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BULETINUL

Universităţii Petrol – Gaze din Ploieşti Vol. LIX

No. 2/200797 - 104 Seria Filologie

Mutual Gifts in “Romeo and Juliet”. Shakespearereads Derrida

Arleen Ionescu

Petroleum-Gas University of Ploieşti, Bd. Bucuresti, 39, Ploieşti

E-mail: [email protected]

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 Derrida’s readings on gifts and on Shakespeare’s 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, “c’est

que tout, nourriture, femmes, enfants, biens, talisman, sol, travail, services, offices sacerdotauxet rangs, est matière à transmission et reddition” [15, 19] and we are not free to refuse the giftswe are offered: “Tous, hommes et femmes, tâchent de se surpasser les uns les autres engénérosité. Il y avait une sorte de rivalité à qui pourrait donner le plus d’objets de plus devaleur” [M. Brown quoted in 15, 26-27]

French structuralism focused on the circuits of gift exchanges and it is from Mauss that Lévi-Strauss 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 Hyde’s 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 giftas 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 thathe 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 onrestitution).” [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,



98 Arleen Ionescu

which sets us in motion. We have always to do with what is always yet to be given, a givennessto come, a givenness which is never given, whose givenness is structurally impossible of “beinggiven” (étant donné ).” [4, 8] Thus, “the event called gift is totally heterogeneous to theoreticalidentification, to phenomenological identification” [Derrida in 4, 59] and it is also “foreign tothe horizon of economy, ontology, knowledge, constantive statements, and theoreticaldetermination and judgment.” [Derrida in 4, 59]

Trying to comprehend the truth of the gift means for Derrida the annulment of the gift: “thetruth 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 immanentstructure of any kind of phenomenality, whether immanent or transcendent.” [Jean Luc-Marionin 4, 70] In Reduction and Givenness, the question of the gift is modified through the issue of givenness or Gegebenheit , taken from Husserl’s phenomenology. The gift may be interpreted

from three different perspectives: it “could achieve itself with a gift, a receiver, but without anygiver; or, in another solution, with a giver, a gift, but no receiver; or, in a third figure, with agiver, 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.” [Derridain 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, isfinally 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 wecannot know. This impossibility of thinking the gift leads to the impossibility of a discourse onit, 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 anobject. 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 helpseeing the irony of the impossibility of discourse. In this impossibility that Frow speaks about,we got Frow’s 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, takesliberties,”

1

Gifts of Love

said the poet. Our life is a give-and-take: we are given the gift of life by God, we aregiven birth by our mother, we are given the gift of speech, we are given a name, we give and aregiven blessings, we give and are given love, and we are given a fate or a freedom of choice, wegive people time to think or to do something, we give instances or are given instances of love,we give our daughter’s hand in marriage, we give or are given lectures on life and gifts, on lifeand 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 lover’s arms and lips, we take our lover by the hand, we take things for granted and we take people’s advice, things take us longor short.

This article focuses on gifts as unbelievable, unforeseeable emanations of Eros. It is preciselythat situation of givenness which cannot be quantified that I am interested in. It is the casewhere 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] ToMarion’s list, I add the situation when we give love taking over Kearney’s definition of such

1John Donne, “A Hymne to Christ, at the Authors Last Going into Germany”



Mutual Gifts in “Romeo and Juliet”. Shakespeare reads Derrida 99

no-give-ness(es) situations, “highest” examples of the saturated phenomenon, “revelation.” [seeKearney, 63] I have chosen a woman’s gifts of love taking into account Lewis Hyde’s concernfor “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 God’s creation of the womanfrom Adam’s rib, after God noticed that Adam could not stay alone and he said: “I will make ahelper 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 bonesand 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 manwill leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.”

