The Time is Out of Joint

       Jacques Derrida

      “So long? ...”

      (Hamlet)

       I

      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