Gift and the Unity of Being. Antonio López M.
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.”
Derrida argues that gift clarifies the meaning of time because it forces us to think of it apart from the 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