Shakespeare à contretemps

How does Derrida read Shakespeare? If his teacher's judgement on Derrida's khâgne assignment on Shakespeare’s idea of kingship – recently surfaced from University of California, Irvine's collection of his papers – is anything to go by, it is ‘quite unintelligible’. His reading of Romeo and Juliet in ‘Aphorism Countertime’ is exemplary of Derrida’s approach to the Shakespearean corpus. As Derek Attridge notes, this piece disrupts the ‘homogenous spatiotemporal continuum’ of the ‘traditional critical essay’. This short but incisive text is thus not least remarkable because of Derrida's decision to write in aphorisms. What is an aphorism? ‘As its name indicates, aphorism separates, it marks dissociation (apo), it terminates, delimits, arrests (horizō). It brings to an end by separating, it separates in order to end – and to define [finir – et définir].’ This is what ‘Aphorism Countertime’ does to Romeo and Juliet. It separates, it dissociates, but it is perhaps because of this that this short piece is so arresting. Like thirty-nine arrows, its aphorisms puncture our understanding of what a philosophical reading of Shakespeare might be, indeed what reading Shakespeare in general might entail.

Its form is not the only unusual thing about ‘Aphorism Countertime’. It also marks a highly uncommon way of approaching Shakespeare. In French, contretemps means ‘mishap’, as well as ‘out of time’ or, more literally, ‘against time’ (Collins-Robert French Dictionary). Doing something à contretemps means going against the grain. Apart from the fact that ‘Aphorism Countertime’ is at odds with the way Shakespeare is usually read, reading Shakespeare is also a highly unusual thing for Derrida to do. It is difficult to find a pattern to the philosophical texts Derrida feels drawn to; the shared characteristics of the literary texts he turns to are more obvious. They are, in Attridge's words, ‘mostly twentieth-century, and mostly modernist, or at least nontraditional (many would say “difficult”) in their use of language and literary conventions: Blanchot, Ponge, Celan, Joyce, Artaud, Jabès, Kafka’.