Deconstruction Is/In America. Anselm Haverkamp
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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
III
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