Читать книгу Deconstruction Is/In America - Anselm Haverkamp - Страница 11

Forgive me for thanking you in my language. I am very grateful to you, in the first place, for allowing the foreigner here at New York University—and this is hospitality itself, with which you are unstinting—to thank you in his language. To thank you all, and especially the two friends and colleagues who had the fortunate idea of this colloquium, Tom Bishop and Anselm Haverkamp.

I thank them in my name, of course, since they have done me the honor of confiding this perilous task to me: to address to the experts and the redoubtable readers that you are, a key word, a keynote, at the halfway point, right in the middle of the colloquium, at the very time when the colloquium seems to pivot on itself. Like time, like deconstruction perhaps, like a door on its hinges, our colloquium would turn in this way, and folding back on itself, it would also bend to and obey itself, without the least certainty.

As for deconstruction, it has never been at peace with its hinges—which is perhaps its way of tirelessly reminding us 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 that separates present speech from this event which, in spite of or because of all that destines it to repetition, plays an inaugural, founding, or instituting role in the story. No one can agree about the time of mourning, which is finally the true subject of the play. It is just now, upon rereading the play recently, that I have noticed this, so late, too late, as if by countretemps. Hamlet in fact haunts the book I have just written, Specters of Marx. The phrase “The time is out of joint” is cited, recited, analyzed, and also loved there like an obsession. And yet, after the fact, I read it today differently. Here then is a contretemps, one more contretemps in contretemps itself. Until today, I had not noticed what, lying inhumed in “The time is out of joint”, in the subterranean strata of the text, could also resonate secretly with that essential pathology of mourning. I have become aware of it too late; it is too late, for Specters of Marx, where mourning, the dis- or anachrony of mourning is in some way the very subject. This tragedy of dating has become apparent to me today, too late. But this contretemps is a contretemps within the contretemps because it is a question of a contretemps on the subject of an utterance that says the contretemps. Repetition, the law of iterability, is still the law of differance here. This is not the first time I have given myself over to the Shakespearian contretemps. A few years ago, after an unforgettable trip to Verona, I wrote an essay on Romeo and Juliet, “Aphorism Countertime.” Like Specters of Marx, it crossed the themes of anachrony, mourning, haunting, oath, survival, and the name—which in the that instance as well is the name of the father (Juliet:—“ ‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy … O! be some other name./What’s in a name? … Deny thy father, and refuse thy name … Romeo, doff thy name”). To analyze “the fatedness of a date and a rendezvous” and the “traps in contretemps,” I then tried to demonstrate in what way “dates, timetables, property registers, place-names, all the codes that we cast like nets over time and space—in order to reduce or master differences, to arrest them, determine them—these are also contretemps-traps.” And so as to clarify this question of time, of the being of time, of what then is, in its impossible present, time itself, I continued: “Intended to avoid contretemps, to be in harmony with our rhythms by bending them to objective measurement, they produce misunderstanding, they accumulate the opportunities for false steps or wrong moves, revealing and simultaneously increasing this anachrony of desires: in the same time. What is this time?”¹

A delirium of the date thus confers on the incredible sentence “The time is out of joint” more than one supplementary meaning, to be sure, but at the same time, just as many more madnesses. At the same time. At once [Sur l’heure]. As if there were a dead time in the hour itself.

Everything in fact begins, in Hamlet, with the dead time of this “dead hour,” at the moment when, in an already repetitive fashion, the specter arrives by returning. At the first hour of the play, the first time already marks a second time (Act I, sc.i, Marcellus: “Thus twice before, and jump at this dead hour,/ With martial stalk hath he gone by our watch”). The vigilance of the watching guard, the very watch of consciousness, is also a maddened watch or timepiece that, turning on itself, does not know how to guard or regard the hour of this “dead hour.” It is delivered over to another time for which the timeclock and the calendar no longer are the law. They no longer are the law or they are not yet the law. Dates have come unhinged.

