ABSTRACT
In this paper I would like to discuss the relationship of the gift to "economics" in these ghostly terms. The gift can destabilize economics, question its subjectivity / objectivity, and threaten its confidence because its conception is unstable. Derrida (in Given Time [1992]) represents this instability as a paradox, or aporia, at the basis of which are two contradictory states of the gift: at one pole is generosity, giving without any expectation of a return; at the other pole is reciprocity, the return of the gift, or even the expectation of a return. The aporia consists of the fact that the condition of the gift's possibility is simultaneously the condition of its impossibility: to be a gift, the thing must be intended as gift, but the very act of consciousness whereby the one who gives is acknowledged (or acknowledges himself) produces a type of symbolic return, no less real for being cultural or immaterial. The gift, then, is unstable because it cannot but be suspended between these two poles - in the gap, as it were.5 The instability of the gift makes it impossible for economics to set its gaze upon the thing and fIx the terms of its relationship to it. The instability, that is, produces the functional equivalent of the visor dlect, and the gift thus wears well a ghostly garb, haunting economics.
