Deconstruction Is/In America. Anselm Haverkamp
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of this “dead hour,” at the moment when, in an already repetitive fashion, the specter arrives by returning. At the first hour of the play, the first time already marks a second time (Act I, sc.i, Marcellus: “Thus twice before, and jump at this dead hour,/ With martial stalk hath he gone by our watch”). The vigilance of the watching guard, the very watch of consciousness, is also a maddened watch or timepiece that, turning on itself, does not know how to guard or regard the hour of this “dead hour.” It is delivered over to another time for which the timeclock and the calendar no longer are the law. They no longer are the law or they are not yet the law. Dates have come unhinged.
Then there’s Claudius who wants to have done with mourning, without delay, so he begins by encouraging himself to cut short this time of mourning and to take advantage of time: “Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother’s death/The memory be green, and that it us befitted/To bear our hearts in grief, and our whole kingdom/To be contracted in one brow of woe,/Yet so far hath discretion fought with nature/That we with wisest sorrow think on him/Together with remembrance of ourselves.” Soon, in the same speech he uses words that announce Hamlet’s sentence, “The time is out of joint.” He speaks at this point of the State, such as it appears in the dreamy eyes or the wild imagination of the son of Fortinbras, the one who will, let us not forget, end up on the throne. The King pretends to thank his guests: “For all, our thanks,/ Now follows that you know young Fortinbras,/ Holding a weak supposal of our worth,/ Or thinking by our late dear brother’s death/ Our state to be disjoint and out of frame,/ Col-leaguèd with this dream of his advantage,/ He hath not failed to pester us with message . . .” (Act I, sc.ii; emphasis added).
A little later, the King, once again, encourages Laertes to take his time, to appropriate it (“time be thine”), to use the seal of his father, Polonius, and with the authorization thus obtained, to go away (the time it takes, his time—in fact in the logic and the chronology of the play, all the time it will take for his father to die in his turn by Hamlet’s hand, and so forth): “Take thy fair hour, Laertes. Time be thine,/ And thy best graces spend it at thy will./ But now, my cousin Hamlet, and my son . . .” (ibid.).
After which, turning to the one who refuses the name of son, he exhorts Hamlet to count the days, to cut short the time of mourning, to measure it in a measured fashion, “for some term,” to put a term to it; a term, that is, at once the engagement, the terms of a mourning contract, so to speak, and the limit, the boundary, the endpoint, or the moderation that is appropriate. One must, he tells him in effect, know how to put an end to mourning. This presumes (but this is one of the enigmas of the play, as it is of mourning) that mourning depends on us, in us, and not on the other in us. It presumes above all a knowledge, the knowledge of the date. One must indeed know when: at what instant mourning began. One must indeed know at what moment death took place, really took place, and this is always the moment of a murder. But Hamlet, and everyone in Hamlet, seems to be wandering around in confusion on this subject. Now, when and if one does not know when an event took place, one has to wonder if it indeed took place, or in any case if it took place in “material reality” as Freud might have said, and not only in the fabric of some “psychic reality,” in phantasm or delirium. A date, which is to say, the objectivity of a presumed reference, stands precisely at the joining of the “material” and the “psychic.”
To carry mourning beyond its “normal” term is no longer the gesture of a son, says the King to Hamlet; and it is even “unmanly,” thus perhaps inhuman, he suggests, not realizing that he has just said very well that the question of mourning, which is the very heart of any deconstruction, carries beyond the human (or the viril) the only possibility of interrogating the human (or the viril) as such:
King: ’Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet,
To give these mourning duties to your father,
But you must know your father lost a father,
That father lost, lost his, and the survivor bound
In filial obligation for some term
To do obsequious sorrow. But to persever
In obstinate condolement is a course
Of impious stubbornness. ’Tis unmanly grief. . . .
. . . ’tis a fault to heaven,
A fault against the dead, a fault to nature,
To reason most absurd, whose common theme
Is death of fathers, and who still hath cried,
From the first corse till he that died today,
“This must be so.” We pray you throw to earth
This unprevailing woe, and think of us
As of a father . . .
(Act I, sc. ii)
Exhorting him to put a term to his grief, to comprehend his mourning, to comprehend it between two dates, the beginning and the end, the King proposes to Hamlet, with the same gesture, to replace his father. He confirms thereby that if, according to the common prejudice and one which Freud (the Freud of The Rat Man) did not escape, a mother is, by universal testimony, naturally irreplaceable, the father, on the other hand, remains that “legal fiction” that Stephen talks about in Ulysses, not far from a meditation on Hamlet. A legal fiction, yes, especially when a father is the father in the figure of the king. For one of the king’s “two bodies” can always, by definition, be replaced.
It seems then all the easier to put a term to mourning: everything happens as if the father were not dead, as if the murder had not taken place, as if it were impossible to testify to it and to assign it a date. Since, Claudius says, the “death of fathers” is a “common theme” of reason, a father who always dies never dies, he is replaced on the very date on which he dies. If this death is always a murder, there is always someone—and occasionally it is the murderer—to offer his paternity to the orphan. A priori, always and without delay, on the very date of a death concerning which one immediately wonders if it took place, someone comes to say to the orphan: “I am your true father, be my son.”
Now, you will have noticed, in the same scene, what cannot be a chronological coincidence: Remaining alone on stage after having heard his uncle-King, which is to say from now on his stepfather, or as one says in French his beau-père, his legal father, his father according to the law (or his father-in-law), Hamlet seems no longer to know when his father died. On what date? Since when? The confusion seems to cause his memory to go astray. Since when is he in mourning? Two months or one month? “That it should come to this:/But two months dead, nay, not so much, not two ...” And less than ten lines later he says “and yet within a month—/Let me not think on’t; frailty, thy name is woman—. . . O god, a beast that wants discourse of reason/Would have mourned longer—married with my uncle,/My father’s brother, but no more like my father/Than I to Hercules. Within a month ...”
When he accuses his mother of not respecting the terms, the dates, and the time of mourning, he returns the accusation of inhumanity. The King his stepfather had said to him: to maintain mourning beyond the normal time, beyond the term appropriate to human mourning, is inhuman, it is a crime against the dead and against reason. Hamlet, for his part, accuses the woman, the mother, he accuses feminine-maternal frailty of giving itself up to the replaceability of a surrogate mother, there where the father is irreplaceable, and of conducting itself like a beast, that is, in an inhuman fashion. Mourning is human, only beasts do not wear mourning and know nothing of dates. And the rationalism of the reasonable, the invocation of reason, of the “discourse of reason,” is also on the side of this inhuman bestiality; it is a strategy of rationalization destined to serve and to hide the interests of a crime.
Time passes. As time passes, time passes. Instead of taking place, it disappears, it ceases to take place. It mourns itself. Instead of stretching out, instead of growing larger, it shrinks, it recalls mourning to the chronological paradox of its economy. The two months, then the month, the less than a month of the “within a month,” and then without delay they will become