CHAPTER Y THE GIFTS OF GOD FOR THE PEOPLE OF GOD: COMMUNION AS DERRIDAS IMPOSSIBLE GIFT JOHN MCATEER

The Problem of the Gift

The gift is an unexpectedly (gratuitously?) complex phenomenon. Philosophical studies of the gift encompass economics,1 the nature of agape love,2 the possibility of phenomenology and the given,3 even fundamental ontology4, art and more5. Jacques Derrida addresses many of these questions simultaneously in the first chapter of Given Time. Derrida observes that the logic of the gift is that someone gives something to someone other.6 But then he goes on to argue that this giving cannot take place: no object can in fact be transferred from one subject to another subject: if there is a gift, it cannot take place between two subjects exchanging objects, things, or symbols.7 The gift object is inevitably returned to the giver (usually in terms of an equivalent counter-gift) and nothing is in fact ever given away. The return of the gift does not only take place when the receiver literally pays back the giver; the gift is undermined simply in the recognition of the attempt to give a gift (i.e., if either the giver or the receiver is conscious of the gift as a gift). This is because, for a post-Kantian like Derrida, recognizing the gift as such (recognizing its phenomenality or intentional meaning8) means objectifying the gift as a concept (turning it into an object or an identifiable thing among identifiable things9), which encircles it in the symbolic exchange of thinking and saying from which there is no escape10 (since, as Derrida says elsewhere, there is nothing outside the text of symbolic structures11). In other words, taking oneself to have given or received a gift means the gift is not given there are no givens (unmediated presentations of reality), only takings (interpretations). Therefore, just as the way a question is framed determines the horizon of the possible answers (thus generating a circle), so the gift (or even the desire or intention to give) implies the circle of its return.12 Moreover, the taking of something to be a gift requires us to enter the symbolic structure of language which puts us in the debt of our linguistic community.13 In short, taking (interpreting) is the essential activity of the subject (i.e., that which has experiences). For Derrida, the subject doesnt giverather subjects are constituted by the impossibility of giving. In other words, we each become a subject by entering the circle, i.e., by entering language, thereby receiving the gift of being able to take things: the gift is the giving of the giving itself. 14 It is in our activity of taking that we constitute ourselves as subjects. Here Derrida assumes a fundamental voluntarism: the subject is its will.15 This means that narcissism is universal. Derridas interpreter and disciple defender John Caputo explains why:
Even love, the affirmation of the other, would be impossible without the trace of narcissism (Points, 199). When I love the good of the other, that is the good I love. In the most hospitable, open-ended narcissism, the good I seek for my self is the good of the other.16

If I desire that the other be happy, then my benevolence toward the other is not purely disinterested (i.e., it is not purely benevolent). Disinterested desire is a contradiction in terms. 17 Moreover, since giving is good (something we approve of), then the desire to give is a desire to be good (to approve of oneself), and hence is narcissistic.18 Hence Derrida seems to assume a psychological egoism according to which all voluntary or intentional action is selfinterested. On Caputos reading, Derrida thinks:
...it is impossible, in the straightforward sense of the simple modal opposite of the possible, to do without subjects of knowledge and action who retain a certain measure of self-interest, who know what they are doing and do what they

know.19

This is because the very idea of the subject [is] that the subject never gives without expecting a return. 20 Thus pure, disinterested love (benevolence or altruism, the giving of a gift which seeks no return) turns out to be impossible for Derrida. From a theological point of view, Derridas deconstruction of the gift is troubling for several reasons. First, if pure altruistic benevolence is impossible, then one might be tempted to think agape lovethe highest ideal of Christian ethicis also impossible. This is the point John Milbank takes up, offering a convincing defense of Christianity by showing that agape is not distinct from eros and Christian love is not the same as pure benevolence.21 But there may be is another, perhaps worse problem for Christianity if Derrida is right. If the gift is impossible, then grace is impossible: God cannot give gifts. Or if we except God from the impossibility of giving (perhaps because God is not a subject in Derridas terms), then we still run into the problem that we could not receive Gods gift as a gift. Milbank worried enough about Derrida to ask Can a gift be given? but we must also ask Can a gift be received? If the mere recognition of the gift serves to return the gift, then can Christians actually receive Gods grace? Does our gratitude in terms of worship and good works mean that we have in fact entered into an economic relationship with God and have thereby, in effect, attempted to earn our salvation?

