Marion and the gift

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:10 am by Peter Leithart

Marion and the gift 2017-09-07T00:10:49+06:00 Peter Leithart

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In his discussions of gifts, Marion takes both Heidegger and Derrida as interlocutor. In dialogue with Heidegger, he wants to show that the reduction that Heidegger performs does not necessarily reveal Being as the final horizon; he wants to argue that the reduction reveals givenness as the ultimate horizon instead. In response to Derrida, he wants to show that there is a gift that escapes from exchange, a gift that fulfills something of Derrida’s hope for a pure gift. He believes that it is possible, operating within the strict limits of phenomenology and not entering on the terrain of metaphysics or theology, to think the gift according to the mode of givenness rather than according to the mode of exchange. He accepts the challenge of Derrida’s bracketing of the triple transcendence of the giver, the gift, and the recipient and still arrive at an identifiable gift that does not “collapse into a vague cloud, the last breath of a collapsed concept.” The conditions of the im/possibility of the gift that Derrida lays out can yield a gift understood in the mode of givenness. The following summarizes some portions of Marion’s “Sketch of a Phenonenological Concept of Gift,” published in Merold Westphal, ed., Postmodern Philosophy and Christian Thought.

He begins with a discussion of the gift itself, intending to bracket the gift. What, he asks, is a gift? It is not a transfer of property, because there are gifts in which the gift does not yield property to the recipient (a loan, a lease) and more importantly because “a gift sometimes does not consist in any object at all: in the cases involving a promise, a reconciliation, a blessing (or a curse), a friendship, or a love (or a hatred), the gift is not identical to an object but emerges only at the moment of its occurrence; rather than being identical with the gift, the object becomes the simply occasional support for the gift.” He suggests that the “richer” a gift, the less it is visible in the actual object given. Power is given in a crown, a pallium, and other insignia of power, but the objects do not give the power but symbolize it. Likewise, the wedding ring is a sign of the most precious self-gift, and yet the ring is not equivalent in value to the gift at all. He claims that “the gifts which give the most give literally nothing – no thing, no object; not because they disappoint expectations but because what they give belongs neither to reality nor to objectivity.” Thus, the disappearance of the gift itself does not obliterate the gift, but helps us focus on the give in the mode of givennness rather than in the mode of exchange.

A gift he says it the result of a predicate; it arises as soon as the giver considers it “for the first time, as gift, or, more exactly, as givable.” Its givability doesn’t depend on any intrinsic property of the gift itself, nor does the object itself change when the give determines that the object is a gift. The gift arises when givability arises, which, Marion says, arises because the giver recognizes a prior debt, a prior obligations based on an anterior gift: “The gift begins when the potential giver suspects that another gift has already preceded him, to which he owes something, to which he owes himself to respond. Not only does the gift reside in the decision to give, accepted by the potential giver, but the giver can only decide to give inasmuch as he recognizes that another gift has already obliged him.” This means that the giver is not the ultimate determiner of the beginning of a gift; the gift in a sense gives itself because the prior gift obliges the giver to give in the first place: “The decision to make a gift implies, first of all, the decision to make oneself a giver; but making oneself a giver cannot be decided without the obligations (weighing on the giver) of the gift which he has first received. The gift decides the giver. The gift itself decides: it resides in the decision of the giver, but this decision itself rests upon the obligation motivated by an anterior gift.”

Bracketing the gift, the gift-object, didn’t destroy the gift, but instead revealed the deepest reality of the gift, and the background of givenness that obliges the giver to give in the first place. It revealed the gift in the mode of givenness. What happens when we bracket the recipient? Like the gift, the reception does not lie in the object itself nor in being the end-point of a transfer of property. Rather, reception lies in the act of reception itself, a point that can be illustrated by pointing to the phenomena of ignorance and refusal. A gift that is not known to be a gift is not a gift; it must be recognized as a gift; similarly, a gift refused is not fulfilled as gift. It is not missing any thing, any object; what is missing is simply the acceptance. Reception occurs when a person makes up his mind to be a recipient.

But this reception is not easy. Receiving a gift means receiving obligation, and this is something we may well want to avoid. This obligation is not a debt that the recipient owes to the giver. That would lead back to the gift in the mode of economy, which, Marion agrees with Derrida, would destroy the gift as such. What obligates is not the giver but the gift itself. The gift itself is a challenge to the autocracy of the recipient, his desire to be self-sufficient and autonomous: “the gift, by its own allure and prestige, decides the giver to decide himself for it – that is to say, decides (or determines) him to sacrifice his own autocracy, the autocrat of what is his own, in order to receive it. The gift decides about its own acceptance by deciding about its recipient. Thus, we will conclude that in the regime of reduction, the experience of consciousness in which the gift gives itself consists of the decision of the gift – the decision to receive the gift by the recipient but especially to decide the recipient of the gift by the gift itself.” Again, the gift remains even in the bracketing of the recipient, but the gift emerges not according to an economy of exchange but according to the mode of givenness.

Marion furthers the argument that the gift remains even when the recipient is bracketed by bringing up specifically Christian standards of gift-giving, specifically from Luke 6. When gifts are given to enemies and ingrates, the gift is still a gift. He doesn’t simply argue that the gift remains when the recipient is bracketed, but that when the gift is given to an enemy who has no intention of returning a gift or an ingrate who refuses to recognize the gift, the sheer gratuity of the gift stands out in greater relief.: “The simple fact that a gift is abandoned does not destroy it; on the contrary, it confirms it in its character of givenness – no reciprocity whatsoever; there is not even the recognition of this gift which would corrode its pure gratuity. The abandon indicates that the gift not only surpasses every counter-gift but that it surpasses every possible acceptance. The abandoned gift manifests, by its very disproportion, its givenness.”

Finally, he suggests that bracketing the giver doesn’t destroy the gift but shows the gift in its pure form of gratuity. A gift that comes from an anonymous or dead benefactor is one that escapes any counter-gift, since the recipient is either ignorant of his benefactor, or has not benefactor to respond to.

From this analysis, Marion concludes that the gift is not destroyed by the triple bracketing. On the contrary, this triple bracketing of the giver, the gift itself, and the recipient, shows the gift in the mode of givenness rather than in the mode of economy; that is to say, it shows the gift in its sheer gratuity, its character as purest gift.

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