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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A matrix of Derrida's early programmatic texts and thought, October 27, 2003
If there could be such a thing as a text that 'exemplifies' Derrida's thought, one that meticulously and clearly explains the strategies of 'deconstruction,' while at the same time distilling not just its own theory, but also producing a critical reading of several other prominent thinkers and their texts (and one that of course demonstrates the practical ends of the exposé of his theory), then "Given Time" ("Donner le temps") would unequivocally be that book. It is that good. In fact, it is superb. For those who have read Derrida's texts of the late 60s and early 70s, and know where they stand regarding Derrida's ideas, this book acts like a kind of overview or survey of his thought, a matrix or map of his thought, an architectural plan, even a game plan. The primary text is a story by Baudelaire, and Derrida uses this two-page story to explicate the relations he has with his own masters, the lessons learned and the major points that he has taken from them and transformed. Husserl on the notion of the gift and the necessity to zigzag (a "Zick-Zack" or "mouvement en vrille") between bound and free idealities; Heidegger on being and temporality and the impossibility of appropriation or presence; Bataille on excess. All through a refreshing reading of Baudelaire's story together with Mauss' seminal essay from 1923 "The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies" (often considered the most influential work of anthropology, focusing on the social customs of exchange and the obligation to reciprocate) which conceives of a total social fact of gifting that Bataille had himself begun to unhinge in his 1949 "The Accursed Share" by implicitly laying waste to Hegel's philosophical economy - a multivolume work that was itself greatly influenced by "The Gift." From a map of thought to Derrida's Joycean world "Given Time" is a brief treatise on the layered notions of the 'gift' in several important works (in Husserl, it means what is given to us in the world through the 'immediate experience' of our senses; in Husserl's phenomenological reduction or "epoche" what is intended is separated from what is given. Derrida, in his earliest critical works on Husserl, analyzes the conceptual foundations of the intuition/intention relationship, and while he critiques Husserl's formal limits of the two, he maintains that the "epoche" is indispensable for transcendental phenomenology and for his own work. However, via Heidegger, Derrida will insist that in every act of being given there remains by necessity an aspect of the gift that holds itself back, is not given, and that gives nothing - the flipside of giving, as Deleuze noted, is theft. This temporizing aspect of the gift is reflected in Derrida's title "Given Time"). Derrida's thesis is that giving is only possible through a splintered 'time' of originary difference, which produces a doubling-effect of the notion of the 'origin,' and which means that the only possibility of authenticity will always be that of inauthenticity, which doubles and splits the difference. In other words, contamination occurs between the concepts of authenticity and inauthenticity: authenticity is impossible without the possibility of inauthenticity. Much like all 'counterfeit money' (which is also the title of Baudelaire's story) you can't tell whether the coin is or isn't truly money that you can buy a commodity with and truly possess something. Is it or isn't it fake? It's a split decision that Derrida patiently explores the 'logic' of. (By the way, art historian Georges Didi-Huberman has written a wonderful book, "Phasmes" (1990), partially translated as "The Phasmid," on deception and pretending; search for it on the net.) This important concept, which also runs throughout Deleuze's work, is a term he calls "the power of the false." But to give credit where it is due, it comes first of all in Heidegger's critique of his own project of a fundamental ontology (very arguably, to my mind) in Section 72 of "The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics," where he speaks of the assertive logos as "false," "deceptive," and "pretending," and discusses the as-structure that will be so crucial for all of Derrida's work - in fact his explication of the true/false pair in "Given Time" explains this operative concept of 'relation' without naming it. 