Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money

by Jacques Derrida, Peggy Kamuf (Translator)

Is giving possible? Is it possible to give without immediately entering into a circle of exchange that turns the gift into a debt to be returned? This question leads Jacques Derrida to make out an irresolvable paradox at what seems the most fundamental level of the gift's meaning: for the gift to be received as a gift, it must not appear as such, since its mere appearance as gift puts it in the cycle of repayment and debt.

Derrida reads the relation of time to gift through a number of texts: Heidegger's Time and Being, Mauss's The Gift, as well as essays by Benveniste and Levi-Strauss that assume Mauss's legacy. It is, however, a short tale by Baudelaire, "Counterfeit Money," that guides Derrida's analyses throughout. At stake in his reading of the tale, to which the second half of this book is devoted, are the conditions of gift and forgiveness as essentially bound up with the movement of dissemination, a concept that Derrida has been working out for many years.

For both readers of Baudelaire and students of literary theory, this work will prove indispensable.

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, Nonfiction, France, Anthropology

182 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher best known for developing deconstruction, a method of critical analysis that questioned the stability of meaning in language, texts, and Western metaphysical thought. Born in Algeria, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he was influenced by philosophers such as Heidegger, Husserl, and Levinas. His groundbreaking works, including Of Grammatology (1967), Writing and Difference (1967), and Speech and Phenomena (1967), positioned him at the center of intellectual debates on language, meaning, and interpretation.
Derrida argued that Western philosophy was structured around binary oppositions—such as speech over writing, presence over absence, or reason over emotion—that falsely privileged one term over the other. He introduced the concept of différance, which suggests that meaning is constantly deferred and never fully present, destabilizing the idea of fixed truth. His work engaged with a wide range of disciplines, including literature, psychoanalysis, political theory, and law, challenging conventional ways of thinking and interpretation.
Throughout his career, Derrida continued to explore ethical and political questions, particularly in works such as Specters of Marx (1993) and The Politics of Friendship (1994), which addressed democracy, justice, and responsibility. He held academic positions at institutions such as the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the University of California, Irvine, and remained an influential figure in both European and American intellectual circles. Despite criticism for his complex writing style and abstract concepts, Derrida’s ideas have left a lasting impact on contemporary philosophy, literary theory, and cultural criticism, reshaping the way meaning and language are understood in the modern world.

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

every / gift is erotic. The pleasure of giving / is a sexual pleasure. - Sharon Olds

My buddy Alec pointed me to a passage in Sedgwick’s A Dialog on Love where she identifies a “post-Proustian” kind of love--a circle of lovers small enough that you eventually get back “all of the / erotic energy you’d / sent around[.:]” But, she imagines, the circle could be big enough “that you could never / even know whether / the system was closed...the point could only / lie in valuing / all the transformations and / transitivities / in all directions / for their difference, trans-i-ness, / and their skilled nature.” An exchange economy transformed into a gift economy. And Whitman’s twenty-eight young bathers--another gift economy: An “unseen hand” passes over their bodies, descending, trembling, from temples and ribs. They “do not ask who seizes fast to them, / They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch, / They do not think whom they souse with spray.” Who is gifting whom in this erotic economy remains entirely unclear. And Melville’s crew: “Squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted in it...a strange sort of insanity...squeezing my collaborator’s hands in it...an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling...continually squeezing their hands...and looking into their eyes...let us squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness...for ever!” For Derrida (in debt to the alterity of Levinas), metaphysics itself is a kind of hospitality characterized by an unlimited openness to the Other, a demand for hospitality that precedes all revelation and obligates all humans to welcome every other in an infinite obligation to hospitality. The ethical claim is absolute, and translating it into politics a problem. This perspective informs his thinking on the gift. The gift is “that which interrupts economy,” that which “in suspending economic calculation, no longer gives rise to exchange.” The gift defies reciprocity or symmetry--that which is given must not come back to the giver as it would in an economic system. Indeed, neither the gifter nor the recipient can recognize the gift as gift; the former would thereby “give back to himself symbolically the value of what he thinks he has given”; for the latter, recognition becomes gratitude, a return that annuls the gift as gift. A true gift cannot be recognized as such. The gift is--at the limit--impossible, the “very figure of the impossible.” Pierre Bourdieu steps into this thread arguing that gift giving is based on an individual and collective denial of interest and calculation, a “common misrecognition”--everyone does and does not know (want to know) the true nature of the exchange. Generous conduct is thus not a product of choice but something that presents itself as “the only thing to do.” The philosophy of the mind and conscious intention must be left behind to understand the gift, which is “only available to agents endowed with dispositions adjusted to the logic of ‘disinterestedness.’” Bourdieu ultimately calls for the “purely speculative and typically scholastic question [ouch!:] of whether generosity and disinterestedness are possible” to give way “to the political question of the means that have to be implemented in order to create universes in which, as in gift economies, people have an interest in disinterestedness and generosity[.:]”

