Here again, the emphasis rests on difference rather than on unity. In Baudelaire’s story, as explained by Derrida, when the “giver” tells his friend the real “value” of the coin, the narration-gift drives a wider distance between all the characters. The gift separates the two friends because the one does not give and the gift of the other turns out to be deceptive. The gift also separates itself from the giver, since it shows that he has not been true to his own gifts and position in society.25 His gift reveals him to be de-centered. Furthermore, the gift causes the beggar’s status to plummet further down the social scale, while the apparent magnanimity of the giver heightens his superiority.26 Lastly, since the text is what enables the story to be narrated, the distance also affects Baudelaire’s reader—at least in Derrida’s account. The donation of the false coin, as in the case of the betrayed friend, detaches every engaged reader from the story. This distance, opened by the gift of the counterfeit money, signals the “absolute heterogeneity” proper to space.27 The gift reveals further, as with time, that space is made both possible and impossible by the giving of the difference. Derrida calls this differing “spacing,” which, as R. Gasché clarifies, “is the discrete synthesis of (1) the movement by which the self-identity of an entity is interrupted and (2) the passive constitution by inscription as habitation.”28 Gift gives time and space, that is, it differentiates being by postponing the present and forestalling indwelling.
The circularity of time, space, and gift—aimed at the elimination of the metaphysical understanding of being as presence—could seem to define gift as the ruling principle that orders the Derridean “system.” Yet Derrida’s “gift” does not designate a giving origin. To understand what “it” is, it may be helpful to acknowledge that, for him, gift and différance are synonymous. Like différance, gift temporizes and spaces. Like différance, gift—in its simultaneous possibility and impossibility—is more originary than contradiction is; it is understood through the written text; and it sets itself forth as absent in what is present. In this regard one could define gift simply as différance: “the non-full, non-simple, structured and differentiating origin of differences. Thus the name of ‘origin’ no longer suits it.”29 In other words, both différance and gift—without being an “it”—displace being as presence and eliminate any unified whole by proposing a perception of time as event in which event differs from itself. Derrida claims that the simultaneous possibility and impossibility of gift is not an oxymoron. Paradox and contradiction still presuppose unity. The simultaneity of the possibility and impossibility of the gift reflects the “unpresentable”: equivocal origins that ongoingly supplement and undo each other.30
The analysis of originary experience prompts the question of whether “gift” necessarily leads to the dissemination of origins or subjectivity indicated by Derrida’s empty, abstract différance. Is it not rather the case that Derrida’s conclusion results from his abstract account of the difference between gift, giver, receiver, time, and space, an account that systematically neglects the concrete singular’s integral mode of being and hence, a priori, excludes the role of the body and the community from consideration?31 If the previous examination of originary experience is valid, we may ask further: is it not the case that gratuity, which is required for both the donating and the reciprocating of the gift, is better thought of through the lens of agape, rather than through the purity of a subjectless, objectless intention? The experience of being given, as it appeared earlier, reveals “giving” as an event in which one desires union with the other without absorption. If, as originary experience suggests, this is how difference is to be conceived, does it not appear then that Derrida’s equivocal account of gift rejects unity and the tout autre (God) precisely because he does not accept that the concrete singular, in this case the human person, is not the absolute other? If this is the case, then perhaps postmodernity—in its numerous forms, Derrida’s included—is the epitome of the subjectivity that it attempts to deconstruct; that is, a subject that does not wish to deal with itself, the world, and God because it cannot account for its own finitude from and by itself.
2. A Radical Difference
Giving has indeed a paradoxical nature: the finite giver’s gratuitous donation must be total and free; yet the donation is also a response to a preceding sign. The gift is both a sign of and irreducible to the source, hence, it is simultaneously transparent to the giver and other than the giver—the child, as we saw, is not a mechanical repetition of the parents. The receiver’s response is gratuitous when it reciprocates without closing itself off to the giver, that is, when it affirms the giver and is open to further giving. This paradoxical structure of the gift requires taking up two related factors. First, in contrast to the view that the gift is both possible and impossible, as Derrida believes, the paradoxical structure of the gift can be explained through the primordial giving known as creation ex nihilo. In fact, to claim that the gift cannot presuppose anything, that it must give all of itself to another who remains other, that it gives time and space, and that it must generate a free, gratuitous response, is to describe creation. Only creation allows an understanding of difference and unity that does not conclude by hypostasizing the giving and receiving of being—as is the case with Heidegger’s Ereignis—or breaking the whole into fragments from whose relation their identities are carved out—as in Derrida’s work. The substitution of creation with reflections on “ground” or “differentiating origins” in order to avoid dealing with the gift ex nihilo that creation is, and hence to avoid grappling with both the nothingness and real being proper to finite beings, leaves Derrida’s philosophical reflection on gift at an unresolved, aporetic level. Creation ex nihilo reveals that the exchange of gifts is a free participation in the original, creative gratuity that brings singular beings into existence and whose gratuity constitutes their very nature. Second, to account for gratuitousness it does not suffice to invoke a purity of intention, particularly one that ends by evacuating the giver, the receiver, and the gift of any identity or content for fear of losing the gift. It is necessary to consider the dimensions of love expressed in the terms eros, agape, and koinonia. What follows will consider the difference that creation ex nihilo introduces and how the negative aspect is to be perceived, beginning with this threefold dimension of love.
To start with an obvious but important point, we must recall that creation ex nihilo, while a legitimately philosophical concept, presupposes a difference between God and the world that is not available to unaided human experience. Creation requires the possibility that the world could have not been and that God’s greatness would have been unaffected by the lack. As Sokolowski describes it, the Christian difference, that is, the difference between a world created ex nihilo and its transcendent God, was unknown to the Greeks.32 Greek tragedies taught that however the gods excelled human beings and historical affairs, their dwelling place was on Mount Olympus, and their eternal history was inescapably tied to human history. Although corrected on many crucial points, the worldview underpinning Greek mythology remains intact for the great philosophers. Sokolowski also notes that Aristotle’s unmoved mover or self-thinking thought, Plato’s Good, and even Plotinus’s One are part of the cosmos. Plotinus’s One, despite its extreme otherness, cannot be without the Spirit and the Soul; Plato’s Good, although separated by an abyss from finite beings (becomings), does not exist independently of them; Aristotle’s self-thinking thought, regardless of whether it is aware of it, shares a necessary existence with those finite beings that never fully reach the unmoved mover and that imitate it either through eternal circular movement or through continual reproduction.33 Once philosophy welcomes the intimation of divine revelation, it is possible to see that creation accounts for what human experience perceives as the truth of the gift: a complete, gratuitous donation that awaits, without demanding it, a free response. For there to be the gift of the concrete singular at all, this radical difference between the world and God is needed.
Without pondering the meaning of nihil, one could claim that what originary experience considers a gift is simple necessity, and that the cosmos does in fact enclose the divine within its own horizon. Since Hegel’s attempt to integrate within the absolute spirit the difference between God and the world established by the creative nihil and Heidegger’s claim regarding the equi-primordial nature of truth and nothingness, we are inclined to think that we enjoy a panoptic vision of nothingness. Nothingness tends to be perceived as a concept synonymous with biological death. As a verb, “nothingness” is an exercise in contradiction. Nothingness is thus pictured as an “absent