Beyond Subjectivity
Derrida has shown that the impossibility of receiving a gift is entailed by the nature of subjectivity. Derridas fellow French phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion also accepts the view of the subject as essentially desiring, 22 but Marion thinks, beyond Derrida, that we can step outside our subjectivity. According to Marion, Derridas argument only establishes the conditions under which the gift becomes impossible. It in no way establishes that that which thus becomes impossible merits the name of gift. 23 In other words, the impossibility we just noticed does not concern the gift as such but rather its economical interpretation.24 Instead Marion calls for the renunciation of the economic horizon of exchange and a break with the metaphysical interpretation of the given as the effect of an efficient cause.25 The problem raised by Derrida only arises when the recipient and the giver [are] interpreted as conscious agents such that the gift must acquire the consistency of objectivity, and thus also the visibility and the permanence which make it accessible to all the potential partners of economic exchange.26 According to Marion, for a gift to be given we must reject our view of ourselves as self-sufficient subjects. For me to give you a gift, I must admit that I have some surplus, something given to me from outside myself (otherwise I have nothing to give). As Marion puts it,
Givability arises around the potential giver when he, in relationship, first of all, to himself alone, recognizes that the principle I owe no one anything may (and must) admit at least one exception. The gift begins and in fact ends as soon as the giver envisions that he owes something to someone, when he admits that he could be a debtor, and thus a recipient. 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.27

Likewise, for there to be a gift, you (the receiver) must take on my surplus and thereby also relinquish your selfsufficiency:
In effect, there is nothing easy about even deciding to receive. [I]t is necessary to have more than the desire to possess or the search for ones own interestit is necessary to renounce clearly the independence which permits oneself to be convinced that I owe no one anything.28

When the receiver does not renounce independence, he destroys the gift by treating it in terms of economic exchange (i.e., by paying for it, selling it, stealing it).29 Thus Marion agrees with Derridas claim that accepting the gift does imply the owing of something to someone.30 For when I have received a gift, I owe the gift to the giver (the giver is the origin of my gift). But this need not reduce the gift to economics as Derrida claims. My owing the giver only implies an economic debt to be repaid if I insist on self-sufficiency. In short, Marions critique is that Derrida defines the gift as something (pure, disinterested benevolence), which assumes that the giver must take up the position of self-sufficient subject, an atomic individual over against other atomic individuals. For Marion, however, (as indeed for Derrida) self-sufficiency is an illusion, because the self only exists in its givenness (i.e., the self is essentially dependent for its identity on what it has received from the other):
It is in recognizing its debt that consciousness becomes conscious of itself, because the debt itself precedes all consciousness and defines the self: the self, as such, the self of consciousness, receives itself right off as a gift (given)

without giver (giving).31

Therefore it is important to learn to be passive and to accept the presence of the other rather than to objectify everything into something I can control by actively conceptualizing it. This intellectual passivity is hard to accomplish, since the subject is essentially a constructor of experience. However since, as Derrida argues, a finite subjects possessing (taking, interpreting) the gift of being destroys it, we must cultivate the ability to receive the gift without trying to make it our own (to grasp it, to conceptualize it): A gift, and this one above all, does not require first that one explain it, but indeed that one receive it.32 So how can we move beyond the subjects incessant will toward objectification?

The Culture of Total Work

Derrida links the impossibility of the gift to the impossibility of the present moment (the presence of meaning). But German Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper points out that the reason we cannot be present is that we have followed Kant in making knowledge into worksomething we do rather than something we receive.33 Whereas classical philosophy made a distinction between ratio (the power of discursive thought, of searching and researching, abstracting, refining and concluding) and intellectus (a passive reception of a vision of being as a whole, the lightening-like insight, true contemplation, which comes to one like a gift), modern and postmodern philosophy only recognizes active, discursive reasoning.34 Pieper traces the motivation for this modern shift to an assumption that only what is achieved by effort is valuable: The fact that intellective vision did not cost anything is what made it so suspicious to modern philosophy.35 This suspicion of leisure shows up in Kants ethics where he views virtue as that which makes it possible for us to master our natural inclinations36 against classical ethics which held that virtue perfects us so that we can follow our natural inclination in the right way such that the mark of virtues are that they take place effortlessly because it is of their essence to arise from love.37 The passage continues:
And yet the overemphasis on effort and struggle has made an inroad even on our understanding of love. Why, for instance, in the opinion of the average Christian, is the love of ones enemies the highest form of love? Because here, the natural inclination is suppressed to a heroic degree. What makes this kind of love so great is precisely its unusual difficulty, its practical impossibility.38

