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An epilogue for today, a word for the end on all the possible ends of the Nation-State and of that which in the Nation-State will have always been, no doubt, “out of joint.” For Hamlet’s phrase must also describe and interpret that State which was the rotten state of Denmark.

This word for the end brings me back again to the United States. It reawakens in me, moreover, the living and, in many regards, happy memory I retain of that moment in October 1966 when I was so generously invited to speak there for the first time. I am referring to the conference at Johns Hopkins University on Critical Languages and the Sciences of Man. I will recall merely that my remarks on that occasion concerned the concept of interpretation. They opened with a quotation from Montaigne (“We need to interpret interpretations more than to interpret things”) and they closed with the distinction between two interpretations of interpretation, more precisely, with a “second interpretation of interpretation, to which Nietzsche pointed the way,” although I then added that, between these two interpretations, it is not a question for us today of “choosing.”

Returning in conclusion to Nietzsche, to Nietzsche’s testimony concerning Hamlet’s phrase, I would like to weave together the eschatological motifs of interpretation, the last word, testimony, and the work.

Bearing witness for itself, but no less for all the shoahs of history, “Aschenglorie,” the poem by Celan (who was a great translator of Shakespeare), declares the enigma itself:

Niemand

zeugt für den

Zeugen.

No one

bears witness for

the witness.

In the seminar on testimony I have been conducting for several years, we are trying to interpret all the possible interpretations of these three lines. They say to us, among so many other things, both the eschatology of a witness who is always a last survivor, or even a last man, and the absolute immanence, that of a testimony without outside other than the infinite, irreducible, and spectral alterity of another witness, of the witness of the witness as other. There is no witness for the witness, but there are only witnesses for the witness.

Now, in Hamlet, the dramatization deploys a spectacular and supernaturally miraculous mise en abîme of testimonies. Each witness is always alone in bearing witness in general (this is of the essence of testimony) and thus of testifying to the impossible possibility of testimony, thereby “testifying for the absence of attestation” as Blanchot puts it.¹ Hamlet is alone in being able to bear witness in this way to the testimony. The play named Hamlet thus becomes, like “Aschenglorie,” a testimony on the essence of testimony, which also becomes the absence of testimony.

For this final word today, I would thus like to return once more to Hamlet. To Hamlet as read by Nietzsche. Not to what I may have said about being “out of joint” in Specters of Marx, but to what I added a moment ago when, concerning the disorder or the inadequation that marked the dating, the calendar, or the timetable, namely, the impossibility of assigning a real date, thus an external, objective reality, to the death of Hamlet’s father, we considered the impossibility of measuring time and thus of measuring the measure of all things.

Measurelessness thus becomes the law. The law of the law is what measurelessness will always have been. For justice and for injustice, justly and unjustly. This inadequation is a dismembering, an essential disjoining, and first of all of time, of the present that is also out of joint. Among all the consequences and the interpretations that may thus be authorized, let us limit ourselves to one, whose trail I have just picked up thanks to a recent rereading of The Birth of Tragedy. Hamlet makes a strange apparition there. The latter apparition seems to disturb all the great interpretations, notably the psychoanalytic readings (Freud, Jones) of Hamlet and of Oedipus.

Nietzsche wants to see in this apparition of Hamlet a Dionysiac figure, which is already odd in itself. But he also sees there someone who renounces action (this time it is the classic vision of a paralyzed Hamlet, unable to decide, the neurotic Hamlet who no longer knows what to do and becomes a witness, merely a powerless witness, a profoundly indifferent observer beneath all his apparent passions). In the withdrawal that immobilizes him, this witness is now but a spectator of the play: passive and apathetic, pathetically patient and apathetic, pathologically apathetic in his very passion. It is in these terms that, most often, the witness is determined, the witness-witness, the one who attends [assiste] but does not intervene, the one who no longer even bears witness to what he has been a witness to. It is always supposed that the “good” witness, the one who attends, finds himself in this situation of the spectator who is neutral or neutralized, that is, paralyzed, turned to stone, stupefied, stunned, struck by lightning, thunderstruck by the flash of lucidity.

When we speak of testimony as active or performative, we are talking about bearing witness, the declaration, the oath, and so forth. But the witness-witness, the one who sees, is in principle passive, as passive as the camera that he can never be.

