The Prize and Price of Thinking and Thanking: False Life, Living On

Thinking and thanking form an uneasy couplet. As Nietzsche, the great doubter and relentless interrogator of ingratitude, cautions us in Human, All-Too-Human: A Book for Free Spirits: “He who gives a great gift encounters no gratitude [findet keine Dankbarkeit]; for the recipient, simply by accepting it, already has too much of a burden [denn der Beschenkte hat schon durch das Annehmen zu viel Last].” (180, translation slightly adjusted) It is no accident, therefore, that Nietzsche later has Zarathustra say: “Great indebtedness does not make men grateful [nicht dankbar], but vengeful [sondern rachsüchtig]; and if a little charity is not forgotten, it turns into a gnawing worm [Nage-Wurm]” (89). There is a sense in which the thinking of thanking, and the act of thanking for thinking, are fraught with an irreducible overdetermination. The gift for which we are called upon to give thanks places a double burden on us: the fact of its magnitude (which may be out of all proportion to what we were prepared to receive) and the corresponding debt of gratitude that we come to owe to the one from whom we have received the gift. Perhaps we might say, pace Nietzsche, that the “gift,” when thought in the context of thanking, becomes visible in both its English and its German senses—that is, as a present and as a poison. If Nietzsche’s intuition is correct, our indebtedness also occasions something other than gratitude. It evokes resentment and persistent feelings of revenge, gnawing at us like a worm. There is no doubt about the pertinence of Nietzsche’s sentiment. Yet perhaps we should begin by taking a step back to contemplate specific circumstances that will cast the relationship between thinking and thanking into sharper relief. One such circumstance is the pivotal moment in which a thinker, poet, or artist receives the public honor of a prize and responds to this honor with a speech that records, and thinks through, his or her gratitude.

Delivering a public speech to mark such an occasion makes visible the imbrication of the honoree’s own life and thinking with the life and thinking of an other. This being-with is a fundamental dimension of our being in the world. As creatures who dwell in Mitsein, we also think, speak, and write within more or less visible quotation marks. Even the thoughts that we, in moments of egoic grandeur, call our “own” tend to be mere evocations of other voices that participate in a spectral conversation inside of us. As such, the occasion of a prize speech invites the one whose life and work are being honored to reflect upon, and to make public, the traces of those others who have made the honoree’s life and work what they are. A prize acceptance speech, therefore, also calls into presence the inextricable relation between thinking and thanking, which is to say, the relation between the call issued by an other’s thinking and the gratitude that such an inheritance silently demands. This gratitude of and for thinking hardly can be reduced to the currency of an economic transaction, the mere repayment of an outstanding debt, which, once performed, would lift, from the one who has recorded this gratitude, the burden of debt and guilt (two interlaced concepts for which, as Nietzsche himself well knew, German tellingly employs but a single word, Schuld).¹ What is it about contemplating the relation between thinking and thanking in the rhetorical contexts of a prize acceptance speech that sheds new light on a thinking life that is both inherited and created for another time, a time to come, a time that is still to be lived? And—from the perspective of the fragility and radical finitude of the life in which thinking and thanking meet—how do thinking and thanking inflect our relation to the idea of damaged life, possible survival, and modes of living on?

Paul Celan’s 1958 “Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen” bears the visible and invisible scars...