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If I chose this title, “The time is out of joint,” would it be merely so as to recall these supplementary disturbances of an abyssal mourning or just to attempt in vain to make up for my own lateness? No, it is also out of fidelity, out of a taste for memory and repetition. In this case I wanted to thematize what may be a traditional gesture of deconstruction, at least the deconstruction that interests me. This gesture would consist in interrogating, so as to put them back into play, titles in general: the title of the title, the justification and authority of the title. And to do so by marking a multi-referentiality, which is to say (forgive me this suitcase word) a differeferentialty [différéférentialité] of the title that is thus suspended. The reference of the title, that to which it refers, the thing in play becomes at once multiple, different, and deferred. Thus for example “The time is out of joint” does not announce only the dislocations, disjunctions, disjoinings, disarticulations, anachronies, contretemps, all the untimeliness that I will be speaking about this evening. In other words, this title does not anounce only the subject or the content, the stakes of this discourse (and this subject is already a certain difference within time, a temporal and temporalizing differance). “Out of joint” also describes in advance what will be the time of these remarks. Disorganization, disarticulation: these are both the thematic stakes and the form of these out-of-joint remarks, the dis-junction at the heart of the “is” that is so poorly defined, and with so much difficulty, by the third person singular present indicative of the verb to be.

Two quotations therefore. Two reported sentences neither of which (because I am quoting them) is, as one says, by me, signed or countersigned by me:

1. “The time is out of joint.”

2. “Deconstruction is/in America.”

I signed neither the one nor the other, that is true, but I have loved both of them. Moreover, one can never love anything other than that: what one cannot sign, he or she in the place of whom one neither can nor wants to sign.

I loved them for a time, and it is about them, which I loved for a time, and which therefore I still love inasmuch as they are not mine, that I would like to talk a little.

What do they have in common, these two beloved sentences? First of all, I have loved them, which at least for me is priceless. This love renders them desirably ineffaceable within me. Next, these two sentences pretend to say what is, what is “is,” only in order to end up also by forcing me to relinquish the “is,” by dis-locating, discrediting, and suspending the very authority of the “is.”

And perhaps deconstruction would consist, if at least it did consist, in precisely that: deconstructing, dislocating, displacing, disarticulating, disjoining, putting “out of joint” the authority of the “is.” Or yet again, rather than doing that, sooner, even before 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 itself out of joint. And the shock waves of such a disjoining doubtless affect the heart of the question “to be or not to be.” The essence of Being is often determined, in a non-fortuitous fashion, as Heidegger often insists, on the basis of the third person singular of the present indicative, so that what happens to “is” happens to the bar that separates to be and/or not to be. There would no longer even be a question without this disjoinng of the “is.”

Perhaps deconstruction has never done anything but interpret this extraordinary phrase of Hamlet’s; to interpret it in the sense in which the hermeneut interprets, interpret it in the sense in which the actor interprets, interpret it in the sense of the play or the performance, interpret it in the sense in which one must still, beyond reading and theater, interpret interpretation.

And if this interpretation is neither America nor in America, not only America nor in America, then what is America today? What is deconstruction doing at this very moment in America? Before outlining a partial and preliminary response to that question, here is a third step.

3. Third step. If the slash between “is” and “in” says in silence something about what “The time is out of joint” may mean, if that is the very affirmation of deconstruction, then the good and the wicked fairies that for more than thirty years have been following its destiny, proliferating teleological verdicts, eschatological prognoses, or organicist diagnoses concerning the birth, growth, health, sickness, and death of deconstruction, all these voluble fairies begin by not knowing what they are talking about. This does not mean that no historian or sociologist of deconstruction ever says anything pertinent. Nor that one has to reduce all their plotted curves to so much silliness—which they are sometimes. It remains necessary, no doubt, to attempt to analyze the becoming, the genesis, and the decline of what is thus reduced to a fashion, a school of thought, an academic current, a theory, or a method. But even there where they do not fall into unfortunate stereotypes, even there where they are more rigorous and more lucid, these historico-sociological analyses encounter several limits: a) They miss the most acute aspect of deconstruction, that which exceeds, in their very deconstructibility, the themes, objects, methods, and especially the axiomatics of this historical or sociological knowledge; b) they already incorporate and import from deconstruction what they attempt to objectify; c) they most often resemble performatives disguised as constatives: they would like to make happen what they claim to describe in all neutrality. For more than twenty-five years, in fact, we have been told that deconstruction is dying or that it is “on the wane.” And in a certain way this is true! Since it has been true from the beginning, and that’s where the question is, since deconstruction begins by being in poor shape (being out of joint) and even by dying, since that is all anyone talks about, one must stop believing that the dead are just the departed and that the departed do nothing. One must stop pretending to know what is meant by “to die” and especially by “dying.” One has, then, to talk about spectrality. You know very well who pronounces the sentence “The time is out of joint”: Hamlet, the heir of a specter concerning which no one knows any longer at what moment and therefore if death has happened to him.

The diagnoses and the prognoses are here at once more true and (as many signs also attest) less true than ever. This implies that the teleological schema (birth, growth, old age, sickness, end or death) can be applied to everything, and to everything about deconstruction, except, in all certitude and in the mode of a determinant knowledge, to that which in it begins by questioning, displacing, and dislocating the machine of this teleology, and thus this opposition between health and sickness, normality and anomaly, life and death.

With that I undertake my fourth step, to say a few words about what is going on in America today. Not about what deconstruction may represent there, here, now, today, but what, far more modestly, I am doing there, myself, or believe I am doing there in this very moment.

To take a shortcut and get very quickly to the point, I will distinguish two times in my work, two recent upheavals. The one and the other had their place, their landscape, as well as their language, in this country, in the East and then in the West, in New York and in California. Such as I first felt them in myself, these upheavals will not have failed to be announced, like all phenomena of this type, by long-range waves whose traces can be found in my work for the last thirty years. But this does not mean that they were any less irruptive and sudden.

The first, about which I will say only a word, was on the occasion of a colloquium organized by Drucilla Cornell at the Cardozo Law School around the theme “Deconstruction and the Possibilities of Justice.” In “Force of Law,” I tried to demonstrate that justice, in the most unheard-of sense of this word, was the undeconstructible itself, thus another name of deconstruction (deconstruction? deconstruction is justice). This supposed a decisive distinction and one of incalculable scope between law and justice. Such a distinction of principle, joined to a certain thinking of the gift (a thinking which had also begun long ago and in a more visible fashion in recent publications) will have allowed me to knot or unknot, in a more political book on Marx which I have just finished, a great number of threads that were already crossing throughout all the earlier texts, for example on the gift beyond debt and duty, on the aporias of the work of mourning, spectrality, iterability, and so forth.

And last Spring, once again in the United States, on the other side, on the other coast, on the occasion of a keynote address that I was generously invited to deliver at a large colloquium, “Whither Marxism” at the University of California, Riverside, I was finally able to hazard a discourse that would have liked to be something other than a Marxist discourse, something other than a discourse on Marx or a reading of Marx, in the conventional, academic, or exegetical sense of this word. What I try to make understood there corresponds first to a political position-taking: it was uttered first of all in America, but surely also on the subject of America, and doubtless, to an extent that remains to be determined, against a certain America in the new world order that is attempting to impose itself today.³