Post #26 of the Art as Gift project’s reading of Jacques Derrida’s Given Time

The Unconditionality of the Gift and the Event (123)

The event…the unique, the one-off, happening now and never to be repeated.

Both the gift and the event must be unforeseeable and must be structured by the aleatory the “chancy,” apprehended in a “perception that is absolutely surprised by the encounter with what it perceives.” A gift or an event that was foreseeable would not be “lived” as either a gift or an event.

The condition common to both the gift and the event is a certain “unconditionality.” The event as gift and the gift as event must be irruptive, unmotivated, disinterested. They must tear the fabric, interrupt the continuum of the narrative that they call for. The effect of the gift and event must be in the instant, bringing into relation luck and the freedom of the throw of the dice. The gift and the event obey nothing, except perhaps principles of disorder.

Yet effects of pure chance will never constitute a gift if its meaning includes the desire to give a gift. Derrida asks “what would a gift be if I gave without wanting to give?” This is the paradox of the gift, which is explored from the beginning of Given Time. There is no gift without the intention of giving, the gift can only have a meaning that is intentional in both senses of the word. Intention as wanting to give and intentionality as being directed towards the gift and the act of giving. Yet this intentional meaning also threatens the gift with being taken for and kept as a gift, annulling it as a gift. This expresses the enigma of the gift event, which must encompass both chance and intentional freedom, “these two conditions must – miraculously, graciously – agree with each other.”

Derek Hampson