Repository | Book | Chapter

This chapter takes many of the findings from previous chapters concerning Marion and Derrida's respective positions on the gift and desire, and demonstrates the stark differences between the two thinkers according to four aspects: anti-subjectivity/the adonné, possibility/impossibility, the gift/givenness, and narcissism/love. It also turns to Marion's and Derrida's 1997 roundtable discussion on "On the Gift" in order to provide further insight into this juxtaposition. Although Derrida is correct to reject the modern ego, Marion is convinced that something must stand "in its place." Yet Derrida claims that Marion's phenomenology privileges the "possible," which is an economical concept that inhibits the arrival of the gift despite any intentional effort to bring it about. Thirdly, while Derrida conceives of the gift in an aporetic relationship with economy and its possibilities, Marion demotes economy to the primacy of givenness. Then, although Marion conceives of love according to its being a gift par excellence, Derrida insists that love is inherently "narcissistic" because it involves an appropriation of the other for the sake of one's own desires or inherently economical interests. Does Marion's theory of givenness rely upon a "cosmic giver," despite his insistence upon the unexpected appearance of things in their supra-subjective state? Are there temporal vicissitudes that mark an inherent rupture in the steady constitution of the gift, and if so, should the gift be thought according to the register of "impossibility" or of "givenness"?

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-27942-8_8

Full citation: