Nietzsche and Derrida on giving

This paper analyses two approaches of giving in Derrida's book Given Time: one of them is logical, semantic, the other ontological. To consider a question of the gift from a logical, semantic aspect is to encounter the aporia of the gift. In common language and logic a gift means that someone gives something to somebody else. Derrida's aporia of the gift is that the conditions of the possibility of the gift are the conditions of its impossibility. That is to say, once the gift is recognized as a gift, it is no longer a gift, it becomes an obligation that demands reciprocity. The ontological approach is that Derrida concludes that the structure of the gift, like the structure of-Being and of time, is not a thing, it is nothing. It has the structure of an event, an event of forgetting. Derrida, as well as Nietzsche, seeks to depart from "the metaphysics of the gift" that has treated the gift and the debt together, as a system. This metaphysics of the gift can be seen in the anthropological view of Marcel Mauss's works. Nietzsche's account of the gift-giving virtue closely resembles Derrida's transgressive interrupting of the economic logic of the gift. Nietzsche sees the gift as both valuable and dangerous, because the gift is a sign of power. Nietzsche describes gift-giving as a duty and a privilege of nobles, such a duty arises from the Will to Power. Nietzsche's Zarathustra interrupts the circle of economic exchange by treating the giving as prodigal expenditure like sunshineVytauto Didžiojo universitetasŠvietimo akademij