'Relation' is one of the most important concepts in Derrida's thought, and he explicates it at length in "Given Time." Derrida shows how there is indeed a beyond to the binary couple of truth and falsity, authenticity and inauthenticity, by exploring a catachresis that simultaneously surpasses each of them (suggesting that they are impossibly pure concepts, as each implies the other as its limit) but that also makes their 'false' opposition possible (and that they must therefore mix or contaminate each other). Derrida has given many strategic names to this notion, such as originary difference or différance (which Leonard Lawlor has suggested is Derrida's reinscription of Husserl's notion of intention). This relation of possibility to impossibility is very clearly laid out in "Given Time" ("on one hand"..."on the other hand"), and gives the reader a penetrating insight into the importance that Derrida ascribes here and throughout his work - especially his more recent works "Aporias" (another very clear book of his, and highly recommended), "The Politics of Friendship" and "Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness" - to the counter-intuitive and non-oppositional relationship between impossibility and possibility (which is an important redrawing of Kant's condition of possibility and the notion of 'limit' and critique). Also, one can read the entire book as a long commentary on capitalism, one which places Marxian thinkers in an uncomfortable position and that tries to think through capitalism a little bit further from within 'deconstruction': Derrida's most overt attempts at this are 'From restrictive to general economy' of 1966 (a superb essay with a very pretentious title that plays on Einstein's 1905 and 1916 Nobel-prize earning work "Special [aka "Restricted"] and General Theory of Relativity" - although his 1921 Nobel was technically awarded for his "contribution to photoelectrics") and "Specters of Marx," from 1994, with a title that's cribbed from his mentor and colleague Louis Althusser's book "Specters of Hegel" as an homage. One also has to remember that this book was originally a lecture course from c. 1979. Derrida is of course using transcendental phenomenology as the guiding thread to discuss literature and sociology, and makes something really interesting occur in each, along with modifying our concept of capitalism. From anywhere you stand you can see Derrida's French qualities: literature, anthropology, the belief that philosophy has to engage with capitalism if it is to be considered at all relevant. All are relevant to deconstruction, and are considered game for being folded into it, so long as they take you somewhere else, produce different thoughts regarding the world we inhabit, and permit these thoughts to be formalized. There is no other book written by Derrida that lays out the material and the method so clearly and patiently (although again, "Aporias" is highly recommended). It does assume familiarity with his earliest programmatic works. If one looks at pp. 71-75 of Derrida's brief and incisive "Introduction to Husserl's Origin of Geometry," for example, one glimpses the thematic affinity between that earlier, more programmatic work, and how Derrida's conclusions there are extended in multiple and different directions in "Given Time" (those pages discuss the troubled constitution of ideal objects and how they can always be false and inauthentic in their expression. If Derrida chooses a work of fiction by Baudelaire on counterfeit money, it is in part because all truth must pass through fiction, or to put it differently, the necessary possibility of inauthenticity). In sum, this is one of Derrida's most elegant and accessible treatises on his own philosophy and how its relations extend to other modes of thought that on the one hand he himself is influenced by, and on the other hand he radicalizes as he engages them. It is a book that thoroughly transforms the interrelated concepts of the gift that exist in separate disciplines - not least of which is philosophy, which is often said to have 'begun' in wonder or amazement at the world and what is supposedly simply presented or given to us. Derrida takes a critical step back (à la Husserl's method of "rückfragen," that attempts to account for the structuring of tradition) to explore how this presencing comes about, and how the 'there is' (es gibt, in German) appears, and then goes a step further to explain how we relate in our everyday, societal lives via an uncanny and counter-intuitive 'structure' or 'logic' (as well as mediated 'experiences') of giving and receiving, and how these open onto the issues of responding responsibly (which is a theme that Derrida explicitly explores in his works on forgiveness and on hospitality). As to the translation, which is polished and luminous, it is one of the best translations of Derrida's work into English.
