The (False) Gifts of Writing

Abstract

The intimacy, indeed, the alliance, between and will not be questioned here: is at once a language, a language game or?if I may accept one of Derrida's gifts already3?plus d'une langue, more than language, more than any language. Rather, the concern here will be with the manifold, often secret and duplicitous affiliations between and language, giving and writing, or better yet, between and the letter?the missive and the graphic mark. To begin with the simplest of relations and operations: the signifier gift is of course no but a substitute resulting from an operation of (arbitrary) exchange. But uniquely in this case, a similar quasi-linguistic operation holds doubly for the referent: the or gift-object is itself a representative (of Gift as such); an effigy, it both marks and, as we will see, bears the often visible graphic marks of the substitution which simultaneously founds it and, as economy, necessarily threatens to annihilate it, as gift. (Whence perhaps the confusion of with exchange, and therefore, the tendency for to be compensated and precisely as annulled ought to be traced to this originary and illicit affiliation with language, itself?at least on the level of structure?a system of exchange.) Gift we know is not any (one) thing. The objects from the scene of writing that Sartre receives from Beauvoir for his war diaries?azure ink (bleu des mers Sudn) and dark blue notebooks (bleu de nuit)?are just that. Objects converted, or so as to acknowledge the duplicity of