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Giving, Going, Gone: Variations onDerrida's Death of the GiftMichael Angelo TataPublished online: 26 Jan 2010.

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Giving, Going, Gone: Variations on Derrida’s Death of the Gift

Michael Angelo Tata

Oh, To Give Oblivion . . .

For Jacques Derrida, death itself constitutes an exchange-beyond-exchange withphilosophical and theological import, and as such arrives as the ultimate gift.1 Yet aswhat he means by the gift of death with regard to gifting in general and its functionwithin the average human life is not nailed down with any precision or specificity, itis possible to read the gift in a number of ways: in terms of concrete items circulatingamong a social structure and determining the status of its various members, throughreception histories and affect production within consumer culture, and evenregressively, in relation to the flux orchestrated at a cellular level throughmetabolism and the passage of molecules across a membrane demarcating an insidefrom an outside. Given Derrida’s deconstructive excrescence and its anthropologicaldestabilization of the gift, identifying a particular cadeau, recipient and responsebecomes largely a matter of taste, scope and interpretation, leaving these issuesmarvelously open to personal appropriation and reflection. Like Kierkegaard’s‘Knight of Faith’ in Fear and Trembling, in the non-moment corresponding to thetemporality of the gift, instantaneous and hence immeasurable according tostandards of empiricism since its temporal boundaries can never be clearly drawnand exist only as blurred nebula or corona fringing a number line, when I give anygift, and especially the gift of death, I suspend the ethical in order to transcend theethical, engaging the absolute duty of Kantian ethics and practical reason bydispensing with the categorical imperative in an Augenblick of unsurpassablegenerosity: it is in this way only that I may give the gift of death, the oblativeextreme by which all other acts of donation are compared.2

Supremely, the gift of death comes to denote the sacrifice or burnt offering I supplyto a Deity with whom I exist in a relationship of radical dissymmetry. In thisscenario, ‘the ethical is a temptation’, as I am faced with the madness of the instant andeither leap counter-intuitively into this vortex spinning wildly before me, or remainbehind with the safety of law and consensus, my physical reward.3 As in the OldTestament story of Abraham and Isaac, in the moment of gifting, I am called by theOther to perform an act which will violate every standard of sanity and decorumknown to my society, and I am presented with the alternative of either obeying thedisembodied voice of the abyss and breaking any number of laws, or disobeying thedivine and remaining within the comfort of the ethical, which sanctions my refusal

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ISSN 1353-4645 print/ISSN 1460-700X online q 2010 Taylor & Francishttp://www.tandf.co.uk/journalsDOI: 10.1080/13534640903478734

parallax, 2010, vol. 16, no. 1, 47–55

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and offers me the solace of knowing that I have ‘done the right thing’. Hence I mightremain fixated on the ethical, or transcend it toward the religious, much as, in theFreudian system, my development may arrest at the anal stage, or continue ontoward the genitals: either I pass through and transcend this stage, or remainbehind, my desires pinned to the wrong object in the genesis of perversion.4

The thesaurization, or laying up of wealth, I undertake with regard to the richesI am able to accumulate in the Derridean paradigm thus takes two potential pathsrepresenting two specific and heteronymous economies: either I obey the ethical andamass earthly treasure as my proper remuneration for following its dicta, therebybecoming a pervert for ethics, or I defy the ethical in order to earn spiritual richesaccumulating in an elsewhere while my ‘here’ slips away, thereby becoming apervert for my peers, family, neighbors, and colleagues: ‘Now the line demarcatingcelestial from terrestrial economy is what allows one to situate the rightful place ofthe heart’.5 And where I locate my heart is everything, at least as far as the gift isconcerned, and where perversion enters the picture.

