2 - In and ‘Out of Joint’, In and Out of the Norm: On Rhetoric and Law

Summary

And still your fi ngers on your lips, I pray.

The time is out of joint. Oh cursed spite,

That ever I was born to set it right.

Nay, come, let's go together.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, I, v, 186–90

1. DISJOINTMENTS

In the development of this chapter, I have been largely inspired by an essay entitled ‘The Time is Out of Joint’, written by Jacques Derrida and concerning (mainly) Hamlet's madness (Derrida 1995: 14). In that essay, Derrida recounts Hamlet's crisis and argues on the deep meaning of the famous sentence uttered by Hamlet – ‘The time is out of joint’:

Whether Hamlet played or lived his madness, whether he was able to mimic it only in order to think it (in view of thinking it and because already he thought of himself on the basis of madness), the one who said ‘The time is out of joint’ knew in any case, as nearly as possible, what ‘disjoncter’ means. What happens if time is mad? And what if what time gives is fi rst of all the measurelessness of all madness? (1995: 15)

Hamlet is mad with regard to dates, events, causes and consequences. He is mad because all reality before him appears to be disjointed. His present, his memory, his mind are all suffering from traumas, from a symbolic loss – and thus the madness of the character stands to signify ‘anachrony, mourning, haunting, oath, survival, and the name – which in that instance as well is the name of the father’ (Derrida 1995: 19). The tragedy begins with and develops around an event, an irruption of time, a deadly and ghostly time. And it is around a series of contretemps that the plot expands. Hamlet is exhorted to count the days, ‘to cut short the time of mourning, to measure it in a measured fashion’ (1995: 20).

In trying to bring accident back within a system of pre-established rules (like temporality), law is in itself hamletic. And, by consequence, tragic. What does it mean to be within the juridical joints? What does it mean to go across them, to go beyond the settled thresholds of the law? Both order and disjointment are innate in law.