Universitii Petrol Gaze din Ploieti

BULETINUL

Vol. LIX No. 2/2007

97 - 104

Seria Filologie

Mutual Gifts in Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare reads Derrida

Arleen Ionescu
Petroleum-Gas University of Ploieti, Bd. Bucuresti, 39, Ploieti E-mail: arleen_ionescu@yahoo.com

Abstract
Trying to explore the (im)possibility of gifts and starting from a debate between two great 20-th century French philosophers, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion, the article presents the gifts seen from a different perspective but the economic one. The article investigates the mechanisms of gift-giving in Romeo and Juliet, through Derridas readings on gifts and on Shakespeares play.

Keywords: gift, givenness, Gegebenheit

Mechanisms of gift-giving, gift-receiving

The concept of gift and different mechanisms of gift-giving and gift-receiving have represented a matter of concern in both philosophy and anthropology for centuries. As Mauss noted, cest que tout, nourriture, femmes, enfants, biens, talisman, sol, travail, services, offices sacerdotaux et rangs, est matire transmission et reddition [15, 19] and we are not free to refuse the gifts we are offered: Tous, hommes et femmes, tchent de se surpasser les uns les autres en gnrosit. Il y avait une sorte de rivalit qui pourrait donner le plus dobjets de plus de valeur [M. Brown quoted in 15, 26-27] French structuralism focused on the circuits of gift exchanges and it is from Mauss that LviStrauss developed a more abstract model of the homeostatic system of exchange, a model that could be extended to all symbolic exchanges (language, material goods, women). [12,114] In Hydes opinion, any exchange, be it of ideas or of goats, will tend toward gift if it is intended to recognize, establish, and maintain community. [14, 78] More recently Jacques Derrida attempted to go beyond the purely economic strictures of the gift as caught within a circle of exchange in order to think through a more radical (im)possibility of the gift. According to Given Time, in order to witness a gift situation, it is necessary [il faut] that the donee not give back, amortize, reimburse, acquit himself, enter into a contract, and that he never contracted a debt. [9, 13] Not only does the return of the gift annul it but so does the mere recognition of the gift, since it is a form of return, or what the French philosopher tentatively called a symbolic equivalent: The donee owes it to himself even not to give back, he ought not owe [il a le devoir de ne pas devoir] and the donor ought not count on restitution). [9, 13] As John Caputo and Michael Scanlon wrote in their 'Introduction' to the proceedings of the conference on Religion and Postmodernism held at Villanova University in 1997, the impossibility of gift-giving is the stuff of a faith or a desire with which we begin,

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which sets us in motion. We have always to do with what is always yet to be given, a givenness to come, a givenness which is never given, whose givenness is structurally impossible of being given (tant donn). [4, 8] Thus, the event called gift is totally heterogeneous to theoretical identification, to phenomenological identification [Derrida in 4, 59] and it is also foreign to the horizon of economy, ontology, knowledge, constantive statements, and theoretical determination and judgment. [Derrida in 4, 59] Trying to comprehend the truth of the gift means for Derrida the annulment of the gift: the truth of the gift is equivalent to the non-gift or the non-truth of the gift. [9, 27] For Jean-Luc Marion, however, the gift is different from givenness and it remains an immanent structure of any kind of phenomenality, whether immanent or transcendent. [Jean Luc-Marion in 4, 70] In Reduction and Givenness, the question of the gift is modified through the issue of givenness or Gegebenheit, taken from Husserls phenomenology. The gift may be interpreted from three different perspectives: it could achieve itself with a gift, a receiver, but without any giver; or, in another solution, with a giver, a gift, but no receiver; or, in a third figure, with a giver, a receiver but no thing which is given. [Jean-Luc Marion in 4, 65] For Derrida such classifications represent nothing but the very destruction of the gift. [Derrida in 4, 66]. Derrida tries to suggest to Marion the need to redefine Gegebenheit as a gift, as everything that is given to us in perception, in memory, in a phenomenological perception, is finally a gift to a finite creature, and it is finally a gift of God. [Derrida in 4, 66] According to the French philosopher, we cannot know the gift, we cannot think of what we cannot know. This impossibility of thinking the gift leads to the impossibility of a discourse on it, or, as Frow notes: There can be no possible logic of the gift, no discourse which could coherently take the gift as its object, since the gift is just whatever escapes the measure of discourse, whatever cancels itself as soon as it signifies itself as gift. [12, 108] Yet he himself writes a whole book on the gift and elaborates such a discourse that could take the gift as an object. On the one hand, in spite of this impossibility of the gift, taking something as an object somehow pressuposes that there is something to be given; on the other hand, we cannot help seeing the irony of the impossibility of discourse. In this impossibility that Frow speaks about, we got Frows gift, his book that we received in order to interpret, in order to take our time and think of its meaning. His gift/givenness was the book itself. Yet every single day of our life, we symbolically give and take. Who ever gives, takes liberties,1 said the poet. Our life is a give-and-take: we are given the gift of life by God, we are given birth by our mother, we are given the gift of speech, we are given a name, we give and are given blessings, we give and are given love, and we are given a fate or a freedom of choice, we give people time to think or to do something, we give instances or are given instances of love, we give our daughters hand in marriage, we give or are given lectures on life and gifts, on life and literature ; we return these gifts to other human beings and we take: we take the name that our Godmother gave us, we take a deep breath, we take our lovers arms and lips, we take our lover by the hand, we take things for granted and we take peoples advice, things take us long or short.

