Hamlet, the work, does. The work alone, but alone with us, in us, as us.
This is what one has to know: It is against the background of this disaster, it is only in the gaping and chaotic, howling and famished opening, it is out of the bottomless bottom of this open mouth, from the cry of this khaein that the call of justice resonates.
Here then is its chance and its ruin. Its beginning and its end. It will always be given thus as the common lot [en partage], it will always have to be at once threatened and made possible in all languages by the being out of joint: aus den Fugen.
—Translated by Peggy Kamuf
Notes
1. Trans. Nicholas Royle, in Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 419.
2. “The fourth reason is that of a singular circle, one which is ‘logical’ or ‘vicious’ in appearance only. In order to speak of ‘deconstruction in America,’ one would have to claim to know what one is talking about, and first of all what is meant or defined by the word ‘America.’ Just what is America in this context? Were I not so frequently associated with this adventure of deconstruction, I would risk, with a smile, the following hypothesis: America is deconstruction [I’ Amerique, mais c’est la deconstruction]. In this hypothesis, America would be the proper name of deconstruction in progress, its family name, its toponymy, its language and its place, its principal residence. And how could we define the United States today without integrating the following into the description: It is that historical space which today, in all its dimensions and through all its power plays, reveals itself as being undeniably the most sensitive, receptive, or responsive space of all to the themes and effects of deconstructon. Since such a space represents and stages, in this respect, the greatest concentration in the world, one could not define it without at least including this symptom (if we can even speak of symptoms) in its definition. In the war that rages over the subject of deconstruction, there is no front; ther are no fronts. But if there were, they would all pass through the United States. They would define the lot, and, in truth, the partition of America. But we have learned from ‘Deconstruction’ to suspend these always hasty attributions of proper names. My hypothesis must thus be abandoned. No, ‘deconstruction’ is not a proper name, nor is America the proper name of deconstruction. Let us say instead: deconstruction and America are two open sets which intersect partially according to an allegorico-metonymic figure. In this fiction of truth, ‘America’ woud be the title of a new novel on the history of deconstruction and the deconstruction of history” (Memoires for Paul de Man, rev. ed. [New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), pp. 17–18.
3. Since then, this reading has become a book. It will appear this year in France and next year in the United States. Once again Peggy Kamuf did me the favor of translating it, a favor I will never be able to match with my gratitude.
4. Le pas au-delà (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), p.107.
5. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), p.60.
1 Deconstruction and the Lyric
Jonathan Culler
It seems thoroughly appropriate for a conference on Deconstruction in America to begin with literature, since literature—the study thereof—is where deconstruction in America itself began to take root. But one might also suspect that, if we lead off with literature, it is in order to get it out of the way and to get down to the important stuff—philosophy and politics. Crucial in a sense, yet perhaps inconsequential, there to be passed beyond—is that of the condition or the fate, shall we say, of literature today?
My subject is that combination of importance and inconsequentiality known as the lyric—which for me at least is the most economical if not quintessential instantiation of literature.
Jacques Derrida has always written about authors deemed literary but recently he has dealt more frequently with the idea of literature itself. For example, he speaks of literature as
[an] historical institution with its conventions, rules, etc., but also this institution of fiction which gives in principle the power to say everything, to break free of the rules, to displace them, and thereby to Institute, to invent and even to suspect the traditional difference between nature and institution … The institution of literature in the West, in its relatively modern form, is linked to an authorization to say everything and doubtless too to the coming about of the modern idea of democracy. Not that it depends on a democracy in place, but it seems inseparable to me from what calls forth a democracy, in the most open (and doubtless itself to come) sense of democracy.1
Here is another passage from the same text; an interview with Derek Attridge in Acts of Literature (1992):
This experience of writing is “subject” to an imperative: to give space for singular events, to invent something new in the form of acts of writing which no longer consist in a theoretical knowledge, in new constative statements, to give oneself to a poetico-literary performativity at least analogous to that of promises, orders, or acts of constitution or legislation which do not only change language, or which, in changing more than language, change more than language. ... In order for this singular performativity to be effective, for something new to be produced, historical competence is not indispensable in a certain form (that of a certain academic kind of knowledge, for example, on the subject of literary history), but it increases the chances.2
Or again, Derrida remarks that deconstruction, in this historical moment, is crucially conditioned by “l’événement de la littérature depuis trois siècles, en tant que système de possibilités performatives. Elles ont accompagnées la forme moderne de la démocratie. Les constitutions politiques ont un régime discursif identique à la constitution des structures littéraires” [“the event of literature for the past three centuries, as a system of performative possibilities. They have accompanied the modern form of democracy. Political constitutions have a discursive regime identical to that of the constitution of literary structures.”]3
Finally, here is a passage from “Passions: ‘An Oblique Offering,’ ” which recapitulates with a difference:
Literature is a modern invention, inscribed in conventions and institutions which, to hold on to just this trait, secures in principle its right to say everything. Literature thus ties its destiny to a certain non-censure, to the space of democratic freedom. No democracy without literature; no literature without democracy. It is always possible to want neither one nor the other, and there is no shortage of doing without them under all regimes, … But in no case can one dissociate one from the other. No analysis would be equal to it. … The possibility of literature, the legitimation that a society gives it, the allaying of suspicion or terror with regard to it, all that goes together—politically—with the unlimited right to ask any question, to suspect all dogmatism,