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7 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Free lunch?, April 11, 2008
I've been trying to read Derrida off and on for about six years. Before that, I had heard good things about him from people I respected to varying degrees (in literary, not philosophical, circles) for perhaps a dozen years. This review isn't so much one for this book as for Derrida in general. The three stars are intended to be neutral, rather than informative, as I don't consider myself to be qualified to judge. Not really, anyway. What I've come to believe is that a person can really only appreciate intelligence in a window of limited radius (say, two standard deviations) about one's own. So, if my mind is 3.5 to 4 s.d. right of the mean in mathematics, then while I'm certainly no genius, I ought to be able, with effort, to make sense of the work of all but a few of the very top mathematicians in the world. That's gratifying, and pretty cool. But now, let's say that my facility with language is much less impressive (1.5 to 2 s.d. right of the mean). Now what? Is the reading of, say, Derrida going to be a complete waste of my time? Answer: yes. (Please don't try to convince me otherwise. I tried hard. Really, I did.) What I'm thereby missing is another question, and it's this question that you'll get wildly varying answers to, depending on who you ask. Generous critics tell me I'm just missing a lyrical, albeit substanceless, play of words/ideas that would be a lot of fun for me to listen to if I were just a little bit smarter. The "faithful" on the other hand would have me know that Derrida is the most important philosopher in the world, and that what I'm missing is...well...usually I don't understand what they are saying, either, so I don't know what. But it's supposed to be something good. Really good. I decided finally that I could figure out the truth if only Derrida would talk about something recognizable and mundane (and recognizably mundane) for just one paragraph. Unfortunately, he's usually on "jouissance", "differance" or some other thing I don't know what is (logocentric metaphysics?), so I can't tell whether he's forced to these language extremes by the subtlety of his thought, or whether he's just having a bit of fun with ideas that would otherwise sound banal or trite if expressed in some form of human idiom. Forgive me for quoting at such ridiculous length, but from my perspective "ridiculous" is the operative word in matters Derridean, and I think it's important, in a fair review, to give a hint, even to novices like myself, of the flavor of the writing...given that it's controversial whether or not the writing itself is the star attraction. Pithy or too-cute one-liners might serve to amuse, but they don't, by themselves, necessarily constitute verbosity. Intractable passages likewise fail to give an adequate test for those of us who can't decipher them. From pages 13-14 (italics in the original removed, sadly, due to limitations in this medium): "For there to be a gift, it is necessary that the donee not give back, amortize, reimburse, acquit himself, enter into a contract, and that he never have contracted a debt. (This "it is necessary" is already the mark of a duty, a debt owed, of the duty-not-to: The donee owes it to himself even not to give back, he ought not owe and the donor ought not count on restitution.) It is thus necessary, at the limit, that he not recognize the gift as gift. If he recognized it as gift, if the gift appears to him as such, if the present is present to him as present, this simple recognition suffices to annul the gift. Why? Because it gives back, in the place, let us say that the symbolic re-constitutes the exchange and annuls the gift in the debt. It does not reconstitute an exchange, which, because it no longer takes place as exchange of things or goods, would be transfigured into a symbolic exchange. 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. It suffices therefore for the other to perceive the gift--not only to perceive it in the sense in which, as one says in France, "on percoit," one receives, for example, merchandise, payment, or compensation--but to perceive its nature of gift, the meaning or intention, the intentional meaning of the gift, in order for this simple recognition of the gift as gift, as such, to annul the gift as gift even before recognition becomes gratitude. The simple identification of the gift seems to destroy it. The simple identification of the passage of a gift as such, that is, of an identifiable thing among some identifiable "ones," would be nothing other than the process of the destruction of the gift. It is as if, between the event or the institution of the gift as such and its destruction, the difference were destined to be constantly annulled. At the limit, the gift as gift ought not appear as gift: either to the donee or to the donor. It cannot be gift as gift except by not being present as gift. Neither to the "one" nor to the "other". If the other perceives or receives it, if he or she keeps it as gift, the gift is annulled. But the one who gives it must not see it or know it either, otherwise he begins, at the threshold, as soon as he intends to give, to pay himself with a symbolic recognition, to praise himself, to approve of himself, to gratify himself, to congratulate himself, to give back to himself symbolically the value of what he thinks he has given or what he is preparing to give. The temporalization of time (memory, present, anticipation; retention, protention, imminence of the future; "ecstases," and so forth) always sets in motion the process of a destruction of the gift: through keeping, restitution, reproduction, the anticipatory expectation or apprehension that grasps or comprehends in advance." If you weren't counting, that was 28 occurrences of "gift". Not bad for a single paragraph; though I'm sure Milton could've done it in one sentence, if someone had told him how witty it would be. Please understand, I've quoted but a fraction of a multi-paragraph, pages-long ramble on the "paradox of gift". Much too long to quote in full. As a piece of writing, it's definitely amusing. Intricate, imaginative, at least somewhat brilliant if not dazzlingly so (this isn't to say Derrida is not often quite dazzling). Is it philosophy? Well, maybe, sort of. I think the entire discursion says, roughly: "There's no such thing as a free lunch." Just, with a lot less economy.
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3 of 64 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Typical Deconstructionist Wool-Gathering, August 26, 2003
Derrida here engages in his usual word-games and cute metaphores, and the result is pointless and nearly incomprehensible, as usual. How exactly is human knowledge furthered in a positive and valuable way by saying things like "The title of the text is the title (without title) of the text"? Nothing but meaningless verbiage...
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