At the end Zhuangzi 7, Hundun (the Middle Sea) invites his two neighbours, the North Sea and South Sea, to visit him. They repay his kindness by drilling seven holes (for seeing, hearing, breathing and eating) in his face to make him more ‘human’ but Hundun dies. This essay pursues Daoist, Derridean and Levinasian readings of the parable which foreground issues of non-duality and the absolute priority yet impossibility of unconditional hospitality or infinite openness to others (or to the Other). (...) Key concepts include selflessness, non-duality and/or the relativity of opposites in Laozi and Zhuangzi, conditional and unconditional hospitality and the aporia of gift-giving in Derrida and in Levinas the ontological priority of infinity to totality, that of the face of the other or neighbour to the self or subject, and that of ‘saying’ to ‘the said’. (shrink)

Bourdieu and Derrida share a focus on the ambiguity of the practice of gift relationships already pointed out by Mauss. From Bourdieu’s perspective, the question of gratuity is epistemically futile, as it veils the objective truth of gift-giving, yet ethically and politically relevant, as it refers to a hypocrisy which can be instrumental to enhancing civic virtue and solidarity. Bourdieu’s “scientific humanism,” however, implausibly reduces this ambiguity to interest maximization, and aims to build a solidaristic democracy by means of the (...) generalization of the hypocrisy of gratuity. In turn, by interpreting gratuity as “unconditionality,” Derrida aims not at dissolving, but at dramatizing the ambiguity of gift relationships by turning it into “madness” and an “impossible possibility”. Whereas I agree with Derrida’s insistence on the salience of the requirement of gratuity, his approach can lead to counterintuitive and hubristic consequences. Instead, I suggest some elements of an alternative way of understanding gratuitous gifts as communicative acts irreducible to an economic calculation or circle. From this standpoint, a gratuitous gift can be constituted by certain forms of recognition, emotions, or convictions without for that becoming an “impossibility”. (shrink)

Niklas Luhmann and Jacques Derrida start with a common assumption in their analyses of the law and the economy - the foundational paradox of social institutions. But then autopoiesis and deconstruction move into opposite directions. Luhmann pursues the question of how de-paradoxification constructs the immanence of social institutions and builds a world of autopoietic social systems. By contrast, Derrida's thought aims at the transcendence of social institutions through their re-paradoxification. However, there is a hidden supplementarity of autopoiesis and deconstruction which (...) makes it worthwhile to relate the theories to each other. Derrida's distinction of writing/speech is necessarily blind toward Luhmann's distinction of consciousness/communication, but is, at the same time, continuously provoked by it. On another level, the opposite happens. Luhmann's autopoiesis is permanently irritated by Derrida's différance but is at the same time unable to conceptualize it. This complementary blindness of their distinctions directrices is a permanent source of mutual irritation which requires a reformulation of the social and of the possibility of justice. (shrink)

Given the coterie of philosophers focused on everyday aesthetics, it's fascinating that gift reception has heretofore managed to escape their scrutiny. To enact a gift, recipients begin by imagining its use. On this level, gifts serve as a litmus test. In luring us, we're taken out of our normal ways of being to experience a different side of ourselves. Enacting a gift is thus a kind of performance, whose value depends on the donee’s interpretation, just as exhibitions, concerts, staged plays (...) or books are performances of visual art, scores, scripts or texts, whose interpretations demonstrate their aesthetic value. To develop the relationship between enacting gifts and performing artworks, I begin by surveying junctures along the gift-event’s arc: reply, imagination, trust, recognition, transformation and memory. Transformations arising from agonistic gifts strike me as significant because they characterise the way gifts challenge our beliefs, eventually altering our values. That we grow to love gifts, which we originally rejected out of hand, casts doubt on self-knowledge. Enacted gifts handily challenge self-knowledge’s twin features: authority and transparency. As this paper indicates, gift reception helps both to understand ourselves better and to remove the obstacles to what Quassim Cassim calls Substantive Self-Knowledge. (shrink)

An original and innovative exploration of Antigone, femininity, and love in various cosmological, philosophical, and theological contexts.

Thêsauroi, or treasure-houses, are small, temple-like structures, found typically in the sanctuaries of Delphi and Olympia. They were built by Greek city-states to house the dedications of their citizens. But a thêsauros is not just a storeroom: it is also a frame for costly votives, a way of diverting elite display in the interest of the city. When placed on view in a treasure-house, the individual dedication is re-contextualized: although it still reflects well on its dedicant, it also glorifies the (...) polis. Thêsauroi effectively nationalize votives—and, with them, a dedicant's privileged relationship to the gods. The sculptural program of the Siphnian treasury exemplifies these issues. (shrink)

This article tries to show the irreducible connection between vulnerability and violence. This connection leads us back to the ethical level of experience. If vulnerability makes violence irreducible, then at least two reactions to violence are possible. On the one hand, a reaction is possible in which one attempts to negate vulnerability in order to close down the very thing within us that allows violence to enter. This negative reaction is actually the worst violence. On the other hand, a reaction (...) is possible in which one attempts to affirm vulnerability, even though its affirmation opens us to the violence that will happen. Affirming vulnerability is the least-violent reaction. If the formula for the worst violence is apocalypse without remainder, then the least violence is the maintenance of the remainder. The maintenance would happen only by not possessing the remainders, which places us in a new situation of poverty. (shrink)