Derrida’s observations on gifting and ethical suspension in The Gift of Death

supplement those he offers in Given Time I: Counterfeit Money, the textual locus inwhich he first lays out what is at stake in the transcendental dimensionality of thegift, be it of death, time or object per se, and those qualities it must share with allgift-like species participating in its genus in order for the gift to carry any semanticconsistency or breadth: ‘One may wonder whether this multiplicity of meanings thattransmits the multiplicity of givens and refracts it in the multiplicity of the to give has asort of general equivalent which would permit translation, metaphorization,metonymization, exchange within an ultimately homogenous semantic circle’.6 Yes,I do wonder, and am captivated by what kind of theory of the gift can be devised ifI take as my point of inception the morbid but delectable, awful yet awesome,offerings of death. Adding the perspectives of both books together, I undertake astrange mathematics; as I sum Given Time with its gendered allotment of time as thisquantity is parceled out by the morganatic wife of the Sun King, Madame deMaintenon (also Madame de Maintenant), and The Gift of Death with its centralproblem of suicide, as coded into the French idiom donner le mort, I arrive at a sense ofwhat is giftworthy about death, and death-worthy about the gift – i.e., what aboutthe gift constitutes a secret treasure transcending the simple quid pro quo of economicexchangism, what lies before and after the gift’s uncanny arrival, what value the gifthas for the European imagination and its commitment to metaphysical alternativesto death, and what the gift of death has to do with the history of responsibility andthe responsibility of history.7

Tied to questions of ethical obligation, the fate of the individual within thecommunity, and the interplay between demand and expectation, Given Time placesexpiration itself within a larger economical and chrematistical or commercialframework, where it becomes infinitely more than the mere termination of a humanlife due to trauma or physiological malfunction, and where its existence representsand exemplifies the primal generosity of the donative consciousness and thethereness of noumena like space, time and being.8 As with his treatment offriendship, fraternity and enmity inThe Politics of Friendship, Derrida presents death-as-gift in relation to a political meaning hinging upon pivots of self, radical otherness

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(the divine, the daemonic) and relative otherness (the ‘other others’ or the ‘ToutAutre Et Tout Autre’ populating a communal and/or mythopoetic structure).9 Everdemonstrating the surprising ways in which the personal and the political supportone another in a range of experiences verging on the ontological extremerepresented by the relationship between Yahweh and Abraham in the OldTestament and the looming sacrifice of Isaac – a gift which, incidentally, can onlybe refused, never accepted, as illuminated by Yahweh’s exemplary termination ofAbraham’s gift-sacrifice – Derrida in The Gift of Death examines the sacrificialnature of gifting, while in Given Time he exposes the ethics of exchange and itstranscendence through donation. Specifically, in Given Time, the act of giving almspresents a situation in which selfhood and otherness come into contact through thecharitable deed and its falsification, his prime example being Baudelaire’s prosepoem ‘Counterfeit Money’ from his collection Paris Spleen, as it is in this piece thatfriendship finds itself jeopardized by the truth and falsehood of giving as specularperformance or show permitting the giver to reap diurnal riches in the form of anenhanced reputation based on the visual dissimulation of counterfeit currency,10 orwhat Kant in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View refers to as Scheidemunze(literally small change, but also that smallest change of all: fausse monnaie).11 By theside of the Abraham and Isaac story, this Baudelairian snippet removes gifting fromthe radical dissymmetry of the human/divine relationship, placing it within therelative dissymmetries of human/human relationships, all to demonstratethe dangers of gifting, which might, after all, culminate in jealousy, displeasure,and the dissolution of friendship: such are the vicissitudes of fortune.

Scatological Roots, Eschatological Routes

Beyond Derrida’s ‘phenomenoblativity’, as I would term it, gift-giving may becarried back further, returned to the crassly physical sense represented by the proto-gifts uncovered by psychoanalysis, for which ‘gift’ begins as fecal material and thedemonstration of anal control, as in the Freudian notion of an anality that is the seatof generosity and the Lacanian theory of the scybala and its role in metaphor, orlaunched forward toward the aesthetics of the individual’s inevitable dissolution atthe terminus of his or her timeline, death the final item in an individual’s giftingseries.12 The vistas these perspectives afford allow an expansion of Derrida’sconcepts of the exchange of life for value and the transcendence of life represented bymy death, a death that only I can die, even if I am offered the gift of a stand-in,someone who fills in for me while I expire, taking my death so that I may live (forexample, Sydney Carton’s accession to the guillotine in Dickens’s A Tale of Two

