Deconstruction Is/In America. Anselm Haverkamp
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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
Notes
1. Trans. Nicholas Royle, in Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 419.
2. “The fourth reason is that of a singular circle, one which is ‘logical’ or ‘vicious’ in appearance only. In order to speak of ‘deconstruction in America,’ one would have to claim to know what one is talking about, and first of all what is meant or defined by the word ‘America.’ Just what is America in this context? Were I not so frequently associated with this adventure of deconstruction, I would risk, with a smile, the following hypothesis: America is deconstruction [I’ Amerique, mais c’est la deconstruction]. In this hypothesis, America would be the proper name of deconstruction in progress, its family name, its toponymy, its language and its place, its principal residence. And how could we define the United States today without integrating the following into the description: It is that historical space which today, in all its dimensions and through all its power plays, reveals itself as being undeniably the most sensitive, receptive, or responsive space of all to the themes and effects of deconstructon. Since such a space represents and stages, in this respect, the greatest concentration in the world, one could not define it without at least including this symptom (if we can even speak of symptoms) in its definition. In the war that rages over the subject of deconstruction, there is no front; ther are no fronts. But if there were, they would all pass through the United States. They would define the lot, and, in truth, the partition of America. But we have learned from ‘Deconstruction’ to suspend these always hasty attributions of proper names. My hypothesis must thus be abandoned. No, ‘deconstruction’ is not a proper name, nor is America the proper name of deconstruction. Let us say instead: deconstruction and America are two open sets which intersect partially according to an allegorico-metonymic figure. In this fiction of truth, ‘America’ woud be the title of a new novel on the history of deconstruction and the deconstruction of history” (Memoires for Paul de Man, rev. ed. [New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), pp. 17–18.
3. Since then, this reading has become a book. It will appear this year in France and next year in the United States. Once again Peggy Kamuf did me the favor of translating it, a favor I will never be able to match with my gratitude.
4. Le pas au-delà (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), p.107.
5. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), p.60.
1 Deconstruction and the Lyric
Jonathan Culler
It seems thoroughly appropriate for a conference on Deconstruction in America to begin with literature, since literature—the study thereof—is where deconstruction in America itself began to take root. But one might also suspect that, if we lead off with literature,