to the common prejudice and one which Freud (the Freud of The Rat Man) did not escape, a mother is, by universal testimony, naturally irreplaceable, the father, on the other hand, remains that “legal fiction” that Stephen talks about in Ulysses, not far from a meditation on Hamlet. A legal fiction, yes, especially when a father is the father in the figure of the king. For one of the king’s “two bodies” can always, by definition, be replaced.
It seems then all the easier to put a term to mourning: everything happens as if the father were not dead, as if the murder had not taken place, as if it were impossible to testify to it and to assign it a date. Since, Claudius says, the “death of fathers” is a “common theme” of reason, a father who always dies never dies, he is replaced on the very date on which he dies. If this death is always a murder, there is always someone—and occasionally it is the murderer—to offer his paternity to the orphan. A priori, always and without delay, on the very date of a death concerning which one immediately wonders if it took place, someone comes to say to the orphan: “I am your true father, be my son.”
Now, you will have noticed, in the same scene, what cannot be a chronological coincidence: Remaining alone on stage after having heard his uncle-King, which is to say from now on his stepfather, or as one says in French his beau-père, his legal father, his father according to the law (or his father-in-law), Hamlet seems no longer to know when his father died. On what date? Since when? The confusion seems to cause his memory to go astray. Since when is he in mourning? Two months or one month? “That it should come to this:/But two months dead, nay, not so much, not two ...” And less than ten lines later he says “and yet within a month—/Let me not think on’t; frailty, thy name is woman—. . . O god, a beast that wants discourse of reason/Would have mourned longer—married with my uncle,/My father’s brother, but no more like my father/Than I to Hercules. Within a month ...”
When he accuses his mother of not respecting the terms, the dates, and the time of mourning, he returns the accusation of inhumanity. The King his stepfather had said to him: to maintain mourning beyond the normal time, beyond the term appropriate to human mourning, is inhuman, it is a crime against the dead and against reason. Hamlet, for his part, accuses the woman, the mother, he accuses feminine-maternal frailty of giving itself up to the replaceability of a surrogate mother, there where the father is irreplaceable, and of conducting itself like a beast, that is, in an inhuman fashion. Mourning is human, only beasts do not wear mourning and know nothing of dates. And the rationalism of the reasonable, the invocation of reason, of the “discourse of reason,” is also on the side of this inhuman bestiality; it is a strategy of rationalization destined to serve and to hide the interests of a crime.
Time passes. As time passes, time passes. Instead of taking place, it disappears, it ceases to take place. It mourns itself. Instead of stretching out, instead of growing larger, it shrinks, it recalls mourning to the chronological paradox of its economy. The two months, then the month, the less than a month of the “within a month,” and then without delay they will become hours, less than two hours—”within two hours”—or else “twice two months” depending on the place mourning assigns to one or to the other, Hamlet or Ophelia. We say that this happens “without delay”; 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,
