Derrida's gift to eco/theo/logy: a critical tribute.

Derrida is dead. While the philosopher considered death a gift (The Gift of Death, 1995), he found it hard to accept existentially. (1) I, for one, certainly relate to Derrida's refusal of death: try as I might, I find it difficult (perhaps impossible) to accept death as a gift--except, perhaps, by ecologically interpreting it as a way of making room for the coming of other-than-human and human others. Try as I might, I find it difficult to move beyond the Christian dogma of death as the fatal consequence of Edenic sin: this dubious notion is difficult to abandon because orthodoxy leaves a stain more stubborn than sin.

And so, upon Derrida's death, one could very appropriately consider the gift of mortality, but let us consider instead Derrida's gift of rethinking the gift per se, and how this refiguring has opened up a way of ecotheologically reconsidering the gift of creation. Upon Derrida's death, we leave for others the gift of his thanatos and consider instead his gift of thinking the gift anew, and how this renewed reconfiguration may be a gift to the Earth itself.

For those unfamiliar with the recent controversy over the gift, this is how it all began: in typically scandalous French-postmodern fashion, Derrida's Given Time (1992) brought to our attention the fact that the gift is a problem, a paradox, a contradiction. (2) Why is gifting--which is surely one of our most treasured and apparently straightforward practices--a problem or aporia? While the gift is ordinarily understood as that which is given gratuitously (without condition) and recognized as such, there is nevertheless always an exchange of some kind, ranging from responses like gratitude, thanksgiving, counter-gifting, indebtedness, and so on. (3) Exchange marks all three aspects of gifting: giver, gift, and recipient. To begin with, the giver receives something in return: be it another gift, gratitude, self-congratulation, or even hostility--for even displeasure or rejection gives back to the gift-giver their identity. (4) On the part of the recipient, the mere recognition of the gift is enough to bring it into circularity. It may lead to a countergift or a sense of obligation. The gift-thing itself likewise does not escape exchange economy. Whether it is a thing, an intention, a value, or a symbol, it is nevertheless identified as a gift and this recognition brings it into the circle of return. If the gift is not identified as such, then it would perhaps elude the circle, but then it would no longer be phenomenally recognized as such. Derrida muses: "There must be chance, encounter, the involuntary, even unconsciousness or disorder, and there must be intentional freedom, and these two conditions must--miraculously, graciously--agree with each other." (5) An aporia, indeed.

Giving credit where credit's due, I would propose that Derrida's originality lies not so much with a "discovery" of the gift's irreducible duality, but with his rigorous philosophical articulation of what, I suspect, many of us have known or intuited all along (and I return to this recognition in a moment): that the gift is not so pure or unconditional, or, perhaps more accurately, that it is both "pure" (conditional, reciprocal) and "impure" (conditional, circular). Expectation and exchange, on the one hand, coincide with autonomy and gratuity, on the other. As annoying as it may sound to minds bred on the logic of the either/or (Aristotle lives on), the gift evidently appears to be an irresolvable paradox or aporia constituted by two irreducibly contradictory or heterogeneous (sets of) elements.

Entangled in the Gift-Aporia

The gift's aporeticity (doublesidedness, heterogeneity) expresses itself as a discontinuity and entanglement both in our lived experience and on the level of theory. I think most of us (perhaps all of us) have at some time felt somewhat tense about the tension between the gift's discordant elements of excess and exchange. We encounter this glaring incongruity everyday. For instance, when I am invited to a dinner party, I bring the gift of a bottle of wine. On the one hand, I feel the wine is a gift, given freely; on the other hand, it is also an obligation, for it is customary to go to a dinner party with some kind of gift--how could one attend a dinner party empty-handed? And so, an exchange takes place, which leaves one wondering how gifting could arise in such a context: the gift's excess is displaced or even erased by this transaction (meal-for-wine). Christmas is another glaring example of this inevitable loss: the whole custom revolves around exchange and the expectation of exchange. How can Christmas gifts be exchanged, anticipated? The element of spontaneity seems totally lacking.

The gift's aporeticity--and our concomitant perplexity and confusion--is also disclosed in texts and discourses that treat this question and phenomenon. I briefly cite here a few examples drawn from the Bible, theology, and philosophy which exemplify the entangled attempt to try to hold the two elements together or, alternatively, to break free from it by either siding with (or reducing it to) its element of excess or exchange. First of all, the Christic logic in Luke's Gospel, on the one hand, overturns the notion of giving in strictly reciprocal and equivalent terms: "If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you?... But love your enemies, do good, and [gift], expecting nothing in return" (Luke 6.35a). (6) Nevertheless, this subversive logic immediately reverts to an economic rationale, for this giving also earns divine credit: "Your reward will be great ..." (Luke 6.35b). Here, the two logics (gratuity and reward) appear side by side--aporetically. Of course, let us not ignore the radicality of "expecting nothing in return," considering that the logic of expectation governs the First Testament and its culture/s, a logic also governing contemporary capitalist society, which is all about calculations and expectations of returns. (7) And so, despite the reversion to calculation, one nevertheless glimpses the subversive logic of unidirectional gifting, which is also evidenced in the call for countless forgiving (Matthew 18.21-22). A second biblical example is perhaps my favorite scriptural instance of the entanglement of gratuity and circularity: it occurs at 1 Corinthians 9.15 when Paul refers to grace--that unconditional gift par excellence--and he exclaims: "Thanks be to God for [God's] indescribable gift!" Paul offers thanksgiving for a gift that nevertheless exceeds or eludes return.

Has the gift's tension been resolved by theology and philosophy? On the contrary, their entwinement deepens as they delve deeper into the aporia. This is illustrated in admirable efforts by theologians like Kenneth Schmitz's The Gift (1982) and Stephen Webb's The Gifting God (1996), as well as theologian Jean-Luc Marion's brilliant phenomenological work Being Given (2002). (8) This last text is especially instructive, particularly since Marion rethinks the gift in the wake of Derrida's provocative treatment. For those unfamiliar with Marion's rethinking, what he basically (and brilliantly) does is think the gift without or beyond causality, beyond the everyday understanding of gifting as a metaphysical chain of giver-gift-recipient: gifting can occur without an identifiable giver or gift or recipient. Marion's phenomenological treatment is powerful, but while he appears to evade causality--a noble evasion when the gift burdens--his account nevertheless retains the notion of indebtedness (an exemplary figure of the circle). Indeed, Marion goes so far as to suggest that the self is preceded by and defined by this indebtedness. (9) And so, we are back to square one: Marion's post-metaphysical rendering ends up retaining--and even amplifying--gratitude and circularity, thereby preserving the gift's aporeticity.

Derrida's Abandon

While the biblical, theological, and phenomenological texts cited above disclose the gift's ineradicable doublesidedness, perhaps the most surprising example of lapsing the tension by biasing one element (excess) over the other (exchange) is found in the thinker who announces the gift's aporeticity--Jacques Derrida himself. A number of passages in "On the Gift," a fascinating 1997 exchange between Derrida and Marion, indicate a cessation of the tension. (10) In a passage where Derrida summarizes Marion's position on the gift, and having just mentioned Given Time, Derrida argues: "as soon as a gift is identified as a gift, with the meaning of a gift, then it is canceled as a gift.... So I dissociate the gift from the present.... The event called gift is totally heterogeneous to theoretical identification, to phenomenological identification.... The gift is totally foreign to the horizon of economy, ontology, constantive statements, and theoretical determination and judgment." (11) In his effort to save the gift from the totalizing grip of knowledge (which would certainly undo it), Derrida participates in a kind of totalizing thinking himself. He employs a vocabulary of totalization: "totally heterogeneous," "totally foreign" (emphases added). These kinds of assertions are terribly problematic. If the gift were absolutely "foreign to the horizon of economy, ontology, knowledge, constative statements, and theoretical determination and judgment," then it would remain absolutely imperceptible and one would wonder how the word "gift" even enters language.