(Genesis, 24)Interpreting the patriarchal meaning of God’s words, we can see that the woman he gave Adamwas a product of God’s labour, therefore a measure of value, becoming part of the exchange.Coming back to Mauss’s assertion: “c’est que tout, nourriture, femmes, enfants, biens, talisman,sol, travail, services, offices sacerdotaux et rangs, est matière à transmission et reddition,”[15, 19] we should note that women are part of the list of gifts that one can receive. Lewis Hydementions Margaret Mead’s record of an Arapesh aphorism : “Your own mother, your ownsister, your own pigs, your own yams that you have piled up, you may eat” [MargaretMead, 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 Protestantchurch, 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 whichmarriage is an exchange between tribes or clans, the one giving the bride and the other givingwealth (or service, or a different bride) in return.” [14, 93] Margaret Radin’s concept of market-

inalienability and Annette Weiner’s concept of inalienable possessions refer to possessions that“can be given away but not alienated by sale in the market. This domain includes personalattributes and the integrity of the body, sacred objects, and kinship relations.” [12, 148] Theinalienable possession of the father who gives his daughter’s hand in marriage to a man is not acommodity: “her father may be able to give her away, but he may not sell her.” [14, 94] Thesituation 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? Isthe mother consulted in the matter at all? If a marriage must be a gift exchange, why could thecouple not give themselves away?” [14, 94] The church answers these questions simply, it isthe 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 issuperior 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 thisact, not the mother. Even if the woman procreates, contributing matter, the man produces, providing form. Thus, for the church, matter gives in to form.



100 Arleen Ionescu

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, thetribe 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 insex 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 Juliet’s 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 simplyanswers “Words, words, words.” (2.2.194). Yet in relation to Polonius’ doubt: “What is thematter my lord?” (2.2.195), Hamlet does not mean that words are the matter of a book, hencethe 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 “theconfusion lies in the multiple meaning of the word matter . In accordance with Polonius’sincomplete 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 besearched for continuously.” [6, 113] Juliet’s constant preoccupation is also with names. “What’sin a name?” she wonders and finds the answers of a precocious philosopher. We are going tolook into the gifts of names that become Romeo and Juliet’s ghosts.

Gift/ no (Don/ non) and name/ no (noms/ non) are at play in Derrida’s 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 asurname; others, parents, god-parents chose her first name.

Derrida discusses the present time of names: “The name seems produced, one time only, by anact 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 thusconsecrated. 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 thename of their parents, children become their “thing” as there is no free will in naming. So, onthe 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 thatmake Romeo and Juliet a tragedy. “Romeo and Juliet love each other across their name, despitetheir name, they die on account of their name, they live on in their name.” [10, 423] The

impediment against Romeo and Juliet’s fulfillment in love is the names they were given; on theother hand, the gift of their names is a poisonous gift. This is why Juliet proposes a possiblesolution –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 throughthe 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 I’ll no longer be a Capulet.” (2.1.75-79)




What Juliet realizes is that it is not enough if she gives up her surname, as in marriage shewould not keep her given name at birth, but her husband’s. 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 hewould give it to Juliet who cannot take it. This is what Derrida calls the “double bind” of thegenealogical law, which condemns the two lovers to death: “He is doomed [voué] 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 speaking2

Literature offers us infinite examples of love stories in which women were the source of poeticinspiration. Eros presupposes first of all the face. Can we consider a beautiful face or a beautiful body a gift? And if so, whose gift? God’s 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, tomake them desire her, dream of her, love her. Thus, the feminine is erotic by excellence.

Juliet enters Shakespeare’s play, in Act I, Scene III, as the nurse’s ‘lamb” and “lady-bird”, afortnight 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 uponthe 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 nightLike a rich jewel in an Ethiope’s ear-Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear.So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows

As yonder lady o’er 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)

Shakespeare’s protagonist sees her as “more fair” than the moon that is “envious” of Juliet’s beauty.

These are only some of Juliet’s gifts from God that make Romeo fall in love with her. Receiving

Juliet’s gift of beauty, Romeo can give her his gift of love.

The Kiss – mysterium fascinans

Romeo and Juliet’s “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 thelovers.” [3, 141]

Without evaluating her own worth, without considering the consequences of her act, Juliet givesherself 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

2after Levinas, see Richard Kearney, Desire of God, in God, the Gift and Postmodernism, 119



102 Arleen Ionescu

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 suddenToo like the lightning which doth cease to be

Ere one can say it lightens. (2.1.160-163The 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 noteven 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 isJuliet giving words to if not revelation in

The more I give to theeThe more I have, for both are infinite. (2.1.176-177)?

