HJS

THE GIFT

According to Heidegger, what idle talk achieves is "a perverting of the act of disclosing (Erschliessen) into an act of closing-off (Verschliessen)" (Being and Time 169), thus bringing "what is understood to a sham clarity" (164). In Finnegans Wake this closing-off of Dasein from primal self-knowledge is echoed, "at the very dawn of protohistory" (169.21), in Shem's "first riddle of the universe" (170.04): "when is a man not a man?" (170.05), "the correct solution being ... when he is ... sham" (170.22-24).

The event at the "origin" ("the very dawn of protohistory") of the gift (es gibt) of Heideggerean Being-in-the-world, corresponds to an event of language (the "first riddle of the universe"). The event of the gift -- as a gift of the Other -- closes off all avenues of approach. It covers its trail, closing itself off from any genealogy, in such a way that in pursuing it Dasein becomes entangled in itself. As Derrida suggests, "[i]f the essence of the gift is not to be an object of exchange, then we see that strictly speaking the gift annuls itself as such ... It is recognised only by being lost in indebtedness and exchange" (Bennington, 'Derridabase' 188-189).

The "Court Room" scene in Finnegans Wake -- still trying to unravel, via ever more convoluted means, the mystery of the "virtual crime of crimes" (107.26) alleged to have taken place in Phoenix Park -- provides a staging of this event of the gift and the way a gift, by "losing" itself within an economy of exchange, marks, paradoxically, the impossibility of derivation or translation, at the same time (if even through sheer incomprehension) that it calls for derivation or translation. The event of the gift is thus staged as the "giving" of "unsolicited testimony on behalf of the absent" (173.29.30), becoming "as glib," through a kind of "erroneous" translation of es gibt:

... to those present (who meanwhile, with increasing lack of interest in semantics, allowed various subconscious smickers to drivel slowly across their fitchers), unconsciously explaining, for inkstands, with a meticulosity bordering on the insane, the various meanings of all the different foreign parts of speech ... [173.30.36]

Within the space of translation (between "all the different foreign parts of speech") meaning (and reason, logos) has the possibility of going astray -- such as is revealed in the Wake's deployment of the Biblical allegory of the "fall" of the Tower of Babel and the "chaos" of language(s):

The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnsk awntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!) ... [3.15-17]

It is important to note, however, that the "border of translation" "separates translation from itself, it separates translatability within one and the same language" and not simply across languages (Derrida, Aporias 10):

Babelization does not therefore wait for the multiplicity of languages. The identity of a language can only affirm itself as identity to itself by opening itself to ... a difference from itself or a difference with itself. [10]

Between the pure event of the gift and the genealogical will thus lies the aporia marked by the concept of "identity" -- the identity of language being precisely what is affirmed through this differance. Hence we would say that by giving itself as the need for and impossibility of translation, the gift inaugurates a place of transverse communications: an originary place of alterior discourse within language and languages which is also a non-place, a "nothing" without limits and which is "programmed," to an infinite level of chance, to comprehend everything.