[Egor xS · Rating 5 out of 5]

Is generosity beyond selfishness possible? What a vertiginous treatise on economy.

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The circle has already put us onto the trail of time and of that which, by way of the circle, circulates between the gift and time.”

“Archaic society, the archaic, or the originary in general can be replaced by anything whatsoever (by X or by Chi), by nature, the mother, father, creator, supreme being, prime mover”

“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”

“The truth of the gift is equivalent to the non-gift or to the non-truth of the gift. This proposition obviously defies common sense. That is why it is caught in the impossible of a very singular double bind..
On the one hand, Mauss reminds us that there is no gift without bond, without bind, without obligation or ligature; but on the other hand, there is no gift that does not have to untie itself from obligation, from debt, contract, exchange, and thus from the bind.

to think the singular or double condition both
of the gift and of time.
What there is to give, uniquely, would be called time.”

“For finally, the overrunning of the circle by the gift, if there is any, does not lead to a simple, ineffable exteriority that would be transcendent and without relation. It is this exteriority that sets the circle going, it is this exteriority that puts the economy in motion.”

“Even if the gift were never anything but a simulacrum, one must still render an account of the possibility of this simulacrum and of the desire that impels toward this simulacrum. And one must also render an account of the desire to render an account.”

“One can translate as follows: The gift is not a gift, the gift only gives to the extent it gives time. The difference between a gift and every other operation of pure and simple exchange is that the gift gives time. There where there is gift, there is time”

“Mauss would like to bring off several operations (and this is one of the admirable things about his essay: it seeks to match the stubbornness of this impossible non-thing that would be the gift with a certain stubbornness of its own): (1) to succeed in maintaining an originary specificity of the process of gift in relation to cold economic rationality, to capitalism, and mercantilism-and in that way to recognize in the gift that which sets the circle of economic exchange going; (2) to succeed in describing the symbolicity that runs throughout cold economic rea-son, to render an account of religious, cultural, ideological, discur-sive, esthetic, literary, poetic phenomena that are inseparable from the process of the gift and that organize it from within this total social fact which Mauss makes the very object of sociology (here it would be necessary to evoke his critique of a certain economism in Marx and the whole context of the Cahiers de Sociologie, and so forth); (3) to succeed in understanding the at least relative homogeneity of all human cultures, whatever may be the type or the level of economic and juridical functioning; (4) to succeed in making credit, time, "term" — or the supplementary differance (the "return-more-later") —into a de-mand, an interest of the thing itself, thus an interest that cannot be derived from anything other than the thing, an interest of the given thing, of the thing that calls for the gift, of the given "it" or ça (sa is not in Mauss's vocabulary): not the ça of ça donne (es gibt, il y a, there is) but of the a donné, of the given it, although the thing's requirement that it be given-returned allows one to dispense with the distinction between the it of it gives and the it of the given. The given it will have required that it gives. The it is giving-given, giving-giving.
Finally, with the sole difference of a distancing in time and of the interest of usury, the it is at once, "at the same time," given-given and giving-giving.”

