‘The Time Is Out of Joint’ ~ Shakespeare, Derrida & Marx

‘This looks like the end of everything!’, someone remarked at an exhibition.

First work from the ‘Time Is Out of Joint’ series, which references the following exclamation by Prince Hamlet in William Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ (in the form of an embodied metaphor): “The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right!”

Context

Rest, rest, perturbèd spirit.—So, gentlemen,
With all my love I do commend me to you,
And what so poor a man as Hamlet is
May do t’ express his love and friending to you,
God willing, shall not lack. Let us go in together,
And still your fingers on your lips, I pray.
The time is out of joint. O cursèd spite
That ever I was born to set it right!
Nay, come, let’s go together.

— quoted from The Folger Shakespeare edition, ‘The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark’ (1623), act I, towards the end of scene V.

Also see: Kasper Bergholt Photography

Background

March 31st, 2024: Last Day of March (flat stretch of grass outside Hellerup, Denmark, facing Swedish nuclear power-plant Barsebäck)

Derrida on The ‘Time Is Out of Joint’

In the French translations [of Shakespeare’s Hamlet], the demands are distributed here, it seems, around several major possibilities. These are types. “The Time is out of joint,” time is either ‘le temps’ itself, the temporality of time, or else what temporality makes possible (time as ‘historie’, the way of things are at a certain time, the time that we are living, nowadays, the period), or else, consequently, the ‘monde’, the world as it turns, our world today, our today, currentness itself, current affairs: there were it’s going okay (whither) and there where it’s not going so well, where it is rotting or withering, there where it’s not working [‘ca marche’] or not working well, there where it’s going okay without running as it should nowadays [‘par les temps qui cournet‘].Time: It is ‘le temps’, but also ‘l’histoire, as it is ‘le monde’, time, history, world.

— Jacques Derrida (1930-2004): Specters of Marx, Routledge, 1994.

---

Allusions in The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock?

It struck me when re-reading the passage from the Folger edition that the two lines:

‘Let us go in together’ and ‘Nay, come, let’s go together’

are echoed (at least to some extent) in T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ intertexually:

‘Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky’ & ‘Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets’.