Post #32 of the Art as Gift project’s reading of Jacques Derrida’s Given Time

The interaction between the two friends in Counterfeit Money is fraught with accusation, which leads to the friend justifying his action of seeming over-generosity by saying he had given a counterfeit coin. Derrida speculates on why the friend says this. He may be asking to get himself excused for his prodigality and for dominance of the narrator through his larger donation. His confession may signal a naively triumphal and boastful account of his speculative abilities. Yet these hypotheses do not exclude each other, they bear the appearance of counterfeit money, as such the false-donor the narrator is free of the violence of the gift, breaking the cycle of exchange implicit in the gift. (149-150)

Derek Hampson