If we are tempted, like Derrida, to locate the value of the gift in its impossibility, this is because we misunderstand not only the nature of knowledge but also the nature of value itself. Pieper goes on to give a kind of ethical version of Marions critique of Derrida. If knowing is human construction, then we are not getting in touch with transcendent reality: if knowing is work, exclusively work, then the one who knows, knows only the fruit of his own subjective activity, and nothing else. 39 And if we make knowing into work, we cut ourselves off from true knowledge which comes only through grace: we become characterized by absolute activity and the hard quality of not-being-able-to-receive; a stoniness of heart.40 In particular, we are not able to receive our natural inclinations, our own being as a gift. The one who can only approach the world as an active subject (i.e., as one who constructs experience), can no longer see that being, the world, is something other than him and is more than the mere field, the mere raw material, of human activity 41. This, in turn, means that we are unable to experience the world as a good gift, as something worthy of reverence, and ultimately, creation in the strict sense,42 and we are thus left with the nihilistic inability to affirm the world as good.43 Pieper concludes:
The innermost meaning of this over-emphasis on effort appears to be this: that man mistrusts everything that is without effort; that in good conscience he can own only what he himself has reached through painful effort; that he refuses to let himself be given anything.44

In other words we live in what Pieper calls a culture of total work,45 a culture in which everything is located in terms of a totalizing economics in which anything valuable must be practical and useful and legitimated as social service, as contribution to the common utility.46 All value is thereby drawn into the social system and its distribution of labor.47 This culture of total work has made us incapable of receiving gifts. We no longer know how to be still and know. We no longer know how to receive Gods grace, the good gift of being. We think of our social action as a duty we have to God in return for his salvation. But this transforms our salvation into a contract a salvation by works. Instead we need to accept salvation as a free gift. This entails seeing our social work as a

natural response of a regenerate beingour own most natural and happiest way of being. In other words, we need a virtue ethics, not a deontology. Our good works are to be a response of thanksgivingnot out of a debt, but out of an excess of being. We must pay it forward, not back.

Forgiving the Debt of Gratitude

Caputo sets up the aporia of the gift as a dilemma between egoism and deontology:
if it is an obligation, it is not a gift; if it is not an obligation, it is a personal fancy that gives me pleasure. Either way a gift does not happen. In short again, how can I keep the I, which is always a principle of calculation and self-interest, out of the picture?48

If the only two possible motives for gift giving are obligation or self-interest, then there can be no true gift. Caputos reading of Derridas solution is somewhat cryptic: a gift happens when I give not what I have but what I do not have.49 Thus Caputo takes the widows miteoffering50 to be a thoroughly Derridean story, a paradigmatic example of Derridas gift, because it explains that the madness of the gift is outside the economic equilibrium of duty, beyond duty.51 The point here is clear enough: we need an ethics that goes beyond obligation. As we have seen, Derrida seems to assume a psychological egoism according to which all voluntary or intentional action is self-interested. His point seems to be that any voluntary actionany action the agent wants to dois a selfish action. In this Derrida follows the liberal tradition founded by Hobbes. 52 But Instead, what if, instead, we reject the ontology of will in favor of an ontology of gift? What if a person essentially is a locus of giving-and-receiving and not a self-sufficient atomic individual? This paradigm shift might allow us to ground ethics in beauty and virtue rather than duty and obligation. Beyond Caputo, I would suggest that we need to insist on John Milbanks distinction between the ontology of violence (in which all relations are ultimately forms of power) and the ontology of peace (in which there is an original harmony). 53 If peace is the fundamental reality, then we need not accept that moral principles are assertions of power (as both Derrida and a divine command theorist would argue, albeit for different reasons). Nor do we need to accept that gifts have an inescapable economy (as both Derrida and Milbank argue, albeit for different reasons). Even Milbank agrees that there is an economy of gift giving, though he wants to read that economy as consisting in community and relationship and not in power. In other words, Milbank replaces the (post)modernmodern and postmodern view of economy as violent power struggle with a Christian view of economy as peaceful harmony. But even if the word economy is not irredeemably contaminated by modern capitalism, it seems unlikely that Milbank will be able to accomplish his goal without giving up obligation. Milbank wants reciprocity without coercion, but we can only get this through appeal to beauty and virtue rather than duty and obligation.54 An obligation is something one must do in order to avoid some sanction. How one cashes out the relevant sanction determines ones theory of obligation: punishment by the sovereign (divine command theory), loss of social status (social contract theory), loss of rationality (both Kantianism and utilitarianism), etc. Not only are these sanctions negative, they are also hypothetical imperatives: why should I care about being rational?55 For a fully virtuous person, however, sanction does not enter into the picture. I dont need a reason to be good. I want to be good. I see being good as beautiful (attractive). To need a further reason in terms of sanction is to be out of touch with truth, beauty, and goodnessto misunderstand the good (truth), to misapprehend reality (beauty), and to be less than virtuous (goodness). In Piepers terms, virtue is not work; it does not require something external (a sanction) to restrain my natural inclinations. In other words moral shoulds are not obligations as normally understood in modern moral philosophy. To say everyone should love their neighbor is analogous to saying everyone should see the Louvre before they die. You should see the Louvre, because it is good to see itit contains beautiful artnot because you have an obligation to see it backed up by sanctions for not seeing it. Experiencing beauty is its own reward, and missing the chance to experience it is its own punishment. Derrida is right that the obligation to give and the obligation of return (even in terms of gratitude) deconstructs the gift. But obligations are not naturalthey are socially constructed through the choice to take some external force as a sanction. Hence if we can renounce them and construct our social reality differently then the circle of return is broken and the gift is allowed to happen. What if we give gifts out of love instead of obligation?