When Derrida decides to "dissociate the gift from the present," judging by the totalizing tone of the text, it seems this dissociation would be a clean cut. But Derrida himself teaches that the present is elemental to the gift. Without presence--as "impure" as it may or may not be--the gift would not be received as a gift. Hence, the gift and the present do associate. Somehow. In a state of admirable perplexity, Derrida had previously (and rightly) named this association or agreement "miraculous" and "gracious." However, the above-quoted passage demonstrates that, during the Villanova exchange, Derrida refuses to figure the gift in all its aporeticity by denying it its presence (exchange, circularity, constitutability).

In the above-quoted passage, Derrida does not merely privilege excess but he resolutely denies identification. There is no maintenance of the tension there. What does this mean in terms of an aporetics of the gift? Derrida's aporetics is, in this instance, not aporetic enough. There is an excessive (severe) apohaticism at work there: an absolute insistence on our inability to identify the gift. An excessive apophaticism converts or reverses total circumscription (arguably, traditional epistemology's ultimate ambition) to total non-circumscription (the claim that there is no access to any "small-k" knowledge or "small-t" truth). One needs to alternate between these two extremes--the gift requires it. To be sure, the thing itself slips away, but it slips away from one's grasp. It slips away: the gift is partially grasped.

A second text takes Derrida's excessiveness to the extreme; he declares: "Finally, we have the word gift in our culture. We received it; it functions in the Western lexicon, Western culture, in religion, in economics, and so on. I try to struggle with the aporias which are located in this heritage.... But at some point I am ready to give up the word. Since this word is finally contradictory, I am ready to give up this word at some point." (12) Derrida's "struggle," marked, no doubt, by a healthy dose of play, inspired my own work on the gift. But it seems that, for the exemplary aporetician, the gift-aporia has (almost) won the tussle: Derrida is ready to give up the fight by giving up the word "gift." The revealer (and reveler?) par excellence of the contradictoriness of this aporia was ready to give it up after years of struggling with it.

Straightaway, a number of qualifiers are warranted before proceeding. First (and perhaps most obviously), one may account for this striking capitulation as an instance of Derridean dramatics. Since I did not witness the exchange between Derrida and Marion, I am unable to establish whether these words are uttered with irony or playfulness--one can only go by the letter of the text. To be sure, French philosophers are known for their melodramatic styles. (Merold Westphal expresses it perfectly: "French intellectuals seem to feel a deep need to shock and scandalize.") (13) Perhaps Derrida's apparent desire to give up the word "gift" is a tactic to emphasize its paradoxicality: the gift is finally so aporetic Derrida is ready to give it up. Second, it should also be noted that Derrida is at the brink of giving up the gift: he is "ready to give up the word at some point," but one remains unsure (undecided) whether he has reached it. Has Derrida reached this point? One may argue that Derrida has allowed himself a small opening, in case he decides he is ready to resume the struggle with the gift-aporia. A small opening--in spite of the fact that he employs a vocabulary of finality, epitomized by the word "finally" (mentioned twice in this passage); of course, there is no finality to the gift-aporia.

A third, more general qualification involves the possibility that Derrida's desire to give up the word "gift" is perhaps borne of the frustration of having to hold the tension in/of the gift. We humans--especially we post-Enlightenment humans who perhaps retain a desire to understand everything--are exasperated by our inability to fully comprehend, contain, or overcome aporias. This exasperation is understandable, but one should not give in to it. The aporeticity of the gift must be saved, even at the cost of exasperation.

