Deconstruction Is/In America. Anselm Haverkamp
target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_4a435c3a-3998-50bb-bcbd-224095df6887">7. Richard Rorty, “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” in Objectivism, Relativism, and Truth—Philosophical Papers I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p.175.
8. Richard Rorty, “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida,” Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp.90, 109.
9. See, paradigmatically, Jacques Derrida, “Force de Loi” (The Force of Law), Cardozo Law Review 11 (1990), pp.919–1045.
10. See, paradigmatically, Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 102.
11. Cornel West, Afterword, Post-Analytic Philosophy, eds. John Rajchman, Cornel West (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p.267.
12. See, for instance, Philip Fisher, “Introduction,” The New American Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp.xxi–ii.
13. Stanley Cavell, “Naughty Orators,” Languages of the Unsayable, eds. Sanford Budick, Wolfgang Iser (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p.365.
14. Jacques Derrida, “Toward an Ethic of Discussion,” Afterword, Limited Inc (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), pp.133, 148 (159.16).
15. See, most recently, Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p.246.
16. Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp.39, 138.
17. See, most recently, Gary Wihl, The Contingency of Theory: Pragmatism, Expressivism, and Deconstruction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 182.
18. See, paradigmatically, Shoshana Felman, “Rereading Femininity,” Yale French Studies 62 (1981), pp. 19–44.
19. Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), p.29.
20. Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault, Michael Naas (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1992), pp.8–9.
21. Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, expanded edition 1992), p. 138.
22. See, most pointedly, Thomas McCarthy, “The Politics of the Ineffable: Derrida’s Deconstructionism,” The Philosophical Forum 21 (1989/90), pp.160; 146–168.
23. Jacques Derrida, Donner la mort, trans. David Wills (Chicago: Chicago University Press, forthcoming).
24. Rodolphe Gasché, “On Critique, Hypercriticism, and Deconstruction,” Cardozo Law Review 13 (1991), pp.1115–1132.
25. On Paris is Burning see Barbara Vinken, Mode nach der Mode (Frankfurt/M: Fischer, 1993), pp.45–47; Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp.129–137.
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