Leithart
INTRODUCTION
Jean-Luc Marion is one of the major figures in contemporary French Philosophy, and particularly a leader in French phenomenology. As introduction to Marion’s work on gift and givenness, we’ll be looking at the key figures and ideas of phenomenology, the “theological turn” in French phenomenology, and other work of Marion, especially his early book God without Being.
HUSSERL AND PHENOMENOLOGY
Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) is universally regarded as the father of phenomenology. His work influenced Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre, as well as more recent philosophers like Gadamer and Derrida. According to the summary in Samuel Stumpf’s history of Western philosophy, Husserl saw his life work as an effort to “save human reason,” which was in a state of crisis in the modern west.
The crisis arose from a mistaken attitude toward the world that was encouraged by the rise of science. Though admiring the achievements of science, Husserl saw that science led to the prejudice that the spiritual, the realm of knowledge and value, could be reduced to physical realities. Husserl explained this crisis through a genealogy of Western philosophy. Greek philosophy had established a stance of universal reason from which all particular customs and ideas could be critiqued, a critique that would be part of an effort to raise humanity to a new status through universal reason. Philosophy in this mode was “universal science, science of the world as a whole, of the universal unity of all being.” When it was discovered that much of the perceived world could be explained mathematically, the unified science of philosophy began to split into separate philosophies, as mathematically-organized natural sciences gradually led natural science to repudiate the realm of the spirit. Even the spirit came to be seen as an objective thing that could be explained in chemical and physical terms, and humanity came to be seen in “a predominantly dualistic, i.e., psychophysical form.” For natural science, Husserl said, “there can be no pure self-contained search for an explanation of the spiritual, no purely inner-oriented psychology of theory of spirit beginning with the ego in psychical-self-experience and extending to the other psyche. The way that must be traveled is the external one, the path of physics and chemistry.” As Stumpf says, “It was his desire to develop a proper method for grasping the essential nature of the spirit, to overcome naturalistic objectivism, that led Husserl to formulate his transcendental phenomenology.”
Husserl looked to Descartes as the “genuine patriarch” of his approach. Yet, Husserl employed Descartes to eliminate all presuppositions or prejudices that would guide thought: “We thus begin,” he wrote, “everyone for himself and in himself with the decision to disregard all our present knowledge. We do not give up Descartes’ guiding goal of an absolute foundation for knowledge. At the beginning, however, to presuppose even the possibility of that goal would be prejudice.” The phenomenologist attends only to “things and facts themselves, as these are given in actual experience and intuition” and “to judge only by the evidence.” He wanted to analyze human experience in its pre-scientific mode, according to “immediate and mediate evidences.” Husserl followed Descartes in thinking of the ego as the source of knowledge, but instead of treating the ego as a logical starting point for an argument, as Descartes did, he started with the ego within life experience.
Husserl describes his method as one of “bracketing” (epoche), which is often called “a reduction.” He brackets the “reality” of phenomena (ie, whether they are existing things apart from consciousness), but also the possible “ideality” of phenomena (ie, the idealist notion that the phenomena are fundamentally ideas). By standing back from experience and eliminating presuppositions, he discovered “himself as the ego, the life of consciousness, in which and through which the objective world in its entirety exists. Unlike Descartes, who deduced the objective world from the residual certainty of the ego, Husserl found that the ego ‘contained’ the world” (Stumpf). As Husserl formulated in his “principle of principles,” “everything originarily . . . offered to us in ‘intuition’ is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there.” He thus aims at a pure phenomenological analysis of the “experiences of thinking and knowing,” where “pure” means “freedom from metaphysical, scientific and psychological presuppositions.”
This phenomenological reduction is followed by a second “eidetic” reduction, which strips phenomena to their essential features, purifying them of anything that is accidental. As Husserl’s thought developed, he also described a third “transcendental reduction” in which the phenomena are grounded in the transcendent ego, the “I” that serves as the “horizon” within which phenomena appear. Bruce Ellis Bensons says that for Husserl the ego “provides both the limits of what can be seen and how it is seen.”