Taking into consideration the above qualifications, one nevertheless finds the above passage astounding. Why astounding? Derrida's admission is astounding because the most outstanding thinker of the gift-aporia, and the thinker who implicitly employs something of an oscillating or oscillational logic to respectfully reflect the gift's contradictoriness in Given Time, has finally given up on the gift--or is about to. But what should one do? Should one continue to fight the good fight? Struggles are, after all, demanding: one grows weary wrestling. Nevertheless, we should never give up the gift. First and foremost, it should not be given up precisely because it is contradictory. Annoying as it may be, the word, concept, and phenomenon of gifting exemplifies the paradoxical. It is a powerful reminder of unconditionality and excess, as well as our inability to "escape" from conditionality and exchange. It is precisely because the gift is marked by two remarkably contradictory moments or movements ("pure" gratuity and "impure" reciprocity) that the word "gift" should be saved. This word and phenomenon will remind us, if we think about it carefully and persistently enough, that there is an irresolvable tension between the one and the other. We think, work, play in this tension. We therefore need to oscillate, as unflinchingly as we can--for the gift's sake.

Beyond Pure and Simple Purity--For Creation's Sake

Now, Derrida's bias against exchange may be refigured as a kind of yearning for the pure gift--the unconditional gift that remains unmarked by the "stain" of presence, identification, and exchange. This yearning, which verges on a kind of desire for purity, is made manifest in The Gift of Death (which is cited during the exchange with Marion). In that text, Derrida employs a lexicon of infection to critique the "contamination" of the gift by exchange: "The moment the gift, however generous it be, is infected with the slightest hint of calculation, the moment it takes account of knowledge or recognition, it falls within the ambit of an economy ..." (14) According to Derrida, the gift becomes infected (and fallen). This emotive kind of lexicon blurs Derrida's original (initial and innovative) insight: that the gift is marked by the contradictory aspects of "purity" (gratuity, linearity, etc.) and "impurity" (exchange, circularity, etc.). (15) But when one begins to consider these diverging aspects as "pure" (good) and "impure" (bad), then one risks privileging the former aspect and simultaneously degrading the latter.

One finds particularly insightful support for the postulation of a certain Derridean bias against the circle and its corollaries (presence, impurity, etc.) in the work of theologian Marion Grau: in her essay "Erasing 'Economy'," she traces the way in which, over time, Derrida's thought on the gift has "taken on remarkably different shapes." (16) Armed with the thought of differance, she argues that "the early Derrida" does not choose between the circle and that which ruptures or interrupts it, but rather negotiates or holds together general and restricted economies. Citing decisive Derridean writings like "Differance" and other works that first appeared in the 1960s, Grau cautiously suggests that "In his nineties texts, however, Derrida might appear to shift positions.... 'Economy' in this context first of all refers to the distribution and partition of resources, and to the idea of exchange, circularity, and return, that with or without delay returns to its point of origin. It is this presumed circularity, this law of return that seems to preoccupy some of his further musings on the term, in texts such as Given Time, and The Gift of Death ..." (17) As I have noted above, I think Derrida still maintains the tension in Given Time, though one may argue that he also begins to loosen it there. What is indisputable is that the Villanovian Derrida (together with Marion) displays a dubious desire for purity and a concomitant opposition towards circularity.

Grau draws out the implications of this bias: "Though Marion and Derrida differ about God, they both agree that God and the Gift must be located 'outside the [exchange] economy.'" Recalling ecotheologians like Sallie McFague and John Cobb, Grau questions this exteriority: "Might we see in this attempt to escape a covert flight into transcendence?" Further on, she concludes: "Derrida's attempts to isolate the gift from all polluting economy appear restrictive, if not almost oppressive, in what seems a drive for purity and transcendence." From a "purely" aporetic-theoretic perspective (eco-political implications of the logic of purification are addressed below), we would emphasize that this escape is questionable if and only if we never want to return. In other words, it should be a two-way flight: any desire for transcendence and purity should ceaselessly alternate with a drive for immanence and impurity. Both/and.