“What is the guiding sense or etymon of the gift on the basis of which all semantic diversities, all idioms, and all usages are diffracted? What is the consensus on the basis of which an implicit linguistic contract would permit us to understand one another, to pre-understand one another, right here, to extend credit to each other when we speak of gift, giving, or given? What would happen if the lack of a guiding sense or of a regulated polyse-mia were to force us to renounce this style of question in favor of a certain concept of dissemination? This concept, which would not be the only one possible, would lead us to consider only usage, play, and the contextual functionings of idioms, if indeed it were still possible to speak of idioms in this sense, without postulating a semantic regulation, a system of prescriptions inscribed in language or in the continuum of a linguistic tradition. This alternative, let us note in passing, would in both cases concern a sort of given of the language: what is given by the language or the language as given, as a given language [une sorte de donné ou de donnée de la langue], in other words, two ways of determining the gift of the language said to be maternal or natural.
This hypothesis of a dissemination without return would prevent the locution from circling back to its meaning. It thus also con-cerns-whence this paradoxical fold-the without-return of the gift.
One must say that we are constantly encouraged in this direction by the experience of language each time that the words "gift," "to give,"
"given," "donation," "donee," or "donor" occur there. Not only because of great frontiers, great lines of demarcation that seem to set up a secure barrier between different meanings or different functionings.
For example, one might wonder if the same semantic order governs the logic of the gift whether it is under the regime of to have or to be.
In general, it is thought that one can give only what one has, what one possesses as one's own, and give it to the other who, in his or her turn, can thus have it, come into possession. The very paradox of
"giving what one does not have," which we have already talked about, has the value of paradox only because of what links, in common sense, giving with having. One might wonder if the same semantic order governs locutions that, on the contrary, imply the transfer of what one is to the other who takes-or becomes—what is thereby given to him or her. Think of the expression "to give one-self," of the metonymies or synecdoches concerning partial "objects," the fragments or signs of what one is and which one can give as something one has, abandons, or lets be taken. All the figures of this tropic are difficult to contain within the limits of a rhetoric the margins or
"terms" of which can no longer, in principle and in all rigor, be fixed.
Likewise, one might wonder if the same order governs locutions which imply that one gives something (a determined object, either material or symbolic, to make provisional use of this distinction) and those in which the given of the donation is not an object, a material thing, but a symbol, a person, or a discourse. In other words, does not the direct "object" of the act of "giving," does not the given of the giving alter radically the meaning of the act each time?“

“Take the bag, Beggar. Long you cajoled
—You lacked this vice-the dream of being miserly?
Don't bury your gold so it will sound a glas for you.”

“From the hand of the donor to that of the beggar, we have just seen the passage of gifts in the form of cash money. We can no longer avoid the question of what money is: true money or counterfeit money, which can only be what it is, false or counterfeit, to the extent to which no one knows it is false, that is, to the extent to which it circulates, appears, functions as good and true money. The engima of this simulacrum should begin to orient us toward the triple and indis-sociable question of the gift, of forgiveness, and of the excuse. And to the question of whether a gift can or ought to secure itself against counterfeit money.”

“3. Mauss repeatedly says that one must return to—. Return to what? This "returning" is not a regression but a revolution. Analogous to the natural revolution of the Earth around the Sun, of the absolute sun at its high noon (and this is why we began by making the question of the gift turn around a Sun-King), it would bring about a return to man's nature, to that "eternal morality"“

“Lévi-Strauss proposes what he calls an "objective" critique that will permit one "to reach the underlying reality." He defines this underlying reality as an unconscious, more exactly as a set of "uncon-scious mental structures" (p. 49). These unconscious structures can be reached, he tells us, through institutions and 'better yet, through language." And it is in the name of the recourse to the unconscious, of the "objectivist" recourse ("objective" critique) to the unconscious that he is going to make a search of language, of the treasury of language and linguistic features so as to find the objectivity that interests him and that he thinks is going to protect him from illusory theories.”

