ABOUT GIFTS: DERRIDA, SCRIPTURE, EARTH

In recent times, the question of the gift has become a hot topic across a range of disciplines. Jacques Derrida was a key instigator: he disclosed the gift’s paradoxical or aporetic nature: it is both gratuitous and circular, excessive and reciprocal. An exemplary and decisive textual site of this duality is the Bible, where gift/ing is expressed according to extreme figures like grace and bribery – and much in between. But an examination of the gift should also move beyond the world of the text to the world itself. And so, we ask: ‘What if creation is a gift? How should we respond to the Earth?’ One of the hottest academic discourses in recent times has been the question of the gift. It has been a source of debate across the humanities, especially for disciplines like philosophy, anthro-pology, and theology. Jacques Derrida is the pivotal figure here: the publication of Given Time in the early 1990s caused a bit of a stir with its scandalous problematization of one of our most treasured and – one would think – straightforward phenomena, problematised to the extent that Derrida could be misread as insisting that there is no gift – hence, the scandal. Why is the gift a problem? While it is ordinarily understood as that which is given gratuitously – without condition – there is nevertheless always an exchange of some kind, ranging from explicitly circular responses like gratitude, thanksgiving, and counter-gifting, to more subtle reciprocations, like the reinforce