Deconstruction Is/In America. Anselm Haverkamp

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Название Deconstruction Is/In America
Автор произведения Anselm Haverkamp
Жанр Зарубежная публицистика
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Издательство Зарубежная публицистика
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isbn 9780814773161



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      But this witness will have been the witness of a witness, and the oath of secrecy binding all these testimonies. If Hamlet resolves not to decide, if he resigns himself to remaining the mute witness of the naked and monstrous truth that, in the blink of an eye, has been given to him in a blinding, thundering, traumatizing intuition, it is because he was first of all the witness of that witness that was his ghost of a father, of the violent death and the betrayal of which the latter claims he has been the victim, in the course of a supernatural and spectral attestation (which, in this regard, is like every attestation). Having known this, having believed it, having put faith in it, but having perhaps glimpsed something still worse behind it, the worst which the play would thus have actively silenced, Hamlet can no longer act. A more than lucid knowledge has killed off the action in him. He is from then on a pure witness, he is alone, alone and inconsolable; he ceases to act there where he is alone in having seen, known, alone in being able to bear witness.

       He is alone in bearing witness.

      Like every witness—and he bears witness also for every witness. He says no more than that, while keeping it secret: I am alone in being able to bear witness to it. A witness is always alone in being able to bear witness. Like a prophet who gives up speaking and acting or causing to act, precisely because he has seen too much. This “too much,” that which goes beyond measure, is the “out of joint” (aus den Fugen in German, which is the common expression for “out of joint,” something I noticed in Heidegger’s text on the Dikē in Der Spruch des Anaximander).

      In the long passage that I will now read, I am not sure whether the Nietzschean interpretation of Hamlet and of the experience of being “out of joint” could not be dissociated from the theory of art, of salvation through art, of the sublime and the comic that Nietzsche nevertheless manifestly attempts to attach to it. I will thus leave that question provisionally supended.

      In this sense the Dionysian man resembles Hamlet: both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained knowledge, and nausea inhibits action; for their action could not change anything in the eternal nature of things; they feel it to be ridiculous or humiliating that they should be asked to set right a world that is out of joint. Knowlegde kills action; action requires the veils of illusion: that is the doctrine of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much, and, as it were, from an excess of possibilities does not get around to action. Not reflection, no—true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth, outweights any motive for action, both in Hamlet and in the Dionysian man.

      Now no comfort avails any more; longing transcends a world after death, even the gods; existence is negated along with its glittering reflection in the gods or in an immortal beyond. Conscious of the truth he has once seen, man now sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of existence; now he understands what is symbolic in Ophelia’s fate; now he understands the wisdom of the sylvan god, Silenus: he is nauseated.

      In sum, Hamlet, surviving witness, is also the one who has seen death. He has seen the impossible and he cannot survive what he has survived. After having seen the worst, after having been the witness of the worst disorder, of absolute injustice, he has the experience of surviving—which is the condition of witnessing—but in order to survive what one does not survive. Because one should not survive. And that is what Hamlet says, and that is what 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.

      5. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), p.60.

I The Time of Analysis

       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,