Pure Gift Research Articles

The (Anarchic) Gift of Gelassenheit: On an Undeveloped Motif in Derrida's Donner le temps II

In his recently published Donner le temps II, Derrida raises, but does not develop, the possibility that Heidegger's notion of Gelassenheit (‘releasement’, ‘letting-be’) might escape the economic confines of exchange, debt, and repayment and therefore qualify as a pure gift. In this paper, I explore this possibility, explaining that Gelassenheit would have to be understood, first, not primarily as a human comportment but at the level of being itself, second, beyond appropriation, and third, as ‘without why’. If Heidegger's focus on appropriation in ‘Time and Being’ remains entangled in the economy of exchange (as Derrida insinuates in the final session of Donner le temps II), Heidegger's anarchic treatment of ‘letting’ ( laisser, Lassen) in the final session of his 1969 seminar in Le Thor opens instead onto a ‘pure giving’ ( pur donner, reines Geben).

순수증여로서 돌봄에 대한 교육학적 고찰

Caring is an important issue of education in a society that aims for a welfare state. The education world has prepared care policies for infants, elementary and secondary schools, and uses them as an outlet for the era of low birth rates. However, despite high social interest, the understanding of care tends to remain in the dimension of 'providing services'. In this paper, I consider the relationship between 'caregiver = caretaker' of Nel Noddins, a pioneer of caring theory, to examine the characteristics of caring relationships through reciprocity, a concept that is often confused with services. In reciprocity, human relationships are understood from the perspective of exchange, which is likely to be confused with an exchange economy that often pursues exchange and satisfaction. In order to comprehensively approach and view this problem, it is switched to the problem of exchange and gift theory that the post-structuralist philosophy was interested in and sheds new light. When someone gives a gift, the recipient follows the pattern of exchange gifts that are appreciated and returned later. On the other hand, it seems impossible to give a pure gift without wishing for return, but in this study, to dismantle the exchange economy thinking by positioning teaching-learning, caring-care taking that occurs in schools as a pure gift, first, it was analyzed focusing on the state of commitment of the caregiver as a state of pure gift, and second, it was reasoned that caring was placed in a larger virtuous cycle of gift. Although caring belongs to the realm of pure gift, it is easy to be recovered by gift exchange or currency exchange, and is often damaged due to its nature. Care is clearly being taken in various contexts, but it is not caring in itself. Gifts occur where care takes place. The topic of pure gift needs to continue to be questioned as the central theme of educational care theory.

Queering Craft in Santa Clara del Cobre

As an artist-anthropologist who studies “making” through apprenticeship, I have discovered that craft production in the Mexican copper-smithing community of Santa Clara del Cobre is a practice of care, a kind of love. This inversion of careful and caring labor, required to create the well-made copper piece, also encompasses qualities and skills that queer societal stereotypes of binary gender-lines. Artisans generate bodies of knowledge through representative and reproductive performance, i.e. productive labor anchored in the forge through care, perspicacity and attention. Like all nurturing activities given freely, artisanal reproductivity cannot be adequately measured as wage labor. This is not to say that this generous work should be unpaid. But rather to suggest that what is desired of craft is precisely this non-enumerative quotient of care. My research is based upon an apprenticeship to Maestro Jesús Pérez Ornelas, an independent coppersmith artisan, successful enough to be free to follow his vision and imagination, to create things with care. Maestro Jesús would say: “If I counted all the blows of my hammer, I would go crazy! And besides, no client would be able to afford to buy my work!” It is this boundless giftedness that makes up the imaginary of craft, its tropes and aura: its generosity. Like women’s “reproductive” work of family, the work of the artisan is also “reproductive.” Both demand a “maternal” nurturance, unquantifiable attention and care. This quotient of care is pure gift without reciprocity. This non-enumerative labor… a kind of love.