Gifts of Love
This article focuses on gifts as unbelievable, unforeseeable emanations of Eros. It is precisely that situation of givenness which cannot be quantified that I am interested in. It is the case where no thing (nothing) is given: When we give time, when we give our life, when we give death, properly and strictly speaking, we give no thing. [Jean-Luc Marion in 4, 63] To Marions list, I add the situation when we give love taking over Kearneys definition of such
1

John Donne, A Hymne to Christ, at the Authors Last Going into Germany

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no-give-ness(es) situations, highest examples of the saturated phenomenon, revelation. [see Kearney, 63] I have chosen a womans gifts of love taking into account Lewis Hydes concern for the gift we long for, the gift that, when it comes, speaks commandingly to the soul and irresistibly moves us. [14, xvii] Let us start from the beginning, when we were given life, from Gods creation of the woman from Adams rib, after God noticed that Adam could not stay alone and he said: I will make a helper suitable for him. (Genesis, 18). The moment God created Eve as the best helper for Adam, the man said, This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman for she was taken out of man. (Genesis, 22) So God took something from Adam, a rib, and gave him a partner and, for this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. (Genesis, 24) Interpreting the patriarchal meaning of Gods words, we can see that the woman he gave Adam was a product of Gods labour, therefore a measure of value, becoming part of the exchange. Coming back to Mausss assertion: cest que tout, nourriture, femmes, enfants, biens, talisman, sol, travail, services, offices sacerdotaux et rangs, est matire transmission et reddition, [15, 19] we should note that women are part of the list of gifts that one can receive. Lewis Hyde mentions Margaret Meads record of an Arapesh aphorism : Your own mother, your own sister, your own pigs, your own yams that you have piled up, you may eat [Margaret Mead, 14, 93] and a fragment from the Old Testament, in which peace is reached after the members of a tribe think of the best armistice : Let us take their daughters to us for wives and let us give them our daughters. [Hyde quoting The Old Testament, 14, 93] Among the most used phrases containing the verb to give, Lewis Hyde seems to be concerned with to give a woman in marriage, still preserved in the wedding ceremony in the Protestant church, when the minister asks: Who giveth this woman to be married? and the father of the bride replies, I do. The ceremony is a vestige of the more ancient institution in which marriage is an exchange between tribes or clans, the one giving the bride and the other giving wealth (or service, or a different bride) in return. [14, 93] Margaret Radins concept of marketinalienability and Annette Weiners concept of inalienable possessions refer to possessions that can be given away but not alienated by sale in the market. This domain includes personal attributes and the integrity of the body, sacred objects, and kinship relations. [12, 148] The inalienable possession of the father who gives his daughters hand in marriage to a man is not a commodity: her father may be able to give her away, but he may not sell her. [14, 94] The situation makes Hyde think of further questions which are hard to answer: How did the father get the right to give his daughter away, in the first place? Can a mother give her son away? Is the mother consulted in the matter at all? If a marriage must be a gift exchange, why could the couple not give themselves away? [14, 94] The church answers these questions simply, it is the man who was made first, and he was given a woman by God, so he has rights over women; then it is Eve who brought the sin into the world and who made Adam sin and fall from heaven, it is Eve who made us a community-in-sinfulness; so even if it is the woman who gives birth, she has no right to give her daughter/son in marriage; a son cannot be given in marriage as he is superior both to his mother and to the woman he is marrying, so it is him who takes her, not vice versa; a daughter can be given in marriage, but it is the father who has the right to perform this act, not the mother. Even if the woman procreates, contributing matter, the man produces, providing form. Thus, for the church, matter gives in to form.