Subsequent to and as a result of the epoche, Husserl finds himself led back to the conscious self at the center of his world. Thus, “the epoche . . . discloses the greatest and most magnificent of facts: I and my life remain – in my sense of reality – untouched by whichever way we decide the issue of whether the world is or not.” Through this method, “I have discovered my true self. I have discovered that I alone am the pure ego, with pure existence . . . Through this ego alone does the being of the world, and, for that matter, any being whatsoever, make sense to me and have possible validity.” Again, this method discloses that “The world of transcendent ‘res’ is entirely referred to consciousness and, more particularly, not to some logically conceived consciousness but to actual consciousness.” Everything, Bensons says, is “ultimately reducible to me.” And this, of course, makes it very difficult to see how Husserl can find room for any “other.” Husserl addresses this through a concept of analogy; Benson writes, “Since I know that behind my phenomenal body (one that, as a phenomenon, can be sensed by others) is a transcendental ego (which cannot be sensed by others), I can assume that behind the body of the other stands a transcendental ego.”
This apparatus was designed to further Husserl’s goal to save philosophy as the search for truth, absolute truth and certainty, and, like many modern philosophers, he turned toward the self, toward subjectivity, to establish this absolute objectivity and non-relative truth. As Robert Solomon puts it, “To avoid relativism it would be necessary to identify the essential foundations of experience within consciousness. To go outside of consciousness would be to invite skepticism once again, for any distinction between things ‘in themselves’ and the objects of experience introduces just that gap which makes skepticism possible.” Yet, to look at consciousness as it was ordinarily done was to retreat to psychologism, which ends in skepticism again. What is needed, Husserl argued, was “a new kind of description of experience which is valid regardless of whether or not the object is ‘real’ apart from our consciousness of it, and which does not vary no matter what the details of psychology might be.”
To reach this new description, Husserl wanted to start from a “phenomenologicalR
21; standpoint that he set in contrast to the “natural standpoint.” This was not an abandonment of the natural standpoint, but a way of justifying it and founding it. The reason for bypassing the natural standpoint is that the natural standpoint is full of philosophical absurdities – the notion that consciousness is a contained “in” which are the objects of consciousness, the notion that bodily objects “cause” mental events,” and above all the “uncritical acceptance of the notion that objects are simply ‘given’ to us.”
At the end of the process, the self and consciousness is not poor, but enriched, particularly because it is discovered that consciousness is intrinsically tied to objects, and cannot exist apart from objects. He criticized Descartes for the dualism of mind and external bodies, insisting that the object of thought and knowledge is contained in the experience of thought itself. That is, consciousness is always consciousness of something, and therefore the object of thought is constituted by the ego and not merely received by the ego. This is Husserl’s notion of “intentionality,” the process by which the ego constitutes objects out of the continuous stream of experience and consciousness. For instance, we have fragmentary impressions of another person, and never perceive the person “whole” (either physically or psychologically). Consciousness “intend” the person as a person. The ego thus constitutes the world through what Husserl described as a “passive genesis.” For phenomenology, therefore, the description of experience not only attends to object, but also to (in Stumpf’s words) “our actual perception of it, the object as we mean it, and the act of intentionality which constitutes the object for us.”
Husserl put it this way: “For me the world is nothing other than what I am aware of and what appears valid in such cogitationes (my acts of thought). The whole meaning and reality of the world rests exclusively on such cogitationes. My entire worldly life takes its course within these. I cannot live, experience, think, value, and act in any world which is not in some sense in me, and derives its meaning and truth from me.”
How does this address the threat of skepticism? Husserl argues that his method of discovering pure consciousness leads us to recognize that there are “objects of consciousness” or “intentional objects.” Whatever we know of the outside world is in fact only known through these intentional objects, and thus it is a “logical absurdity” to suggest that the “objects themselves are different from objects as we know them.”
