Deconstruction Is/In America. Anselm Haverkamp

of prolonging these preliminary precautions that could go on infinitely, I am not going to delay jumping to the second quotation, “The time is out of joint.” It will help me to say something about what is happening today, ten years later, for me, for me at least, with deconstruction in America.

      Before making the jump, however, allow me a few steps by way of take-off. Four little steps the last of which will lead me to speak in English.

      1. First step. The first step passes by way of the passage, namely translation. It is not merely for the sake of facility that I decided to speak several languages this evening, yours and mine, and then to announce in Shakespeare’s English that I was going to speak French. I do it for at least three reasons:

      a) Deconstruction, as we know it, will have been first of all a translation or a transference between French and American (which is to say also, as Freud has reminded us about transference, a love story, which never excludes hatred, as we know).

      b) In the passage from Mémoires for Paul de Man that turns around Deconstruction in America, is the only definition that I have ever in my life dared to give of deconstruction: “more than one language” (p. 15). But I insisted then on an obvious point that had to be taken into account: “more than one language” does not constitute a sentence, it is not a proposition of the kind S is P. In the sense in which Austin understands meaning, therefore, this phrase does not have a meaning. It was then necessary for me to underscore that, contrary to what is often thought, deconstruction is not exported from Europe to America. It has in this country several original configurations that in their turn produce singular effects. I said that this American radiation or hegemony must be interrogated, which sometimes means contested, in all its dimensions (political, technical, economic, linguistic, academic, editorial). Deconstruction is often perceived in Europe as an American brand of theorems, a discourse, or a school.

      Is there an irreplaceable place and a proper history for this thing, deconstruction? Is there anything else in it but transference in all the senses this word assumes in more than one language, and first of all in the sense of transference among languages? Allow me once again this quotation: “If I had to risk a single definition of deconstruction, one as brief, elliptical, and economical as a password, I would say simply and without overstatement: plus d’une langue—both more than one language and no more of just one language. In fact it is neither a statement nor a sentence. It is sententious, it makes no sense if, at least as Austin would have it, words in isolation have no meaning. What makes sense is the sentence. How many sentences can be made with ‘deconstruction’?” (ibid; trans, modified).

      2. Second step. This translativity of deconstruction destines it to erring and voyage, which is to say, to a destination and destinerrance. Now, when I discovered with some surprise the title of this colloquium, the title such as is it was chosen not by me but by Tom Bishop and Anselm Haverkamp, I let myself dream about all the readings one could give of it. I read it suddenly as if in a newspaper, a travel diary, or a press release: Hey, deconstruction, on this date, finds itself here these days, it is in America, it landed yesterday at JFK and is just passing through, more or less incognito and for a little while. Today, deconstruction is, happens to be; it turns out that it is in America. Where was it yesterday? Where will it be tomorrow? etc. With that slash in the middle (is/in America) which interrupts the reverie and gives us a start by marking clearly with an implacable injunction that we have to choose: either is or else in.

      Here then again the difference of a single letter, n or s. It marks for us very well, in the first place, that if deconstruction is in America, “in” can indicate inclusion as well as provisional passage, the being-in-transit of the visitor (Deconstruction is just visiting—and from visitation one passes quickly to the visor, to the visor and haunting effect in Hamlet—return to Hamlet’s father.) If, then, Deconstruction is in America, that means also, in the second place, that it is not America. If D is in A, it is not A; if D is A, it is not in, etc. The slash indeed inscribes or incises a disjunction in the copula “is,” in the coupling of the present that interests me here. How can the is itself be disjoined from itself, out of joint?

      When Hamlet says “The time is out of joint,” he says, to be sure, many things (we will come back to that); but he says at least and first of all this, by folding the proposition back on itself in advance: that time itself, the present indicative of the verb to be in the third person singular, the “is” that says what time is, this tense of time is out of joint, itself and by itself out of joint. And the shock waves of such a disjoining doubtless affect the heart 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.