Then there’s Claudius who wants to have done with mourning, without delay, so he begins by encouraging himself to cut short this time of mourning and to take advantage of time: “Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother’s death/The memory be green, and that it us befitted/To bear our hearts in grief, and our whole kingdom/To be contracted in one brow of woe,/Yet so far hath discretion fought with nature/That we with wisest sorrow think on him/Together with remembrance of ourselves.” Soon, in the same speech he uses words that announce Hamlet’s sentence, “The time is out of joint.” He speaks at this point of the State, such as it appears in the dreamy eyes or the wild imagination of the son of Fortinbras, the one who will, let us not forget, end up on the throne. The King pretends to thank his guests: “For all, our thanks,/ Now follows that you know young Fortinbras,/ Holding a weak supposal of our worth,/ Or thinking by our late dear brother’s death/ Our state to be disjoint and out of frame,/ Col-leaguèd with this dream of his advantage,/ He hath not failed to pester us with message . . .” (Act I, sc.ii; emphasis added).

A little later, the King, once again, encourages Laertes to take his time, to appropriate it (“time be thine”), to use the seal of his father, Polonius, and with the authorization thus obtained, to go away (the time it takes, his time—in fact in the logic and the chronology of the play, all the time it will take for his father to die in his turn by Hamlet’s hand, and so forth): “Take thy fair hour, Laertes. Time be thine,/ And thy best graces spend it at thy will./ But now, my cousin Hamlet, and my son . . .” (ibid.).

After which, turning to the one who refuses the name of son, he exhorts Hamlet to count the days, to cut short the time of mourning, to measure it in a measured fashion, “for some term,” to put a term to it; a term, that is, at once the engagement, the terms of a mourning contract, so to speak, and the limit, the boundary, the endpoint, or the moderation that is appropriate. One must, he tells him in effect, know how to put an end to mourning. This presumes (but this is one of the enigmas of the play, as it is of mourning) that mourning depends on us, in us, and not on the other in us. It presumes above all a knowledge, the knowledge of the date. One must indeed know when: at what instant mourning began. One must indeed know at what moment death took place, really took place, and this is always the moment of a murder. But Hamlet, and everyone in Hamlet, seems to be wandering around in confusion on this subject. Now, when and if one does not know when an event took place, one has to wonder if it indeed took place, or in any case if it took place in “material reality” as Freud might have said, and not only in the fabric of some “psychic reality,” in phantasm or delirium. A date, which is to say, the objectivity of a presumed reference, stands precisely at the joining of the “material” and the “psychic.”

To carry mourning beyond its “normal” term is no longer the gesture of a son, says the King to Hamlet; and it is even “unmanly,” thus perhaps inhuman, he suggests, not realizing that he has just said very well that the question of mourning, which is the very heart of any deconstruction, carries beyond the human (or the viril) the only possibility of interrogating the human (or the viril) as such:

King: ’Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet,

To give these mourning duties to your father,

But you must know your father lost a father,

That father lost, lost his, and the survivor bound

In filial obligation for some term

To do obsequious sorrow. But to persever

In obstinate condolement is a course

Of impious stubbornness. ’Tis unmanly grief. . . .

. . . ’tis a fault to heaven,

A fault against the dead, a fault to nature,

To reason most absurd, whose common theme

Is death of fathers, and who still hath cried,

From the first corse till he that died today,

“This must be so.” We pray you throw to earth

This unprevailing woe, and think of us

As of a father . . .

(Act I, sc. ii)

Exhorting him to put a term to his grief, to comprehend his mourning, to comprehend it between two dates, the beginning and the end, the King proposes to Hamlet, with the same gesture, to replace his father. He confirms thereby that if, according to the common prejudice and one which Freud (the Freud of The Rat Man) did not escape, a mother is, by universal testimony, naturally irreplaceable, the father, on the other hand, remains that “legal fiction” that Stephen talks about in Ulysses, not far from a meditation on Hamlet. A legal fiction, yes, especially when a father is the father in the figure of the king. For one of the king’s “two bodies” can always, by definition, be replaced.