Late in his career, Husserl gave attention to the full development of the concept of the Lebenswelt, the “life-world.” The reduction that followed the bracketing was a leading-back to actual lived experience, the daily world of experience, my own personal life-world. Stumpf describes the Lebenswelt as “all those experiences – the perception, response, interpretation, and synthesis or organization of the many facets of everyday affairs – in which human beings are typically involved.” This is a pre-scientific involvement in the world, an involvement that science cannot account for.
What does Marion derive from Husserl? Two things. First, Marion employs the phenomenological notion of a “reduction,” the effort to turn back from everything secondary in a phenomenon to the pure phenomenon itself. We shall see Marion employing a triple reduction with regard to the gift. Second, he draws from Husserl a basic principle regarding the “givenness” of reality. Husserl suggested that “in its basis, every phenomenon surges forth as a gift, and therefore all phenomenality comes to pass as a donation.” Though Husserl did not develop this insight at any length, Marion uses it as an opening to introduce givenness, and hence an idea of revelation, into phenomenology. Derrida, Dominique Janicaud, and others have objected that Marion has distorted the significance of “givenness” beyond anything that Husserl intended, and that he is no longer doing phenomenology.
HEIDEGGER AND ONTO-THEOLOGY
Marion is also drawing on elements of Heidegger’s thought, and particularly on his critique of onto-theology. According to Merold Westphal’s summary of Heidegger, onto-theology gives “essential primacy” to the “cognitive dimension” of religion, and thus is a danger to faith in three directions: in seeking conceptual mastery, it attempts to liberate thought from pre-theoretical practices; when mathematical physics becomes the queen of sciences, and technical attitudes get transferred to theology; theology is cut off from “mode of appropriation, singing and dancing, for example, that constitute living faith.”
Fundamentally, onto-theology is the capture of theology and faith by philosophy: “Theology becomes onto-theology when Jerusalem sells its soul to Athens by buying in on the latter’s project. Within Christian history, the critique of onto-theology belongs to a tradition of dehellenizing repristination. Heidegger explicitly links his critique with Luther, and thus, by implication, with a tradition that looks back to Augustine and ahead to Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Barth. He seems to confirm Jerusalem’s declaration of independence from Athens whe he writes, ‘On the grounds of its specific positive character and the form of knowing which this determines, we can now say that theology is a fully autonomous ontic science.’” Yet, for Heidegger, Christian theology is still determined by pre-Christian “ontological” determinants. Christian doctrines of sin, for instance, must be understood in terms of universal conceptions of guilt. Heidegger calls this contribution of philosophy to theology both “guidance” and “correction.”
Marion accepts Heidegger’s claims that theology must not be captive to philosophy, but is also dissatisfied with the notion that philosophy should come alongside to “correct” theology. When Heidegger is guide, “every theology remains subject to the question of Being,” which is not a question of theology. Heidegger grants theology “ontic independence, which implies an irreducible ontological dependence . . . . it seems that the question of ‘God’ never suffered as radical a reduction to the first question of Being as in the phenomenological enterprise of Heidegger.”
Marion finds help for theology in Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God, which he understands as the welcome death of the god of the philosophers. This god is an idol, “a determination of God that formulates him in a precise concept.” Heidegger’s assault on onto-theology too provides a backdrop for Marion, but Marion believes that Heidegger escapes one idolatry for another: “Beyond the idolatry proper to metaphysics, there functions another idolatry, proper to the thought of Being as such.” Because Heidegger subordinates God to Being, for him “any access to something like ‘God’ . . . will have to determine him in advance as a being.” Marion wants to formulate a theology that does not bind God either to the ontic realm, nor limit Him by some prior thought of Being as such. These two sorts of idolatry, Benson argues, are not all that different, because “it is difficult to see how, once we place God under the category of Being, God does not become ‘a’ being.” Marion thus aspires to “think God outside of metaphysics” and “to think God without any conditions.” When he says that we must think “God without being,” Marion is not introducing a refined sort of
atheism: “God is, exists, and that is the least of things.” But since God is not to be confined by any prior framework or system of metaphysics or ontology, He exists in a very different way than creatures exist. When he says that God is beyond the realm of human thought, he does not mean that we cannot speak or think of God, but that we must think and speak of him “otherwise” than we think and speak of everything else.
