Deconstruction Is/In America. Anselm Haverkamp
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we could say the opposite: it will “delay,” but without delay, because the more it delays, the less time is long, thus the less it delays. It is a matter of thinking what “delay” means and of putting this delay in relation to the time of mourning (is there a time that is not a time of mourning?) and to the time of mourning as messianic time of imminence. Here the term of mourning gives the measure. But it is the impossible measure of time. And thus the impossibility of an objective and stable reference to the violence of the founding event—which always has something to do with a phantasm. To have said “two months,” then twice “within a month,” in a play whose chronology is so difficult to follow and whose calendar so difficult to reconstitute (the play’s action stretches over several months), will not in fact prevent Hamlet from reducing, much later (Act III, sc. ii) the months into hours. But one does not know then, no more than ever, if for the time being he is speaking figuratively, if he is truly raving or if he is playing at madness in order to outmaneuver his partners, fool everybody, and put the event back on stage, by organizing the theatrical repetition in which it already consists, with the sole aim of ensnaring the criminal, trapping him, catching him with his symptom (“The play’s the thing/Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king . . .”). To Ophelia, after having pretended to want to put Hamlet’s head between her legs, as if to mimic penetration or birth—which would have made of his beloved his surrogate mother, his replacement mother, his virgin mother—to Ophelia who says to him “You are merry, my lord,” Hamlet responds as if he were looking at his watch. And naming survival (“outlive”), he counts the hours: “What should a man do but be merry? For look you how cheerfully my mother looks, and my father died within’s two hours. Ophelia: Nay, ’tis twice two months, my lord. Hamlet: So long? Nay, then, let the devil wear black, for I’ll have a suit of sables. O heavens! Die two months ago, and not forgotten yet? Then there’s hope a great man’s memory may outlive his life half a year. But, by’r Lady, he must build churches then . . .”
II
If I chose this title, “The time is out of joint,” would it be merely so as to recall these supplementary disturbances of an abyssal mourning or just to attempt in vain to make up for my own lateness? No, it is also out of fidelity, out of a taste for memory and repetition. In this case I wanted to thematize what may be a traditional gesture of deconstruction, at least the deconstruction that interests me. This gesture would consist in interrogating, so as to put them back into play, titles in general: the title of the title, the justification and authority of the title. And to do so by marking a multi-referentiality, which is to say (forgive me this suitcase word) a differeferentialty [différéférentialité] of the title that is thus suspended. The reference of the title, that to which it refers, the thing in play becomes at once multiple, different, and deferred. Thus for example “The time is out of joint” does not announce only the dislocations, disjunctions, disjoinings, disarticulations, anachronies, contretemps, all the untimeliness that I will be speaking about this evening. In other words, this title does not anounce only the subject or the content, the stakes of this discourse (and this subject is already a certain difference within time, a temporal and temporalizing differance). “Out of joint” also describes in advance what will be the time of these remarks. Disorganization, disarticulation: these are both the thematic stakes and the form of these out-of-joint remarks, the dis-junction at the heart of the “is” that is so poorly defined, and with so much difficulty, by the third person singular present indicative of the verb to be.
Two quotations therefore. Two reported sentences neither of which (because I am quoting them) is, as one says, by me, signed or countersigned by me:
1. “The time is out of joint.”
2. “Deconstruction is/in America.”
I signed neither the one nor the other, that is true, but I have loved both of them. Moreover, one can never love anything other than that: what one cannot sign, he or she in the place of whom one neither can nor wants to sign.
I loved them for a time, and it is about them, which I loved for a time, and which therefore I still love inasmuch as they are not mine, that I would like to talk a little.
What do they have in common, these two beloved sentences? First of all, I have loved them, which at least for me is priceless. This love renders them desirably ineffaceable within me. Next, these two sentences pretend to say what is, what is “is,” only in order to end up also by forcing me to relinquish the “is,” by dis-locating, discrediting, and suspending the very authority of the “is.”
And perhaps deconstruction would consist, if at least it did consist, in precisely that: deconstructing, dislocating, displacing, disarticulating, disjoining, putting “out of joint” the authority of the “is.” Or yet again, rather than doing that, sooner, even before doing that, and doing it methodically, it would be a matter for deconstruction of measuring itself against the historical experience—and this is history itself—against the experience of that which in the “is,” in time or in the present time of the “is,” remains precisely “out of joint.”
I will come back to this later while insisting on what Hamlet says to me today in America when he pronounces in English “The time is out of joint.” And I will say why I cannot separate this extraordinary sentence from the one that, modestly, is murmuring, far from the stage and the theater: “Deconstruction is/in America.”
Concerning this latter sentence, one of the two quotations therefore, forgive me if I recall, still in a preliminary fashion, that I in fact pronounced it but without assuming it, without subscribing to it, without ever believing it. It was in 1984; in America, at the University of California, Irvine, where I had not yet begun to teach regularly. At that time, and for some time yet to come, I remained more of an East-coast American since I was teaching every year for several weeks at Yale after having done the same thing at Johns Hopkins. In 1984, then, I had been invited to give the Wellek Lectures at Irvine. David Carroll and Suzanne Gearhart had suggested that I speak—this was ten years ago—on what already for some time had been called “Deconstruction in America.” This was also the title of a book published in 1983 at University of Minnesota Press, The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America. I had explained the reasons—there were four of them—for which I thought I had to renounce, as I must also do this evening, talking about “Deconstruction in America.” I will not recall these reasons because all this has since been published in Mémoires for Paul de Man. But permit me to say, in the most neutral fashion possible, that these reasons seem to me still to withstand all the considerable transformations that have occurred in the last ten years and, however presumptuous this may sound, I would not change a word of what I said then on the subject.
Having arrived at the fourth of these reasons, I risked putting forth an hypothesis according to which, if it is impossible to talk about deconstruction in America, this is because “America is deconstruction [l’Amérique, mais c’est la déconstruction].”
I had tried, then, to explain why it was impossible and illegitimate to speak about “Deconstruction in America,” but also and above all that, in marking one of the reasons not to speak about “Deconstruction in America,” the sentence “Deconstruction is America” formulated merely an hypothesis. Better yet, it formulated an hypothesis that I finally relinquished and to which, however seductive it may remain, I would not in any case subscribe.
This abandoned hypothesis was not merely what I called then a “fiction of truth.” We must recognize in the two open sets, in the “allegorico-metonymical figure” that they describe, the power to dislocate and destabilize the “is” as well as the “in.”
This is what puts into deconstruction the very thing that confers its title on the present conference. The history of deconstruction or the deconstruction of history perhaps roams around the disjointed pivot of this copula “is,” this clause of inclusion “in,” or this conjunction “and” by which one seeks at the same time to couple, enclose, or conjoin a subject and a predicate. For example here,” Deconstruction and (in, is, as) America.”