the gift: christ & derrida (part 2)

{After a spark of comments on the previous post, I have been asked to clarify Derrida and the gift.}

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Let me say firstly that i really don’t understand most of what Derrida is doing, when I think I am following his thoughts he very quickly muddies the waters. This is probably highly intentional on his part, a result of his ‘post modern’-ness of not wanting to get pigeon-holed into some created structure.

Jake—I have listened to those podcasts from the emergent village. They were very good, though it has been a while since I listened to them. I haven’t read Caputo’s book What Would Jesus Deconstruct. On the theological side, Romans 5 has been at the fore-front of thought along this question, as well as the early Christian writer Origen.

This morning I was able to pull out a book I read a while back  Postmodern Philosohpy and Christian Thought. It is a collection of essays dealing with a wide assortment of topics. One of the essays is on the gift, “Sketch of a Phenomenological Concept of Gift”, written by Jean-Luc Marion. He uses phenomenological examination to examine Derrida’s paradoxical understanding of the gift. I’ll try to sum up the essay—without using too much jargon—which should be helpful for our discussion of Christ’s gift.

{In trying to sum up this essay, I ended up with 4 pages of notes. I originally intended for that to be part of this post, but it became too unweildy and so I have attached those notes as a pdf, which you can find [here].}

Marion uses phenomenology to understand the gift by examining the different parts through the use of bracketing. Those parts are the giver, the gift, the recipient. There is a basic paradox which Derrida raises about the gift. The trouble with giving is that the model is linked together by reciprocity, which causes it to fall apart through self-contradiction. Marion gives 4 arguments from Derrida to show this.

(1)There can be no reciprocity because it transforms the givenness into a system of exchange, economy. (2)The donee can’t give back or feel as though he has contracted a debt to be paid. (3)The giver can’t be conscious of the gift giving act, or else they will gain self-satisfaction or approval. So at the limit neither the doner or donee can recognize the gift as gift. (4)The gift can’t present itself as present or it no longer presents itself as such. Pushed to the limit the gift outside of presence outside of truth or reality.

Marion proposes that we are looking at the gift wrongly, impossibility which is presented is a result of a economical interpretation. Marion attempts to explain the gift under the rubic of givenness. To do this we must bracket the various parts to see if givenness can hold up the gift on its own.

{I will leave the full explanation of this argument out for brevity, but simply say to look at my notes for a fuller explanation.}

You can leave the giver out of the situation; unknown givers or anonymously given gifts still are gifts to be received. The recipient doesn’t really matter either. As Marion explains it, it is actually easier to give to an enemy than a friend, because the enemy won’t try the economical exchange of giving you a gift, whereas a friend would. Marion also uses the parable of Christ from Matthew 25. When Christ returns to judge the actions of men, people will ask when did we not feed you Lord and he will say when you ignored the poor and needy. In that Christ can be found in the faces of the needy means that their is a certain invisibility to the other; we don’t really know who they are who receives the gift. Therefore it doesn’t matter who receives it because it is about the act of givenness.

Although there is, what seems to me, a contrasting passage from the essay, which Marion talks about the need of the recipient to accept the gift. As if a gift isn’t a gift until it is acknowledged as a gift. But it might simply mean that there is a need of acknowledgement. Because he talks about the enemy denying the gift or the ingrate who denies the gift because he says he owes no one anything and the gift opens the possibility that he might owe something to another. So these people even in their acts of denial acknowledge the gift.

This is really where my question of Christ’s gift comes from. Is it that Christ’s gift is simply available for all, meaning they must accept it as their own? Or is a gift still mine even when I don’t accept the gift, as the case of the enemy or ingrate? This essay from Marion helps me see how the gift is independent of me in some way. But the question that remains is can the gift (Christ’s atonement) still have redeeming power over my life when I deny the acceptance of it? It is clear that Christ’s gift is still valid as gift even if it’s not accepted, but it’s not clear what happens to the unaccepted gift.

In defense of the possibility that Christ’s gift could still have power over one who denies it, nature is going to be made a new with the coming kingdom. I would think that nature’s doesn’t have a choice in the matter, it will just happen. There may be a passive acceptance, but there isn’t the freewill to accept or believe. So how is it that nature is going to be redeemed? Or to consider the sovereignty of God, if God can change the hearts of men such as Pharaoh’s hardening couldn’t He change the hearts of all men during the final transformation? I think I am more worried about the hearts of men than their sins. I know that Jesus’ sacrifice has already atoned for their sins, for all sin. But the concern, for me, comes in consider the hearts of people in the new heaven & earth. So I wonder if he is fine with changing Pharaoh’s heart, for Pharaoh’s own well being as Genesis says, then could he not change the heart of every man when the time comes?

Derrida is definitely right to point out the paradox of the gift. We can’t think of the gift being a gift or we fall into exchange frame of mind where we think we need to return the favor. This is an extreme difficulty for Christians, to embrace God’s gift without trying to return the favor with a gift of our own. I mean this was the fight of the Reformation, faith not works. Could it be that even the church’s demand of faith, declarations of doctrine & dogmas falls into that same trouble though? Isn’t the church’s work kind of like ‘hot potatoe’ with the gospel, continuing to pass on the gift onto others without holding to long onto it, because it isn’t something you can hold onto without the gift disappearing.