Beyond the theoretical dubiousness associated with pure and simple purity, Grau locates eco-political problems with the Derridean desire to locate gifting outside circularity. Together with Grau:

       We might wonder whether the gift, given without return and
       reciprocity, truly represents a desirable alternative to
       [exchange] economy.... Is an 'untied' gift in any way salvific
       for our relations? Exploitative economies have often depended
       upon the nonreciprocity of women or slaves to be the willingly or
       unwillingly 'gifting' contributors of what Bourdieu calls
       'symbolic capital,' so that those in power could convert this
       symbolic capital that came to them as a 'gift' that could be
       converted into realized capital owned by those in power. Is not
       part of the problem in economies that they have not respected
       enough the need for a somewhat balanced reciprocity, that women,
       slaves, creation, environment have been excluded from a truly
       reciprocal and inclusive economy?

This line of questioning discloses a second crucial reason for the conservation of the gift's heterogeneity: if we apply the concept and phenomenon of "gift" to corporeal things, that is, if we consider the matrix of material beings (whether other-than-human, human, or humanly manufactured) as gift/s, then the preservation of the element of identification (circularity, exchange) reflects and promotes our relationality (reciprocity, interdependency). In other words, if excess signifies things like linearity and singularity, then exchange denotes--and reminds us of--our interrelatedness and interindebtedness. If thinkers devote too much time to transcendence and individuation, there is a danger that our radical interconnectedness is ignored, marginalized, devalued, or forgotten. A world of absolute transcendence would be non-reciprocal, orderly, sheer grace and gratuity--unlike this messy matrix of interrelating, interindebting, intertwining bodies.

Thus, not only is any escape from the interface between the immanent and transcendent theoretically dubious but also eco-politically disastrous. The drive for purity is a somewhat fanciful flight from dirty materiality to stainless ethereality. (The qualifier "somewhat" signifies that we shouldn't be absolutely against absolute transcendence, but that we should acknowledge existence as the interplay between transcendence and immanence, presence and absence, etc.). Certainly, there is a perception that postmodern theory has paid insufficient attention to corporeal interconnectedness. In order to redress and restrict this drive towards the pure or absolute, thinking the two elements of the gift together ensures that the element of circularity opens up the re-integration of relation and reciprocity as crucial and undeniable--a re-integration which is all the more vital in an age of unparalleled ecological devastation. We should therefore think the gift's relationality and reciprocity--and not just excess and gratuity--for creation's sake.

And so, any radical suspension of the gift's aspect of identifiability appears to be an excessive move--both theoretically and eco-politically. An absolute abandonment of the circle (even if such a thing were possible) would be an extreme gesture, even if it is a noble gesture that means to save the gift's aspect of freedom or gratuity--the aspect that differentiates the gift from a commodity.

Oscillationally Encountering the Creation-Gift

Since we are dealing with an aporia (aporos) which, by definition, allows no way through it, we are, in a sense, paralyzed by it: but this is no pure and simple immobility. Movement still occurs; indeed, it is a very dynamic motion, moving in the diverging directions of exchange and excess. We could describe this paradoxically moving paralysis as an "oscillation" (or "alternation," "vacillation," etc.), for it is a rotating action that is nevertheless steadfast. According to the OED (online), to oscillate is "To swing backwards and forwards, like a pendulum; to vibrate; to move to and fro between two points. To fluctuate between two opinions, principles, purposes, etc., each of which is held in succession; to vary between two limits which are reached alternately." Unceasing alternation saves the gift's irresolvable and, as we shall attempt to explain, ecologically productive tension, reflecting and preserving its giftness, rather than becoming fixed by one of its elements (fixation thereby limiting it to the limits of grace or commerce). Oscillation's both/and thereby guards against exclusion and reification. It does not take sides, but takes both sides. It does not bias: it is a double movement that does not favor one of the elements at the exclusion of the other, for any exclusion dissolves the gift itself. Note, too, the phrase "held in succession": gifting occurs over time; like gifting, oscillation takes time. Temporality is thereby respected.

