ABSTRACT
In Given Time 1: Counterfeit Money (1991), Derrida broadens the context for a
reception of Husserl’s analyses of self evidence and the givenness of phenomena,
into an analysis of the paradoxes of a present which is not present, of a given-
ness, of what cannot be anticipated, and what cannot be reciprocated, without
annulling the status of the given, as gift. This shift from givenness to the gift
might be thought to take the analysis out of the sphere of Husserl’s concerns,
since for Husserl’s phenomenology, givenness is an operation in relation to
securing the classical concerns of philosophy, with knowledge, and truth, its
justification and its objects, and with metaphysics, as a delineation of the
structures of knowledge in relation to those objects. However, once Husserl
becomes committed to a thought of an incompletion underpinning the projec-
tions of idealisations, Derrida’s analyses of the paradoxes of the gift can be seen
as assisting in thinking the paradoxes of such givenness, as necessarily incom-
plete. The transition from analysis in terms of givenness, to an analysis in terms
of the gift reveals a connection to an enquiry about the constitution of value,
in terms of political economy, and an economy of psychic energy. Derrida
invokes the structural anthropology of Mauss and of Durkheim to complement
attention to Marx’s more familiar account of political economy, as a critique of
positive economics. Implicitly, there is a parallel from this to Husserl’s critique
of positivist psychology, and the development of the broader concerns of a
transcendental psychology. Thus, in this later text, apparently dating from 1991,
Derrida can be seen to be making connections from Husserl on givenness, and
the critique of positivist psychology, to a set of concerns with restricted and
general economies, in relation both to modern and to so called primitive social
organisation.