Cities). For the only death that I can ever know or experience is my death, its scarletgenitive tying me inextricably to and with the irreplacebility of my passing, ajourney only I can take, even if a proxy wills to go in lieu of me. My ‘irreplaceablesingularity’ leads directly to my responsibility for my own death, an experience thatcannot be transferred or deferred because it can only take place once, and for meonly.13 In this vein, the aesthetics of death also play a critical role in its giftliness, myirreplaceability and singularity making the set of experiences bounded by my birthand death something of a consumable surface for these others around me, whoappreciate death qua sublime commodity. As death arrives to close out a perfectly

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bounded set of human experiences for me and me alone, I am left to wonder whateffect it will have on the totality of my existence and on the reception of that totalitywith respect to those communities to which it is presented, the open set of myexistence finding itself suddenly closed, complete, passe, surpassed, a commodity inits own right, present solely through the presentness and presence of its pastness, agilded fait accompli that is my final offering.

In some sense, there is always an artistic coefficient to death, an art of dying,whether I give death or receive it: for example, the passing of Anna Nicole Smith, or,more recently and acutely, Michael Jackson, can come as nothing but the mostperfect quintessence of a life lived on a pharmaceutical and psychiatric edge, whilethe famed end of Nietzsche enhances his nihilism, messianism and transvaluationismwith the spectacle of a psychic and syphilitic break in whose gaps treponemesproduce megalomania. Supplementing Derrida’s connections among giving,befriending and sacrificing, I thus seek to expand the notion of death’s giftworthinesssuch that it incorporates a critique of subjectivity and of the aesthetics of termsotherwise existential in nature (Heidegger’s time, Sartre’s nothingness), transitionstraditionally belonging to the domain of ethics (Kierkegaard’s stages), and evenbiological designations (the treponemic etiology of syphilis). As terminalpunctuation mark or closing bracket making it no longer possible to continue asyntax or fill a mathematical space with numerical and geometrical items, deathalways arrives as a gift, whether we wish to sign for it or leave it on our neighbor’sstoop. Aesthetically, death’s strange beneficence refers to social phenomena like theexecution of Socrates in the Phaedo, hemlock arriving at just the right moment and injust the right way to solidify Socrates’s equation of lover of wisdom with lover ofdeath and to make it clear that the melet�e thanatou, or discipline and exercise of death,has taken place publicly with utter perfection for the witness, Phaedo, the witness’witness, Euchrates, and the witness’ witness’ witness, us, whoever we are, where- andwhenever we may be.14 Furthermore, the melet�e thanatou can also be extended to referto incorporation and the work of mourning, or those ways in which the presentabsence of the beloved inspire us to take her into ourselves for special processing untilshe becomes the absent absence of amnesia – as happens, for example, in Proust’sThe Fugitive, as the gravity of oblivion’s geodesic pulls the narrator away from thepresent absence of Albertine Simonet. Consequently, death and gift effect anenrichment of the Freudian notion of incorporation presented in Mourning and

Melancholia, bringing it closer to sublimation, that one aesthetic method whichproduces the masterpiece from the inchoate, the artistic from the insufferable; theDerridean hybrid category of the gift of (the work of) mourning will thus be my finalresting place as I conclude this contemplation on why and how death bearssomething of the gift about it, and what to do with that gift once the onus is upon usto accept it.15 For unlike the deity, who can refuse such a gift, the human being hasno choice but to receive it, and thus to do something with it, and about it, and to it.And through it.

When Paula Abdul, on Episode 104 of her television fiasco Hey, Paula utters,without the faintest tint of irony, comedy, or camp, ‘I’m tired of people nottreating me like the gift I am’, she speaks to both the psychoanalytic connectionbetween oblativity and ‘eliminating’, as well as to the gift of a death which brings