Marion traces the rise of onto-theology to Thomas, arguing that Thomas privileges ens as a description of God because of his convictions about the primacy of ens in human perception: “if theology proceeds by the apprehension of concepts, as a ‘science,’ then for it also, the ens will be the first, and man’s point of view normative . . . . If theology wills itself to be THEOlogical, it will submit all its concepts, without exception the ens, to a ‘destruction’ by the doctrine of the divine names, at the risk of having to renounce any status as a conceptual ‘science,’ in order, decidedly nonobjectivating, to praise by infinite petitions.” This “destruction” is what Thomas refuses to do, detaching his discussion of ens from the discussion of divine names, leading Thomas to the position that “ens, although defined starting from a human conception, should be valid as the first name of Gxd. This claim does not easily escape the suspicion of idolatry.” Thus, “it is only with Saint Thomas that the Gxd revealed in Jesus Christ under the name of charity finds himself summoned to enter the role of the divine of metaphysics, in assuming ens as his proper name.”
GOD WITHOUT BEING
Marion is in his most Heideggerian mode in his early work, God Without Being, a more overtly theological work than his later work on gift and givenness. A brief summary of God Without Being will be helpful background for the later work. (I am following the summary of Bruce Ellis Benson.)
Marion is concerned with the distinction between an “idol” and an “icon.” An idol is created to satisfy our “gaze,” and idols are ultimately mirrors, various forms of self-idolatry and self-deception. By contrast, an icon is not limited to what is visible on the surface, but “summons sight in letting the visible . . . be saturated little by little with the invisible.” Christ Himself is the “norm” of the icon. Like Christ, the icon is neither a sign of an absent reality nor a wholly present reality that can be mastered by the gaze. Instead, the icon is a trace of presence.
Westphal characterizes the difference between the icon and the idol as dependent on the intentional gaze directed at it: “a given visible can function as either idol or icon depending on the nature of the intentional act directed toward it.” It becomes an idol when the gaze “is satisfied or fulfilled with what it sees, when it stops, freezes, settles, or comes to rest at its visible object.” The idolatrous gaze “admits no beyond” and “allows no invisible” (these last phrases are Marion’s own). This makes the human gaze “the measure of the divine being,” and ultimately the idol is the gazing idolater himself. Viewing a visible as an icon, however, means refusing to stop and rest, refusing to be satisfied or fulfilled with the visible. Iconic gazing seeks to “transpierce visible things.” And this leads, in a Levinasian fashion, to a subversion of the gaze: “the gaze of the invisible, in person, aims at man . . . the icon opens in a face that gazes at our gazes,” so that “the human gaze is engulfed . . . does not cease, envisaged by the icon, there to watch the tide of the invisible come in . . . . The icon offers an abyss that the eyes of men never finish probing.” The iconic gaze thus shattered the adequacy of our concepts. This does not entail an abandonment of conceptualizing: “the icon also can proceed conceptually, provided at least that the concept renounce comprehending the incomprehensible to attempt to conceive it, hence also to receive it, in its own excessiveness.”
