Monday, October 18, 2004
(6:18 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Gift: Really Impossible?
By AKMA's count, we did thirteen Derrida posts last week -- almost two a day, for you humanities majors who aren't good at math. And now, three days too late, I am going to add a fourteenth. Here is a brief passage from Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money (trans. Peggy Kamuf):It suffices therefore for the other to perceive the gift--not only to perceive it in the sense in which, as one says in French, "on perçoit," one receives, for example, merchandise, payment, or compensation--but to perceive its nature of gift, the meaning or intention, the intentional meaning of the gift, in order for this simple recognition of the gift as gift, as such, to annul the gift as gift even before recognition becomes gratitude. The simple identification of the gift seems to destroy it. The simple identification of the passage of a gift as such, that is, of an identifiable thing among some identifiable "ones," would be nothing other than the process of the destruction of the gift. It is as if, between the event or the institution of the gift as such and its destruction, the difference were destined to be constantly annuled. At the limit, the gift as gift ought not appear as gift: either to the donee or to the donor. It cannot be gift as gift except by not being present as gift. Neither to the "one" nor to the "other." ... The temporalization of time (memory, present, anticipation; retention, protention, imminence of the future; "ecstaces," and so forth) always sets in motion the process of a destruction of the gift: through keeping, restitution, reproduction, the anticipatory expectation or apprehension that grasps or comprehends in advance.John Holbo's recent post on Donnie Darko evoked a comment from Dr. Paisley that crystalized for me why the movie affected me so deeply:
I think a lot of the appeal is that it takes the old "would you die for a loved one" question and adds the "if doing so meant they never knew/loved you" edge to it.Although perhaps I could have picked a better passage from Given Time to illustrate this, it appears that Donnie's sacrifice for his girlfriend meets Derrida's requirements for a perfect gift -- and it cements his claim that the gift is impossible, because this example of the perfect gift requires time travel.
Perhaps this Derrida/Donnie Darko problematic is a way for theoretical physics and phenomenology to come together -- or, at the very least, a good "in" for the perpetrator of the next Sokal hoax.