This paper analyses the commodification of post-tsunami aid in Sri Lanka, a process that ‘contaminated’ the ‘purity’ of good intentions with the politics of patronage and international aid. It argues that gifts are not just material transfers of ‘aid’, but also embodiments of cultural symbolism, social power, and political affiliations. The tsunami gift re-enforced and reconfigured exchange relationships among different patrons and clients in Sri Lankan communities, perpetuating the political economy that has driven social conflict and discontent in the post-independence (...) years. Beyond dominant rationales of ethnic or political party patronage, the paper finds that gifts by disingenuous patrons not only became patrimonial, but that the patrimonial rationale emerged as much from above as from below—a dynamic that became nearly inescapable and self-reinforcing. Through three case studies, we explore the intricate chain of relations, obligations, and expectations pertinent in the co-evolving, but often contradictory, gift rationales that permeate the practices, performances, and discourses of tsunami aid. (shrink)

This paper considers the nature of time and temporality in Homer. It argues that any exploration of narrative and time must, as its central tenet, take into account the irreducible plurality and interconnectedness of memory, the event, and experienced time. Drawing on notions of complexity, emergence, and stochastic behavior in science as well as phenomenological traditions in the discussion and analysis of time, temporality, and change, and offering extensive readings of Homer, of Homeric epithets and formulae, and of key passages (...) in the Iliad and Odyssey, the paper argues against chronological notions of linear time and progression and in favor of a complex, dynamic temporal “geometries” of Homeric temporality. The paper concludes by briefly extending the argument to the wider domain of ancient time in general. Homer is a fundamental point of reference in the ancient world. Thus, Homeric temporality—irreducibly complex—affects the cognition and perception of time throughout the whole of antiquity. (shrink)

Feminist analyses have made important contributions to the sociocultural experiences of pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding. This article draws upon recent theorizing within science studies to focus on the mattering of these processes. Specifically, the article expands upon Mauss's notion of the ‘gift’, which Diprose develops through the idea of ‘corporeal generosity’. I am interested in corporeal generosity insofar as it circumvents descriptions of relationships in terms of a closed economy in which resources are exchanged without excess or remainder. Corporeal generosity (...) refers to the often missed but nevertheless inescapable debt that a body owes to other bodies. At the same time, this embodied ‘gifting’ is both unpredictable and intrusive – there is as much possibility of threatening the integrity of bodies as there is of opening new possibilities. (shrink)

Performativity and performance of language are the subject of this re-writing of Derrida's position on the gift. Here the source of performativity is Althusser's while the source of the gift is not only Marcel Mauss, but also both the opening of Derrida's Given Time: I, Counterfeit Money and the signing through letters of Madame de Maintenon, wife of Louis XIV and founder of a school for girls. A third writing plays a role, that of a 1910 biography of Madame. The (...) paper is a ‘relay,’ a ‘re-play’ of the positions of the central ‘characters,’ -- Derrida and Maintenon -- and a semiology of their writings. Out of this a new ‘gift of pedagogy’ is evoked in a conception of ‘pedagogical retreat.’. (shrink)

The paper discusses Iris Marion Young's idea of asymmetric reciprocity that rethinks typical understandings of gift giving. Iris Marion Young's proposals for asymmetric ethical relationships have important implications for democratic contexts that seek to take differences seriously. Imagining oneself in the place of the other or expecting from the other what one expects from oneself levels out differences between people and hinders possibilities of interaction. The conditions of asymmetry and reciprocity of Iris Marion Young's communicative ethics, as well as that (...) of the unexpected as understood within situations of gift giving, bring about new readings of learning and teaching situations. The paper discusses issues of power and knowledge that have important ethical implications for how the relationships between the teacher and student could be imagined and how the teacher and student imagine themselves. Following Derridean underpinnings to Young's notion of asymmetric reciprocity the paper questions pedagogic attempts that seek to minimize the asymmetric positions of the teacher and the student and challenges educational practices based on the reproduction of knowledge and reproduction of persons. The paper follows Young's arguments against Derrida's reading of asymmetry as being one sided. It argues that such a reading does away with the idea of teaching and learning altogether as teaching necessarily involves acts of responding. It continues to argue that Young's conceptualizations of gift giving as reciprocal and asymmetrical open up alternative understandings of the pedagogic relationships between teachers and students. (shrink)

Challenges the accepted model, and builds a politically sensitive notion of generosity.

This paper orchestrates various moments in which Derrida makes recourse to the notion of anachrony – in analyses of khōra and demiurgic creation in the Timaeus and of the trace in Husserl – in order to describe a structural law according to which philosophy attempts to determine some ‘thing’ with the very categories that it makes possible and that are therefore structurally derivative, both too early and too late, in a word, anachronous.

This essay first examines the issue of intersubjectivity in terms of the paradigmatic relationship between I and You. From a grammatical standpoint this relationship seems asymmetrical as well as necessarily performative: I implies the speech act of the speaker. You exists only as I's interlocutor. This helps us understand the very different status of what is called the 3rd person--and which would more accurately be called a nonperson, as Benveniste explains. This nonperson marks the position of a Third Party. I (...) propose to show that the same Third Party--whether a living being or a thing--is also involved in the traditional ceremonial gift-exchange relationship discussed by Marcel Mauss. The relationship between the partners in gift-exchange is mediated by the being or the thing given, which is for the recipient a token and substitute of the giver. What this involves is the reciprocal public recognition of the partners. In modern societies this function is performed by the law and by the institutions of the arbiter-State as they emerged in the formation of the Greek city. (shrink)