For Marion, then, the icon becomes a main example of a larger category of phenomena, which he described as “saturated phenomena,” a phenomenon that contains more than what appears: “not everything is capable of being given perfectly,” and this means that there is something beyond the limits of what is offered to the intuition by phenomena. Confronted by a saturated phenomenon, we are unable to subdue it to our mastering gaze, but are instead overwhelmed by it; as Benson says, “consciousness is surprised, overwhelmed and drawn up short by its inadequacy.” Marion himself writes that “It is in fact a question of something visible that our gaze cannot bear; this visible something is experienced as unbearable to the gaze because it weighs too much upon the gaze . . . . What weighs here is not unhappiness, nor pain nor lack, but indeed glory, joy, excess.” The reality of saturated phenomena like icons implies a decentering of the transcendental ego, which can no longer be considered the source of meaning. This disrupts a central phenomenological conclusion, and opens up the possibility of theology that is not mastered by philosophy.
Marion offers what Benson calls “strategies” for thinking and speaking of God without idolatry. First, he “crosses out” the linguistic sign “God” as a reminder that however God is present His presence is never complete: This usage “does not indicate that Gxd would have to disappear as a concept, or intervene only in the capacity of a hypothesis in the process of validation, but that the unthinkable enters into the field of thought only by rendering itself unthinkable there by excess, that is, by criticizing our thought . . . . We cross out the name of Gxd only in order to show ourselves that his unthinkableness saturates our thought – right from the beginning, and forever.” Crossing out the name of God reminds us that we do not possess God; He gives Himself freely to us – we don’t grasp Him – and what He offers is “the only accessible trace of He who gives.”
Second, Marion focuses on agape as the name and character of God. While metaphysics is offended by a lack of limits, by the inability of a concept to encompass the reality, “love does not suffer from the unthinkable or from the absence of conditions, but is reinforced by them.” That is, “love loves without condition, simply because it loves.” Or, love “is not spoken, in the end, it is made. Only then can discourse be reborn, but as an enjoyment, a jubilation, a praise.” Love is not connected to understanding, but to faith; only bad lovers want to understand love before they love. And God gives Himself as a gift for “no reason at all,” and thus cannot possibly be limited and conditioned by metaphysics. If God is gift and love, then we ought to renounce every effort to domesticate Him into our theories. Benson: “In place of knowing, there is trusting and faith. In place of possessing, there is the gift, God and his love are given to us, but not in a way that would make either one ours, not in the sense that they become our personal property.”
Third, Marion illustrates the difference between the economy of possession and the model of gift/love by a reading of the prodigal son. The prodigal begins the story requesting possession, his “ousia,” which Marion takes, philosophically, as “being”: “He asks that one grant that he no longer have to receive any gift – precisely, no longer have to receive the ousia as gift: He asks to possess it, dispose of it, enjoy it without passing through the gift and the reception of the gift. The so
n wants to owe nothing to the father, and above all not to owe him a gift; he asks to have a father no longer – the ousia without the father or gift.” Such an ousia as possession does not last; it yields immediately to dispossession, as the son wastes all in riotous living, as it becomes “liquid” and slips through his fingers. In the process of losing the ousia, the possessed being, the son also loses filiation as well – “I am no longer worthy to be called your son.” Yet, in the end, the father returns him his filiation. And this is because the father’s gaze is iconic rather than idolatrous; for the father, nothing is possession without gift, and the game that allows a non-possessive Being or being is gift.
In this way, Marion moves to a “God without being,” a God who is gift. Being/beings does not determine the gift, but the opposite. The distance of giver and gift is a distance that unified even as it separates: “This other model of the gift, since it unifies only to the extent that it distinguishes, can, precisely, distort Being/being . . . being remains in its appropriation to Being . . . but distance includes it in another apparatus, in another circulation, in another giving.” In short, Gxd does not need to be; “Gxd gives” is a sufficient confession.
Finally, Marion wants to affirm that his strongly apophatic theology retains a way of speaking of God, but insists that speaking of God is not “predication” but “praise.” This involves a particular view of Scripture: “The text results, in our words that consign it, from the primordial event of the Word among us; the simple comprehension of the text – the function of the theologian – requires infinitely more than its reading, as informed as one would like; it requires access to the Word through the text. To read the text from the point of view of its writing: from the point of view of the Word.” To be truly theological, theology must break from the logos and stress the theos. Theology is ultimately “done rather than spoken or theorized” (Benson), and Marion sees this access to Christ beyond the text preeminently in the Eucharist.