The Gift as Communion

Theorists typically affirm one of two models of the gift: one model sees gifts along the lines of a favor, the other

model along the lines of a sacrifice. Both see gifts as gratuitous, but only the favor creates a bond of return. If I do a favor for you, then I am doing something I am not strictly obligated to do; it is a gift. But, at the same time, we both expect that some day you will return the favor. Sociologist and anthropologist Marcel Mauss calls these sorts of gifts obligatory-voluntary gift-exchanges.56 To understand the function of returning a counter-gift, it is helpful to consider the practice of giving favors to those who attend ones wedding or birthday party (who themselves are obligated to bring a gift). After the cost of the party and the favors, the celebrant is often left no richer than they were, as Mauss says.57 Here we have a whole category of obligatory gifts and counter-gifts for birthdays, weddings, baby showers, Christmas gift-exchanges etc. The logical extreme of the counter-gift is where two people give each other gift-cards or cash for equivalent amounts. Neither party ends up with any objector even purchasing powerthey didnt already have. So the economic function can only be understood in terms of social bond. Mauss accounts for the bond as a kind of social contract: To refuse to give, or to fail to invite, islike refusing to accept the equivalent of a declaration of war; it is a refusal of friendship and intercourse.58 Yet conceiving of the gift as a favor can seem contradictory. As Derrida notes, if the gift must be returned, then it is not really a gift. A gift must be free. At the other end of the spectrum, therefore, is the model of gift-as-sacrifice. Returning the sacrifice is, in effect, to reject the sacrifice by implying that it can be balanced by another sacrifice and is, therefore, not really a sacrifice at all. A true sacrifice gives up something whose value cannot be compared to other values. In other words, a true sacrifice can never be returned. One problem with this account of giving, however, is that it does not allow for a genuine relationship between giver and receiver. Mausss work explains how the favor leads to a social bond, but community seems to drop out of the account when we conceptualize the gift as sacrifice. Further, Milbank offers another reason to resist the model of gift-as-sacrifice: in Christianity agape/gift, not sin/brokenness is supposed to be the fundamental reality. God is agape, so agape is prior to any sin and brokenness. In a perfect world like Eden or the Eschaton, agape would still exist but would not involve any need for personal sacrifice of ones own good for the good of another. So any theory of the gift needs to make sense of gifts in Eden and Heaven. Is there a third kind of gift? I propose that we think of gift as communion where what is given is the gift of being-with-the-other. This conception can avoid the problem that Derrida raises about the obligation of return without completely rejecting reciprocity as does the sacrifice model. Here we should qualify our previous Pieperinspired statements about the passivity of gift-receiving. The gift creates communion because the gift is always accompanied by a simultaneous counter-gift: giving is always reciprocal giving. 59 But this reciprocity is still passive in that the counter-gift is only the gift of letting the other give you a gift.60 When someone gives us a gift, we are apt to respond, How can I ever repay you? The giver ought to reply, You dont need to repay me. Its a gift! Why do we want to repay gifts? Often gratitude, far from being a simple expression of thanks, can be an expression of our will to self-sufficiency. We want to be our own gods, but, as Marion showed, gifts force us to recognize the personhood of the other and thus to enter into a communitynot because the gift is a favor that creates a bond reciprocity (a debt of gratitude), but because the gift is a communion that requires a recognition of the other as a distinct person both capable of giving to me and receiving from me. This is why giving can turn into a competition; as in Mauss.61 I can use my gift to dominate you and force you to recognize me. Hence Jesus commands us to give in secreta nonviolent ethic of the gift. 62 Genuine thankfulness actually excludes repayment since thanksgiving is the feeling of humility that accompanies the awareness that repayment is impossible whereas repayment is the desire to return the gift and therefore re-establish selfsufficiency.63 Moreover, once I have renounced my own independence (a pre-requisite for receiving a gift), I am able then to give the surplus I have received to others. I am able to pay it forward. I am able, in Derridas terms, to start the movement of a circle. You give to me, and then I give to a third person, and so on, until we are all bound together in a circle of interdependence and communion.

