Téléiopoièse

Criticisms of Derrida often hinge on the belief that he advocates that a text can mean whatever we want it to. Implied in this critique is that Derrida reads literature as a kind of vanity project, and that under his gaze every literary or philosophical work, no matter how great, becomes a mirror reflecting nothing but himself. It is, so the critique goes, because of this fatal self-absorption that this Narcissus – deconstruction – must ultimately fail to achieve anything but its own demise. As I have argued in the last chapter, the ‘logic’ of contretemps Derrida dissects in his reading of Romeo and Juliet speaks of an essential contretemps of time and being. Moving in this chapter to Derrida's understanding of the act of reading Shakespeare itself, I will show that this generalised out-of-jointness, to couch it in the terms of his reading of Hamlet, also bears on the act of reading, and since, for Derrida reading is philosophising, on the very act of doing philosophy itself.

As discussed in the previous chapter, Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare's drama of double survival, inaugurates a new ‘logic’, namely that accidents are anything but ‘accidental’. It is worth taking another, closer look at what exactly Derrida writes about contretemps in ‘Aphorism Countertime’: ‘This logic, at the same time, throws out into the unthinkable an anachrony of structure, the absolute interruption of history as deployment of a temporality, of a single and organized temporality.’In Derrida's French this sentence reads: ‘Cette logique, du même coup, rejette dans l’impensable une anachronie de structure, l’interruption absolue de l’histoire en tant que déploiement d’une temporalité, d’une temporalité une et organisée.’ Derrida's word choice rejeter is striking. Rejeter means both (1) ‘to reject’ or ‘throw out’, as well as (2) ‘to throw back’ or (3) ‘discharge’ (Collins-Robert French Dictionary). While holding on to the idea of throwing, Nicholas Royle's translation of rejeter as ‘to throw out’ loses the word's negative inflection, as well as the pluri-directionality the French word comprises: the anachrony of structure is both thrown out into the unthinkable, and thrown back – but thrown back or towards what? Who shoots off and who is hit? Who sends and who receives? Who reads or writes whom? Together with time, agency, address and the vectors of reading are warped.