Giving Beyond the Gift by Wolfson Elliot R.;

Author:Wolfson, Elliot R.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press

THE GIFT UNGIFTED: GIVING BEYOND THE GIVER AND THE GIVEN

The mythopoeic power of imagining the force of life as a gift and the lingering psychological need to render transcendence metaphorically are not difficult to comprehend. But, from a strictly philosophical perspective, the eventfulness of giving is far more neutral than what the image of the gift would suggest. I agree with Derrida that there is no necessary “semantic continuity” between the use of Gegebenheit in phenomenology and the problem of the gift.219 Marion’s presumption that there is such a continuity leads to the obfuscation of the line separating phenomenology and theology. To cite Derrida’s pointed criticism of Marion’s undertaking: “My hypothesis concerns the fact that you use or credit the word Gegebenheit with gift, with the meaning of gift, and this has to do with—I will not call this theological or religious—the deepest ambition of your thought. For you, everything that is given in the phenomenological sense, gegeben, donné, Gegebenheit, everything that is given to us in perception, in memory, in a phenomenological perception, is finally a gift to a finite creature, and it is finally a gift of God.”220 The phenomenological identification of givenness with the gift is driven by this anthropo-theologization.221 I am not swayed by Marion’s rejoinder to Derrida: “I am not trying to reduce every phenomenon to a gift and then to say that, after that, since this is a gift, and given to a finite mind, then there is perhaps a giver behind it all.… My project attempts, on the contrary, to reduce the gift to givenness, and to establish the phenomenon as given.”222 Givenness may be the “immanent structure of any kind of phenomenality,” inasmuch as everything that appears must appear as given, but the enframing of that givenness as a gift requires an agency that is still circumscribed as transcendent to or immanent within the horizon of Being in spite of Marion’s protestation that his “proposal remains merely philosophical and without any theological presupposition.”223 What gives just gives, not as a gift but as the inevitable consequence of there being something rather than nothing, the fundamental datum of existence that remains inexplicable in spite of the most imaginative efforts on the part of philosophers and physicists to explain it. Moving beyond the binary logic implied in what Heidegger considered to be the ultimate question of Western metaphysics, we would say that the something that is given is the very nothing that gives, and hence that something is nothing to the extent that nothing is something. In the giving, there is giving—nothing more, nothing less. Just as the rose blooms because it blooms, so the giving gives, not as gift but as giving, without will, intention, or design. Both object and subject, the given and the giver, are subsumed in the giving, which is indistinguishable from the givenness.224

In the ungifting of the gift, we detect that the exterior can be experienced as interior only relative to an interior experienced as exterior. My thinking is in accord with William E.

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