Participation in the Trinitarian Community

Derrida would not be satisfied with our solution to the problem of the gift. From Derridas point of view, our insistence on rejection of self-sufficiency has not allowed us to escape economy. We may have, as Milbank claims to have done, purified gift exchange, but the exchange remains. Can we say more? On Milbanks Christian Platonist view we exist only insofar as we participate in God. D. Stephen Long and Tripp York, explain Milbanks model this way:
God gives to us what God isthe goodness of being. We are to participate in that goodness and this is the purpose for our being. We are called to reciprocate the gift of being by participating in its goodness. But this is always a nonidentical reciprocation. We cannot create being ex nihilo; we participate in it by reciprocating Gods good gifts with God

and each other.64

This participation in God is most fully effected in the communion of Eucharist:

In consuming the flesh and blood of Christ we participate in the ultimate giving away: the giving away of Christs body. In this act we become Christs body, which, once it is in us, cannot be contained but must be shared. For it is not conformed to us, but we are conformed to it.65

In Marions terms, we can see that what happens in communion is that we pass beyond subjectivity. Our relationship to one another and to God becomes a relation between of atomic individuals but the interrelation of an organic wholethe body of Christ.66 We may wish to maintain Gods self-sufficiency (though it is a self-sufficiency that does not prevent God from including us in God through Christ), but even so we must renounce our own selfsufficiency. Since we each only exist in God, we each only exist in each other. Moreover, since our reception of Gods gift of Being requires us to actively affirm it in a transformative love, our recognition of our own giftedness can move us to actively share our gifts with others. Having renounced our self-sufficiency and accepted our communion with others in God, we are inevitably moved to express our own being in the beauty of good works. Thus communion makes the impossible gift possible. Derrida argues (as Milbank puts it) that for there to be a pure free gift, there would have to be no donating subject, no receiving subject, and no gift-object transferred. A true gift would be from no-one, to no-one and of nothing.67 But even if this is true, couldnt God still give a pure gift of Godself to Godself? And isnt this what happens in the Eucharist? An approach like this is taken by Gerard Loughlin who builds a response to Derrida out of a synthesis of Aquinas, Marion, and Milbank. Loughlin notes that Aquinas holds that Gods gift is inalienable: Gods giving never leaves Gods hands, in which are held all things as beinggiven.68 Because Gods gift of Christ holds all things together in God, then God is inseparable from the gift:
In this giving of Christ we are given to one another also, insofar as we are incorporated into the body of Christ, written into his story, called on to the stage to perform his drama. Gift and given, Christ and the donees who receive him, are one. To receive the gift of God is to be incorporated into the triune life, into the eternity of donation, of giving and receiving back again. Indeed, the unity of the body of Christ is the unity of giver, gift and givenof teller, story and listener; of playwright, play and player; of host, meal and guestand the unity of the Body is the presence given in the present of the Eucharist.69

Thus the gift is possible despite Derridas conditions.