Eucharist is “the test of every theological systematization” because it eludes all systematization. It is the final bulwark against idolatry: “Explanation, even theological explanation, always seems to end up in a ‘eucharistic physics’ ( . . . it matters little if for physics one substitutes, e.g., semiotics), that is, by attempting to reabsorb the Eucharistic mystery of charity in a rational conceptual system. In the case of failure, such an effort appears either useless (if it limits itself, through theological concern, to recognizing a pure and simple ‘miracle’ in the succession of physical or linguistic events) or else insufficient (if it imputes its conceptual insufficiency to a mystery that it has not even approached, by an infracritical or terroristic subjectivism). But in the case of apparent success, the effort is open no less – and here the essential appears – to two other suspicions: does not one contradict oneself by seeking, in principle to reinforce credibility, to frame and then reabsorb the liturgical fact and the mystery of charity in a system, at the risk, here again, of attaining only a conceptual idol?” Eucharist is the model of gift, and as such “does not require first that one explain it, but indeed that one receive it.”
A few preliminary criticisms of Marion. First, Marion is weak on the doctrine of creation, and hence on the doctrine of revelation. If the creation is nothing but the words of God (“day to day uttereth speech”), then the apophatic gap he is trying to maintain doesn’t exist. Put another way, creation is pre-designed to reveal the character of the Creator. Of course, when we say “God is more glorious than mountains of prey,” that is not an exhaustive description of God; God is far more mountain-of-prey than any mountain of prey. But why is the language problematic in the first place? Second, though Marion denies possession of God, that is precisely what the NT promises: The mutual possession of marriage is only a dim image of the mutual possession of Christ and His church; the chiasm of love in the Song of Songs, “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.” This is truly beyond thought – far more beyond thought than Marion’s idea that we cannot possess Him. Finally, it is not clear why Marion wants to oppose knowledge to “faith” and “love.” That seems to presume already a narrowed conception of knowledge; Scripture can speak of love and faith both as a kind of knowing (and vice versa). Marion seems to be assuming a traditional opposition of faith and reason, doxa and episteme, that he elsewhere wants to escape.
MARION AND THE THEOLOGICAL TURN
We have been looking at Marion’s overtly theological views, but in addition to God Without Being, Marion has begun writing a series of books in which he argues that phenomenology itself opens into an idea of pure givenness, pure gift, which is itself open to theological interpretation. For this, he has been dismissed as a traitor to phenomenology. Whatever the outcome of that debate (and who cares? really), Marion’s arguments concerning the gift should be briefly recounted. (Risto Saarinen’s God and the Gift has been particularly useful in the following paragraphs.)
Phenomena appear only insofar as they give themselves: “in order to appear, a phenomenon must be able to give itself.” Within this overall framework of “the given,” Marion has particularly explored the nature of the gift. Accepting Derrida’s claims that gift exchange is impure and “economic,” Marion proposes, in place of Derrida’s annihilation of the gift, a reduction of the gift to pure givenness. This can be done through the phenomenological method of “bracketing” the various features of the gift situation: the giver, the gift itself, and the recipient. He speculates on the possibilities of gifts without givers, without recipients, with an object given: “you can describe a gift without a receiver, as in giving to an enemy or in giving anonymously to a humanitarian association. It is also possible to describe a gift without a giver, as in the case of inheritance. There is even the possibility of gift without any giver, as in the case of Robinson Crusoe who finds a tool on the sand. The tool might not be given at al, but is just luckily lying there. And a gift can be something wholly immaterial, like giving time or giving power. For Marion, these descriptions are symptomatic of the primordial givenness of the world” (Saarinen’s summary).