“But the question posed in this way,' continues Mauss, "concerns only the arbitrary limit that must be placed on the use of the world.
In my view, one only defines in this way a second type of money— our own."
This note tries to justify the extension of the notion of money and value. Bearing, then, as a title "A Note of principle concerning the use of the notion of money," it deals with the very title of money and with the question of whether money must be, as one says in French, titrée, titrated®—and titrated by the State—in order to earn its title as money. Everything turns around this value of title and the title of value. In sum, it is a matter of knowing when one is right to (entitled to, justified in) naming money, true money in opposition not to counterfeit money but to non-money. Mauss calls money what his objectors say is not true money and he claims that it is in truth true money, that it is truly authentic money, having the right to the title of true money even if it is not titrated or titled. Nevertheless, his adversaries would not say that this non-true money is counterfeit money.”

“At that moment, for this common, immediate reading that is facilitated by so many established and solid conventions, the title "Counterfeit Money" is already divided, betrayed, displaced. It has two referents: (1) what is called counterfeit money and (2) this text here, this story of counterfeit money. It has two referents that both title it—or titrate it as one ti-trates money and guarantees it: one is counterfeit money itself, the other is the narrative that has counterfeit money as its referent or narrated content, this story about counterfeit money. This first division then engenders many other dehiscences, virtually to infinity. For if this title is double, if it refers at the same time to the thing and to the narrative, to the text of the narrative, what is the consequence?
First of all, recall that the thing — as counterfeit money -is not a thing like any other, it is a sign and an incorrectly titled sign, a sign without value, if not without meaning, Next, the narrative is a fiction and a fiction of fiction, a fiction on the subject of fiction, the very fiction of fiction”

“As for the economy of the narrative and the narrative of the economy, we have glimpsed the reason for which the gift, if there is any, requires and at the same time excludes the possibility of narra-tive. The gift is on condition of the narrative, but simultaneously on the condition of possibility and impossibility of the narrative. The economy of this story of counterfeit money is put in circulation by a remainder but also contained in a remainder of change after a purchase of some tobacco. The time of the narrative begins once the change is returned, and returned after expenditure on a luxury: an unproductive expenditure-apparently at least—for the acquisition of a luxury product, that is, a product of pure consumption that is burned without leaving, apparently, any remainder. The two friends are apparently linked, in this scene, by the common possibility of smoking, in other words, of expending at a pure loss, for pure au-to-affective pleasure, very close to the voice, this singular natural product that is tobacco.”

“Among so many different texts on drugs and artificial paradise, we select, for reasons of pure proximity, the very brief and authoritarian
"Enivrez-vous," "Get Drunk." It justifies this exhortation by the necessity of fleeing from Time. Drugs, whether hard or soft, whether in the form "of wine, poetry or virtue," are salvation from Time. For if time is given to us, it is also counted and our days are numbered; the
"clock" is named twice in these few lines and the imperative, we would say, concerns the hour [l'heure]: "Il est l'heure de s'enivrer! Pour n'être pas les esclaves martyrisés du Temps, enivrez-vous sans cesse! De vin, de poésie ou de vertu, à votre guise" [It is time to get drunk! If you are not to be the martyred slaves of Time, be perpetually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue, at your pleasure].23 Drunkenness gives time but by assuring "salvation from Time." To give time would therefore come down to annuling it. Given time is time taken back. To give time is to take time and to take it back altogether, leav-ing, for example for Madame de Maintenon, only time enough to regret the rest. Four times time, time against time, this would be— along with smoke, money, women, and drunkenness— the subject.”

“The event takes place in the structured layers of the narration, in the fabric of the narrative relation that links the narrator to his friend.
For even the relation as link or as religion of friendship between them also takes-between them-the manifest form of the narrative rela-tion. If the friend had not told the narrator what had in fact happened”

“And he is assured this possible innocence by the aleatory nature of the capitalist machine. In this way the poor man owes him nothing.
Let us go a step further: The counterfeiter will have figured out how to indebt himself infinitely, and will have given himself the chance of escaping in this way from the mastery of reappropriation. He will have figured out how to break indefinitely the circle or the symmetry.
Conditions: fault, debt, duty.
And thereby another-inverse—hypothesis is authorized, but one which is included in the preceding one. It is the hypothesis of the worst violence: At little cost, while giving the poor man his chance, he has indebted that man who can do nothing about it, he has surprised his friend not only by the force of his calculations but also by the calm force of his confession. He has honored his contract of friendship because he has told the truth: I owe you the truth, I will tell you the truth, it was the counterfeit coin. Assuming that he did tell the truth, and the truth counts here! Assuming that there is any sense in speculating on it! For it is also possible—we will never know”

“It is almost as if the other had not honored the credit that his friend the narrator had opened for him by "lending wings" to his mind. He lent him wings, the other did not return them. Remains this enigma”

"Icarus dies for having "em-braced the clouds..

