The Gift of Death, Second Edition & Literature in Secret (Religion and Postmodernism) [Paperback]

Jacques Derrida (Author), David Wills (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2007 | ISBN-10: 9780226142777 | ISBN-13: 978-0226142777 | Edition: 2

The Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida’s most sustained consideration of religion, explores questions first introduced in his book Given Time about the limits of the rational and responsible that one reaches in granting or accepting death, whether by sacrifice, murder, execution, or suicide. Derrida analyzes Czech philosopher Jan Patocka’s Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History and develops and compares his ideas to the works of Heidegger, Lévinas, and Kierkegaard. One of Derrida’s major works, The Gift of Death resonates with much of his earlier writing, and this highly anticipated second edition is greatly enhanced by David Wills’s updated translation.

 

This new edition also features the first-ever English translation of Derrida’s Literature in Secret. In it, Derrida continues his discussion of the sacrifice of Isaac, which leads to bracing meditations on secrecy, forgiveness, literature, and democracy. He also offers a reading of Kafka’s Letter to His Father and uses the story of the flood in Genesis as an embarkation point for a consideration of divine sovereignty.

 

“An important contribution to the critical study of ethics that commends itself to philosophers, social scientists, scholars of religion . . . [and those] made curious by the controversy that so often attends Derrida.”—Booklist, on the first edition

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

French philosopher Derrida stares death in the face in this dense but rewarding inquiry. Beginning with an analysis of an essay on the sacred by Czech philosopher/human rights activist Jan Patocka, Derrida follows the development of moral and ethical responsibility, and the concept of the soul's immortality, in the transition from Platonism to Christianity. He then ponders the self's anticipation of death in sacrifice, war, orgiastic mystery cults, murder and execution, with reference to Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, Nietzsche, Heidegger's thought (a "constant attempt to separate itself from Christianity") and the biblical story of Abraham's contemplated sacrifice of his son, Isaac, at God's behest. In the most provocative section, Derrida links religious injunctions of sacrifice to the "monotonous complacency" of modern society, which allows tens of millions of children to die of hunger and disease.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

This is Part 2 of Derrida's exploration of the ambiguity of giving. Part 1 (Given Time: Counterfeit Money, Univ. of Chicago Pr., 1992) weaves in and out of a Baudelaire prose poem on giving a beggar a counterfeit coin. Part 2 is more direct and reality-grounded, probably because its point of departure is an essay on history, religion, and responsibility by Jan Patov cka, Czech philosopher who died of a brain hemorrhage after police interrogation in March 1977. When confronted with the death of a scholar who gave his life because of his commitment to human rights, Derrida's readers will find the paradox of giving one's life-through death-somewhat precious. Derrida moves through texts from Emmanuel Levinas, Kierkegaard, the New Testament, and Nietzsche before ending with a passage from Baudelaire's art criticism, where he finds some of the same possibilities for double-reading a gift. Willis's model translation renders the text in clear English, with sufficient parenthetical French interpellations for readers to see where Derrida is playing on the gaps between the two languages. Recommended primarily for academic libraries.
Marilyn Gaddis Rose, Binghamton Univ., N.Y.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 2 edition (October 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9780226142777
• ISBN-13: 978-0226142777
• ASIN: 0226142779
• Product Dimensions: 5.6 x 0.5 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #126,841 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

69 of 74 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Father of Deconstruction Reconstructed August 18, 2001

By Samuel Chell HALL OF FAMETOP 100 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

You can give someone life--or you can put someone to death. But you cannot "give" someone their own death. Death is a "gift" because it insures our irreplaceableness in God's eyes; it is ours and ours alone. No one can die in my place no more than I can die in theirs. Our willingness to acknowledge this relationship with our own deaths (which above all requires "responsibility," a term Derrida seems to prefer to "faith") in turn unites us with God and the self, with the giver and the receiver.

I'll admit I hadn't expected a deconstructionist to use terms like "absolute," "transcendant," "God," "self"--in profusion and in earnest. But perhaps Derrida has sufficiently exposed the instability, metaphoric basis and deceptive play of language to be able to employ it without qualifiers, disclaimers, and tedious textual self-referentiality. As is his custom, he represents his own work as a critique of others' works--Plato's "Phaedo," Nietzsche's "Genealogy of Morals," Kierkegaard's "Fear and Trembling," and the contemporary, politically executed Polish philosopher Jan Potocka. While he establishes his distance from Plato and Nietzsche, his re-visioning of Kierkegaard offers new angles without questioning or challenging the great Dane's existential reading of the Abraham-Isaac story. And his alignment with Potocka is so complete as to suggest more an apologia than a critique of the latter's work. Add to these texts numerous references to Heidegger and to both the Old and New Testaments as well as to stories by Poe and Hawthorne, and you'll have some idea of how richly allusive, not to mention dense, Derrida's discourse can be, even in a brief work such as this.

