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New Literary History 31.3 (2000) 435-458



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The (False) Gifts of Writing

Zsuzsa Baross


The story is never anything but a fragment.

--Maurice Blanchot 1

I am going to give them to you, says one to the other. At the break of the day.

--Jacques Derrida 2

I. Gift and Writing

The intimacy, indeed, the alliance, between gift and language will not be questioned here: gift is at once a language, a "language game" or--if I may accept one of Derrida's gifts already 3 --"plus d'une langue," more than language, more than any language. Rather, the concern here will be with the manifold, often secret and duplicitous affiliations between gift and language, giving and writing, or better yet, between gift and the "letter"--the missive and the graphic mark.

To begin with the simplest of relations and operations: the signifier "gift" is of course no gift but a substitute resulting from an operation of (arbitrary) exchange. But uniquely in this case, a similar quasi-linguistic operation holds doubly for the referent: the gift or gift-object is itself a representative (of Gift as such); an effigy, it both marks and, as we will see, bears the often visible graphic marks of the substitution which simultaneously founds it and, as economy, necessarily threatens to annihilate it, as gift. (Whence perhaps the confusion of gift with exchange, and therefore, the tendency for gift to be compensated and precisely as gift annulled ought to be traced to this originary and illicit affiliation with language, itself--at least on the level of structure--a system of exchange.)

Gift we know is not any (one) thing. The objects from the "scene of writing" that Sartre receives from Beauvoir for his "war diaries"--azure ink ("bleu des mers Sud") and dark blue notebooks ("bleu de nuit")--are just that. Objects converted, or so as to acknowledge the duplicity of [End Page 435] language (letter, gesture, or sign) in this operation right away: objects translated into gifts; that is to say, transported/transposed by some fundamentally linguistic gesture--in Beauvoir's case, by a letter--from one domain and economy (of utility) to another (the symbolic, close to the sacred).

Yet, translation/transposition in and by writing is not a simple or a single operation. "Please accept this gift as a token of my friendship and love," we may write or only fantasize to write, but the gift thus dispatched by our letter as a token would itself be only a token. For neither this or that thing, Gift itself cannot be given. Yet, at the same time and by the same reason, any thing can be given--as gift. Virtually anything can take its place and serve, in its place, as its substitute: signifier, delegate, or representative. In other words, Gift itself is pure symbol ("symbol à l'état pur" 4 ) or to introduce the felicitous word right away, Hau.

For Mauss, who is the father and "intellectual originator" of the concept, Hau is the gift's immaterial "force" or "virtue"--in excess of any thing or object given. Hau is that (excess) which can only be given with--objects, words, letters. (That this insight should come to Mauss as a gift and in writing 5 --in a note "for Davy and Mauss"--lends it particular poignancy in the context of this inquiry.) By the time his successor, Levi-Strauss, finishes with the concept, Gift's "manna" (as well as the "manna" of the gift of Mauss) will have been exchanged for an empty meta-sign. In "the familiar story of succession," Hau is reduced to a "floating signifier": the sign of excess or the "surabondance" of signifiers. (Nonetheless, as if touched by gift's magic, Levi-Strauss too offers a mythical account for the origin of language. 6 ) Of course, the attempt to "economize" on the excess of Hau cannot but fail. 7 Even when reduced to a signifier of excess (of the excess of signifiers/of excessive signification), "Hau" remains in an irreducible relation of "inadequation" with the excess it signs but which it, as...

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