My consumed eyes see only
Souvenirs of the sun.”

“These are the structural paradoxes, the stigmata of the impossibility with which we began: So as not to take over the other, the overtaking by surprise of the pure gift should have the generosity to give nothing that surprises and appears as gift, nothing that presents itself as present... And at stake in this forgetting that carries beyond any present is the gift as remaining without memory, without permanence and consistency, without substance or subsistence… The secret of that about which one cannot speak, but which one can no longer silence.”

“the "lending" of wings and to the credit of all the hypotheses: "'It was the counterfeit coin, he calmly replied as though to justify himself for his prodigality.”

"Careful, you think there is gift, dissymmetry, generosity, expenditure, or loss, but the circle of debt, of exchange, or of symbolic equilibrium reconstitutes itself according to the laws of the unconscious; the 'generous' or 'grateful consciousness is only the phenomenon of a calculation and the ruse of an economy. Calculation and ruse, economy in truth would be the truth of these phenomena."
But such a displacement does not affect the paradox with which we are struggling, namely, the impossibility or the double bind of the gift…we had in mind also the keeping in the Unconscious, memory, the putting into reserve or temporalization as effect of repression. For there to be gift, not only must the donor or donee not perceive or receive the gift as such, have no consciousness of it, no memory, no recognition; he or she must also forget it right away..It must not give rise to any of the repressions that reconstitute debt and exchange by putting in reserve, by keeping or saving up what is forgotten, repressed, or censured..As condition of a gift event, condition for the advent of a gift, absolute forgetting should no longer have any relation with either the psycho-philosophical category of forgetting or even with the psychoanalytic category that links forgetting to meaning or to the logic of the signifier, to the economy of repression, and to the symbolic order. The thought of this radical forgetting as thought of the gift should accord with a certain experience of the trace'
…traces of repression, this forgetting, this forgetting of the gift cannot be a simple non-experience, a simple non-appearance, a self-effacement that is carried off with what it effaces. For there to be gift event (we say event and not act), something must come about or happen, in an instant, in an instant that no doubt does not belong to the economy of time, in a time without time, in such a way that the forgetting forgets, that it forgets itself..Far from giving us to think the possibility of the gift, on the contrary, it is on the basis of what takes shape in the name gift that one could hope thus to think forgetting. For there to be forgetting in this sense, there must be gift. The gift would also be the condition of forgetting.. One might say on the mode of being of forgetting, if "mode" and "mode of being" did not belong to an ontological grammar..Forgetting and gift would therefore be each in the condition of the other. This already puts us on the path to be followed. Not a particular path leading here or there, but on the path”

[Maksym Karpovets · Rating 4 out of 5]

Найбільш легка для сприйняття книга Дерріди. В основі тексту є спроба осмислити природу, специфіку і суперечність часу завдяки методу деконструкції (хоча конкретного і покрокового використання/апробування цього методу не знайдемо ні в Дерріди, ні в його послідовників). Варто нагадати, що це філософське поняття дотичне до поняття деструкція, яке вводить у філософський дискурс Мартин Гайдеґґер, але саме в постструктуралістській теорії Жака Дерріди воно набуває форми критичного інструментарію і вперше обґрунтовується в праці Дещо, що відноситься до граматології (1967). Завдяки залученні широкого контексту філософських, художніх та історичних текстів, автор намагається відповісти на низку питань: що значить дарувати і мати час? як ми можемо взагалі говорити про час?

