Post by Admin on Feb 11, 2017 13:09:52 GMT
Chapter two of Jacques Derrida’s Given Time: “The Madness of Economic Reason: A Gift without Present,” focuses on anthropologist Marcel Mauss’s 1925 essay The Gift, which seeks to explain the structure of the economies of archaic societies, which were based on the exchange of goods, as gift economies.
The central question that Mauss attempts to answer is what drives this gift structure, one in which the giving of a gift demands its return? Mauss addresses this question through a study of the potlatch, a gift-giving ritual practised by indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest coast of Canada and the USA. He uses his account to challenge contemporary views of the underlying structure of the potlatch, which was thought as an economic cycle, of debts entered into and debts repaid, at a legally binding “due date.”
Instead Mauss prioritises the potlatch’s gift structure, as one of “presents made” and “presents repaid,” characterising it as a process of “exchanging gifts,” in which the demand for the restitution of the gift is “inscribed in the thing itself that is given or exchanged.” (40) Rather than a contract between donor and donee, with an inherent due-date, the gift/countergift as theorised by Mauss is a force immanent to the thing: “a mysterious force, the thing itself demands gift and restitution.” Time is central to this, the gift cannot be reciprocated immediately, a length of time, a term must elapse before its return.
Derrida’s analysis (pp. 36-40)
Derrida points out the incongruity of Mauss’s description, gifts cannot be exchanged “tit for tat,” as this leads to their annulment.
Yet the gift as given and its restitution by its return, the phenomenon of the exchanged gift, is undeniable. The gift and its exchange are joined, they are in synthesis. For Derrida this paradox constitutes the “madness of the gift,” one which informs his thinking on the subject.
He says that the syn of synthesis, which means “together,” has “an essential relation to time,” in terms of a “certain deferral/differing in time.” (38) In Derrida’s eyes the delay of the gift, its term, as a word and as the length of time of delayed return, creates a differance*, which is in turn a “guardrail”** against the madness of the gift. Which, to be a gift, must remain foreign to the circle of exchange, while being pulled into it through its restitution, the antithesis of the gift.
Thus the temporalised thing, that which is in a neutral and homogenised time, is transformed as a gift, “temporized” – made subject to the time of delay. Derrida says this force of delay is inscribed in/upon the given-exchanged thing, in terms of “limit and time.” The thing of the gift has its essence in this demand of the “gift-counter-gift.” For Mauss the delay, the term between the reception of the gift and its restitution, forms the “original essential feature of the gift.” (39) Thus the time of delay appears as intrinsic to the gift.
*A key term for Derrida, plays on the French différer, which means both “to defer” and “to differ.”
**”Guardrail” is the translation of garde-fou, which, when translated literally, means “crazy guard.”
Derek Hampson
The central question that Mauss attempts to answer is what drives this gift structure, one in which the giving of a gift demands its return? Mauss addresses this question through a study of the potlatch, a gift-giving ritual practised by indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest coast of Canada and the USA. He uses his account to challenge contemporary views of the underlying structure of the potlatch, which was thought as an economic cycle, of debts entered into and debts repaid, at a legally binding “due date.”
Instead Mauss prioritises the potlatch’s gift structure, as one of “presents made” and “presents repaid,” characterising it as a process of “exchanging gifts,” in which the demand for the restitution of the gift is “inscribed in the thing itself that is given or exchanged.” (40) Rather than a contract between donor and donee, with an inherent due-date, the gift/countergift as theorised by Mauss is a force immanent to the thing: “a mysterious force, the thing itself demands gift and restitution.” Time is central to this, the gift cannot be reciprocated immediately, a length of time, a term must elapse before its return.
Derrida’s analysis (pp. 36-40)
Derrida points out the incongruity of Mauss’s description, gifts cannot be exchanged “tit for tat,” as this leads to their annulment.
Yet the gift as given and its restitution by its return, the phenomenon of the exchanged gift, is undeniable. The gift and its exchange are joined, they are in synthesis. For Derrida this paradox constitutes the “madness of the gift,” one which informs his thinking on the subject.
He says that the syn of synthesis, which means “together,” has “an essential relation to time,” in terms of a “certain deferral/differing in time.” (38) In Derrida’s eyes the delay of the gift, its term, as a word and as the length of time of delayed return, creates a differance*, which is in turn a “guardrail”** against the madness of the gift. Which, to be a gift, must remain foreign to the circle of exchange, while being pulled into it through its restitution, the antithesis of the gift.
Thus the temporalised thing, that which is in a neutral and homogenised time, is transformed as a gift, “temporized” – made subject to the time of delay. Derrida says this force of delay is inscribed in/upon the given-exchanged thing, in terms of “limit and time.” The thing of the gift has its essence in this demand of the “gift-counter-gift.” For Mauss the delay, the term between the reception of the gift and its restitution, forms the “original essential feature of the gift.” (39) Thus the time of delay appears as intrinsic to the gift.
*A key term for Derrida, plays on the French différer, which means both “to defer” and “to differ.”
**”Guardrail” is the translation of garde-fou, which, when translated literally, means “crazy guard.”
Derek Hampson