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about a celebrity that might stand the test of time: Paula is the gift that keeps ongiving, a generous philanthropist producing ever more of herself, tweet byprecious tweet, despite the fact that she is underappreciated, treated like ascybala.16 For, like Nietzsche, or Anna, or Michael, Paula is a gift, somethingselflessly given to the masses implied by any theory of ‘mass production’ or‘mass psychology’, given to be rented, destroyed, devoured, made use of, digested,and, ultimately, expelled, repelled into the impersonal space of star maps and thechilly annals of popular culture. We wonder: with all these rumors of drinkingand pill-popping, what will her, Paula’s, Paula Abdul’s, death be like when itarrives, an end uniquely hers, final famous quantum or master stroke she is ableto offer before her skin turns cold to the touch and we are off to the next disasteror disorder in this age of community-without-community? When it arrives, herswill be a death I can, and must, accept, unless I mythologize her absence andposit an alternate existence for her on a desert island with Elvis Presley and EdithPiaf: if only Weekly World News had not gone out of print. In the meantime, I cancontent myself watching her performance in Sacha Baron Cohen’s Bruno, as she isconvinced that live Mexicans make the most chic furniture, and cavalierlydispenses lessons in giving from the literal back of a ‘wetback’, taking the time toreach for a glass of water laid out for her refreshment on a human table by herpredatory host as she speculates about the spiritual returns of giving, that firsteconomy we must transcend, if ever there is to be the gift of death, or any gift atall.17 Voracious, we demand death, and wait for it patiently. Paula gives andgives, and, perhaps, like Michael and Anna and Friedrich, will one day handover to us as our rightful inheritance that utter and singular disappearancewithout which we will never be satisfied. Hers is the gift-to-come, something wecan only order telepoetically, or by placing a Derridean telephone call to a QVCof the future.18

The Gift of (the Work of) Mourning

With the work of Jacques Derrida, and in some sense deconstruction in general,it becomes imperative for one to play in order for there to be work. For me, thistendency means capitalizing upon the desire to crosswire various Derrideanconcepts, such that they pass through textual chiasma, or crossroads, and exitthe loop deformed, mutilated, recombinant. Performing this operation, variouschimaeric concepts follow: for example, death of the gift, given death,counterfeit death, counterfeit time, the gift of mourning, the work of death, thework of the gift, and, most importantly, the gift of (the work of) mourning. Thisfinal item in my series of Derridean mutants is where I am led by Derrida,Freud, Lacan, Nietzsche, Anna, and Michael, perhaps Paula, all of whom seemto be ordering me to find some order in the entropies of death, metempsychosesof mind and matter which act the part of gift, and must be analyzedaccordingly, whether the cadeau is essentially anal, lamellal, mortal or fiscal.19

After entertaining these possibilities, or ‘variations’, as I have identified them, itseems that the place of confluence for these themes and motifs has become thework of mourning as gift-effect, or, in other words, the introjection/incorporationbifid and the dual paths it offers to us after we have received the gift of

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another’s death or the gift that death makes of an/other. For the gift of my owndeath as it is received by others to whom it might make a difference has nomeaning for me whatsoever, except to constitute an unknowable horizon of myexperience, ‘unknowable’ because it is not clear what happens when theknowledge of my passing is transmitted to me, if I am ever able to grasp thatlimit to my thought. Yet for the other others of the Derridean scheme, mydeath, arriving as gift, possesses intrinsic value, and caries along with it a task:that of doing something with my remains, both from the standpoint of burial,cremation or other preparation of my death for corporeal dissolution, and interms of a cultural work bearing a family resemblance to other psychiccreations, like the dreamwork, the wahnbildungsarbeit, or, above all, sublimation.In some extremes, as with the death of Anna Nicole Smith, bodily preparationand mnemonic processing clash, leading in her case to legal battles over theownership of the corpse, and therein making aesthetic closure something of apublic scandal, although even here, mourning is both gift and work, as werepeat her dying over and over again as a means of keeping her alive.

