Signature Derrida (A Critical Inquiry Book) by Derrida Jacques

Author:Derrida, Jacques [Derrida, Jacques]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2013-04-11T00:00:00+00:00

8 Given Time: The Time of the King*

Translated by Peggy Kamuf

Epigraph

The King takes all my time; I give the rest to Saint-Cyr, to whom I would like to give all.

It is a woman who signs.

For this is a letter, and from a woman to a woman. Madame de Maintenon is writing to Madame Brinon. This woman says, in sum, that to the King she gives all. For in giving all one’s time, one gives all or the all, if all one gives is in time and one gives all one’s time.

It is true that she who is known to have been the influential mistress and even the morganatic wife of the Sun King1 (the Sun and the King, the Sun-King will be the subjects of these lectures), Madame de Maintenon, then, did not say, in her letter, literally, that she was giving all her time but rather that the King was taking it from her (“the King takes all my time”). Even if that means the same thing, in her mind, one word does not equal the other. What she gives, for her part, is not time but the rest, the rest of the time: “I give the rest to Saint-Cyr, to whom I would like to give all.” But as the King takes all her time, then the rest, by all good logic and good economics, is nothing. She can no longer take her time. She has no more time. And yet she gives it. Lacan says speaking of love: It gives what it does not have, a formula whose variations are ordered by the Écrits according to the final and transcendental modality of the woman inasmuch as she is, supposedly, deprived of the phallus.2

Here Madame de Maintenon is writing, and she says in writing, that she gives the rest. What is the rest? Is it, the rest? She gives the rest which is nothing, since it is the rest of a time concerning which she has just informed her correspondent she has nothing of it left since the King takes it all from her. And yet, we must underscore this paradox, even though the King takes all her time, she seems to have some left, as if she could return the change. “The King takes all my time,” she says, a time that belongs to her therefore. But how can a time belong? What is it to have time? If a time belongs, it is because the word time designates metonymically less time itself than the things with which one fills it, with which one fills the form of time, time as form. It is a matter, then, of the things one does in the meantime [cependant] or the things one has at one’s disposal during [pendant] this time. Therefore, as time does not belong to anyone as such, one can no more take it, itself, than give it. Time already begins to appear as that which undoes this distinction between taking and giving, therefore also between receiving

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