One may propose that "oscillation" resembles "dialectic" insofar as the latter is broadly cast in terms of the negotiation of antinomies. If there is a resemblance, why not employ the more common term ("dialectic") to describe the way in which we are broaching the question of the gift? First of all, it is precisely the polyvalence and prevalence of the more popular word that dissuades me from employing it: one would be hard pressed to find too many other words in the history of western thought that carry more baggage, lumbered with a variety of meanings and nuances. If "oscillation" suits, why choose the more problematic "dialectic"? A second reason why I avoid the term "dialectic" is that its use would risk connoting a synthesizing movement wherein the oppositions (gratuity and gratitude) are resolved or sublated in a third or "higher" position (a synthesis which appears to be more Fichtean and Schellingean than Hegelian). The gift is an aporia precisely because its heterogeneity cannot be reduced. If one were to fold or fuse its fundamental characteristics, "gift" would then signify something other than it presently does.

Hence, the gift-aporia requires thinking it in terms of its duality. To be sure, distinguishing between its excess and exchange should be distinguished from any severe dualism in which one aspect dominates and denigrates the other. But does this distinction, which preserves the gift's heterogeneity, mean that we should purely and simply oppose or exclude any idea of the gift's unity? Certainly not: while the gift is divided by the heterogeneity internal to it, it is nevertheless a unity; it is a divided unity--or a united division. The gift is paradoxical or contradictory precisely because of the interplay between the excess and exchange that unite and divide it. If the gift were exclusively gratuitous, excluding any kind of identification or reciprocity (if it were, for instance, something like "indescribable grace"), then there would be nothing aporetic about it--baffling (or impossible) for thought and perception, perhaps, but not aporetic. Alternatively, if the gift were exclusively circular, then it would no longer be "gift" but a commodity. But the gift, as we un/know it, is neither indescribable grace nor calculable trade. The "gift," as it occurs on the plane of lived experience, is a unity (or division) that is nevertheless divided (or united) in its heterogeneity. Both/and.

And so, for theoretical and eco-political reasons, it appears that the gift-aporia cannot--and should not--be dissolved but only resolved by resolutely remaining faithful to its contradictory duality. Perhaps surprisingly, this tension provides an opening for action (as I explain momentarily), particularly when it comes to interpreting and encountering the Earth as a gift-aporia.

But before I offer a few thoughts regarding responses by intentional agents that would be informed by the gift-tension, it is important to note how the creation-gift's excess precedes and overcomes us. In other words, the creation-gift precedes and exceeds the gift-recipient. This precedence and overwhelmingness may be expressed by phenomena like astonishment, wonder, and silence (hesychia). (19) One of the most ecologically significant things about these kinds of presubjective "reactions" is that they are very ecological: by definition, this passivity allows the world to be (gift), rather than being mastered, controlled, commodified, and disfigured by us humans. If anything, we gift-recipients are, in a sense, acted upon by the creation-gift--in the most wonderful (and sometimes challenging) ways--rather than acting upon it in often disfigurative and destructive ways.

Letting-Be, Playing-With, Utility, Reciprocity

Of course, we must also consider how we, as intentional agents, do and should respond to the creation-gift in modes that respect and reflect this irreducible heterogeneity, and it is in this respect that a radical gift hermeneutics can also be a kind of ethico-politics. So, how can the doublesidedness of the Earth-gift inform our conscious interactivity with it? An oscillating interactivity with the world (which, according to a properly egalitarian ecologicality, includes humans, non-human others, and humanly manufactured things) is one that would properly reflect and respond to the creation-gift-aporia. An acknowledgment of the world-gift's aporeticity would make room for a variety of competing responses, and since this interactivity would be governed by the maintenance of the gift-tension, it would disrupt and inform the more ecologically problematic aspects of these responses. In other words, there is something of the ethical and disciplined involved in a vacillating responsiveness, each element informing and restricting the other. How so? Some of the fundamental intentional responses reflecting and respecting the gift's paradoxicality include letting-be, playing-with, utilization, and reciprocity.

