Page 92 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes 7.7.1 The Gift
The aporia that surrounds the gift revolves around the paradoxical thought that a genuine gift
cannot actually be understood to be a gift. In his text, Given Time (GT), Derrida suggests that the
notion of the gift contains an implicit demand that the genuine gift must reside outside of the
oppositional demands of giving and taking, and beyond any mere self-interest or calculative
reasoning (GT 30). According to him, however, a gift is also something that cannot appear as such
(GD 29), as it is destroyed by anything that proposes equivalence or recompense, as well as by
anything that even proposes to know of, or acknowledge it. This may sound counter-intuitive, but
even a simple 'thank-you' for instance, which both acknowledges the presence of a gift and also
proposes some form of equivalence with that gift, can be seen to annul the gift. By politely
responding with a 'thank-you', there is often, and perhaps even always, a presumption that because
of this acknowledgement one is no longer indebted to the other who has given, and that nothing
more can be expected of an individual who has so responded. Significantly, the gift is hence
drawn into the cycle of giving and taking, where a good deed must be accompanied by a suitably
just response. As the gift is associated with a command to respond, it becomes an imposition for
the receiver, and it even becomes an opportunity to take for the 'giver', who might give just to
receive the acknowledgement from the other that they have in fact given. There are undoubtedly
many other examples of how the 'gift' can be deployed, and not necessarily deliberately, to gain
advantage. Of course, it might be objected that even if it is psychologically difficult to give
without also receiving (and in a manner that is tantamount to taking) this does not in-itself
constitute a refutation of the logic of genuine giving. According to Derrida, however, his
discussion does not amount merely to an empirical or psychological claim about the difficulty of
transcending an immature and egocentric conception of giving. On the contrary, he wants to
problematise the very possibility of a giving that can be unequivocally disassociated from
receiving and taking.
The important point is that, for Derrida, a genuine gift requires an anonymity of the giver, such
that there is no accrued benefit in giving. The giver cannot even recognise that they are giving, for
that would be to reabsorb their gift to the other person as some kind of testimony to the worth of
the self - i.e. the kind of self-congratulatory logic that rhetorically poses the question "how wonderful
I am to give this person that which they have always desired, and without even letting them know
that I am responsible?". This is an extreme example, but Derrida claims that such a predicament
afflicts all giving in more or less obvious ways. For him, the logic of a genuine gift actually
requires that self and other be radically disparate, and have no obligations or claims upon each
other of any kind. He argues that a genuine gift must involve neither an apprehension of a good
deed done, nor the recognition by the other party that they have received, and this seems to render
the actuality of any gift an impossibility. Significantly, however, according to Derrida, the existential
force of this demand for an absolute altruism can never be assuaged, and yet equally clearly it can
also never be fulfilled, and this ensures that the condition of the possibility of the gift is inextricably
associated with its impossibility. For Derrida, there is no solution to this type of problem, and no
hint of a dialectic that might unify the apparent incommensurability in which possibility implies
impossibility and vice versa. At the same time, however, he does not intend simply to vacillate in
hyperbolic and self-referential paradoxes. There is a sense in which deconstruction actually seeks
genuine giving, hospitality, forgiving and mourning, even where it acknowledges that these
concepts are forever elusive and can never actually be fulfilled.
7.7.2 Hospitality

It is also worth considering the aporia that Derrida associates with hospitality. According to
Derrida, genuine hospitality before any number of unknown others is not, strictly speaking, a
possible scenario. If we contemplate giving up everything that we seek to possess and call our
own, then most of us can empathise with just how difficult enacting any absolute hospitality
would be. Despite this, however, Derrida insists that the whole idea of hospitality depends upon

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