InMourning andMelancholia, Freud outlines the two classic paths we might take whenpresented with the gift of death: either we may mourn and incorporate, or becomemelancholy and introject. To introject is to install the bad object or doppelganger deepwithin us, where, along with phenomena like primal repression, it continues to exerta pernicious pull, while to incorporate is to take the death of the significant otherand find a way to fashion it into a part of the mosaic of selfhood we have alreadyconstructed as work-in-progress. At this juncture, vastation creates a rift in mysubjectivity, posing the challenge of accepting the gift of death and using themourning process to metabolize this present absence: otherwise, the vastness of myvastation might engulf me, leaving me suspended over its emptiness like a pigroasting on a spit. Lacan, too, recognizes the dual options available to me as I acceptthis unwanted gift:

The terms introjection or projection are always used ratherrecklessly. But, certainly, even in this context of unsatisfactorytheorization, something is given to us that comes into the foregroundon all sides, namely, the function of the internal object. In the end,this function is polarized into the extremes of that good or badobject, around which, for some, revolves everything in a subject’sbehaviour that represents distortion, inflection, paradoxical fear,foreign body.20

The status of this foreign body is critical, depending upon my ability to take on theincredible responsibilities demanded of me by the gift of death, which gives me theunparalleled opportunity to experience the joy of the grief of loss, the rare pleasuresof devastation, and the salubrious recoils of de-vastation. The choice betweenincorporation and introjection comes to me straight from across an evolutionaryvoid, as the consequences of meiotic reproduction are a mortal world whose contentsdiminish over time, aspects of my habitus vanishing before me in what the Proust ofTime Regained rather accurately describes as being a ‘peepshow of the years’.

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What will I do with this box, gift bag or open hand? Does the knowledge thatsomewhere celibate ciliates, who know neither sex nor death, refrain fromexchanging ribonucleic strands bring me any solace, the possibility of their infinitedivisibility opening up a view of eternity that can never be mine, but which I mightappreciate from a vast distance? Am I brought any comfort from the thought that,like Anna Nicole Smith or Nietzsche, I might make death my gift by incorporating itinto an aesthetic performance or commodity: in other words, that by practicing themelet�e thanatou, I might find the one right way to end my existence properly, closingoff my present with just the right stroke? Socrates says, ‘I am afraid that other peopledo not realize that the one aim of those who practice philosophy in the propermanner is to practice for dying and death’,21 but then again, he also orders ‘Come,Crito, let us obey him. Let someone bring the poison if it is ready; if not, let the manprepare it’,22 and it is not soon after that he reports a heaviness and numbness in hislegs, an anaesthesia passing to his calves, then his heart, and eventually to his friends,especially Crito, who are uncertain what to do with the awesome responsibility thathas fallen upon them as recipients of the gift of Socrates’s death. That Phaedochooses to make a report of the incident, and Plato a closet drama of the report,should give some indication of what I mean by fusing Derrida’s concepts of the gift ofdeath with the work of mourning, providing an answer to the kinds of optionsavailable to me through incorporation, a process without which time itself mighthave no meaning outside of an interminable expanse of days and hours glutted withinterchangeable clumps of matter.

Back in the present, I hear a knock at my email door, and am invited to attend amemorial service for my friend, mentor, and icon Eve Sedgwick at ColumbiaUniversity. Once again, death has made a present of its presence, and I am not surewhat to do with this parcel of grief that has suddenly been handed to meelectronically. With regard to the job I am asked to do from among the other otherspopulating my noosphere, I am suddenly flooded with joy, as I am returned to humanstatus from the post-humanism of the ultracontemporary to the here-ness of mymind and body and whatever it is about the pair that makes me think they might bea pair in the first place: yes, I am a person, too, in case I have forgotten, all thesewires and screens feeding into me having convinced me that I might have becomesomething other than hominid. I am de-roboticized by this parcel of grief, by thelimestone chasm that opens before me. Yes, I have loved, and, yes, she will enter themontage of my subjectivity with the jagged and irregular traces of her presence.There is no time for melancholy, no luxury of wasting away: the work of mourning,the play of death, leads me on an expedition of uncovering the obscured tentacles ofa Calabi-YauManifold pulsing beneath a midnight sun belonging to any number ofimplicit dimensions. That I can work to mourn her is a privilege, just as, for Derrida,there is something fortuitous about his being able to mourn the likes of Levinas andLyotard: not everyone is so lucky, not everyone has the gift of tyche. Among theseruins, death’s gift, mourning, comes to me as morganatic morning-gift, even the giftof morning, which I feel dawning somewhere distant, yet accessible, Da to my sein asthe Sun King illuminates my grief with rays inciting photosynthetic sugarproduction and recalling plays of object and shadow, star and spotlight, image andafterimage.23