To begin with (and I must be unforgivably brief here), I noted above the preconscious reaction of letting-be, but it can also be a response--or, more accurately, a response-without-response--from the intentional subject. This exemplary reception allows the gift to appear and be as gift. In its recognition of the gift's circularity, letting-be is akin to "returning" it--although, in this context, there is nothing insulting about such an act, for it saves the gift from responses that are disfigurative and destructive. By letting it be, we allow creation to "grow old," as Freya Mathews wonderfully puts it, rather than exhausting it and polluting it. (20) Letting-be is radically non-interventionist. It is, without a doubt, the most ecological response. It disrupts the more problematic aspects of alternative reactions (discussed below). There should, of course, be way much more passivity towards the Earth. However, we are reminded that the gift warrants a heterogeneous receptivity--not to mention the fact that, as corporeal-beings-in-relation, letting-be could not possibly be our one and only response. We are bound to also not-let-the-world-be.

A second key reaction is joyous interactivity, whereby the gift is not treated non-interventionally or instrumentally, but where the "object" or "end" of the interaction is play. The "objective" is rather purposeless--a terribly threatening thing for us rational-instrumental-managerial capitalists and socialists still over-coming our Neoplatonic asceticism and puritanism. A playful response responds to the gratuity of the gift: take it, have fun! Of course, recreational interactivity with creation can--and often is--excessively unecological. (The ever-expanding "snowfields" come to mind.) Hence, this response may become gentler by staying in tension with letting-be and other circular-reflecting reactions.

Having referred to evidently eco-noble receptions and interactions like letting-be and play, one may expect well-meaning ecologists to be offended by the allowance of an instrumental use of the creation-gift. However, staying true to the gift's aporeticity, responding in an instrumental way reflects the gift's gratuity: it is there for the taking. Nevertheless, when it appears in extreme forms like hyper-commodification and hyper-consumption, there is an utter lack of acknowledgment of gratuity's other--circularity. As an aporia, the gift makes room for an instrumentality that would also make room for competing practices, thereby restricting an ecologically devastating instrumentalism like tech-no-consumerism. In a severely capitalized world, however, the opposite is true: almost everything is figured instrumentally almost all of the time.

Now, a fourth category of responses is that of exchange or reciprocity (which incorporates a variety of reactions, such as thanksgiving, indebtedness, and paying-back). Even though we lovers of gratuity (including Derrida, Marion et al) love to privilege the freedom of the gift, we have already discerned why its circularity should be respected--but it bears repeating: it not only lets the gift be, but it counteracts any responses evoked by the element of gratuity which can easily slide to a squandering or wastefulness which reaches its zenith with hyper-capitalism. An acknowledgment of the gift's circularity prompts us to redress any receptivity informed by a misplaced (but often well-meaning) emphasis on the gift's graciousness. When we respond to creation--or when we will respond to it--with more reciprocity, gratitude, and thanksgiving, it is more likely the Earth-gift will be treated more gently.

And so, if creation is a gift--a gift in all its splendid aporeticity--then it would inspire and inform an oscillational interactivity with it, which may save it. And, if another name for an interactivity marked by letting-be, utility, enjoyment, and reciprocity is "love," then, in a word, the Earth should be loved.

From the gift-aporia to love: Derrida's controversial treatment of the gift sparked off an enriching, revealing journey that I have been pursuing for a number of years now. Perhaps the latter-day Derrida became too much of a purist and this thereby endangered the undisclosed ecological possibilities in rethinking the gift-aporia. Nevertheless, he got the ball rolling and, for that, I thank him--a grateful thanking, of course, which oscillates with an unreserved taking.

