Giving and receiving

Pickstock offers a theological alternative to Derrida’s concern that giving is impossible since any hope of a return robs the gift of its character as gift and puts it instead into the category of mutually advantageous capitalist exchange. Pickstock points out that in renouncing “the return” as “an ethical category,” Derrida is in fact renouncing “mutuality or the enjoyment of shared society” as “the ultimate ethical goal,” to be replaced by a “self-abasing sacrifice as unambiguous ‘loss,’ which, by definition, betokens a prior ownership of the thing lost.” Derrida is thus assuming a modern conception of giving and receiving at the same time that he attempts to deconstruct it. Will the grubby capitalist please stand up?

Pickstock’s alternative begins from the assumption that we own nothing whatever that is not a prior gift. In this framework, there is no temporal gap between gift and return because the ability to give is itself a gift. And this “middle voice” of giving is possible only in a theological framework, where our giving is neither merely our action nor merely our being acted upon, but both action and passion simultaneously.