All the terms of the giftdonor, donation and doneeare collaposedcollapsed into the one event that is finally the Body of Christ. God gives only himself. When God gives, nothing passes from God to someone else; rather God draws near. Nor is God given to someone else, for the someone else is the being of the gift.70

I would add that the someone else is God himself (the Church as Body of Christ): God (the Father) gives Godself (the Son) to Godself (the Spirit as embodied in the Church). We must affirm the words of the Psalmists rejection of self-sufficiency: all things come from you O God and from your own we have given you. 71 I must recognize that I cant give anything myself because all I have is Gods and only God can give through me. (Even our innate talents are on loan from God for our stewardship.) Likewise all the other has is Gods, too. Neither of us is self-sufficient. God must give Godself to Godself, because only God has anything to give. We give on behalf of God to God in others: What you have given to the least of these you have given to me.72 All we can do is accept this gift of God and rest in Gods grace. The rest is silence.

Notes

1 2 3

Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (London: Routledge, 1990) John Milbank, Can a Gift be Given? Prolegomena to a Future Trinitarian Metaphysic, Modern Theology, 11 (1995): 119-61

Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002) 4 Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996)
5 6 7 8 9

Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, (New York: Random House, 1983) Jacques Derrida, Given Time 1: Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 11 Derrida, Given Time, 24. Ibid., 14. Ibid. Ibid., 13. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 158. Ibid., Given Time, 22-3.

10 11 12 13

Ibid., 23. Cf. 13: The symbolic opens and constitutes the order of exchange and of debt, the law or the order of circulation in which the gift gets annulled. 14 Ibid., 28. Thats why both Being and time have the same structure as the gift (27): they are both beyond our experience and the conditions for our experience of all beings. 15 John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock also read Derrida as a voluntarist. See Truth in Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2001), 91.
16

See John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 172. 17 This is not even to mention the fact that in erotic love I want to be the one who benefits the other (i.e., I myself want to give my beloved a gift), such that, on Derridas view, erotic love would be essentially narcissistic. Compare Robert Adams on agape as the desire that a gift be given whereas eros is the desire that I give the gift. See Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 141. 18 Derrida, Given Time, 23
19 20 21

Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 171. Ibid., 169. Cf. 172.

See Milbank, Can a Gift be Given?. Robert Adams gives a similar analysis of the proper relation between agape and eros, but without reference to Derrida. See reference above. 22 Marion argues that we desire to know, which he interprets as a desire to construct a Husserlian intentional representation. This desire is the gaze which attempts to find objects to fill it. Only the invisible God is big enough to fill the gaze, so all visible things are transpiereced by the gaze, which points beyond them. Idols are human constructions fabricated to fill the gaze and stop it from passing beyond. See God Without Being: Hors Texte, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991), 10-11. 23 Jean-Luc Marion, Sketch of a Phenomenological Concept of the Gift in Postmodern Philosophy and Christian Thought, ed. Merold Westphal (Indiana University Press, 1999), 129. 24 Ibid., 130
25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 133. Ibid., 135. Ibid., 134. Ibid., 136. Ibid., 141.

Marion, God Without Being, 162. Cf. Richard Kearney, ed. On the Gift: A Discussion between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion in God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, ed. John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 70-1. 33 According to Pieper modern philosophy rejected the medieval concept of intellectual vision: To Kant, for instance, the human act of knowing is exclusively discursive, which means not merely looking. In Kants view, then, human knowing consists essentially in the act of investigating, articulating, joining, comparing, distinguishing, abstracting, deducing, proving all of which are so many types and methods of active mental effort. According to Kant, knowing (intellectual knowing, that is, by the human being) is activity, and nothing but activity. See Josef Pieper, Leisure, the Basis of Culture, trans. Gerald Malsbary (South Bend: St. Augustines Press, 1998), 10. In fact, Pieper points to some passages where Kant explicitly argues that knowledge should be understood as a form of work (Ibid.). 34 So, for modern philosophers, knowing is active construction and hence a kind of work, whereas ancient, medieval, and Romantic philosophy that there was an element of purely receptive looking, not only in sense perception but also in intellectual knowing (Ibid., 11). For the ancients, the highest form of knowledge was the lightening-like insight, true contemplation, which comes to one like a

gift; it is effortless and not burdensome (18, emphasis added). What has been lost is the distinction between intellectus, the ability of simply looking (simplex intuitus), to which the truth presents itself as a landscape presents itself to the eye, and ratio, the power of discursive thought, of searching and re-searching, abstracting, refining and concluding (11). By eliminating intellectus and thereby reducing all knowledge to discursive activity, modern philosophy has eliminated contemplation of being as a whole (13). 35 Ibid., 15.
36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Ibid., 12. Ibid., 18. Ibid. Ibid., 14. Ibid. Ibid., 77. Ibid., 78.