Now what does Nietzsche say? How does he see Hamlet? Because the latter was able to see what he saw, because he saw as a witness, and because he saw absolute disorder, the world out of joint, measurelessness, monstrosity (the ghost, his murdered father, his mother as merry widow, the political disorder that accompanies all this and perverts all the reasons of family and state, etc.), but also because he perhaps saw, through all of this, something that he cannot even say or admit to himself, Hamlet glimpsed [entrevu] such a terrifying thing, the Thing itself, that he decides to make no further move: he will remain but a discouraged witness, paralyzed, silent, made desperate by the being “out of joint” of time, by the disjoining, the discord, the terrible dismembering of the world in its present: originary Dionysianism, the Dionysiac itself.

But this witness will have been the witness of a witness, and the oath of secrecy binding all these testimonies. If Hamlet resolves not to decide, if he resigns himself to remaining the mute witness of the naked and monstrous truth that, in the blink of an eye, has been given to him in a blinding, thundering, traumatizing intuition, it is because he was first of all the witness of that witness that was his ghost of a father, of the violent death and the betrayal of which the latter claims he has been the victim, in the course of a supernatural and spectral attestation (which, in this regard, is like every attestation). Having known this, having believed it, having put faith in it, but having perhaps glimpsed something still worse behind it, the worst which the play would thus have actively silenced, Hamlet can no longer act. A more than lucid knowledge has killed off the action in him. He is from then on a pure witness, he is alone, alone and inconsolable; he ceases to act there where he is alone in having seen, known, alone in being able to bear witness.

He is alone in bearing witness.

Like every witness—and he bears witness also for every witness. He says no more than that, while keeping it secret: I am alone in being able to bear witness to it. A witness is always alone in being able to bear witness. Like a prophet who gives up speaking and acting or causing to act, precisely because he has seen too much. This “too much,” that which goes beyond measure, is the “out of joint” (aus den Fugen in German, which is the common expression for “out of joint,” something I noticed in Heidegger’s text on the Dikē in Der Spruch des Anaximander).

In the long passage that I will now read, I am not sure whether the Nietzschean interpretation of Hamlet and of the experience of being “out of joint” could not be dissociated from the theory of art, of salvation through art, of the sublime and the comic that Nietzsche nevertheless manifestly attempts to attach to it. I will thus leave that question provisionally supended.

In this sense the Dionysian man resembles Hamlet: both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained knowledge, and nausea inhibits action; for their action could not change anything in the eternal nature of things; they feel it to be ridiculous or humiliating that they should be asked to set right a world that is out of joint. Knowlegde kills action; action requires the veils of illusion: that is the doctrine of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much, and, as it were, from an excess of possibilities does not get around to action. Not reflection, no—true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth, outweights any motive for action, both in Hamlet and in the Dionysian man.

Now no comfort avails any more; longing transcends a world after death, even the gods; existence is negated along with its glittering reflection in the gods or in an immortal beyond. Conscious of the truth he has once seen, man now sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of existence; now he understands what is symbolic in Ophelia’s fate; now he understands the wisdom of the sylvan god, Silenus: he is nauseated.

Here, when the danger to his will is greatest, art approaches as a saving sorceress, expert at healing. She alone knows how to turn these nauseous thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live: these are the sublime as the artistic taming of the horrible, and the comic as the artistic discharge of the nausea of absurdity. The satyr chorus of the dithyramb is the saving deed of Greek art; faced with the intermediary world of these Dionysian companions, the feelings described here exhausted themselves.⁴

In sum, Hamlet, surviving witness, is also the one who has seen death. He has seen the impossible and he cannot survive what he has survived. After having seen the worst, after having been the witness of the worst disorder, of absolute injustice, he has the experience of surviving—which is the condition of witnessing—but in order to survive what one does not survive. Because one should not survive. And that is what Hamlet says, and that is what Hamlet, the work, does. The work alone, but alone with us, in us, as us.

This is what one has to know: It is against the background of this disaster, it is only in the gaping and chaotic, howling and famished opening, it is out of the bottomless bottom of this open mouth, from the cry of this khaein that the call of justice resonates.

Here then is its chance and its ruin. Its beginning and its end. It will always be given thus as the common lot [en partage], it will always have to be at once threatened and made possible in all languages by the being out of joint: aus den Fugen.

—Translated by Peggy Kamuf