Game of the World différance and Ukrainian Theology: Language, Experience, Ethics, Advent

Late XX and early XXI centuries are marked by increased interest in deconstruction of Jacques Derrida, which covered with its influence almost all spheres of humanities studies, including theology. In Ukrainian theological discourse the theme of deconstruction is just beginning to be elaborated. The main purpose of the presented article is to consider the key Derridian word-notion “différance” (distinction) – the engine of deconstruction – and its influence on philosophical discourse, the central theme of which is language. The author also critically analyzes the adjacent strategies of “pure gift”, “chora” (khôra) and “unconditional hospitality” in the context of the key symbol of the Derridian corpus: a coming democracy (démocratie à venir), identified in this article with the Christian eschatological symbol “the Kingdom of God”. These strategies, developed by Derrida, aim at a gradual transformation of experience and ethics in the known structures of existence (linguistic, political, religious, social and domestic). The article concludes with an analysis of the relationship between the principles of coming democracy (represented by Derrida’s deconstructivist project and John Caputo’s “weak theology”) and Ukrainian theological thought, as well as a consideration of its possible future.

Donner, recevoir et rendre : L’économie familiale chez Marie NDiaye

Contrary to the transactional nature of capitalism, family inspires images of relationships that are selfless and without the expectations of reciprocity. Thus, the family construct is often symbolized as an altruistic space and gift to its members. By analyzing Marie NDiaye’s play, Papa doit manger, I show that not unlike capitalism, family as an institution, reproduces similar dynamics of exploitation. If family is ascribed as a type of gift economy, it is not, however, a pure gift free from ulterior motives or without agenda. Rather, I argue that family tends to operate more like the archaic gift as examined in Marcel Mauss’ ethnographical essay, The Gift. In NDiaye’s work, as in Mauss’s work, the gift is never free. In my analysis of Papa doit manger, I posit that family engages in a system of exchanges. Consequently, this system is suggested as more insidious than capitalism due to its covert nature and exploitation of family relations requiring sacrifices of its members.

Exploring the intersectionality of culture, sacrificial offering, and exploitative prosperity gospel rhetoric in Africa

Research has well documented the evidence of the growth of prosperity gospel churches across the globe, but there is a dearth of studies that investigate the interface between culture and exploitative rhetoric among African prosperity gospel ministers. Examining the concept of making sacrificial offerings in the traditional African context, I theorize that culture has significant influence on the exploitative power of prosperity gospel ministers by the following considerations: the African tradition of consulting oracles for solution to spiritual and physical problems, the cultural practice of making sacrificial offerings to the gods in exchange for favor, and the poor socio-economic condition of many prosperity gospel adherents in Africa. This study highlights the use of the rhetoric of spiritual engagement and liberation for audience manipulation, examines the idea of the pure gift, proposes some ethical questions that should govern the prosperity movement, and underscores the need for scholarly engagement.

Anacleto. El tiempo y el don en una ruta del transporte público (Tijuana, México)

En Tijuana, en la frontera México-Estados Unidos, desvencijados camiones conectan la periferia urbana con una de las garitas terrestres más transitadas del mundo. Estas rutas conformanlos estratos más bajos del sistema de movilidad fronteriza; en ellas, el imperativo de la movilidad capitalista —convertida por la frontera en un valor supremo— lleva la explotación laboral a un extremo y fragiliza la solidaridad entre los trabajadores. Entre ellos, emerge un impulso hacia el “don puro”: el don absolutamente desinteresado, que apenas puede reconocerse como tal. Este impulso toma forma en el contraste entre diferentes tipos de tiempo; se manifiesta de manera importante en los actos de comunicación lingüística, que convierte en dones delicados y fugaces. Centrándose en la (no) relación entre la antropóloga y su interlocutor principal, este ensayo usa las complejidades éticas del intercambio etnográfico como punto de partidapara explorar la relación entre el tiempo, el don y la comunicación en la frontera.

