Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money (Carpenter Lectures)

Derrida, Jacques

ISBN 10: 022650431X / ISBN 13: 9780226504315

Published by University of Chicago Press, 1994

About this Item

Minor shelf wear. Otherwise a square, tight, unmarked book. x, 174 pp.

Seller Inventory # 054104

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money (Carpenter Lectures)
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication Date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 022650431X
• ISBN 13: 9780226504315
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: Very Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Philosophy

About this title

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 the Authors

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. Several of his books have been published in their English translation by the University of Chicago Press.

Peggy Kamuf is the Marion Frances Chevalier Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. She has written, edited, or translated many books, by Derrida and others, and is coeditor of the series of Derrida’s seminars at the University of Chicago Press.