Belatedness and speed

Hélène Cixous considers that many of Shakespeare’s characters are submitted to the mutualencounter 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 iseither going on too early or it happens too late, as Juliet speaks to herself when learning that shehas just fallen in love with her family’s 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 meThat must love a loathed enemy. (1.5.137-140)

Juliet and Romeo are untimely or against time or countertime [contretemps], as Derrida playson words in his essay on Shakespeare’s tragedy. On Sunday night, after the party, Juliet gives




him her word that she would become his bride the next day. She gives him her hand on Mondayafternoon, even if her hand was promised to Paris by her parents. Thus, Juliet gives Romeosomething 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 twolovers part and Juliet is told of her Thursday marriage. Friar Lawrence gives Juliet the potion totake “tomorrow-night”; at this point there is no time for Juliet anymore. The fateful belatednessof the letter making Romeo think that she is dead means that he voluntarily gives himself todeath. His finding out that Juliet is not dead does not happen on time and “what is coming, inwhich, 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 shegives herself to. The moment Juliet wakes up she sees the gift her husband offered himself, thelast gift of death, the gift of poison:

What’s here? A cup closed in my true love’s hand?Poison, I see, hath been his timeless end. (5.3.161-162).

Time precipitates things. Waiting for the poison on Romeo’s 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 Juliet’s 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 lasttime), 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 pointin the story they can just learn the consequences of their innocent children’s gift of the death.They give words to their mourning, learning their mistake against time. Belatedness becomestoo-latedness:

CapuletO brother Montague, give me thy hand.This is my daughter’s jointure, for no moreCan I demand.MontagueBut I can give thee more,For I will raise her statue in pure gold,That while Verona by that name is knownThere shall no figure at such rate be setAs that of true and faithful Juliet.

CapuletAs rich shall Romeo’s by his lady’s 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 namesimpossible to associate), and they had to go through the cruelest experience possible that of seeing each other dead, missing each other’s life by seconds. But, as Hélène Cixous suggests, nodead 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 twolovers remains closed.



104 Arleen Ionescu

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

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A r i s t o t l e , Politics, translated, with Introduction and Notes by C. D. Reeve, Indianapolis,Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 19983. B o o r ma n , S. C, Human Conflict in Shakespeare, London and New York: Routledge and

Kegan Paul, 19874. 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, 19977. Cixous, Hélène, 'The Gift of the Ghost of the Beaver and the Mole', lecture given on

September 29, 2007, Shakespeare and Derrida Conference, Cardiff University

8. Derrida, Jacques, Glas, transl. John P. Leavey, Jr., and Richard Rand, Lincoln and

London: University of Nebraska Press, 19869. 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, 199210. D e r r i d a , Jacques, Acts of Literature, ed. by Derek Attridge, New York and London:

Routledge, 199211. 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. Frow, John, Time and Commodity Culture, Essays in Cultural Theory and

Postmodernity, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 199713. 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: RandomHouse, 1979

15. Mauss, Marcel, Essai sur le Don, Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés

primitives, édition électronique réalisée par Jean Marie Tremblay, 17 février 2005,

http://classiques.uqac.ca/index.html 16. Shakespeare , Wil l iam, Complete Works, Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1988.

Daruri reciproce in « Romeo şi Julieta ». Lecturi derridiene ale lui

Shakespeare

Rezumat

Articolul exploreazǎ problematica darurilor dintr-o perspectivǎ diferit ǎ de cea strict economicǎ, pornind

de la o discuţie dintre doi poli ai filosofiei secolului XX în Franţa, Jacques Derrida şi Jean-Luc Marion.

Urmǎrind conceptul de gift şi pe acela de givenness , articolul analizeazǎ în continuare darurile

schimbate în piesa shakespeareanǎ printr -o parcurgere a unor texte ale lui Derridida cu privire la daruri

şi la « Romeo şi Julieta. »

http://classiques.uqac.ca/index.html



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