Gifting Knowledge for Long Life

During nonemergency appointments at traditional sites of āyurvedic healthcare in Kerala, South India, classically trained Brāhmaṇa physicians and their patients seldom exchange anything of substance (whether medicinal or monetary). The physician-patient interface instead routinely involves an exchange of knowledge. Interactions between physicians and patients in these meetings evoke the highly theorized notion of the “Indian gift” and the question of prestation in South Indian societies. This article explores the nature of exchange in the supply and reception of healthcare among physicians and patients at traditional sites of āyurvedic treatment (that is, sites not affiliated with governmental or private hospitals or clinics) in contemporary Kerala. Drawing on classical treatises about the dharma of gifts (dānadharma) and the Sanskrit medical classics of Āyurveda, it examines reciprocity, ideal preconditions of givers and receivers of gifts, and the possibility of a “pure gift” in the appraisal and production of wellbeing.

The effects of a merciful heart

In this article, I examine the relationship of charitable help that, through the persons and the work of caregivers, connects some donors to the young persons who grow up in home-based childcare institutions in contemporary Malaysia. The prism of my analysis is the small charity functions that take place within the homes that I have studied, which allow donors and receivers to elaborate, perfect and enact moral ideas of themselves and of their place in society. Because they stage the main characters of charity, the functions also give an insight into how, since an early age, children actively explore the dominant and largely ethnicized model of virtue and merit they are summoned to embody, thus making sense of their shared condition of “charity children”. This self-care work, I argue, inspired by Erica Bornstein’s study on Indian charity, is made possible by the “pure gift” core that characterizes donors and caretakers, as it frees the aided children from the necessity to “buy” their care back, which is otherwise requested in traditional child fostering.

Paul and the Gift by John M. G. Barclay

Reviewed by: Paul and the Gift by John M. G. Barclay Anthony Giambrone O.P. Paul and the Gift. By John M. G. Barclay. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2015. Pp. xvi + 656. $70.00 (cloth). ISBN: 978-0-8028-6889-3. The publication of John Barclay's Paul and the Gift has already proven to be a major event in Pauline studies. A high-powered panel was promptly organized around the book at the 2015 annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, and since then it has continued to find an energetic and very positive reception. For many, this creative and clearly written study promises to break through a stubborn gridlock in the field, dating back to E. P. Sanders's publication of Paul and Palestinian Judaism forty years ago and opposing the "Old" and "New Perspective." The text certainly represents a major effort to re-center the academic discussion around Paul's theology of grace. To this extent, it is already pushing scholarship toward a different—and I believe—better agenda. This is not, however, to endorse the construction of grace that Barclay advances. In the author's own estimation, "the reading of Paul offered in this book may be interpreted either as a re-contextualization of the Augustinian-Lutheran tradition, returning the dynamic of the incongruity of grace to its original mission environment where it accompanied the formation of new communities, or as a reconfiguration of the 'new perspective,' placing its best historical and exegetical insights within the frame of Paul's theology of grace" (573). This formulation is helpful yet hides somewhat the extent to which the book remains a hefty Lutheran counterpunch against Sanders—albeit more civil, supple, and clever than the hardline resistance heretofore, but standing within an unambiguous "Augustinian-Lutheran" pedigree. Barclay thus inscribes himself within a selective and revealing history of research dominated by Reformation voices: Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Barth, Bultmann, Ernst Käsemann, and J. Louis Martyn. Sanders and the New Perspective enter the picture principally as an obstacle for this tradition to overcome. Barclay keenly appreciates that since "Paul and Palestinian Judaism, it has become problematic to identify 'grace' as a matter of dispute between Paul and any of his fellow Jews" (159). In response, Barclay makes two key moves. First, he differentiates a range of possible positions on grace unrecognized by Sanders's monochrome analysis (i.e., homogenized Jewish "covenantal [End Page 287] nomism" as uniformly a religion of "getting in" by grace), using these variegated perspectives as a grid against which Paul's specificity can better be seen. "Grace is everywhere but not everywhere the same" thus recurs as a major leitmotif of the book. Second, within this variety of perspectives Barclay traces a single, common construal of grace—its radical incongruity, the absolute disconnect between God's gift and the (un)worthiness of the receivers—across two massively divergent social locations: Paul's first-century missionary church and Luther's sixteenth-century, long-Christianized society. This hermeneutical alignment aims implicitly to answer the fundamental New Perspective charge of anachronism, by reinserting Luther's (purportedly fundamentally accurate) take on Paul within its original social frame, namely, the ad extra Gentile mission. In that setting, Barclay contends, the incongruity of God's grace upends the value systems of both Jews and Greeks, thereby forging countercultural, even "dissident" communities. The open connection that Barclay makes between such "innovative" and "boundary-erasing" firstcentury cells and present ecclesial experience "in cultures where what it means to be 'church' has become radically uncertain" (573-74) indicates that, in the end, the project's rendition of grace has a very ambiguous relation to classical (i.e., sacramental, magisterial) forms of Christian existence. It is Lutheran but not Missouri Synod. In the process of his reappropriation of a particular Lutheran perspective, Barclay is careful to excise one major accretion from the Reformation view: the noncircularity of grace, that is, the modern, Western notion that grace is "pure gift," a no-strings-attached present that escapes the dynamic of an obliged return. This has nothing, in fact, to do with first-century ways of thinking, as he convincingly shows. "Unconditioned but not unconditional" is...

