On Givenness

Marcel Mauss started a debate about gifting and gift exchange in 1924, by producing an ethnographic work, The Gift, which denied the existence of a free gift. Since then the debate about gifting, which was grounded in material exchange, has drifted into discourses on ontology, phenomenology and theology. This Fall (2006), I heard Margaret Visser give a work shop based on the word "thanks", and its relationship to gifting. She was examining the difference between "Thanks" (and its etymology in the German Dank, and Dink) to its analogue in the Romance languages "Gracias" (grace, gratuity). German forces you to think about what it costs someone, where as Latin acknowledges the prior givenness of the gift. Thanks leads us to accounting, where as Grace leads us to the Feast. I think Visser has more tact then I, prone as I am to drawing harsh lines and caricatures.

Derrida got his hands on this topic and argued for an inaccessible purity in gifting. According to Derrida, the free gift must meet this requirements:
1. There is no reciprocity
2. The recipient must not recognize the gift as a gift or himself as the recipient of a gift
3. The donor must not recognize the gift, either
4. The thing itself cannot appear as a "gift" (I lifted this from the Wiki article on Mauss's The Gift, though it is Derrida's position as recounted in Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite.)

For Derrida, the purity of the gift is exalted to unreachable ends. It makes me think of his analysis of Law in Kafka's famous "Before the Law". With Kafka the Law is unattainable and so far beyond human understanding that one can only stand before the law and grow old (and less as less of a specimen of lawful life). It reminds me of Roman 3:23, "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God". I can assent to this; however, I think that it is quite clear that Christ thinks right action is knowable (and doable), even though perfection is unattainable by anyone other than the Christ. Still, we must long to be perfect (I used to read Christ's "Be ye perfect like your Father in heaven" as ultimate irony, but I have changed my tune: I think we cannot but attempt such perfection, otherwise we do nothing). Gifting is part of perfection because it is part of God's being. The Father, who is complete in and of himself, cannot help but extend himself in creation through the Word, and the world cannot help but respond fully to such extension as there is nothing (evil) to restrict the perfect perception (a non-response is, in the end, nothing). This is to say that there is no re-presentation in God; the Spirit is one of complete fidelity between subject and object, speaker and spoken, spoken and heard, given and returned. This seems to be a bit of a closed (feedback) loop, if we don't open it to the limited beings, humanity. Because every aspect of humanity is completely given (life, soul-mind, knowledge, love, tradition, language, politics, ontology - except evil), all humanity can do is participate in a gift economy that is beyond human ability to reciprocate. As I write "beyond", I do not mean to say that humans can't aspire to God's ability to freely give from an infinite source, only to say they humans cannot do this without tapping the God-source in the first place. Humans cannot freely give without participating in God.

How is this enacted in the Catholic Church? The Eucharistic ceremony, whereby God gives his body (the Word, language...don't forget it, infused in materiality as it is) to his body, to join them to him in giving, that they might then give to the broader community as he gave to them, and extend the circulation of gift (truth, goodness, beauty).

I was inspired to write on this when I was reading Milbank's small essay "The Gift and the Given". Here are some highlights from his essay (his gift?):

"Supposing that I am myself, really, ontologically a gift? Then one does not immediately need to invoke the other in order to grant oneself this status. If mind or spirit is more than an illusory epiphenomenon, then it does not derive from matter, and must be in consequence a mysterious and fundamental gift from the unknown (Bruaire, 1983). If I am myself a gift, then what lurks in me from before myself is more than the human, horizontal other. It is rather the trace of a vertical donor. And it seems appropriate that this donor, ‘God’, who gives gifts to nothing, and so gives gifts to themselves in order to establish gifts, should create first of all a creature able reflexively to exist by giving this gift to herself in turn. Is this not what it means to think (Bruaire, 1983)? Then gratitude for the gift of self spills later over into generosity towards the neighbour in imitation of that generosity that has first constituted us in being at all." (445)

Milbank's key insight, from my perspective, is that Mauss and other reduce gifting to contracting, which is totally immanent, with no aspect of transcendence, and no relationship to Gift as givenness - tradition/culture/language - the prior gifts none of us can escape, to which we can add little as individuals.

Here is a long quote from Milbank that is worth suffering through (Milbank has incarnated the via dolorosa into his prose, just as Derrida has incarnated play into his):

But to speak of spoken sign as gift – what does this mean? If a gift is a signifying convention then is it at bottom a fiction? Is the impossibility of the pure gift according to Derrida (because we award ourselves economically even in telling ourselves that we have been generous) coterminous with the endless deferral of meaning by the sign, such that to speak is to endlessly project the arrival of meaning, while to act ethically is endlessly to strive towards a generosity that cannot be enacted? This implies, however, as Derrida was aware, that postponement of meaning nonetheless remains ‘truer’ than a foreclosed presence of truth, while equally the impossible gift remains ‘the good’ in a way that economic and contractual self-assurance cannot be. So 11: What is the co-implication between gift and fiction?

Is meaning just postponed? Or can it be in some measure anticipated? And if not, then is the gift basically a sign, a promise of special attention that can never be realized? But perhaps, to the contrary, a sign has always a material vehicle, like the person speaking, the medium in which it is inscribed, the actions, place and time that accompany it. This vehicle itself supplements the import of the sign, and not just the next sign to which it gives rise. This ensures that some meaning is already realized. Is this meaning a suppression of indeterminacy, or does it of itself open up a specific but open horizon of meaning? If it does not, then the significance of the material for meaning seems to be suppressed, by arbitrary fiat. But a sign proffered by a material someone deploying a material vehicle is not just a sign, it is also a gift. Inversely, a material thing handed over must be also a sign in order to be a gift. So gift is the exact point of intersection between the real and the signifying. It thereby exceeds the contrast between history and fiction, just as, at the instance where we receive joyfully a gift, our lives have become saturated with meaning, like novels, as if we were truly living out a dream. Thus, the instance of the gift is the instance of the closing of the gulf between the fictional and the desired on the one hand and the real and the tedious on the other.

And yet this instance only reminds us that such closure is more fundamental than the rift since, originally, no material thing appears to us before it has been interpreted as in some way significant; nor, on the other hand, can any signified meaning ever entirely float free of material actuality. Where this cultural presupposition is seen as itself a response to a prior gift (sign/reality) then one has ‘religion’. Where the latter is absent, then the unavoidable presupposition of original gift – the givenness of gift, both historically and ontologically, for human existence – is placed, with a constant effort, in ironic brackets. Then the gift is seen as only a fantasy in order to escape the givennness of an endless drift, rising up without generosity from a fundamental void. All then unravels: there can be really no gift, unilateral or reciprocal, but only the assertive gestures of power and their self-interested mutual contracting.

So, finally, 12: Is the gift the echo of divine creation and of divine grace? And otherwise, is it an illusion? (445-6)

There we have it: Power or Peace?