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Nevertheless, things are not so simple. Marriage is not always a constraining institution. To the patrilineal side of Protestantism, is opposed the matrilineal example of the Uduk women, the tribe of independent women, whose marriages do not last more than three to four years. Not being the property of men, not even gift property, Uduk women are self-possessed, literally and figuratively. In myth, anecdote and popular expectation [] women often take the initiative in sex and marriage They may often dominate their husbands [14, 99] My essay is neither on gifts nor on literature, but tries to explore the contamination of gifts on Romeo and Juliet. I will take a closer look at Juliets gifts to Romeo.

Dons de noms/ non Given Names, Gifs of Nothing

When Polonius asks Hamlet What do you read, my lord? (2.2.193), the Danish prince simply answers Words, words, words. (2.2.194). Yet in relation to Polonius doubt: What is the matter my lord? (2.2.195), Hamlet does not mean that words are the matter of a book, hence the implication that he is reading words, but he means that Polonius words do not mean what the old man would like Hamlet to think they do. Monica Matei Chesnoiu explains that the confusion lies in the multiple meaning of the word matter. In accordance with Poloniuss incomplete perception of reality, the word means anything engaging the attention, a subject or question. The philosophical connotation implies the essence of things, that which is to be searched for continuously. [6, 113] Juliets constant preoccupation is also with names. Whats in a name? she wonders and finds the answers of a precocious philosopher. We are going to look into the gifts of names that become Romeo and Juliets ghosts. Gift/ no (Don/ non) and name/ no (noms/ non) are at play in Derridas language. Gifts of name bring nothing to the one who is offered the gift. Before she could give her love to somebody, Juliet was given a name. Like everybody else, she did not choose her name; her birth gave her a surname; others, parents, god-parents chose her first name. Derrida discusses the present time of names: The name seems produced, one time only, by an act without a past. There is no purer present, no generosity more inaugural. But a gift of nothing, of no thing, such a thing appropriates itself violently, harpoons, arraigns [arraisonne] what it seems to engender, penetrates and paralyzes with one stroke [coup] the recipient thus consecrated. Magnified the recipient becomes somewhat the thing of the one who names or surnames him, above all if this is done with a name of a thing. [8, column B, 6] Inheriting the name of their parents, children become their thing as there is no free will in naming. So, on the one hand, the gift of the name is the gift of nothing. The given names or rather the associations of the two names of the protagonists are the ones that make Romeo and Juliet a tragedy. Romeo and Juliet love each other across their name, despite their name, they die on account of their name, they live on in their name. [10, 423] The impediment against Romeo and Juliets fulfillment in love is the names they were given; on the other hand, the gift of their names is a poisonous gift. This is why Juliet proposes a possible solution in the name of love, Romeo must give up his name: [] Romeo, doff thy name, And for that name which is no part of thee Take all myself. (2.1. 89-90) Giving up their given names, identities, origins they can continue to desire, to dream through the impossible: [Derrida in 4, 72] O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? Deny thy father and refuse thy name, Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, And Ill no longer be a Capulet. (2.1.75-79)

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What Juliet realizes is that it is not enough if she gives up her surname, as in marriage she would not keep her given name at birth, but her husbands. This is why it is not only Romeo that Romeo has to give up, but also Montague: Romeo must deny his very origins which belong to the Montagues because he would be the one who keeps the name of his father and he would give it to Juliet who cannot take it. This is what Derrida calls the double bind of the genealogical law, which condemns the two lovers to death: He is doomed [vou] to death, and she with him, by the double law of the name. [10, 430]

