what so poor a man as Hamlet is

      Do t’express his love and friending to you,

      God willing, shall not lack: Let us go in together,

      And still your fingers on your lips, I pray.

      The time is out of joint: Oh cursed spight,

      That ever I was born to set it right.

      Nay, come, let’s go together. [Exeunt]

      I thank you thus in my name—I insist on this point—and not at all in the name of some entity nicknamed “Deconstruction.” I have never claimed to identify myself with what may be designated by this name. It has always seemed strange to me, it has always left me cold. Moreover, I have never stopped having doubts about the very identity of what is referred to by such a nickname. Finally, and especially, presuming that it exists and that it can be identified, there is no way one can give thanks in its name since deconstruction will always maintain a relation that is as enigmatic as it is disjointed to gratitude, more precisely, to commerce, to the market, and to the thankfulness of thanking. On the one hand, it is the most thankless thing in the world, a kind of ethics of ingratitude (elsewhere and at length, I have tried to justify this, if one may still say that), a practice of implacable ingratitude, without thanks, sans merci. Deconstruction is merciless. On the other hand, as a thinking of the gift, of a gift beyond the debt and a justice beyond the law, deconstruction should, on the contrary, be devoted to grace and gratitude, thus to a gratitude without thanks, without exchange or, if you prefer, according to an exchange that carries beyond exchange. It should be only at the moment—and on the condition—of opening itself to the possibility of the gift, as to a kind of ecstatic and boundless caress of mute gratitude. It learns only by receiving/It teaches only to receive [Elle n’apprend qu’à recevoir]. It cultivates the experience that consists in receiving from the other the very thing that it can never be a question of restituting and inscribing in the commerce of thanks or the market of commodities.

      Enough on the thanks and the thanksgiving of deconstruction.

      Now, after the merciless gift, the request for forgiveness. Yes, forgive me if I severely limit my remarks this evening to the risky interpretation of a single word.

      A very little word, the minuscule coupling of two letters, a copula or copule, a minuscopule.

      I am, therefore, speaking my language, as if I had already, on the eve of my coming departure, left to return to France. And yet the two chosen letters will be those of an English word, of a verb in truth. Politeness requires, as does hospitality, that English be the chosen language of this verb.

      Such a password might pass unnoticed because it is so common. It belongs to the most common language and it is common to two little phrases that seem to turn on it as on a hinge. What is this word? It is “is.” Here it is:

      “The time is out of joint” says Hamlet and, to cite the title of our colloquium,

      “Deconstruction is/in America.”

      How is one to understand this copula? Does the “is” have the same meaning? Does it perform the same function, or rather the same dysfunctioning, in both propositions? Why should we cross these two quotations—because they are both quotations—at the disjointed juncture, at the crossroads or the crossing of this little “is”? Should we also inscribe it under some erasure in the form of a cross?

      These are, we were saying, two quotations. Two quotations in English. And doubtless there were those who were surprised to see me announce with an English title a lecture concerning which it was made clear, at my request, that it would be given in my language, French. This was not done to be intriguing; nor was it done out of playfulness, nor out of courtesy. Why then?

      First of all, in order to signal that if there is a problem around “Deconstruction in America,” or “Deconstruction being America, as America, or in America,” it is an adventure of translation, at the very least it is a history from which one cannot efface the singular experience of translation and transference. Let us understand these words in all their senses and all their dimensions, which are not only linguistic. At stake is presence and event: of what comes to pass or what takes place.

      (I have often had occasion to define deconstruction as that which is—far from a theory, a school, a method, even a discourse, still less a technique that can be appropriated—at bottom what happens or comes to pass [ce qui arrive]. It remains then to situate, localize, determine what happens with what happens, when it happens. To date it. Has deconstruction happened? Has it arrived? Of course it has, if you like, but then, if it has, so many questions arise: How? Where? When? On what date exactly? Was it so long ago, already? Or perhaps not yet? Supposing that deconstruction has a shibboleth, I remind you that the question of the date is inseparable from it and that the link between shibboleth and date is an insistent theme of what is called deconstructive readings, one of the most apparent themes of deconstruction.)

      Now, Hamlet is mad about dates. His phrase (“The time is out of joint”) does not betray only the symptomatic anxiety of someone whose memory is suffering. His memory is suffering in fact from a death, and a death is never natural. His memory is suffering from the death of a king, a father, and a homonym, but it is suffering first of all and by that very token, as memory, from amnesia, from an amnesia that is not natural either. It is suffering because it cannot remember, thus because it cannot think the event of this so unnatural death, because it is not a memory that is sure of being able to situate, date, determine, objectify the event that the son must account for and to which he must render accounts in rendering justice, in making justice of a crime, through the vengeance and punishment to which he has committed himself with an oath. That the event has taken place and that he remembers it, that it concerns the violent death of his father, that there seems to be unimpeachable testimony in this regard, all of this does not rule out madness. This structuring event may still belong to what Freud called “psychic reality,” as opposed to “material reality”; it may still testify to the phantasmatic dimension of a repetition en abîme, of the theater within the theater that is reflected in the heart of the play.

The proof? The proof that “the time is out of joint”? One proof at least? Well, no one can agree about the time, about the date of the King’s death, and about the time СКАЧАТЬ