or instituting role in the story. No one can agree about the time of mourning, which is finally the true subject of the play. It is just now, upon rereading the play recently, that I have noticed this, so late, too late, as if by countretemps. Hamlet in fact haunts the book I have just written, Specters of Marx. The phrase “The time is out of joint” is cited, recited, analyzed, and also loved there like an obsession. And yet, after the fact, I read it today differently. Here then is a contretemps, one more contretemps in contretemps itself. Until today, I had not noticed what, lying inhumed in “The time is out of joint”, in the subterranean strata of the text, could also resonate secretly with that essential pathology of mourning. I have become aware of it too late; it is too late, for Specters of Marx, where mourning, the dis- or anachrony of mourning is in some way the very subject. This tragedy of dating has become apparent to me today, too late. But this contretemps is a contretemps within the contretemps because it is a question of a contretemps on the subject of an utterance that says the contretemps. Repetition, the law of iterability, is still the law of differance here. This is not the first time I have given myself over to the Shakespearian contretemps. A few years ago, after an unforgettable trip to Verona, I wrote an essay on Romeo and Juliet, “Aphorism Countertime.” Like Specters of Marx, it crossed the themes of anachrony, mourning, haunting, oath, survival, and the name—which in the that instance as well is the name of the father (Juliet:—“ ‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy … O! be some other name./What’s in a name? … Deny thy father, and refuse thy name … Romeo, doff thy name”). To analyze “the fatedness of a date and a rendezvous” and the “traps in contretemps,” I then tried to demonstrate in what way “dates, timetables, property registers, place-names, all the codes that we cast like nets over time and space—in order to reduce or master differences, to arrest them, determine them—these are also contretemps-traps.” And so as to clarify this question of time, of the being of time, of what then is, in its impossible present, time itself, I continued: “Intended to avoid contretemps, to be in harmony with our rhythms by bending them to objective measurement, they produce misunderstanding, they accumulate the opportunities for false steps or wrong moves, revealing and simultaneously increasing this anachrony of desires: in the same time. What is this time?”1
A delirium of the date thus confers on the incredible sentence “The time is out of joint” more than one supplementary meaning, to be sure, but at the same time, just as many more madnesses. At the same time. At once [Sur l’heure]. As if there were a dead time in the hour itself.
Everything in fact begins, in Hamlet, with the dead time 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