The joy of Desire: Understanding Levinas’s Desire of the Other as gift

In this paper, I argue that if we understand Levinas’s Desire of the Other as gift, we can understand it as joyful—that is, as celebratory. After presenting Levinas’s conception of Desire, I consider his claim, found in Otherwise than Being, that the self is a hostage to the Other, and I contend that, paradoxical as it may seem, being a hostage to the Other is actually liberating. Then, drawing on insights Richard Kearney offers in Reimagining the Sacred, I argue for understanding Desire as a gift that is the condition of possibility for joy. If I offer hospitality to the Other, I thereby accept the gift that makes joy possible, and this joy is not egoistic but is the proper response to the gift. Finally, I ask whether Desire can be joyful in practice, given that the pure gift is an originary condition and never a historical one, and I conclude that imperfect joy remains possible. Moreover, this imperfect joy is better than any solitary enjoyment I might experience in the total absence of the Other.

It’s not just the thought that counts: An experimental study on the hidden cost of giving

Receiving a gift can create an impulse to reciprocate, even when doing so may be inefficient and potentially harmful to a third party. This paper provides a theoretical framework for a pure gift effect on reciprocity impulses and experimental evidence that such an effect exists: that is, a gift receiver will favor an actual gift giver over an intended gift giver, even if the intended gift giver incurred the same costs and signaled the same intention to give. This result contrasts with the predictions of existing theories on social preferences. We also show that the pure gift effect is present even when it leads to a less efficient outcome, or when the gift is given without the expectation of future returns. Our findings suggest that when reciprocating a gift becomes socially inefficient, it may be more advantageous to guard against gift receiving or to keep donations “secret” than to try to control the intent to give.

Missional Gift-Giving: A Practical Theology Investigation into what Happens when Churches Give Away “Free” Gifts for the Sake of Mission

A small qualitative case study is presented to investigate what happens when churches give away so-called “free” gifts in missional interventions in their communities. Descriptive text data from the churches is analysed and reflected upon in relation to the theological nature of gift which is problematized between the pure gift and gift exchange, a dilemma illustrated by the data itself. This tension is resolved using the work of Gregory Walter who defines promise theologically as “extended and doubled gift”. Such promise offers a new understanding of time and space in which the impurity of human gift exchange can find a place if it moves to incarnational relationship building from simple transaction within the promise. Practical outcomes of the study are offered in relation to the question of money and gift alongside the importance of growing community through empowerment within a consumerist culture.

PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY'S RETURN

ABSTRACTKojin Karatani's Structure of World History seeks to rescue the philosophy of history and restore to it the relationship between philosophical reflection and historical practice. This connection is particularly pertinent in Karatani's case since he had earlier worked out the philosophical scaffolding of this monumental study in his book Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, which embarked on a “return to Capital once more to read the potential that has been overlooked.” By juxtaposing Marx to Kant and vice versa to discover the importance of exchange over production, he found what was to become the informing principle of his later philosophy of history. While Karatani's accounting of the structure of world history presumes to recount the passage of the world's history from nomadic societies to the present as a condition to rethink “social formations” from a perspective that recalls the form of a stagist philosophy of history attributed to Marx and Engels, he has abandoned its informing principle of the modes of production. Instead, he offers the perspective of modes of exchange, which means waiving any consideration concerning who owns the means of production: the putative “economic base” underlying superstructural representations like the state, religion, and culture upheld by a vulgate tradition of Marxian historical writing and discounted by bourgeois historiography as deterministic. The decision to shift to modes of exchange means rooting the primary mode of exchange taking place first in nomadic societies, rather than forms of production and archaic communal ownership of land. Although his revised scheme still accords priority to the economic, the putative division between base and superstructures still persists, even though the latter are still produced by the former, which is now the mode of exchange. Whereas Marx privileged commodity exchange as dominant, Karatani places greater emphasis on the earliest mode of exchange, which consists of the “pure gift,” associated with early nomadic social formations and reciprocity practices by clans, and seems to offer nomadic/clan communalism as a model that resembles Marx's own strategic linking of the surviving Russian commune and contemporary capitalism. The point to this project is to transcend the hegemonic trinity of capital, nation, and state and satisfy a desire to share with other globalists a vision that aims to overcome the defects of capitalism and the nation‐state and the failure of a Marxian expectation that nation‐states will simply wither away with the final surpassing of capitalism. To this end, Karatani's appeal to Kant offers to inject a moral element absent in the merely economic structure of history that will thus provide the promise of “world peace,” which ultimately requires an abolition of the nation‐state as a condition for realizing a “simultaneous bourgeois revolution” that would finally overcome state and capital and establish a world federation.

It's Not Just the Thought that Counts: An Experimental Study on Hidden Cost of Giving

Receiving a gift can create an impulse to reciprocate, even when doing so may be inefficient and potentially harmful to a third party. For instance, after receiving bribes, people may exhibit impulses to reciprocate. This paper provides a theoretical framework for a pure gift effect on reciprocity impulses and experimental evidence that such an effect exists: that is, a gift receiver will favor an actual gift giver over an intended gift giver, even if the intended gift giver incurred the same costs and signaled the same intention to give. This result contrasts with predictions of existing theories of social preferences. We further show that the pure gift effect is independent of whether the gift is motivated by future returns. Our findings suggest that when reciprocating towards a gift becomes socially undesirable, it may be more advantageous to guard against gift receiving or to keep donations “secret” than to try to control the intent to give.

