Читать книгу Radical Hospitality - Richard Kearney - Страница 11

First, a word on phenomenological debates on the gift conducted between Jacques Derrida (The Gift of Death and Given Time), Jean-Luc Marion (Being Given), John Caputo (God, The Gift and Postmodernism), and Marcel Hénaff (The Philosophers’ Gift: Reexamining Reciprocity). Departing from the classic anthropologies of gift-giving, promoted by Bronislaw Malinowski and Marcel Mauss (The Gift) in the early twentieth century,⁶ these contemporary thinkers of the gift point in a new direction: away from socioeconomic ceremonies of reciprocity and toward a gesture of rupture and disinterestedness.

To this effect, Derrida proposes the gift as an impossible gesture without giver or addressee, a suspension of all economies of exchange in favor of absolute and unconditional gratuity. “For there to be a gift, there must be no reciprocity” (Given Time).⁷ Derrida approaches the subject of gift and givenness through multiple tropes, quotes, and anecdotes without ever actually articulating a coherent conceptual conclusion. (He would doubtless claim this befits the aporetic nature of the gift.) Caputo develops the deconstruction of the gift, with welcome clarity, in the direction of a “radical hermeneutics” surpassing all estimations of credit and debit and repudiating the standard theodicy of sacrificial atonement which traditionally accompanied it (where a Savior pays off the ransom of original and accumulated sin). In similar wise, Marion proffers a phenomenology of the gift as a “saturated phenomenon” where the subject’s intentionality is overturned by an overwhelming intuition, rendering the receiving subject without agency, calculation, or judgment. Finally, Hénaff offers something of a counterposition, in tune with Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of oneself-as-another, where giver and receiver are legitimately acknowledged as mutual beneficiaries of the gifting process—a position where reciprocity is key again.

Contesting the deconstructive claim that for a gift to be a gift, the giver must be unaware of giving and the receiver unaware of the giver’s identity, Hénaff responds that we must learn from the original meanings of the gift in concrete social anthropologies—namely, the power to bring selves and strangers together and overcome enmity in the name of peace.⁸ That is what the so-called potlatch was all about. The conversion of hostility into hospitality. Drawing on Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of dialogue, Hénaff concludes that possible reciprocity, rather than impossible disinterestedness, is at the root of genuine gift rituals and institutions, forming social and political bonds between otherwise competing actors. As such, the gift is the precondition of all functioning societies. And this recognition of the fundamental function of the gift calls in turn for a proper philosophy of hospitality, where host and guest are afforded equal dignity and agency. The present volume is a modest attempt to apply these continental conversations about possible/impossible gifts to relevant questions of hospitality for our time.