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it can be identified, there is no way one can give thanks in its name since deconstruction will always maintain a relation that is as enigmatic as it is disjointed to gratitude, more precisely, to commerce, to the market, and to the thankfulness of thanking. On the one hand, it is the most thankless thing in the world, a kind of ethics of ingratitude (elsewhere and at length, I have tried to justify this, if one may still say that), a practice of implacable ingratitude, without thanks, sans merci. Deconstruction is merciless. On the other hand, as a thinking of the gift, of a gift beyond the debt and a justice beyond the law, deconstruction should, on the contrary, be devoted to grace and gratitude, thus to a gratitude without thanks, without exchange or, if you prefer, according to an exchange that carries beyond exchange. It should be only at the moment—and on the condition—of opening itself to the possibility of the gift, as to a kind of ecstatic and boundless caress of mute gratitude. It learns only by receiving/It teaches only to receive [Elle n’apprend qu’à recevoir]. It cultivates the experience that consists in receiving from the other the very thing that it can never be a question of restituting and inscribing in the commerce of thanks or the market of commodities.
Enough on the thanks and the thanksgiving of deconstruction.
Now, after the merciless gift, the request for forgiveness. Yes, forgive me if I severely limit my remarks this evening to the risky interpretation of a single word.
A very little word, the minuscule coupling of two letters, a copula or copule, a minuscopule.
I am, therefore, speaking my language, as if I had already, on the eve of my coming departure, left to return to France. And yet the two chosen letters will be those of an English word, of a verb in truth. Politeness requires, as does hospitality, that English be the chosen language of this verb.
Such a password might pass unnoticed because it is so common. It belongs to the most common language and it is common to two little phrases that seem to turn on it as on a hinge. What is this word? It is “is.” Here it is:
“The time is out of joint” says Hamlet and, to cite the title of our colloquium,
“Deconstruction is/in America.”
How is one to understand this copula? Does the “is” have the same meaning? Does it perform the same function, or rather the same dysfunctioning, in both propositions? Why should we cross these two quotations—because they are both quotations—at the disjointed juncture, at the crossroads or the crossing of this little “is”? Should we also inscribe it under some erasure in the form of a cross?
These are, we were saying, two quotations. Two quotations in English. And doubtless there were those who were surprised to see me announce with an English title a lecture concerning which it was made clear, at my request, that it would be given in my language, French. This was not done to be intriguing; nor was it done out of playfulness, nor out of courtesy. Why then?
First of all, in order to signal that if there is a problem around “Deconstruction in America,” or “Deconstruction being America, as America, or in America,” it is an adventure of translation, at the very least it is a history from which one cannot efface the singular experience of translation and transference. Let us understand these words in all their senses and all their dimensions, which are not only linguistic. At stake is presence and event: of what comes to pass or what takes place.
(I have often had occasion to define deconstruction as that which is—far from a theory, a school, a method, even a discourse, still less a technique that can be appropriated—at bottom what happens or comes to pass [ce qui arrive]. It remains then to situate, localize, determine what happens with what happens, when it happens. To date it. Has deconstruction happened? Has it arrived? Of course it has, if you like, but then, if it has, so many questions arise: How? Where? When? On what date exactly? Was it so long ago, already? Or perhaps not yet? Supposing that deconstruction has a shibboleth, I remind you that the question of the date is inseparable from it and that the link between shibboleth and date is an insistent theme of what is called deconstructive readings, one of the most apparent themes of deconstruction.)
Now, Hamlet is mad about dates. His phrase (“The time is out of joint”) does not betray only the symptomatic anxiety of someone whose memory is suffering. His memory is suffering in fact from a death, and a death is never natural. His memory is suffering from the death of a king, a father, and a homonym, but it is suffering first of all and by that very token, as memory, from amnesia, from an amnesia that is not natural either. It is suffering because it cannot remember, thus because it cannot think the event of this so unnatural death, because it is not a memory that is sure of being able to situate, date, determine, objectify the event that the son must account for and to which he must render accounts in rendering justice, in making justice of a crime, through the vengeance and punishment to which he has committed himself with an oath. That the event has taken place and that he remembers it, that it concerns the violent death of his father, that there seems to be unimpeachable testimony in this regard, all of this does not rule out madness. This structuring event may still belong to what Freud called “psychic reality,” as opposed to “material reality”; it may still testify to the phantasmatic dimension of a repetition en abîme, of the theater within the theater that is reflected in the heart of the play.
The proof? The proof that “the time is out of joint”? One proof at least? Well, no one can agree about the time, about the date of the King’s death, and about the time that separates present speech from this event which, in spite of or because of all that destines it to repetition, plays an inaugural, founding, or instituting role in the story. No one can agree about the time of mourning, which is finally the true subject of the play. It is just now, upon rereading the play recently, that I have noticed this, so late, too late, as if by countretemps. Hamlet in fact haunts the book I have just written, Specters of Marx. The phrase “The time is out of joint” is cited, recited, analyzed, and also loved there like an obsession. And yet, after the fact, I read it today differently. Here then is a contretemps, one more contretemps in contretemps itself. Until today, I had not noticed what, lying inhumed in “The time is out of joint”, in the subterranean strata of the text, could also resonate secretly with that essential pathology of mourning. I have become aware of it too late; it is too late, for Specters of Marx, where mourning, the dis- or anachrony of mourning is in some way the very subject. This tragedy of dating has become apparent to me today, too late. But this contretemps is a contretemps within the contretemps because it is a question of a contretemps on the subject of an utterance that says the contretemps. Repetition, the law of iterability, is still the law of differance here. This is not the first time I have given myself over to the Shakespearian contretemps. A few years ago, after an unforgettable trip to Verona, I wrote an essay on Romeo and Juliet, “Aphorism Countertime.” Like Specters of Marx, it crossed the themes of anachrony, mourning, haunting, oath, survival, and the name—which in the that instance as well is the name of the father (Juliet:—“ ‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy … O! be some other name./What’s in a name? … Deny thy father, and refuse thy name … Romeo, doff thy name”). To analyze “the fatedness of a date and a rendezvous” and the “traps in contretemps,” I then tried to demonstrate in what way “dates, timetables, property registers, place-names, all the codes that we cast like nets over time and space—in order to reduce or master differences, to arrest them, determine them—these are also contretemps-traps.” And so as to clarify this question of time, of the being of time, of what then is, in its impossible present, time itself, I continued: “Intended to avoid contretemps, to be in harmony with our rhythms by bending them to objective measurement, they produce misunderstanding, they accumulate the opportunities for false steps or wrong moves, revealing and simultaneously increasing this anachrony of desires: in the same time. What is this time?”1
A delirium of the date thus confers on the incredible sentence “The time is out of joint” more than one supplementary meaning, to be sure, but at the same time, just as many more madnesses. At the same time. At once [Sur l’heure]. As if there were a dead