This is the theme of Piepers later work, In Tune With the World: A Theory of Festivity, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (South Bend: St. Augustines Press, 1999). This beatific vision is not an isolated act, but is a mode of being: The achievement of contemplation, since it is the seeing, the intuition of the beloved object, presupposes a specific nonintellectual, direct, and existential relation to reality, an existential concord of man with the world and with himself, a comprehensive affirmation or love of being (21), which, as the title suggests, brings us in tune with the world. Festivity is an absolutely universal affirmation extending to the world as a whole, to the reality of things and to the existence of man himself. [T]he conviction that at bottom everything that is, is good, and it is good to exist (26). 44 Pieper, Leisure, 19.
45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

Ibid., 4; cf. 8. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 21. Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 176. Ibid. Mark 12:41-44 Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 177; he cites Derrida, Given Time, 156.

For no man giveth, but with intention of Good to himselfe; because Gift is Voluntary; and of all Voluntary Acts, the Object is to every man his own Good. See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 105. Cf. gifts as obligating and gratitude as retribution (71); gifts are distinguished from contracts in being one-sided, but they are still always done in the hope of return (94). 53 This distinction is made in Ontological Violence and the Postmodern Problematic, Chapter 10 of Milbanks Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). See especially 279. Cf. Jamie Smiths excellent discussion of this distinction in his Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Toward a Post-Secular Worldview (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004), 195-7. Smith explains that, on Milbanks view, the Christian doctrine of the Trinity enables a peaceful account of difference as harmoniously related, a view that is also affirmed in the doctrine of creation, where an order of multiplicity and difference is pronounced good (Gen. 1:31). Violence and oppositional relations are not inscribed into the structure of creation but rather befell creation with the fall (196). 54 I suspect Eric Severson is right that this new non-coercive re-gifting might need to be given a name other than reciprocity.
55

A Kantian might reply that to ask Why should I care about being rational? implies you do care about being rational. But the appeal to reasons, because instrumental (if instrumental is the right word here), does at least allow the question to arise for a Kantian in a way that the appeal to beauty, because noninstrumental, does not. Beauty is an end in itself not an explanation for why other ends are valuable. It doesnt make sense to ask Why should I care about beauty?, because the concept of beauty includes care: beauty just is that which we care about experiencing. 56 Mauss, The Gift, 13.
57 58 59

He is referring to the parents in Samoan birth ceremonies (Ibid., 6). Ibid., 11.

Milbank suggests something like this in his discussion of the necessary reception of Christ by Israel in the person of Mary (Milbank, Can a Gift, 136). 60 We have already considered Marion on the necessity of renouncing self-sufficiency. Compare the difficulty of letting others wash your feet (Peter and Jesus). This is an example of the general bourgeois difficulty of accepting service (I dont want to be any trouble.). 61 See his description of potlatch, a system whereby social status is determined through an agonistic contest in which tribal chiefs symbolically battle one another by giving more and more extravagant gifts (Mauss, The Gift, 4-5 and 32-3). 62 Matthew 6:1-4
63 64

Pace Derrida who sees the feeling of thankfulness itself as a symbolic return of the gift. D. Stephen Long and Tripp York, Remembering: Offering our Gifts in The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, ed. Stanley

Hauerwas and Samuel Wells (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 340 65 Ibid., 343.
66 67 68

1 Corinthians 12:12. Milbank, Can a Gift, 130.

Nicholas Lash, Believing Three Ways in One God (London: SCM Press, 1992), 105, quoted in Gerard Loughlin. Telling Gods Story: Bible, Church and Narrative Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 242. 69 Loughlin, Telling Gods Story, 242.
70 71 72

Ibid., 243. 1 Chronicles 29:14

Paraphrase of Matthew 25:40. Loughlin follows Milbank in reading this gift as involving an exchange: For what is given absolutely is an absolute return, for return to God is the being and beat of the human heart. We are made for God. And this is our possibility as free creatures who are always-already forgetting our giftedness because of Jesus Christ, who is the perfect return of Gods gift (Loughlin, Telling Gods Story, 243). But I would say instead that we only return to God in Christ who is, as Loughlin himself has argued, both the gift and the giver (God). So there is still no exchange. (Loughlin does say it becomes difficult to maintain the distinction between exchange and gift For what is given is the return or exchange, if exchange has meaning here, 244.)