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ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS “Beggar that I am, I am even poor in thanks.” — Hamlet Acknowledgments constitute a distinct genre, as Daniel Pennac shows to hilarious effect in his monologue, Merci. If I frustrate generic expectations, it is not because I fear acknowledging my debts. On the contrary, I have argued in what follows that we should be less anxious in the face of gifts and less driven to repay them in order to free ourselves from the debts they impose. I wish to remain in debt to those who have helped me instead of repaying my debts, however symbolically. Levinas claims that the true gift should be met with ingratitude. He exaggerates, and I am not ungrateful, but I should not wish a public expression of gratitude to become confused with some sort of payment or suspected of an effort at network building like the dedication at the beginning of a Renaissance poem. I must appear ungrateful here if I am to maintain my gratitude against accusations of covert exchange, name-dropping, or schmoozing. Even if I wanted to, however, repaying my debts would be impossible in practice. Acknowledgments at the beginnings of monographs remain absurdly inadequate, even when they swell into epic lists. Certainly, the notes and bibliography come nowhere near to inventorying what I owe. To contemplate the extent of one’s debts is to recognize the ubiquity of generosity and how poorly theories of exchange describe our lived experience . Repaying what we owe in gratitude is impossible in practice but also in theory. What I owe others defies repayment, for it is as infinite as their difference from me. x Acknowledgments What one owes to the dead illustrates how a debt can exceed our ability to repay. I am grateful to Izaak Walton Killam and Dorothy Brooks Killam, whose estate funded a good deal of my research, especially on The Merchant of Venice, during a postdoctoral appointment at Dalhousie University. The Killams were generous, and I am grateful, but we do not enter into an exchange. In something of the same spirit, I would like to publicly thank the second reader chosen by Duquesne University Press, who offered many useful suggestions. The gift of his or her advice has no donor, at least none I can know, and therefore my gratitude does not constitute one side of an exchange. The reader’s generosity , like that of the Killams, furnishes a concrete repudiation to claims regarding the ubiquity of self-interested, reciprocal gift exchange. In fact, every reader’s attention is more than I have earned. This includes a number of colleagues, friends, and mentors who have read portions of this book and provided valuable advice, but it also includes the reader holding this book in her or his hands. Thank you, whoever you are. ...

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