Щоб відповісти на ці питання Дерріда намагається віднайти для них точку опори у з’ясуванні умов можливості дарування. Чи можливо дарувати без занурення в деспотизм культури, який трансформує дар в борг, що передбачає майбутню його виплату? Це фундаментальне питання є наскрізним в тексті і дотичне до теоретичних пошуків Мішеля Фуко, зокрема його ідеї про місце влади і наглядання в культурі. Однак Дерріда на противагу ідеям Фуко не робить історико-культурний екскурс проблеми, а намагається деконструювати і переосмислити класичні, здавалося, кліше щодо дарування і часу. Так, дарувати час” – не значить давати справжній дарунок, а означає умову присутності усіх дарунків; „дарувати життя” буквально не дає нічого. Показово, що Дерріда завдяки деконструкції настільки розхитує поняття аналізу на тлі літератури та історії економіки, що практично обезсмислює їх і обнадіює будь-яку можливість сенсу.

Важливо, що в збірці попри різноманітній діапазон аналізованих текстів зберігається загальна логіка вирішення поставлених завдань. Починаючи із прикладу листа Мадам де Ментон, Жак Дерріда рухається крізь економічні питання і знову ж таки філософію Мартина Гайдеґґера, а згодом Едмунда Гуссерля, ідеї Марселя Мосса, Жака Лакана та художню літературу. Закінчується цей рух спробою розуміння дару і віддарювання, вибачення і пробачення у Фальшивій монети Бодлера. Саме в цій найбільшій частині доволі нелегкої для читання книги (традиційно для текстів французького теоретика) Жак Дерріда доводить, що ми не можемо ні символічно, ні семантично артикулювати феномену дарування і часу, а тому повинні бути свідомі хиткості концептів і припускати лише відкриту можливість розуміння, але ніколи не повинні бути ствердними щодо будь-чого. В якості фінального акорду Дерріда підкреслює основну ідею свої міркувань: Ми весь час говоримо можливо.

3/5

[Dans]

I’ve been reading this across different times and cities, meeting people I knew online for the first time, telling them about the concept of the book and the impossibility of the gift, taking pictures of the cover in different cafes, thinking about meeting while not meeting all of these people projecting and being projected upon with duties and emotions, all impossible gifts..

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A SERIES OF LECTURES DEVOTED TO “THE QUESTION OF THE GIFT”…

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) was a French philosopher and writer, best known for developing a form of semiotic analysis known as “Deconstruction.”

He wrote in the Foreword to this 1991 book, “this work follows a trajectory the corresponds faithfully to the one I followed in the first five sessions of a seminar given under the same title in 1977-78 at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and the next year at Yale University… the distribution of the four chapters reproduces the rhythm of … Lectures delivered at the University of Chicago in April 1991. On that occasion, I in fact attempted to formalize the discourse first proposed in 1977-78 and which still had a particular significance for me: It was in the course of this seminar that I gave more thematic figuration to a set of questions which for a long time had organized themselves around that of the gift… The problematic of the gift, such as it had signaled itself to me or imposed itself on me up to that point reached there, precisely at the limit of its formalization, a sort of intermediary stage, a moment of passage. The premises of this unpublished seminar remained implied, in one way or another, in later works that were all devoted … to the question of the gift….”

The “gift” concept comes from the epigraph from Baudelaire: ‘The King takes all my time; I give the rest to Saint-Cyrm, to whom I would like to give all.” (Pg. 1)

He says in the first chapter, “The motif of the circle will obsess us throughout this cycle of lectures. Let us provisionally set aside the question of whether we are talking about a geometric figure, a metaphorical representation, or a great symbol, the symbol of the symbolic itself… Saying that the circle will obsess us is another way of saying it will encircle us. It will besiege us all the while that we will be regularly attempting to exit. But why exactly would one desire, along with the gift, if there is any, the exit? Why desire the gift and why desire to interrupt the circulation of the circle? Why wish to get out of it? Why wish to get through it?” (Pg. 7-8)

