Derrida on Giving
Poetry from Plato's Cave:
"Witness the man who raves at the wall
Making the shape of his questions to Heaven.
Knowing the sun will fall in the evening,
Will he remember the lessons of giving?"
-- Roger Waters,
Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun
| 1. | on Page 10: |
| "... assuming responsibility for one's own death, committing suicide but also sacrificing oneself for another, dying for the other, thus perhaps giving one's life by giving oneself death, accepting the gift of death, such as Socrates, Christ, and others did in so ..." | |
| 2. | on Page 27: |
| "... measure of all things. The concept of responsibility is one of those strange concepts that give food for thought without giving themselves over to thematization . It presents itself neither as a theme nor as a thesis, it gives without being ..." | |
| 3. | on Page 33: |
| "... only rouses me to the responsibility it gives me by making a gift of death [en me donnant la mort], giving the secret of death, a new experience of death. The question of whether this discourse on the gift and on ..." | |
| 4. | on Page 35: |
| "... TWO Beyond: Giving for the Taking, Teaching and Learning to Give, Death* The narrative is genealogical but it is not simply an act ..." | |
| 5. | on Page 39: |
| "... to the play of "The Purloined Letter," we are brought back to the apprehension of death, namely this way of giving oneself death that seems to imprint upon this heretical essay its dominant impulse. What we are here calling the apprehension ..." | |
| 6. | on Page 40: |
| "... TWO prehends death differently, giving itself each time a different approach . The approach or apprehension of death signifies the experience of anticipation while indissociable ..." | |
| 7. | on Page 41: |
| "... emphasis ) What is given-and this would also represent a kind of death-is not some thing, but goodness itself, a giving goodness, the act of giving or the donation of the gift. A goodness that must not only forget itself but ..." | |
| 8. | on Page 42: |
| "... of relations between a couple (dying for God, dying for the homeland, dying to save one's children or loved one). Giving one's life for the other, dying for the other, I leidegger insists, does not mean dying in the place of ..." | |
| 9. | on Page 43: |
| "... involved when to give one's life "for" the other means to give to death. Death's dative (dying for the other, giving one's life to the other) does not signify a substitution (o)r is not pro in the sense of "in place ..." | |
| 10. | on Page 44: |
| "... of giving and taking [donner-prendre] that actually exempts itself from the same realm of possibility that it institutes, namely, from giving and taking. But to say that is far from contradicting the fact that it is only on the basis of ..." |
| 11. | on Page 47: |
| "... BEYOND Levinas's thinking, or of understanding what death teaches us [nous apprend], or gives us to think beyond the giving and taking [donner prendre], in the adieu. What is the adieu? What does adieu mean? "what does it mean to ..." | |
| 12. | on Page 65: |
| "... can they negate or deny it, implicate it in the work of negation, make it work: in the act of giving death, sacrifice suspends both the work of negation and work itself, perhaps even the work of mourning. The tragic hero ..." | |
| 13. | on Page 67: |
| "... beloved son, his irreplaceable loved one, and that because the Other, the great Other asks him or orders him without giving the slightest explanation . An infanticide father who hides what he is going to do from his son and from ..." | |
| 14. | on Page 69: |
| "... for examples, there would be too many of them, at every step we took. By preferring my, work, simply by giving it my time and attention, by preferring my activity as a citizen or as a professorial and professional philosopher, writing ..." | |
| 15. | on Page 72: |
| "... gift of death consists in putting to death by raising one's knife over someone and of putting death forward by giving it as an offering, God leaves him free to refuse- and that is the test. The command requests, like a ..." | |
| 16. | on Page 73: |
| "... WHOM TO GIVE TO because God is absolutely transcendent, hidden, and secret, not giving any reason he can share in exchange for this doubly given death, not sharing anything in this dissymmetrical alliance. Abraham ..." | |
| 17. | on Page 74: |
| "... in tongues" (114). If he were to speak a common or translatable language, if he were to become intelligible by giving his reasons in a convincing manner, he would be giving in to the temptation of the ethical generality that I ..." | |
| 18. | on Page 93: |
| "... the most severe suffering upon himself, he gives to himself the death that he is granting his son and also giving, in another way, to God; he puts his son to death or grants him death and offers the death so ..." | |
| 19. | on Page 95: |
| "... one's kin. This is the moment when Abraham gives the sign of absolute sacrifice, namely, by putting to death or giving death to his own, putting to death his absolute love for what is dearest, the only son; this is the ..." | |
| 20. | on Page 97: |
| "... from the Gospels turns, as we know, on the question of justice, and especially what we might call economic justice: alms-giving, wages, debt, laying up of treasures. Now the line demarcating celestial from terrestrial economy is what allows one to situate ..." |
| 21. | on Page 99: |
| "... organized around the question of poverty, begging, alms, and charity, of what it means to give for Christ, of what giving means to Christ, and what it means to give for Christ, to him, in his name, for him, in a ..." | |
| 22. | on Page 101: |
| "... it means breaking with exchange as a simple form of reciprocity. In the same way, so as not to reinscribe alms-giving within a certain economy of exchange, he will say "But when thou doest alms, let not thv left hand know ..." | |
| 23. | on Page 102: |
| "... is to offer the other cheek. It is a matter of suspending the strict economy of exchange, of payback, of giving and giving back, of the "one lent for every one borrowed," of that hateful form of circulation that involves reprisal, ..." | |
| 24. | on Page 107: |
| "... made symmetrical. In the space opened by this economy of what is without measure there emerges a new teaching concerning giving or alms that relates the latter to giving back or paying back, a yield [rendement] if you wish, a profitability ..." | |
| 25. | on Page 112: |
| "... can be inferred by slightly displacing Baudelaire's formulation: as soon as it is calculated (starting from the simple intention of giving as such, starting from sense, knowledge, and whatever takes recognition into account), the gift suppresses the object (of the gift). ..." | |
| 26. | from Table of Contents: |
| "... CONTENTS Translator's Preface vii ONE Secrets of European Responsibility TWO Beyond: Giving for the Taking, Teaching and Learning to Give, Death 35 THREE Whom to Give to ..." | |
| 27. | from Front Matter: |
| "... (or behind it) the English expression "kiss of death." In the text I have tried to follow the idea of "giving" or "granting" wherever possible, but I have used "to put to death" when comprehensibility so demands, sometimes adding the French ..." |