Theo‐Drama as Liberative Praxis

Theo‐Drama as Liberative Praxis Roberto S. Goizueta In Latin American liberation theology, the God of the poor is a Dios Compañero, a God who accompanies us in our everyday struggles. The religiosity of the poor, or “popular religion,” is a privileged locus for experiencing this divine nearness; the rituals and symbols of the people's lived faith are places of divine–human encounter. Yet such an encounter presupposes that God is indeed revealed and made present in the rituals and symbols of popular religion, that is, that these are not merely human constructs that express human needs and longings but are, in fact, revelations of a divine reality that is given to us in and through symbol and ritual. For the poor, God is not a concept that persons and groups conjure in order to express human needs and ideals; God is a self‐communicating reality made present in the world around us and thus received by us as pure gift. If this is not true, then neither is the possibility of hope and liberation. Consequently, I will submit, the lived faith of the poor gives rise to a theological aesthetics of liberation that subverts modern and post‐modern notions of the symbol as an arbitrary, interchangeable sign with no intrinsic connection to its referent. While some European theologians such as the Swiss scholar Hans Urs von Balthasar have effected a retrieval of a premodern understanding of symbol in order to articulate a Christian theological aesthetics, they have not paid due attention to the sociopolitical, liberative import of such a retrieval. Balthasar, for instance, fails to appreciate how the lived faith of the poor gives expression to a theological aesthetics of liberation which resists both the reduction of liberation to sociopolitical praxis and the reduction of theological aesthetics to an apolitical, merely affective experience of the Beautiful. As the retrieval of a premodern symbolic realism which posits that God is really made present and available to us in the cosmos and in history, Balthasar's intellectual project represents an attempt to retrieve both the embodied and the receptive character of Christian faith; God is “the Beautiful” and, as such, can be known only insofar as we surrender ourselves to its intrinsic power, a power utterly gratuitous and beyond our control. “What is here called an ‘aesthetic’,” writes Balthasar, “is therefore characterized as something properly theological, namely, as the reception, perceived with the eyes of faith, of the self‐interpreting glory of the sovereignly free love of God.” Yet Balthasar's aesthetics remains socially and politically ambiguous. In this essay, I will argue for the importance of Balthasar's project. At the same time, I will suggest that only when undertaken in the context of a preferential option for the poor can a methodological attentiveness to the aesthetic character of Christian faith make possible a retrieval of both the normative character of religious faith, as a response to “the True,” and the liberative character of faith, as response to “the Good.” To make this argument, I will draw not only on Balthasar's work, therefore, but also on the insights of Latin American liberation theology, as represented especially by the Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez (the so‐called father of liberation theology). More specifically, I will contend that, while theological aesthetics represents a necessary corrective to modern and postmodern theologies, liberation theology represents an equally necessary safeguard against the opposite danger, a reduction of aesthetics to an apolitical religious experience wherein the Beautiful does not irrupt in the world, transforming it, but is simply a legitimating reflection of that world. For an authentically Christian theological aesthetics, the fundamental criterion of beauty will be the body of a tortured, scarred criminal hanging from a cross—and, therefore, the bodies of those whom Jon Sobrino calls the crucified people of history. Such an expression of the Beautiful can only subvert all merely human preconceptions of beauty, pre‐conceptions that legitimate the exclusion and exploitation of those persons whom the dominant culture considers “ugly.” Christian faith as lived faith For Christians, the act of faith is a lived response of the whole person to a God who, as Love, freely gives Godself...

The Gift Relationship

Abstract Derrida (1992 / 1991) made the case (following Mauss, 1990 / 1925) that the ‘pure gift’ is impossible. Because of the element of obligation and reciprocity involved, gift relationships are inevitably reduced to relationships of economic exchange. This position echoes the exchange theory of the social behaviourists, the cost-benefit analyses of evolutionary psychology, and other reductionist conjectures. In this paper, 18 written accounts of gifting are analysed using established phenomenological tools of reflection. It is shown that the dynamics of the gift relationship are complex (for example the statuses of giver and recipient are problematical, as is the expression of gratitude) and, specifically, reciprocation in gifting is not akin to ‘repaying’ the gift, but should rather be seen as a response to the gift as an expression of affective affirmation, rendering this mutual. Gift giving is in the expressive realm rather than the practical (Harré, 1979). This was, intriguingly, known explicitly by Adam Smith (2006 / 1790).

Comedy Matters: From Shakespeare to Stoppard (review)

