Post #33 of the Art as Gift project’s reading of Jacques Derrida’s Given Time

The relationship between the narrator and the friend is uncertain, questionable, did the friend truly give counterfeit money or did he lie to his friend in a false confession? As Derrida says we will never know the answer to this question, which says something about the place of belief in writing, which frames Baudelaire’s writing. Derrida describes this frame as a four-sided border, a “dislocated frame of a triptych,” (150) which excludes a fourth term.

The narrative is framed in such a way that we, the readers, are like the narrator, in debt to the friend. But we are also his creditor, we extend the credit of belief to him that he gave the counterfeit coin as he said. There is no way we can intervene in the scene in order to ascertain the truth or otherwise of the narrator’s claim. The dual, dialogic nature of the friend’s “stroll tete-a-tete” excludes the reader’s access to the secret, as it excludes the author himself. (150-152)

Derek Hampson