He states, “We are not talking therefore about conditions in the sense of conditions posed (since forgetting and gift, if there is any, are in this sense unconditional), but in the sense in which forgetting would be in the condition of the gift and the gift in the condition of forgetting; one might say on the mode of being of forgetting, if ‘mode’ and ‘mode of being’ did not belong to an ontological grammar that is exceeded by what we are trying to talk about here, that is, gift and forgetting. But such is the condition of all the words that we will be using here, of all the words given in our language---and this linguistic problem, let us say rather than this problem of language before linguistics, will naturally be our obsession here. Forgetting and gift would therefore be each in the condition of the other.” (Pg. 17-18)

He notes, “We are going to give ourselves over to and engage in the effort of thinking or rethinking a sort of transcendental illusion of the gift. For in order to think the gift, a theory of the gift is powerless by its very essence. One must engage oneself in this thinking, commit oneself to it, give it tokens of faith, and with one’s person, risk entering into the destructive circle. One must promise and swear. The effort of thinking or rethinking a sort of transcendental illusion of the gift should not be a simple reproduction of Kant’s critical machinery… But neither it is a matter of rejecting that machinery as old-fashioned.” (Pg. 30)

He observes, “The gift is not a gift, the gift only gives to the extent it gives time. The difference between a gift and every other operation of pure and simple exchange is that the gift gives time. There where there is gift, there is time. What it gives, the gift, is time, but this gift of time is also a demand of time. The thing must not be restituted immediately and right away. There must be time, it must last, there must be waiting---without forgetting…” (Pg. 41)

He explains, “The title of ‘Counterfeit Money’ is, may be, counterfeit money. Counterfeit money is never, as such, counterfeit money. As soon as it is what it is, recognized as such, it ceases to act as and to be worth counterfeit money. It only is by being able to be, perhaps, what it is. This irreducible modality taken into account, and inasmuch as the title may belong to it, obligates you. It obligates you first of all to wonder money is: true money, false money, the falsely true and the truly false---and non-money which is neither true nor false, and so forth.” (Pg. 87)

After a six-page digression about tobacco, he states, “You will no doubt find such a long detour to be excessive, especially on the subject of an elliptical allusion to the tobacconist’s in the first line of ‘Counterfeit Money.’ Why this digression? Is it because a digression---wandering or risky promenade, apparently without method---marks the step of the two friends in ‘Counterfeit Money’ and no doubt the rhythm of every incalculable scene of the gift? Or can the digression be justified by the fact that Baudelaire often paid attention, in other narratives, to the symbolics of tobacco or more exactly to tobacco as symbol of the symbolic itself?” (Pg. 114)

There is little of any “philosophical” import in this book; but those interested Derrida’s writing as “literature” may be delighted with it.

[Muhammed Nijim · Rating 4 out of 5]