Reviewed by: Comedy Matters: From Shakespeare to Stoppard Miriam Chirico Comedy Matters: From Shakespeare to Stoppard. By William Demastes. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008; pp. 224. $80.00 cloth. The machinations of a cast of characters attempting to reconcile their conflicting ambitions by evening's end is typical grist for the comic mill. Comedies that resolve in favor of the collective will seem to prioritize the status quo, but can these same plots also reward individual desires? In his book Comedy Matters, William Demastes analyzes the comic tension between individual desire and the social good. Drawing upon evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and psychology, Demastes explores the dynamic interplay among nature, society, and the individual that comedy embraces. Comedy "matters"—that is, it both bears relevance and reflects material needs—because it showcases the transformation of society and the preservation of the species, as opposed to tragedy's glorification of principled idealism leading to self-destruction. In the comic agenda, social hierarchies are deconstructed through the dramatization of human interconnection, as exemplified by the "life force." Yet it is the intrinsically selfish behavior of humanity that sets the plots in motion. Herein lies the paradox: narratives of intense individualism underwrite comedy's larger agenda of united social betterment. Demastes draws upon an evolutionary model of species development to argue that an individual's biological drive for self-preservation undergirds comedy. Susanne Langer, in Feeling and Form, first theorized that a comic character struggles for homeostatic equilibrium and adapts to a changing environment. Society thus can correct for nonconforming behavior by forcing the individual to adjust to mutually beneficial goals. As Demastes explains, "unsociality, rather than immorality, is the subject of comedy" (18). Drawing upon Richard Dawkins's premise of the "selfish gene," Demastes wonders how comedy can work toward reciprocity if we, at the cellular level, are actually programmed to fight for individual survival. Even though a collective has a higher survival rate than an individual, we are not biologically designed to think collaboratively, a trait that disrupts the dramatic resolution of comedy. Demastes solves this problem by combining Marcel Mauss's analysis of gift-giving, which produces obligatory social bonds through the practice of exchanging gifts, with Timothy Wilson's model of the adaptive unconscious, which posits an unconscious self that secures its survival through a highly conditioned response to its environment. The model of gift-giving allows us to perceive reconciliatory characters such as Prospero and Portia in a new light, because their gifts of forgiveness and mercy, while approaching Derrida's notion of the "pure gift," nonetheless secure their own ends, which happen to be congruent with the community's well-being. A play like American Buffalo, however, does not exemplify comedy's gift-giving nature; according to Demastes, the economic motivation of each individual for himself overwhelms the free circulation of friendship and loyalty in a society represented by the pawn shop. [End Page 147] Demastes's second approach to comedy, modeled on the adaptive unconscious, illuminates how a character's interaction with his or her environment alters the self so that a comic resolution can be attained; rather than remain in a fixed worldview, as a tragic character might, the comic hero adapts to the way the world truly is, a process that leads to self-revelation. In light of the role-theorist's belief that each person possesses multiple selves, this model of an adaptive unconscious yields new interpretations of various plays, such as The Importance of Being Earnest, where, as Demastes shows, Jack Worthing puts forth the self most suited for any particular social environment. Moliere's character Alceste proves a failed comic character, by contrast, because he refuses to adapt to his hypocritical social milieu. Demastes further maintains that comedy negates a Cartesian mind–body dualism and draws upon current theories in neuroscience to demonstrate how mental processes are in no way separate from their bodily connections. Taking Shakespeare's Troilus and Hamlet as examples, Demastes argues that these figures are not comic, because not only do they adhere to a mind–body dualistic vision, but they erroneously prioritize the mind at the expense of the body. As the mind is physically embodied in...

The Incarnation of Language: Joyce, Proust and a Philosophy of the Flesh (review)