The face dissimulating, alluding, alluring with innuendo, speaking by not speaking 2
Literature offers us infinite examples of love stories in which women were the source of poetic inspiration. Eros presupposes first of all the face. Can we consider a beautiful face or a beautiful body a gift? And if so, whose gift? Gods or the parents genealogic gift to their daughter? If the son is genealogically given a name to keep, the daughter is given beauty to enchant sons, to make them desire her, dream of her, love her. Thus, the feminine is erotic by excellence. Juliet enters Shakespeares play, in Act I, Scene III, as the nurses lamb and lady-bird, a fortnight and a few days before being fourteen and she is advised by her mother to think of marriage. I use advise in inverted commas, as in fact her parents have already decided upon the future groom. He is Paris, the noblest young man from Verona. However, the first to see her beauty is Romeo for whom It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night Like a rich jewel in an Ethiopes earBeauty too rich for use, for earth too dear. So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows As yonder lady oer her fellows shows. (1.5.44-48) Later on, under the balcony, Romeo thinks that her beauty makes even the brightness of the sun pale, as she is light itself. When she appears at the window, Romeo asks himself: []What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east and Juliet is the sun. (2.2.44-45) Shakespeares protagonist sees her as more fair than the moon that is envious of Juliets beauty. These are only some of Juliets gifts from God that make Romeo fall in love with her. Receiving Juliets gift of beauty, Romeo can give her his gift of love.

The Kiss mysterium fascinans

Romeo and Juliets sexual hunger for each other is set alongside the Montague-Capulet feud, the protagonists of which are themselves as irrational and impatient, as deaf to reason, as the lovers. [3, 141] Without evaluating her own worth, without considering the consequences of her act, Juliet gives herself wholly to Romeo since the individual has to give everything, to give himself entirely, without any reserve, in order to receive something in exchange. Or rather: in order that the
2

after Levinas, see Richard Kearney, Desire of God, in God, the Gift and Postmodernism, 119

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possibility of an exchange acquire a meaning, it is necessary that there be this initial total gift, which can be the object of no exchange. [1, 135] Gifts and given(ness) come as unexpected, as unforeseeable [see Jean-Luc Marion in 4, 64] Romeo and Juliet give each other love while discovering themselves that they possess this gift. Unaware of the gifts she has, Juliet gives Romeo her hand, then her lips, and eventually her heart, the centre of her emotions: Juliet: Then have my lips the sin that they have took Romeo: Sin from my lips, O trespass sweetly urged! Give me my sin again (1.4. 107-108) Their first kiss is the mysterium fascinans, the kiss that fill both lovers with fear, trembling and bedazzlement. Fear of what they were given without their knowledge and trembling for their impossible future. Bedazzlement because they are given a short time to consume their love but, commensurately they are given an excess of givenness, as Juliet herself remarks: It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden Too like the lightning which doth cease to be Ere one can say it lightens. (2.1.160-163 The two lovers experience the impossible in the sense of having an experience of impossibility prima facie, which Marion calls the counter-experience of bedazzlement, of astonishment or Bewunderung. [Jean-Luc Marion in 4, 75]When love appears to her as a given, Juliet is not even aware of its strength; she is puzzled too by its effects. This is a gift in the Derridean sense: A gift is something you do, without knowing what you do, without knowing who gives the gift, who receives the gift, and so on. [Derrida in 4, 60] Marion asserted that if there could be any revelation, [] no heart, no mind, and no word would be wide enough to host that revelation. [Jean-Luc Marion in 4, 69] Yet, what else is Juliet giving words to if not revelation in The more I give to thee The more I have, for both are infinite. (2.1.176-177)?

Belatedness and speed

Hlne Cixous considers that many of Shakespeares characters are submitted to the mutual encounter between desire and countertime. [7] Romeo and Juliet miss each other in the world of the living. By their death, their love is given another chance. Everything they experience is either going on too early or it happens too late, as Juliet speaks to herself when learning that she has just fallen in love with her familys enemy: Juliet (aside) My only love sprung from my only hate! Too early seen unknown, and known too late! Prodigious birth of love it is to me That must love a loathed enemy. (1.5.137-140) Juliet and Romeo are untimely or against time or countertime [contretemps], as Derrida plays on words in his essay on Shakespeares tragedy. On Sunday night, after the party, Juliet gives

