ABSTRACT
In recent times the problem of the gift has received a great deal of philosophical attention. Its scope is set out powerfully by Jacques Derrida in Given Time. 1: Counterfeit Money, where the conditions of possibility of the gift-that it is completely free and that it is present, or identifiable as such-are simultaneously its conditions of impossibility-no gift that is ever present is completely free, and if it is not present then we cannot know it as a gift.1 The gift structurally exemplifies what Derrida calls “the impossible,” where conditions of possibility meet with conditions of impossibility in an aporia. This aporetic quality of the gift has been the subject of a debate during the last decade that seems inevitably to spill over from the academic arena into the daily lives of its protagonists, if such a distinction between academia and daily life can in fact be made. I sometimes wonder whether Derrida suffers much for having written about the gift. In my own case, at least, and despite anything I might have said or written, any gift-giving on the part of friends or family is now often humorously but cautiously accompanied by the disclaimer, “but of course, we know that there’s no such thing as a gift!” In this spilling over we begin to see, nonetheless, what is at stake in the question. The possibility of the gift seems so incredibly obvious that to problematize it is to make too much of it, to take it too seriously. No one, the anecdotal evidence would
suggest, really thinks of the gift as something that must never be returned. At the same time, however, in the face of this challenge to the all-tooobvious, there is often expressed a deep sense of being affronted, a sense that betrays nothing other than the deadly seriousness of the desire to “really” give.2 *
The gift polemic, especially insofar as it touches a sensitive nerve running through a commitment to the plain common sense of the economy, opens usefully onto other important debates. First, it serves to focus contemporary philosophical discussion about the nature and limits of phenomenology. Is phenomenology inherently metaphysical, as Derrida seems to suggest, because it ultimately seeks to reduce phenomena to presence, a presence that is ultimately reliant on representation by a theoretical consciousness?3 And must it thereby be doomed to fail, since the phenomenological reduction inevitably promises what it cannot deliver?4 Or following the position developed by Jean-Luc Marion, does phenomenology offer a way forward for philosophy beyond metaphysics? In brief, the argument from Marion’s perspective runs something as follows. A reading of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology through a Heideggerian lens, especially as this reading is informed by Derrida, reveals Husserl’s metaphysical focus, where phenomenology is oriented solely towards a reduction of the ontic according to the horizon of its object-ness or presence. Martin Heidegger’s subsequent two-phased reduction is an attempt to move beyond the ontic and to manifest what is not present, sheer being, which brings-into-presence but itself withdraws in the same movement. Yet Heidegger, too, remains implicated in the metaphysics he seeks to go beyond, and this for Derrida as much as for Marion, although with slightly different inflections.5 In part drawing from the work of Emmanuel Lévinas, Marion is critical of the way in which Heidegger absolutises being, blind to the possibilities of what is not given according to the light of being. Rehabilitating Husserl’s work, Marion claims to find in it resources for a third reduction. While in Reduction and Givenness Marion describes this as the reduction to the call, in the two subsequent volumes of his phenomenological trilogy, Being Given and In Excess, it has become the reduction to sheer givenness.6 Phenomenology, he claims, offers a postmetaphysical possibility in its emphasis on the utter self-givenness of phenomena to the reduced consciousness, l’adonné, the “gifted,” the one given over to the self-giving phenomenon. With this emphasis on the priority of the given in place, and with a consequent decentering of any constituting subject, Marion maintains that a whole range
of phenomena can show themselves as given, without making any concession to metaphysics. Such phenomena potentially might include phenomena of revelation. In Marion’s analysis, much will rest on his exploitation of Husserl’s use of Gegebenheit, givenness, and the constellation of terms that might resonate with it, including not only the given, but also the gift.
