Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money (Carpenter Lectures) - Softcover

Derrida, Jacques

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226143147 ISBN 13: 9780226143149

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1994

Synopsis

Is giving possible? Is it possible to give without immediately entering into a circle of exchange that turns the gift into a debt to be returned? This question leads Jacques Derrida to make out an irresolvable paradox at what seems the most fundamental level of the gift's meaning: for the gift to be received as a gift, it must not appear as such, since its mere appearance as gift puts it in the cycle of repayment and debt.

Derrida reads the relation of time to gift through a number of texts: Heidegger's Time and Being, Mauss's The Gift, as well as essays by Benveniste and Levi-Strauss that assume Mauss's legacy. It is, however, a short tale by Baudelaire, "Counterfeit Money," that guides Derrida's analyses throughout. At stake in his reading of the tale, to which the second half of this book is devoted, are the conditions of gift and forgiveness as essentially bound up with the movement of dissemination, a concept that Derrida has been working out for many years.

For both readers of Baudelaire and students of literary theory, this work will prove indispensable.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Is giving possible? Insofar as it enters into the circle of exchange (gift and countergift, debt, acquittal, compensation, symbolic recognition, memory), the gift seems to get annulled. In order to give, one would have to expect nothing in return: to hope for nothing, to count on nothing from what must remain incalculable.

About the Author:

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) was director of studies at the école des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, and professor of humanities at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of many books published by the University of Chicago Press.
 

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0226143147
• ISBN 13: 9780226143149
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 182