Merci / oui!

Notes

1. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). In a recent interview, Derrida confessed: "Less and less, I have not learned to accept death." Le Monde, August 19, 2004.

2. Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I, Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) [henceforth Derrida, Given Time]. The rest of this critical tribute retrieves and elaborates aspects of my doctoral dissertation, "If Creation is a Gift: Towards an Eco/theo/logical Aporetics," Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, 2003 [henceforth Manolopoulos, "If Creation is a Gift"], as well as a seminar of the same name conducted at Monash University's Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies on September 22, 2004.

3. The qualifier "ordinarily understood" signifies an openness to Ken Lokensgard's culture-sensitive assertion that "Derrida's definition applies for only a limited number of people in today's world"--though one wonders how any other definition of "gift" could differentiate its meaning from words like "commodity" or "exchange." Refer to Ken Lokensgard, "The Matter of Responsibility: Derrida and Gifting Across Cultures," par. 26, in Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 4.1 (December 2002) <http://www.jcrt.org/archives/04.1/lokensgard.shtml> September 10, 2003.

4. Derrida, Given Time, p. 13.

5. Derrida, Given Time, p. 123.

6. Simon Jarvis notes that the original Greek and Latin words translated in this verse as "lend" more accurately correspond to the verb form of "gift" (dapizete, date). Jarvis, "Problems in the Phenomenology of the Gift," Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 6.2 (August 2001): 67-77, 74.

7. J. A. Selbie confirms that the conditional gift continues to prevail in Eastern cultures: "So firmly established is the custom in the East of giving a present upon certain conditions that the latter is demanded as a right." Selbie, "Gift," in Dictionary of the Bible, ed. J. Hastings (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1958), pp. 172-173, p. 173.

8. Kenneth L. Schmitz, The Gift: Creation (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1982); Stephen H. Webb, The Trinitarian God: A Trinitarian Ethic of Excess (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); JeanLuc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002) [henceforth Marion, Being Given]. Refer to my detailed analyses of these texts in Manolopoulos, "If Creation is a Gift," Chs. 2-3.

9. Refer to Marion, Being Given, p. 98.

10. Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion, "On the Gift: A Discussion between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion, Moderated by Richard Kearney," in God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, ed. John D. Caputo and Michael Scanlon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 54-78 [henceforth Derrida and Marion. "On the Gift"].

11. Derrida and Marion, "On the Gift," p. 59.

12. Derrida and Marion, "On the Gift," p. 67.

13. Merold Westphal, "Positive Postmodernism as Radical Hermeneutics," in The Very Idea of Radical Hermeneutics, ed. Roy Martinez (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1997), pp. 48-63, p. 55.

14. Derrida, The Gift of Death, p. 112; emphases added.

15. An astute critic like Merold Westphal, for instance, cites the initial "Derridean claim that there is no pure gift, no gift completely eccentric to the economy of exchange." Merold Westphal, "Appropriating Postmodernism," in Postmodern Philosophy and Christian Thought, ed. Merold Westphal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 1-10, p. 7. Of course, we are now in a position to more vividly highlight the gift's aporeticity by stating that the gift is "im/pure." Both/and.

16. Marion Grau, "Erasing Economy: Derrida and the Construction of Divine Economies," CrossCurrents 52.3 (Fall 2002): 360-370, 361 [henceforth Grau, "Erasing 'Economy'"].

17. Grau, "Erasing 'Economy,'" p. 363.

18. Grau, "Erasing 'Economy,'" p. 365; until stated otherwise, subsequent citations are drawn from this page.

19. Refer to the fourth chapter of "If Creation is a Gift" Monash University, Melbourne, 2003.

20. Freya Mathews, "Letting the World Grow Old: An Ethos of Countermodernity," Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion 3.2 (August 1999): 119-137.