The primary requisite for reading "The Gift of Death" is some knowledge of its precursor, "Fear and Trembling." Like Kierkegaard, Derrida defines religion as access to the responsibility of a free self, which in turn is defined as a relationship consciously and secretly experienced by the individual subject who sees him or herself in the gaze of God. Truth is separated from Socrates' truth by its interiority, by its replacement of reason, ethics, and aesthetics with the sheer horror of the abyss. Compared to Kierkegaard, however, Derrida's account is less romantic, less inspiring, more disturbing. The leap of faith involves not a sacrifice of Isaac but of oneself, a secret and senseless meeting with one's own death. Derrida interprets the absence of woman in the Abraham and Bartleby stories as proof that the "knight of faith's" quest is not the "tragic hero's". Instead, it is beyond all knowledge, a confrontation with the abyss that marks the Absolute singularity of the self. (This latter observation is reminiscent of Marlowe's inability, or unwillingness, in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," to share the "truth" of Kurtz' final words, "The horror, the horror," with Kurtz' fiance.)

In the latter part of his critique, Derrida offers a paradoxical criticism of the technological, modern age. Far from becoming quantified or de-naturalized, we have returned to the demonic and orgiastic from which religion arose. Modern man has fallen into inauthenticity, becoming not a self or person but assuming the mask of a "role." Present-day democracy, in turn, is not about the equality of individuals but of roles. Hence the importance of discovering and accepting the gift of death that determines human uniqueness. Responsibility is the criterion; freedom is the result.

This is a work not to be read quickly or only once. Derrida moves slowly, taking two steps backward before moving one step forward, but his method insures the communication of his meanings. If it's any inducement to the reader, I would suggest that the fourth and final chapter, "Tout autre est tout autre," is anticlimactic and unhelpful. By then the attentive reader will already have located the gift.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Donner la Mort January 18, 2009

By Peter Downing

Format:Paperback

Like much of Derrida's work, The Gift of Death does require a familiarity with the continental tradition. Without knowledge of Heidegger, Levinas and Kierkegaard, it is unlikely to make an impression, but the central figure of the text is Jan Patocka, a little-known Czech philosopher who is only now beginning to come to light. Contact with his thoughts on Europe and the care of the soul makes this slim tract come to life. I actually found it to be one of the clearest of Derrida's works, certainly no more challenging than the average in current continental philosophy. Illuminates the tension between secrecy and givenness, human freedom and responsibility, and shows the ways in which death opens the space for human existence. A valuable contribution to the phenomenology of religion, and destined to be one of Derrida's more widely read essays, even if it never surpasses the importance of his earlier works.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Killing the son. July 28, 2008

By Kallionsivu Mikko

Format:Paperback

The deconstruction of Christianity plus some extent also Jewish and Islamic thinking from the point of view of gift or symbolic exchange is an interesting topic. Especially the core of Derrida's analysis, how to interpret -- or to deconstruct, depending your own stance -- the story of Binding of Isaac, is insightful. One could also use it as a masterful, more or less isolated close-reading of an enigmatic story.

I also liked the general idea that morality is always based on shortcomings and that the monotheistic religions try to evade this impossibility of total ethicalness by totally merging the ultimate other (the God, the permanently unknowable) within the very core of the self.

The Gift of Death is short book and not easy to read. I read it as a critique of monotheism, of 'monomanic' ethics that are based on surrendering yourself to an absolute and thus to monotony, monomania, monology and singularity (as opposite to generality). If this indeed what Derrida is saying, it is not as original as the idea of deconstructing religion seem to promise. But, as always -- with Derrida it is not so much what he says, but HOW he says it. Unlike Heidegger, for instance, this is also FUN to read.

A good dose of poetry makes any give subversive morality more interesting. In the words of Bob Dylan, "Don't follow leaders, watch the parking meters." I do both and it seems that in introducing multiple levels of simultaneous, symbolic exchange paradigms Derrida does, too.