It seems then all the easier to put a term to mourning: everything happens as if the father were not dead, as if the murder had not taken place, as if it were impossible to testify to it and to assign it a date. Since, Claudius says, the “death of fathers” is a “common theme” of reason, a father who always dies never dies, he is replaced on the very date on which he dies. If this death is always a murder, there is always someone—and occasionally it is the murderer—to offer his paternity to the orphan. A priori, always and without delay, on the very date of a death concerning which one immediately wonders if it took place, someone comes to say to the orphan: “I am your true father, be my son.”

Now, you will have noticed, in the same scene, what cannot be a chronological coincidence: Remaining alone on stage after having heard his uncle-King, which is to say from now on his stepfather, or as one says in French his beau-père, his legal father, his father according to the law (or his father-in-law), Hamlet seems no longer to know when his father died. On what date? Since when? The confusion seems to cause his memory to go astray. Since when is he in mourning? Two months or one month? “That it should come to this:/But two months dead, nay, not so much, not two ...” And less than ten lines later he says “and yet within a month—/Let me not think on’t; frailty, thy name is woman—. . . O god, a beast that wants discourse of reason/Would have mourned longer—married with my uncle,/My father’s brother, but no more like my father/Than I to Hercules. Within a month ...”

When he accuses his mother of not respecting the terms, the dates, and the time of mourning, he returns the accusation of inhumanity. The King his stepfather had said to him: to maintain mourning beyond the normal time, beyond the term appropriate to human mourning, is inhuman, it is a crime against the dead and against reason. Hamlet, for his part, accuses the woman, the mother, he accuses feminine-maternal frailty of giving itself up to the replaceability of a surrogate mother, there where the father is irreplaceable, and of conducting itself like a beast, that is, in an inhuman fashion. Mourning is human, only beasts do not wear mourning and know nothing of dates. And the rationalism of the reasonable, the invocation of reason, of the “discourse of reason,” is also on the side of this inhuman bestiality; it is a strategy of rationalization destined to serve and to hide the interests of a crime.

Time passes. As time passes, time passes. Instead of taking place, it disappears, it ceases to take place. It mourns itself. Instead of stretching out, instead of growing larger, it shrinks, it recalls mourning to the chronological paradox of its economy. The two months, then the month, the less than a month of the “within a month,” and then without delay they will become hours, less than two hours—”within two hours”—or else “twice two months” depending on the place mourning assigns to one or to the other, Hamlet or Ophelia. We say that this happens “without delay”; we could say the opposite: it will “delay,” but without delay, because the more it delays, the less time is long, thus the less it delays. It is a matter of thinking what “delay” means and of putting this delay in relation to the time of mourning (is there a time that is not a time of mourning?) and to the time of mourning as messianic time of imminence. Here the term of mourning gives the measure. But it is the impossible measure of time. And thus the impossibility of an objective and stable reference to the violence of the founding event—which always has something to do with a phantasm. To have said “two months,” then twice “within a month,” in a play whose chronology is so difficult to follow and whose calendar so difficult to reconstitute (the play’s action stretches over several months), will not in fact prevent Hamlet from reducing, much later (Act III, sc. ii) the months into hours. But one does not know then, no more than ever, if for the time being he is speaking figuratively, if he is truly raving or if he is playing at madness in order to outmaneuver his partners, fool everybody, and put the event back on stage, by organizing the theatrical repetition in which it already consists, with the sole aim of ensnaring the criminal, trapping him, catching him with his symptom (“The play’s the thing/Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king . . .”). To Ophelia, after having pretended to want to put Hamlet’s head between her legs, as if to mimic penetration or birth—which would have made of his beloved his surrogate mother, his replacement mother, his virgin mother—to Ophelia who says to him “You are merry, my lord,” Hamlet responds as if he were looking at his watch. And naming survival (“outlive”), he counts the hours: “What should a man do but be merry? For look you how cheerfully my mother looks, and my father died within’s two hours. Ophelia: Nay, ’tis twice two months, my lord. Hamlet: So long? Nay, then, let the devil wear black, for I’ll have a suit of sables. O heavens! Die two months ago, and not forgotten yet? Then there’s hope a great man’s memory may outlive his life half a year. But, by’r Lady, he must build churches then . . .”