In his book Given Time: Counterfeit Money (1994), Jacques Derrida tries to challenge the idea of ‘gift’ and its position within the common economic system, namely capitalism. Derrida seems to be influenced by many philosophers such as Hegel and Marx. There is no doubt that Derrida had read Marx’s works, especially his phenomenal text of Capital (1867), and based many of his arguments in this book, without saying so, on that. Yet, he criticizes Marx in a few parts throughout the book because he thinks that the main problem that all of us face today lies beyond the economic system. He critiques the structural approach and believes that the major dilemma is the perpetuation of a hegemonic system, not only through economy, but more importantly through language and semiotics. In so doing, he implicitly rejects the base and superstructure approach that was Marx theorized. Derrida seems to accuse that approach of being deterministic as it diagnoses the reality, mainly, from an economic standpoint. Language, semiotics, and psychoanalysis seem to be some underlying and root causes for the hegemonic reality that we have, according to Derrida. One should note that Marx was not primarily interested in the psychoanalytic or the linguistic side per se. Economy is a powerful institution in any state, but for Derrida power exists immensely in the language and semiotics that mould and engineer our daily life and cultures. In his view, the inheritance of the same lingual system and taking it for granted without challenging its tenets and foundations represent the major dilemma. Reforms must be applied to our linguistic and cultural systems before starting to build other institutions including economic.
The ‘gift’ is the main example that Derrida provides to explain what goes in his mind. He problematizes the etymology of the word and argues that its linguistic and semiotic breakdown does not make sense, and maybe we should not call a gift a gift. It is what interrupts the capitalist economy by suspending economic circulation. The exchange formula in its capitalist understanding as given by Marx in his Capital (M-C-M) exists to be. The gift takes the formula of (C-C) and this transaction does not occur immediately. One receives a gift, and s/he is expected to return it on an occasion, depending on the culture. Culture is essentially maintained through language, which is another layer of Derrida’s argument. The form of gifting is impossible according to Derrida, for one should not expect a return and should forget that immediately. Reciprocity should be a precondition for gifting. What Derrida is trying to say, is what is the difference between a gift (in our conventional understanding of it, as it should be accompanied by a return) and a commodity. In our capitalist system, we usually spend money to buy a gift, and for a return gift, the other party should spend money to buy an equivalent gift. Thus, what is the difference between the commodity and the gift? According to Derrida, the language could be inaccurate, or the cultural perception could be erroneous and misleading. When one gives a gift, s/he should not deny any interest or calculations – s/he should misrecognize the giving act and forget about it. Therefore, in the case of giving, generosity becomes inevitable. One cannot say that s/he gives out of generosity but gave with generosity – generosity ceases to be a personal choice but part of a correct lingual and cultural reality.
I believe that the rectification of our lingual, semiotic, and cultural systems can be transformative and can help people regain their agency and become their true selves. The liberation of oneself begins with speaking an expressive language that speaks about true reality. For example, to refer to feudalism or slavery, we often use expressions such as “people were sold and bought.” However, when one speaks about capitalism, we often use expressions such as “people sell their time to the capitalist.” Someone like Derrida would disagree on that and argue that time is invisible and non-physical, and thus it cannot be bought or sold. People will become more conscious if we begin to reform these words and expressions. Imagine that the proletariat in the capitalist system starts to use expressions such as “we sell ourselves.” This is more dehumanizing, demeaning, and triggers a revolt against such a system. For Derrida, change must begin from there before we go ahead and call for a new economic system that would be entrapped in the same dilemma, and hence his biggest critique of Marx. Based on that, Derrida would argue that even Marx himself and his theories are maintaining the same cultural, linguistic, and power system and not changing it. For if we build a new system based on European cultures and languages – which require profound reform, we will be perpetuating the same old system of hegemony.
Although hard to follow and deconstruct, this book raises a lot of questions for those who take the Marxist theory for granted. The book could be used to start a new liberating project similar to what Marx calls for in Capital. For Derrida, any economic reform should be preceded by cultural and lingual reform that can give us a refined language, for it’s the foundation of any epistemological project.

[Juan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've read my share of philosophy and even though some ideas were interesting I found it dull and intentionally complicated.

[Drigo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Much can be and has already been said about Derrida's style of writing, so I won't repeat the well worn criticism about the meandering, the repetition, the writing as though thinking through writing etc. In some of his work his style is less bothersome than others, here it seems his topic has him touching on themes that are not at all his strength and ths he meanders as a means to connect the threads without necessarily having a bigger thesis connecting them (as one finds out upon completing the book). I will say that he produces a concept that of the "gift" that will have zero practicality for 99% of the world, but in doing so unearthed extremely interesting questions, few of which he gives answers to. From a literary standpoint, the book is highly disjointed with little connection between the first and later halves of the books and the ending leaves you wanting something more tangible than the scatering of theses/non-theses made throughout the pages. He invites you to read into so much but takes the risk to say so little, I cannot give more than 3 stars.

[Yota · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though I balked five pages into "Grammatology" this was much more readable. Need to be somewhat familiar with "The Gift" by Marcel Mauss.

Also need to be willing to really stop and think about the wordplay - present, serpent (Ouroboros), give, gift (which means poison in some languages)... it's all in the words!

[Michael · Rating 1 out of 5]

Philosophy. I remember the paper I wrote for this book. no fun.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really did like it, I think it was just too much for me at the time.

That being said, it really is incredible stuff, and Derrida is an incredible, unparalleled thinker.

[Marissa]

ugh