from coercion, transform persons into individuals who view each other as potential enemies; bureaucracy, intended to serve a well-ordered society, alienates citizens from government while it quantifies and treats them as numeric instances of problems to resolve; families appear as transient congregations of isolated individuals; not infrequently work, family life, and play—now reduced to entertainment—are loosely connected for economic but not organic reasons; sexuality is severed from fecundity and both from spousal union; gender is redefined as a cultural category that is not necessarily connected to somatic features; fleeting and competing feelings define, if only for the moment they last, the identity of the human person.
This panoramic description of disintegrated wholes has found in some postmodern thinkers a theoretical elaboration that expresses the opposite view from originary experience. Jean-François Lyotard, elucidating the meaning of postmodernity, wrote that “we have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one, for the reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, of the transparent and the communicable experience. . . . The answer is: Let us wage war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable [which is not another obscure name for God or source]; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name.”2 It is important to underscore that this account both interprets unity in terms of totalitarianism—which itself is a political reading of unity in terms of power—and proposes to overturn it by means of, once again, power. In their attempt to leap out of the metaphysical discourse, postmodern thinkers present the philosophical reflections that preceded them as the inevitable succession of great narratives. Nevertheless, “the grand narrative,” Lyotard writes, “has lost its credibility, regardless of what mode of unification it uses.”3 To underscore the radicality of the rejection of the grand narrative, it is worth recalling that Jacques Derrida, responding to David Tracy’s adoption of the metaphor of fragments to depict our postmodern spiritual situation, rejected his being labeled a postmodern. Even though Tracy acknowledged that “there are only postmodernities,” Derrida noted that postmodernity is yet another “attempt to periodize the totality of history within a teleological scheme.”4 Derrida clarified further that “what is going on today—in religion, in art, in philosophy, in thinking—is a way of inventing gestures which are not subject to totality or to a loss of totality, to the nostalgia and work of mourning for totality. Of course, this is impossible. We cannot simply stop mourning and nostalgia, but then something else is perhaps at work, but this ‘perhaps’ is not in tune with ‘postmodernity’ or with the ‘fragment.’”5 To bring this claim forward inevitably requires postmodern thinkers to reject the subjective humanism that begot the perception of “unity” they so sternly contest.6 The subject is to be let go without remainder and unity replaced by a never-ending multiplicity of origins whose reciprocal supplementarity undermines the very names of “origin” and “unity.”7 Western culture seems to have fallen prey to the allurement of anarchy, that is, to that radical lack of principles that does not even have to conceive of itself as opposed to God. Derrida signals this “something else that is perhaps at work” in many different ways, including the unthinkable, polysemic, and equivocal “unname”: gift. Let us now consider briefly what he means by “gift.”
Derrida’s reflection on gift is offered as a contribution to the destruction of what Heidegger considered one of the basic assumptions of Western thought: the identification of being with presence (parousia).8 Gift, so Derrida contends, rather than accounting for presence as we saw earlier, undercuts it without replacing it with another more basic ground. “Gift” creates difference between the gift, the giver, the receiver, space, and time. For Derrida, therefore, the term “gift” refers to the unpresentable, the unnamable.9 As such, it is not possible to move away from the undecidability with which, according to him, the coexistence of the existence and non-existence of gift leaves us. Gift plays a “fundamental” role. In fact, it is an “open infrastructure” that enables him to elucidate the meaning of time, space, and interpersonal relations. It is important to bear in mind, however, that his exploration of the meaning and relation between gift, giver, and receiver is built upon the presupposition that the logic of gift requires both the absolute purity of the giver’s and the receiver’s intentions and the utter neutrality of the gift with respect to both. More precisely, gratuity presupposes for Derrida the a priori elimination of the subject (both the giver and the receiver). For this reason, Derrida casts gift within what he describes as the logic of the economy, which both requires and precludes gift.
Taking Mauss’s famous work on gift as a starting point, Derrida’s Given Time contends that “gift” belongs to the logic of the economic circular exchange—a logic that could be expressed as do ut des, I give so that you may (have to) give, or do quia dedisti, I give because you have given first.10 For “gift” to be, there has to be a giver who hands on a gift (a “present,” we could say, taking advantage of this feature of English) to a receiver, who is thus put in the position of reciprocating the first donation with a greater (excessive) gift after some time. For the donation to be truly gratuitous, however, it has to break away from the necessity to reciprocate, or to give in the first place. Thus, the giver cannot be aware of himself as giver. A giver must radically let go of the memory of the intention that triggers his giving if he is to truly give and not seek something in exchange. Any intention to give a gift that is not immediately thrown out into the most absolute oblivion spoils the gift and reduces the donation of the gift to pure commerce.11 The human being, so it seems for Derrida, is irremediably egotistic, always turning the gift into a profit of sorts. The gift (a present), to be such, cannot disclose its gift-ness because it would impose its own measure upon the giver or receiver; that is, it would require reciprocation. Lastly, Derrida claims that if the receiver knows himself to be a receiver, he is put in a position of having to show his gratitude and reciprocate the gift, even if simply by receiving it. For the reception of the gift to be true, therefore, the receiver must neither see the gift nor respond to the giver.
Derrida’s other well-known essay on the nature of gift, The Gift of Death, gives the same account of gift from the point of view of ethics and offers, among many other things, an elucidation of the meaning of responsibility in light of gift. The protagonists in this case are God, Abraham, and Isaac. This book, a relentless critique of a distorted perception of Christian ethics, contends that responsibility to God—the mysterium tremens that sets Abraham before the utterly irresponsible content of the request to murder his own son—is possible only “on the condition that the good no longer be a transcendental objective . . . on the condition that goodness forgets itself, hence a movement of infinite love.”12 The giver has to respond and “at the same time efface the origin of what one gives.”13 God, in this regard, is the name for the possibility to keep this secret, that is, to forget the gift.14 For Derrida, donation requires absolute secrecy: the gift (in the threefold “unity” of giver, receiver, and gift) cannot be present. The gift therefore remains unthinkably polysemic and indescribable.15
That the gift is both necessary and impossible entails that, for Derrida, “gift” does not belong to practical reason, nor does it indicate the “essence” or the “presence” of a phenomenon.16 To give, rather, is to open up the difference of time and space. “The gift is such only inasmuch as it gives time. . . . Where there is gift there is time.”17 In Given Time, Derrida uses Baudelaire’s story “Counterfeit Money” to illuminate his understanding of this “trace” he calls “gift” and of the difference that gift introduces between giver, gift, and receiver on the one hand, and of time and space on the other hand. Exiting a tobacco shop, so the very short story goes, two friends encounter a beggar. One gives him what later turns out to be a false coin. The giving, Derrida indicates, establishes a difference between giver, gift, and receiver. This difference is first of all time: “the given thing requires or takes time.”18 In order for the gift to be true, the receiver cannot respond immediately. He must receive the gift and reciprocate it later with another gift. Derrida suggests that the gift of one’s own life for another is perhaps the clearest illustration of this assertion that giving gives, above all, time: to die for another, says Derrida, does not eliminate the other’s death. It simply delays it. The gift reveals in this way that time’s present—in both the subjective and objective connotations of the genitive—is always postponed and hence time cannot be understood as “presence.”