Reviewed by: The Incarnation of Language: Joyce, Proust and a Philosophy of the Flesh Gerald Gillespie (bio) The Incarnation of Language: Joyce, Proust and a Philosophy of the Flesh. By Michael O'Sullivan. London: Continuum, 2008. 189 pp. Cloth $120.00. O'Sullivan in effect combines two valuable studies. He opens with a densely woven, lucid chapter touring French theorizing on "incarnation" in response to phenomenology plus religious tradition, moves to Joyce and Proust, dedicating a chapter to each, and then in a final chapter juxtaposes the novelists mainly in regard to how they develop the principle of "impotence." These four chapters thus perform a double mirroring. Heady chapter 1 is quite able to stand on its own as a study in intellectual history but is intended as a foil for the two great writers, and then Joyce and Proust are mutually reflected in their own right through their fictions. O'Sullivan is clearly a master of the philosophic subject matter that his more general introduction and his Gallocentric first chapter compress into fifty-six pages. It is no mean feat to line up and referee the rolling discourse, with its cross-commentaries, disagreements, and inventions of new terminology right down to the (only recently waned) heyday of deconstruction. Derrida's long-term rejection of Husserl's concept of the sign and incarnational rhetoric is the most prominent plot line in the story chapter 1 tells, but it is by no means the only one; O'Sullivan gives a considered hearing to many variants, more prominently to Marcel Henry's and Emmanuel Levinas's views, with their respective coloration by the Christian and Judaic tradition. Although O'Sullivan scrupulously presents Derrida's views, nonetheless, on balance, once he turns to the novelists, he tends toward showing why Derrida finally is an inadequate guide to the complex artistic legacies of Joyce and Proust. Space restrictions prohibit even a rudimentary summary of the richness of details in chapter 1. Among many lines we follow is that of Derrida's resistance to what he construes as Husserl's staging of logos and phōnē [End Page 100] [voice] and ontotheological transformation of "objectivity" into a "spiritual flesh" that speaks and is present to itself. Against Derrida, Nathalie Depraz believes that the troublesome human "subject is obliged to 'exhibit the genetic deep-rootedness of the experience of otherness as self-alterity'" (28). In an analogous move, Henry sees "empathy grounded in auto-affection" (29). Henry's concept of a "manifestation of Being" entails the meaningful reception of otherness based on awareness of self. O'Sullivan does not draw the connection, but in my estimation there is a broader family resemblance between Henry's idea of the mind's self-discovery and awareness of the "foundation" and Eric Voegelin's idea of the moment when the human subject discovers itself rising out of the ground of being. Henry's proposition that "auto-affection" (when the self can grasp itself as an alter ego) affords "nourishment" suggests two salvational possibilities, I think—both an overcoming of the dilemmas of ego identity probed from romanticism through symbolism, which Voegelin praises in the works of Proust, Mann, and Joyce, and the foundational pure gift of life and love, which Gian Balsamo has expounded in his Joyce's Messianism: Dante, Negative Existence, and the Messianic Self (2004). From another angle, O'Sullivan observes that Emmanuel Levinas derives "responsibility," recourse to interhuman communication, the narrative way of speaking, from the Judaic sense of a known or prefigured truth that requires "commentary"; and here again we have a provocative parallel to the idea of an unfolding scriptural code. It is regrettable to scant chapter 1; it is downright painful to have to pass over innumerable fine insights in chapter 2. O'Sullivan pursues several arguments in an effort to overturn the claims of deconstructionist readers like Derrida and Derek Attridge regarding Joyce. Not only does Joyce start in his own critical writings from a more robust Renaissance sense that privileges the body inclusive of its spiritual faculty but in all his experiments with narrative and voice he maintains his belief in an embodied or incarnated aesthetic and moves toward a rehumanizing...

The Ghost in the Financial Machine

This essay lays out an argument that leads back from some debates in contemporary social studies of finance to arguments that have not been fully developed in some classic writings of Marcel Mauss (1990 [1954]) and Max Weber (2009 [1920]). My starting point is Jacques Derrida’s (1994) famous argument about the “impossibility” of the gift, which annuls itself by its implicit expectation (a negative performative) of a return. I focus here on the idea of the “return” as one entry into a new approach to contemporary financial devices. Derrida’s argument about the logical impossibility of the pure gift is in fact anticipated in the very first pages of Mauss’s classic essay “The Gift,” in the perception by Mauss of the inner contradiction between the voluntary and the compulsory as well as the disinterested and the self- serving elements of the gift. Two facts about Mauss’s study have been lost from view. One is that his entire and fundamental interest throughout his essay is in the question of the force behind the obligation to return. The second point is that Mauss’s thorough archaeology of the gift (in both primitive and archaic societies) was wholly motivated by his interest in the moral force behind the modern contract (legal, impersonal, obligatory, etc.). Bearing these two points in mind allows us to understand better what may have been Mauss’s rich and only partial answer to his question, that is, that the obligation to return lay in the spirit of the thing given (the famous hau of Polynesia), which in turn provided a dynamic and forceful connection between giver and receiver, and the first giver and the second giver/returner, and so forth.