Marion finds (in Saarinen’s words) that “in giving, it is the ‘givability,’ the self-decision and openness of the giver, which is fundamental. ‘The gifts which give the most give literally nothing,’ since in these it is the giver’s self-decision that counts in the final analysis. In my giving this ring to you it is not the ring that finally counts but my self-decision, of which the ring is a symbol. When a ruler gives up power, he is literally giving no object, but the ruler is nevertheless giving the most he can give.” Similarly, reception is not merely the possession of a given object, but the recipients intention to receive openly. Gifts to enemies are, as it were, gifts without recipients, since the one who receives does not acknowledge the gift at all. The gift reduced and abstracted by the bracketing of giver, object, and recipient, is illustrated by the anonymous gift to an enemy.
In Marion’s own words: “If . . . the economy of the gift only makes economy of the gift, the gift only becomes itself by breaking away
from the economy, in order to let itself be thought through along the lines of givenness. Therefore, one must reconduct the gift away from economy and toward givenness. To reconduct is to reduce. How can we reduce the gift to givenness without falling either into tautology (Isn’t the gift equivalent to givenness?) or into contradiction (Doesn’t givenness necessarily imply some transcendence?). But if we must have reduction, it could only occur, even in the case of an eventual reduction to givenness, in the manner in which reduction always operates in phenomenology: by bracketing of all transcendence, whatever it might be. Reducing the gift to givenness thus signifies: thinking the gift as gift, making abstraction of the triple transcendence which affected it until now – by the bracketing of the transcendence of the giver, the transcendence of the recipient, and the transcendence of the objectivity of the object exchanged. If the epokke happens to exert itself upon the gift, it will exert itself in liberating the gift that the terms and status of object, all transcendent, of economic exchange. Thus, it will reconduct the gift to pure and simple givenness, if, at least, such a givenness may occur.” Thus, he intends to show that the “conditions of the impossibility of the gift” enumerated by Derrida are “precisely the conditions off the possibility of the gift’s reduction to pure givenness, by epokke of the transcendent conditions of economic exchange.”
Does a gift always involve a transfer of property? No: “first, because the transfer does not always take the shape of ceding a property item (it could e a loan or a lease, etc.), nor does it always assume some juridical status (it could involve a private agreement or a tacit accord, etc.); next, because such a regimentation would be sufficient to threaten the very status of the gift in leading it back, as we have already seen, to the status of exchange. Finally, the gift sometimes does not consist in any object at all: in the cases involving a promise, a reconciliation, a blessing (or a curse), a friendship, or a love (or a hatred), the gift is not identical to an object but emerges only at the moment of its occurrence; rather than being identical with the gift, the object becomes the simple occasional support for the gift.” In fact, “the more a gift provides an immense richness, the less it can make itself visible in an object, or the less that the object rendering it visible corresponds to the gift in fact.” Giving a crown is only a small symbol of a transfer of power. More, “to give oneself to another obviously does not coincide with the gift of some object; the only object which perhaps might prove this gift, because it makes it visible, is the ring worn on the finger: it indicates that another has given himself or herself to me by giving me this ring. But this ring does not attest to the gift made by another, because it is not costly enough either to pay for my own commitment (as if this golden ring is worth my life, my fidelity, my own gift) or to confirm materially what the other has given me in self-giving.” The object is “symbolic support” for the gift, not the gift itself, and without any parity between the gift and the symbol. As a rule of thumb, he suggests that “the more a gift reveals itself as precious, the less it fulfills itself as an object . . . the more the object reduces itself to the abstract role of support, decoration, symbol.”
What makes the gift is not the object, then; rather, an object becomes a givable by “the eventual giver’s glance upon it.” Thus, “The gift begins and in fact ends as soon as the giver envisions that he owes something to someone, what 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.”
CONCLUSION
Milbank’s work is directed at a more radically theological construal of the gift, and we’ll look at Milbank’s work next week.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In