of the question “to be or not to be.” The essence of Being is often determined, in a non-fortuitous fashion, as Heidegger often insists, on the basis of the third person singular of the present indicative, so that what happens to “is” happens to the bar that separates to be and/or not to be. There would no longer even be a question without this disjoinng of the “is.”
Perhaps deconstruction has never done anything but interpret this extraordinary phrase of Hamlet’s; to interpret it in the sense in which the hermeneut interprets, interpret it in the sense in which the actor interprets, interpret it in the sense of the play or the performance, interpret it in the sense in which one must still, beyond reading and theater, interpret interpretation.
And if this interpretation is neither America nor in America, not only America nor in America, then what is America today? What is deconstruction doing at this very moment in America? Before outlining a partial and preliminary response to that question, here is a third step.
3. Third step. If the slash between “is” and “in” says in silence something about what “The time is out of joint” may mean, if that is the very affirmation of deconstruction, then the good and the wicked fairies that for more than thirty years have been following its destiny, proliferating teleological verdicts, eschatological prognoses, or organicist diagnoses concerning the birth, growth, health, sickness, and death of deconstruction, all these voluble fairies begin by not knowing what they are talking about. This does not mean that no historian or sociologist of deconstruction ever says anything pertinent. Nor that one has to reduce all their plotted curves to so much silliness—which they are sometimes. It remains necessary, no doubt, to attempt to analyze the becoming, the genesis, and the decline of what is thus reduced to a fashion, a school of thought, an academic current, a theory, or a method. But even there where they do not fall into unfortunate stereotypes, even there where they are more rigorous and more lucid, these historico-sociological analyses encounter several limits: a) They miss the most acute aspect of deconstruction, that which exceeds, in their very deconstructibility, the themes, objects, methods, and especially the axiomatics of this historical or sociological knowledge; b) they already incorporate and import from deconstruction what they attempt to objectify; c) they most often resemble performatives disguised as constatives: they would like to make happen what they claim to describe in all neutrality. For more than twenty-five years, in fact, we have been told that deconstruction is dying or that it is “on the wane.” And in a certain way this is true! Since it has been true from the beginning, and that’s where the question is, since deconstruction begins by being in poor shape (being out of joint) and even by dying, since that is all anyone talks about, one must stop believing that the dead are just the departed and that the departed do nothing. One must stop pretending to know what is meant by “to die” and especially by “dying.” One has, then, to talk about spectrality. You know very well who pronounces the sentence “The time is out of joint”: Hamlet, the heir of a specter concerning which no one knows any longer at what moment and therefore if death has happened to him.
The diagnoses and the prognoses are here at once more true and (as many signs also attest) less true than ever. This implies that the teleological schema (birth, growth, old age, sickness, end or death) can be applied to everything, and to everything about deconstruction, except, in all certitude and in the mode of a determinant knowledge, to that which in it begins by questioning, displacing, and dislocating the machine of this teleology, and thus this opposition between health and sickness, normality and anomaly, life and death.
With that I undertake my fourth step, to say a few words about what is going on in America today. Not about what deconstruction may represent there, here, now, today, but what, far more modestly, I am doing there, myself, or believe I am doing there in this very moment.
To take a shortcut and get very quickly to the point, I will distinguish two times in my work, two recent upheavals. The one and the other had their place, their landscape, as well as their language, in this country, in the East and then in the West, in New York and in California. Such as I first felt them in myself, these upheavals will not have failed to be announced, like all phenomena of this type, by long-range waves whose traces can be found in my work for the last thirty years. But this does not mean that they were any less irruptive and sudden.
The first, about which I will say only a word, was on the occasion of a colloquium organized by Drucilla Cornell at the Cardozo Law School around the theme “Deconstruction and the Possibilities of Justice.” In “Force of Law,” I tried to demonstrate that justice, in the most unheard-of sense of this word, was the undeconstructible itself, thus another name of deconstruction (deconstruction? deconstruction is justice). This supposed a decisive distinction and one of incalculable scope between law and justice. Such a distinction of principle, joined to a certain thinking of the gift (a thinking which had also begun long ago and in a more visible fashion in recent publications) will have allowed me to knot or unknot, in a more political book on Marx which I have just finished, a great number of threads that were already crossing throughout all the earlier texts, for example on the gift beyond debt and duty, on the aporias of the work of mourning, spectrality, iterability, and so forth.
And last Spring, once again in the United States, on the other side, on the other coast, on the occasion of a keynote address that I was generously invited to deliver at a large colloquium, “Whither Marxism” at the University of California, Riverside, I was finally able to hazard a discourse that would have liked to be something other than a Marxist discourse, something other than a discourse on Marx or a reading of Marx, in the conventional, academic, or exegetical sense of this word. What I try to make understood there corresponds first to a political position-taking: it was uttered first of all in America, but surely also on the subject of America, and doubtless, to an extent that remains to be determined, against a certain America in the new world order that is attempting to impose itself today.3
III
An epilogue for today, a word for the end on all the possible ends of the Nation-State and of that which in the Nation-State will have always been, no doubt, “out of joint.” For Hamlet’s phrase must also describe and interpret that State which was the rotten state of Denmark.
This word for the end brings me back again to the United States. It reawakens in me, moreover, the living and, in many regards, happy memory I retain of that moment in October 1966 when I was so generously invited to speak there for the first time. I am referring to the conference at Johns Hopkins University on Critical Languages and the Sciences of Man. I will recall merely that my remarks on that occasion concerned the concept of interpretation. They opened with a quotation from Montaigne (“We need to interpret interpretations more than to interpret things”) and they closed with the distinction between two interpretations of interpretation, more precisely, with a “second interpretation of interpretation, to which Nietzsche pointed the way,” although I then added that, between these two interpretations, it is not a question for us today of “choosing.”
Returning in conclusion to Nietzsche, to Nietzsche’s testimony concerning Hamlet’s phrase, I would like to weave together the eschatological motifs of interpretation, the last word, testimony, and the work.
Bearing witness for itself, but no less for all the shoahs of history, “Aschenglorie,” the poem by Celan (who was a great translator of Shakespeare), declares the enigma itself:
Niemand
zeugt für den
Zeugen.
No one
bears witness for
the witness.
In
