Gifts at Christmas

It’s Christmas day.  A time for gifts.  I thought I knew what a gift was. It seems not.

According to Jacques Derrida in his book The Gift of Death, a gift must not be known as such. The receiver must not know that she has been given something; otherwise an economy of exchange will define the giving.

A gift cannot be given in expectation of reciprocation; such giving is not freely undertaken, it is a kind of transaction.

Also, a gift must not be conventional – that is an empty gesture.

Slavoj Žižek makes similar claims about the impossibility of the gift to be known as such.  In his book In Defence of Lost Causes he focuses on potlach (the pre-modern convention of official inter-tribal exchange typical of American Indian history)  as an example of giving that straddles the three inauthentic modes of gift giving I mentioned above and which, despite this, tries to pass itself off as an act of free generosity.

The giver is known, reciprocation is expected and it is a quintessentially conventional act. For all that everyone pretends that the actions are all freely undertaken; that the gifts are real.

This sounds a lot like Christmas! But with such a definition of a gift it is very hard to see how a gift could be given or received at all!

A gift therefore has to appear to be something else; otherwise it is not a gift. 

In The Gift of Death Derrida writes about ‘death’ as gift. What he means (what I think he means) is that Christianity introduced a way of dying that was a kind of double gift. On the one hand, the knowledge that one must die is a reminder of the irreducible difference, uniqueness, and mystery of human beings. On the other hand, the gift of this knowledge is complemented by a way of relating to those mysterious other human beings: the humbling and impossible challenge of God’s infinite love. 

This is for Derrida the challenge of responsibility or what amounts to the same thing, the challenge of love and freedom.

Reading this book reminds me once more of Laplace’s comment to Napoleon regarding the place of God in his hypothesis – “I have no requirement for that proposition”.

The thing is the concept of the gift is important to Derrida and Zizek as it defines one mode of human beings relating to one another that is the practice and model of freedom.  If history teaches us anything it is that so many people reject the challenges of love, freedom, responsibility as mapped out in this way.  This is not only or not just that if god is dead anything is permitted it is that none of these gifts is received or given necessarily. People can – and do – always have and will choose to take and give in ways that have nothing to do with the self-effacing logic of the gift.

People will “have no requirement” for anything other than the propositions of exchange, convention, the marketplace, or what is worse, those of violence, abuse, rape, war.

Perhaps an admission that there is no God would clarify the issue, clear the air, clear the battlefield? Just because there is no God does not mean that the ethics of the New Testament cannot be given and taken – gifted – and used to make the world a decent place in which to live.

Gifts are difficult. Try giving one. There is always a risk. A gift is an act of faith – the giver cannot be recognised as such and may even be misrecognised!  The receiver may despise the gift and the giver.

According to Derrida and Žižek this is the necessary fate of the true gift – it must not be recognised as such – and what better form of not recognising is there than misrecognition?

Think of Jesus’s gift: his message. How was he rewarded? Who would follow his example?

Think of any gift you’ve ever received and rejected in thought or deed.

I’m thinking of the bottle of wine I lazily and carelessly bought my sister on the way home one Christmas Eve. I’m thinking of the ‘Book of Naughty Jokes’ I got this year in the ‘Secret Santa’ at work. I’m thinking of a colander.

I’m also thinking of pomegranates. I’m thinking of the wonderful gifts to me of time and presence that were real sacrifices. 

It’s hard work giving.

It’s hard work receiving. This Christmas week I went to a funeral. That was not the place to mention the gift of death. But I saw the gift of love in the actions of the people there.

In his book, Fear and Trembling Soren Kierkegaard gave the example of Abraham’s faith in God as the ultimate act of faith.

Abraham was ready to kill his son on the basis of a voice from where? From what? A bush?  I cannot speak about the enormity of such a decision but I realise that I have received a gift of faith as well.

Unlike Abraham I know where the voice is coming from. I know where this nightmarish gift is coming from.

This Christmas when I look for evidence of love, of responsibility, of freedom in the world and evidence for the absolute superiority of their challenges (as opposed to those of deceit, violence, greed, selfishness etc) I think of my friend carrying his dead daughter and caring for what remained of his family.  This is all I have to go on. Faith that his impossible response to the horrific, unwanted gift of death is the best possible way of living.