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him her word that she would become his bride the next day. She gives him her hand on Monday afternoon, even if her hand was promised to Paris by her parents. Thus, Juliet gives Romeo something she does not possess, less than twenty four hours after they met for the first time. Near daybreak on Tuesday, after the consummation of their mutual gift of (sexual) love, the two lovers part and Juliet is told of her Thursday marriage. Friar Lawrence gives Juliet the potion to take tomorrow-night; at this point there is no time for Juliet anymore. The fateful belatedness of the letter making Romeo think that she is dead means that he voluntarily gives himself to death. His finding out that Juliet is not dead does not happen on time and what is coming, in which, the untimely appears, is happening to time but it never happens on time. [11, 77, translation modified]. Her sleep for twenty-four hours is a rehearsal for her final sleep that she gives herself to. The moment Juliet wakes up she sees the gift her husband offered himself, the last gift of death, the gift of poison: Whats here? A cup closed in my true loves hand? Poison, I see, hath been his timeless end. (5.3.161-162). Time precipitates things. Waiting for the poison on Romeos lips to kill her, Juliet hears noise and gives herself to death sooner: O happy dagger, This is thy sheath! There rust, and let me die. (5.3.168-169) The time-span of Romeo and Juliets gift of love is almost as brief as that of the married life of Othello and Desdemona: the two lovers meet and fall in love, on a Sunday night, are married on the Monday afternoon, spend part of Monday night together in bed (for the first and last time), and are both dead before the end of Thursday. [3, 143] After they are dead, their two families reconcile. But it is too late, it is so very late; at this point in the story they can just learn the consequences of their innocent childrens gift of the death. They give words to their mourning, learning their mistake against time. Belatedness becomes too-latedness: Capulet O brother Montague, give me thy hand. This is my daughters jointure, for no more Can I demand. Montague But I can give thee more, For I will raise her statue in pure gold, That while Verona by that name is known There shall no figure at such rate be set As that of true and faithful Juliet. Capulet As rich shall Romeos by his ladys lie, Poor sacrifices of our enmity. (5.3.225-304) The gold statues will not bring back their children and they know it. Romeo and Juliet paid their debt to life, which is Death. They ultimately paid the debt to their parents gifts (two names impossible to associate), and they had to go through the cruelest experience possible that of seeing each other dead, missing each others life by seconds. But, as Hlne Cixous suggests, no dead person, no death has anything to teach us. [7] The gift exchange between Capulet and Montague does not restore the ultimate gift to their children: their life. The tomb of the two lovers remains closed.

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Bibliography
1. A l t h u s s e r , Louis, Rousseau: The Social Contract, in Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx: Politics and History, London: Verso, 1982 2. A r i s t o t l e , Politics, translated, with Introduction and Notes by C. D. Reeve, Indianapolis, Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998 3. B o o r m a n , S. C, Human Conflict in Shakespeare, London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987 4. Caputo, John D., Scanlon, Michael J. (eds), God, the Gift and Postmodernism, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999 5. Caputo, John D., The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida. Religion without Religion, Bloomington and Indianopolis: Indiana University Press, 1997 6. Chesnoiu, Monica Matei, Knowledge and Truth, Constanta: Editura Pontica, 1997 7. Cixous, Hlne, 'The Gift of the Ghost of the Beaver and the Mole', lecture given on September 29, 2007, Shakespeare and Derrida Conference, Cardiff University 8. D e r r i d a , Jacques, Glas, transl. John P. Leavey, Jr., and Richard Rand, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986 9. D e r r i d a , Jacques, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, transl. by Peggy Kamuf, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992 10. D e r r i d a , Jacques, Acts of Literature, ed. by Derek Attridge, New York and London: Routledge, 1992 11. D e r r i d a , Jacques, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, Trans. Peggy Kamuf, Intr. Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg New York and London: Routledge, 1994 12. F r o w , John, Time and Commodity Culture, Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997 13. G o u x , Jean-Joseph, Symbolic Economies. After Marx and Freud, translated by Jennifer Curtiss Gage, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1990 14. H y d e , Lewis, The Gift Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, New York: Random House, 1979 15. M a u s s , Marcel, Essai sur le Don, Forme et raison de lchange dans les socits primitives, dition lectronique ralise par Jean Marie Tremblay, 17 fvrier 2005, http://classiques.uqac.ca/index.html 16. S h a k e s p e a r e , William, Complete Works, Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1988.

Daruri reciproce in Romeo i Julieta . Lecturi derridiene ale lui Shakespeare

Rezumat
Articolul exploreaz problematica darurilor dintr-o perspectiv diferit de cea strict economic, pornind de la o discuie dintre doi poli ai filosofiei secolului XX n Frana, Jacques Derrida i Jean-Luc Marion. Urmrind conceptul de gift i pe acela de givenness, articolul analizeaz n continuare darurile schimbate n piesa shakespearean printr-o parcurgere a unor texte ale lui Derridida cu privire la daruri i la Romeo i Julieta.