category of the present. Just as with the gift that requires a present (gift) with neither memory (of the intention that gave the present) nor promise (of a return), the present time cannot be considered in terms of a “now” coming from a past and open to the arrival of an imminent future. Derrida would concur with Heidegger when the latter writes that “to giving and sending there belongs keeping back—such that the denial of the present and the withholding of the present, play within the giving of what has been and what will be.”19 For Derrida, time is not the Aristotelian measure of movement or the Augustinian psychological extension, but rather the passing away without trace and expectation of reciprocation. As such, time, and hence being (parousia), eludes the framework of presence and absence. Time is a “play” without origin or telos.20 Play, reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s language games and de Saussure’s theory of language, is not the grateful, bold enjoyment of having been given existence. Rather, here it is the lively but joyless fight where there is no “other” to respond to or speak to.21 As gift, time plays and conceals “itself” like a forgotten secret. Time, rather than speaking of the unity of the gift, points us to its irretrievable dissemination.
For Derrida, it is this temporization that ties gift and time to a narration, to a text. With this he does not mean that the story has to be told. The text is not simply a conveyance of content. Rather, giving and temporization appear only in a discourse.22 It is important to realize that Derrida’s insistence on the relationship between the gift-giving and its written account does not come from the inseparability of gift and logos alluded to earlier. He is not seeking an origin of the gift that would have no grasping intention. He is rather signaling that there is no “origin” from which the gift is given. What happens (Ereignis), therefore, happens to both the narrator and the narration, “as if the narrative produced the event it is supposed to report.”23 It is the text that makes giving possible in the first place. “The narrative gives the possibility of the recounted thing . . . and by the same token the possibility of the impossibility of gift and forgiveness.”24 For Derrida, what is guiltlessly and inevitably false in Baudelaire’s text is not simply the counterfeit coin given to the beggar, but the text itself. In this sense, the text itself also shows that gift is not possible.
Besides time, according to Derrida, gift speaks of yet another difference: that of “spacing.” Space, for Derrida, is not the indwelling of the gift that our examination of originary experience yielded. In his view space does not have anything to do with indwelling. For Derrida, “gift” differentiates as “space” that simultaneously unites and, more importantly, separates. Here again, the emphasis rests on difference rather than on unity. In Baudelaire’s story, as explained by Derrida, when the “giver” tells his friend the real “value” of the coin, the narration-gift drives a wider distance between all the characters. The gift separates the two friends because the one does not give and the gift of the other turns out to be deceptive. The gift also separates itself from the giver, since it shows that he has not been true to his own gifts and position in society.25 His gift reveals him to be de-centered. Furthermore, the gift causes the beggar’s status to plummet further down the social scale, while the apparent magnanimity of the giver heightens his superiority.26 Lastly, since the text is what enables the story to be narrated, the distance also affects Baudelaire’s reader—at least in Derrida’s account. The donation of the false coin, as in the case of the betrayed friend, detaches every engaged reader from the story. This distance, opened by the gift of the counterfeit money, signals the “absolute heterogeneity” proper to space.27 The gift reveals further, as with time, that space is made both possible and impossible by the giving of the difference. Derrida calls this differing “spacing,” which, as R. Gasché clarifies, “is the discrete synthesis of (1) the movement by which the self-identity of an entity is interrupted and (2) the passive constitution by inscription as habitation.”28 Gift gives time and space, that is, it differentiates being by postponing the present and forestalling indwelling.
The circularity of time, space, and gift—aimed at the elimination of the metaphysical understanding of being as presence—could seem to define gift as the ruling principle that orders the Derridean “system.” Yet Derrida’s “gift” does not designate a giving origin. To understand what “it” is, it may be helpful to acknowledge that, for him, gift and différance are synonymous. Like différance, gift temporizes and spaces. Like différance, gift—in its simultaneous possibility and impossibility—is more originary than contradiction is; it is understood through the written text; and it sets itself forth as absent in what is present. In this regard one could define gift simply as différance: “the non-full, non-simple, structured and differentiating origin of differences. Thus the name of ‘origin’ no longer suits it.”29 In other words, both différance and gift—without being an “it”—displace being as presence and eliminate any unified whole by proposing a perception of time as event in which event differs from itself. Derrida claims that the simultaneous possibility and impossibility of gift is not an oxymoron. Paradox and contradiction still presuppose unity. The simultaneity of the possibility and impossibility of the gift reflects the “unpresentable”: equivocal origins that ongoingly supplement and undo each other.30
The analysis of originary experience prompts the question of whether “gift” necessarily leads to the dissemination of origins or subjectivity indicated by Derrida’s empty, abstract différance. Is it not rather the case that Derrida’s conclusion results from his abstract account of the difference between gift, giver, receiver, time, and space, an account that systematically neglects the concrete singular’s integral mode of being and hence, a priori, excludes the role of the body and the community from consideration?31 If the previous examination of originary experience is valid, we may ask further: is it not the case that gratuity, which is required for both the donating and the reciprocating of the gift, is better thought of through the lens of agape, rather than through the purity of a subjectless, objectless intention? The experience of being given, as it appeared earlier, reveals “giving” as an event in which one desires union with the other without absorption. If, as originary experience suggests, this is how difference is to be conceived, does it not appear then that Derrida’s equivocal account of gift rejects unity and the tout autre (God) precisely because he does not accept that the concrete singular, in this case the human person, is not the absolute other? If this is the case, then perhaps postmodernity—in its numerous forms, Derrida’s included—is the epitome of the subjectivity that it attempts to deconstruct; that is, a subject that does not wish to deal with itself, the world, and God because it cannot account for its own finitude from and by itself.
2. A Radical Difference
Giving has indeed a paradoxical nature: the finite giver’s gratuitous donation must be total and free; yet the donation is also a response to a preceding sign. The gift is both a sign of and irreducible to the source, hence, it is simultaneously transparent to the giver and other than the giver—the child, as we saw, is not a mechanical repetition of the parents. The receiver’s response is gratuitous when it reciprocates without closing itself off to the giver, that is, when it affirms the giver and is open to further giving. This paradoxical structure of the gift requires taking up two related factors. First, in contrast to the view that the gift is both possible and impossible, as Derrida believes, the paradoxical structure of the gift can be explained through the primordial giving known as creation ex nihilo. In fact, to claim that the gift cannot presuppose anything, that it must give all of itself to another who remains other, that it gives time and space, and that it must generate a free, gratuitous response, is to describe creation. Only creation allows an understanding of difference and unity that does not conclude by hypostasizing the giving and receiving of being—as is the case with Heidegger’s Ereignis—or breaking the whole into fragments from whose relation their identities are carved out—as in Derrida’s work. The substitution of creation with reflections on “ground” or “differentiating origins” in order to avoid dealing with the gift ex nihilo that creation is, and hence to avoid grappling with both the nothingness and real being proper to finite beings, leaves Derrida’s philosophical reflection on gift at an unresolved, aporetic level. Creation ex nihilo reveals that the exchange of gifts is a free participation in the original, creative gratuity that brings singular beings into existence and whose gratuity constitutes
