Derrida’s Modernism

Derrida believes the idea of a “gift” is contradictory. As David Hart summarizes, for Derrida, even if the gift is given with no expectation of tangible return, it still cannot be truly a gift, because the gift elicits recognition of the giver, and even the intention to give requires a recognition by the giver that he or she is a giver; the gift, given or intended, carries with it a credit of glory.” The only gift that truly qualifies as gift, Derrida says, is the gift of nothing, and this means fundamentally the gift of time: The only present is the present moment, the nothing, the no-space, the not-duration that does not exist as the future makes its way into the past. The true gift is “the dissolution of being in its manifestation of temporality” (as Hart summarizes).

This is doubly, perhaps triply modern. First, Derrida’s conception of time flattens it into pure clock-time. But there are varying degrees and contours of the “present.” I am “presently” middle-aged, employed as a professor of theology, a father and husband, and so on. Some of these “presents” have durations of years. To reduce the present (as Augustine really didn’t do) to the infinitely thin edge between future and past is to adopt a particularly modern conception of temporality. Further, as Hart points out, Derrida’s stress on purity of intention, purged of desire, is pure Kantianism. And this, in turn, supposes that the intending subject exists prior to the exchanges in which it is enmeshed ?Ean autonomous ego standing somehow above and outside the relations in which it is always already embedded. Finally, Derrida’s conception of gift is modern because it is tragic. The only true gift is the gift of the nothingness of present time, which is for Derrida ultimately the gift of death.