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Notes

* Cinzia Cremona’s My Scarlet Genitive is a visual

companian to Tata’s essay. Readers may view her

work at http://archieve.org/details/MyScarlet-

Genitive1 The paper is dedicated to Eve Sedgwick, with

gratitude, adoration and plenty of bamboo.2 While he does not overtly quote Sartre on this

point, it does seems that Derrida has in mind

Sartre’s observation that, within the temporal

ecstasies, there is no room for the instantaneous,

which arrives on the scene of time as profoundly

atemporal, or perhaps so steeped in time that it

cannot remove itself from the timeline long enough

to be measured, and hence intemporal: ‘The unity

of this crumbling, the temporal atom, will be the

instant, which has its place before certain determined

instants and after other instants without admitting

either before or after inside its own form. The

instant is indivisible and non-temporal since

temporality is succession, but the world dissolves

into an infinite dust of instants.’ Jean-Paul Sartre,

‘Temporality’, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomen-

ological Essay on Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes

(New York: Washington Square Press, 1982),

p.188. It is for this reason that, for Sartre, ‘the

Present is not’, while the past, through retention,

and the future, through protention, are (‘Tem-

porality’, p.178). The paradox of the instant recalls

Lebiniz’s attention to the plenum as philosophical

and geometrical problem in essays like ‘The

Monadology’: ‘61 . . .For everything is a plenum,

which makes all matter interconnected.’ See G.W.

Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, trans. Roger Ariew

and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub-

lishing Company, 1989), p.221. In other words,

geometrically speaking, there are no points, only

lines, no isolable atoms, only continua (‘A Speci-

men of Dynamics’).3 Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans.

David Wills (Chicago: The University of Chicago

Press, 1995). p.61. As for the suspension of the

ethical central to Kierkegaard’s thought in

Either/Or and Fear and Trembling, Derrida presents

two readings. Either the ethical is the pejorative

term, and we transcend it in order to ascend to a

higher phase, as with Kierkegaard’s concept of

the religious, or we suspend it in order to return

to it, as in Levinas’ take on the transcendence of

ethics in his Noms propres. See The Gift of Death,

p.78, n6.4 Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of

Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic

Books, 2000).5 Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, p.97.6 Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. CounterfeitMoney,

trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: The University of

Chicago Press, 1994), p.53.7 Given the obsessions of Madame de Maintenon

with time and its distribution, I dub herMadame de

Maintenant, as she is the queen of now, the madame

of the instant, the maven of the minute.8 In Given Time, Derrida contrasts economics,

which center on home and hearth, with chrema-

tistics, which center on those extra-nuclear

exchanges the family inhabiting that home and

hearth are to undertake in their productive

relations with other families: ‘There is no doubt

what Aristotle had in mind when he distinguished

between chrematistics and economy. The first,

which consists of acquiring goods by means of

commerce, therefore by monetary circulation or

exchange, has no limit in principle. Economy, on

the other hand, that is, the management of the

oikos, of the home, the family, or the hearth, is

limited to the goods necessary to life. It preserves

itself from the illusion, that is, from the chrema-

tistic speculation that confuses wealth with

money.’ See Jacques Derrida, Given Time, p.158.9 For Derrida, the actual line, a chapter title,

reads ‘Tout Autre Est Tout Autre’; I have

substituted ‘Et’ (and) for ‘Est’ (is), both in the

deconstructive spirit of phonetic and homonymic

play, a bit of differance, as well as to link the two

classes of otherness with a paratactic connection

making them in some way ‘summable’ by the non-

other (who, of course, is one of the other others for

the other others and the Other).10 In ‘Counterfeit Money’, Baudelaire presents

gifting as a sort of rivalry threatening the placidity

of the homosexual or homosocial pair. When one

man bestows a fake coin upon a local bum, a

Pandora’s box of gifting problems is opened.

Significantly enough, Derrida reprints the entirety

of Baudelaire’s poem in a flap or furrow at the end

of the book, a secret compartment recalling the

discussion of secrecy inThe Gift of Death: that is, his

caveat that for the secret to be secret, even I must

forget that it exists, despite the fact that it is my

secret, opaque and opalescent as it sinks to the

depths of my being, inaccessible but distinct.11 For Kant, small change, or Scheidemunze, is a

species of counterfeit money, in that through its

distribution and circulation, it effects the exchange

of valuelessness for value: ‘Every human virtue in

circulation is small change, only a child takes it for

real gold. Nevertheless, it is better to circulate

pocket pieces than nothing at all. In the end, they

can be converted into genuine gold coins, though

at a considerable loss.’ Still, when the chips are down,

‘something serious can come from such play with

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pretences’, as the devalued or falsely valued

miraculously turns a real profit. Kant’s remarks

are taken from his Anthropology from a Pragmatic

Point of View, as quoted in Jacques Derrida,

The Politics of Friendship, trans. George

Collins (London: Verso, 2005), p.275. As such,

Scheidemunze relates to aesthetic friendship, which,

as amalgam of virtue and grace, also facilitates the

trading of the false for the true, the minor for the

major, as Kant elucidates in his Metaphysics of

Morals. Derrida explains: ‘Grace is not virtue; it

belongs to these extreme works, these ornaments,

there parerga of virtue, to be sure, but to add grace

to virtue is a duty of virtue! Even if this be a matter

of ‘small change’, like ‘sweetness of language’,

‘politeness’, ‘hospitality’, the ‘ease with which one

lets oneself be approached’, etc. – in a word,

neither friendship nor friendliness, but amiability.’

Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, ‘‘In

Human Language, Fraternity . . . ’’, note 37.12 In ‘The Line and Light’ (Seminar XI), Lacan

identifies the anus as the primary locus of

metaphor and, hence, substitutability in general.

In ‘From Love to the Libido’ (also Seminar XI),

Lacan recasts the scybala, or hardened ball of

feces, as exemplary anal waste product, first

metaphor in a succession that will only end with

the death of the giver of this ‘emmerdeur eternel’

(p.196). Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental

Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Book XI, trans. Alan

Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton & Company,

1998).13 Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, p.51.14 Plato, Phaedo, trans. G.M.A. Grube (Indiana-

polis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1977).15 Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, in

The Penguin Freud Reader, ed. Adam Phillips (New

York: Penguin Classics, 2006). Jacques Derrida,

The Work of Mourning, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault

(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001).16 Hey Paula. Dir. Jason Sands (Bravo TV, 2007).17 Bruno, Dir. Larry Charles (Media Rights

Capital, 2009).18 In The Politics of Friendship, Derrida defines the

defines the telepoetic in relation to Niezschean

messianism, or his appeal to the community-to-

come, which can only be contacted through the

spanning of a temporal and historical divide via

space-time compression. For example: ‘Nietzsche

renews the call; he puts through – from a different

place – this teleiopoetic or telephone call to

philosophers of a new species’ (p.34). While

Derrida spells his term ‘teleiopoetics’, I have

chosen to spell it ‘telepoetics’ in the interest of

readability.19 Lacan’s theory of the lamella, a microorganism-

like bit of sentient matter which is subtracted from

the body after sexuation, is presented in ‘From

Love to the Libido’ (Seminar XI). It relates to ‘what

the sexed being loses in sexuality’, a sort of

immortal amoeba which can reproduce infinitely

because its reproduction is asexual, a-meiotic.

Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI, p.197.20 Jacques Lacan, ‘Analysis and Truth’, in Seminar

XI, p.143.21 Plato, Phaedo, 64a.22 Plato, Phaedo, 116d.23 The morganatic marriage is consummated

when, on the morning after the secret wedding,

the morning gift, or dower, is given to the

disenfranchised spouse (for example, Madame de

Maintenon). This gift takes the place of inheri-

tance proper, and is also a stand-in for the rights of

succession.

Michael Angelo Tata’s essays appear in the recent collections Literature of New York

and Passage to Manhattan: Critical Essays on Meena Alexander, and his work on DanielPaul Schreber is included in the forthcoming anthologyNeurology and Modernity. HisAndy Warhol: Sublime Superficiality arrives from Intertheory Press in early 2010.

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