the economy of the gift

8/6/2019 The Economy of the Gift

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Literature & Theology, Vol. . No. , June , pp. "

doi:10.1093/litthe/frl015

T H E E C O N O M Y O F T H E G I F T :

P A U L R I C O E U R S P O E T I C

R E D E S C R I P T I O N O F R E A L I T Y

W. David Hall

Abstract

This essay takes Paul Ricoeurs use of the phrase economy of the gift as anopportunity to explore the relationship between theology, ethics, and poetic

redescription. A primay focus is Ricoeurs juxtaposition of the golden rule

and the love command, the manner in which these two are poetically related

by biblical discourse, and what this means for theological ethics. This focus

offers the opportunity to explore some of the more radical implications

of Ricoeurs claims about the poetic, redescriptive function of religious

discourse, implications that were not adequately addressed by Ricoeur

himself.

IN ONE of his occasional articles on a topic of theological interest, Paul

Ricoeur wrote:

It is this commandment [to love ones enemies], not the golden rule, that seems

to constitute the expression closest, on the ethical plane, to what I have called the

economy of the gift. This expression approximating the economy of the gift can

be placed under the title of a logic of superabundance, which is opposed as an

opposite pole to the logic of equivalence that governs everyday morality. . .

.

Detached from the golden rule, the commandment to love ones enemies is not

ethical but supraethical, as is the whole economy of the gift to which it belongs.

If it is not to swerve over to the nonmoral, or even the immoral, the

commandment to love must reinterpret the golden rule and, in so doing, be itself

reinterpreted by this rule.1

In this passage, Ricoeur offers the reader a number of enigmatic expressions,

but the most enigmatic of all, and the one about which he is centrallyconcerned here, is the notion of an economy of the gift.2 What could

Ricoeur have meant by economy of the gift? At the level of general reflection,

it is at least difficult to think the ideas of economy and gift together.

In a passage that has now become iconic, Adam Smith explained economic

Literature & Theology # The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press 2006; all rights reserved.

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transactions as such: It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the

brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to

their own interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their

self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities but of their advantages.3

I do not rely on the benevolent disposition of my local grocer when I buy my

milk, but rather on his/her interest to corner as much of the local market as

possible by providing prices that are competitive with the other local grocers.

I bank on the assumption that the grocers self-interested actions will work

out to my benefit in the form of lower prices and greater availability of the

things I need or want.

A gift, on the other hand, is something quite different. A gift is something

that is given to another out of generosity, without an interest in return,

without the concern for reciprocation. Indeed, ideally it is precisely out ofthe benevolence of the giver that the gift is proffered. Intuitively, economy

and gift have little in common and, in fact, seem diametrically opposed.

So, what can Ricoeur have meant by the phrase economy of the gift?

In what follows, I take Ricoeurs use of this strange idea as an opportunity

to reflect on the relationship between theology, ethics and poetry. The most

immediate reward for this engagement is a greater understanding of the

relationship between theology and ethics: theologyand here I follow

Ricoeur in highlighting Jewish and Christian theological reflectionlendsto ethical discernment a dimension that extends beyond simple moral

reciprocity. A supramoral dimension of ethical consideration is characterised

by the biblical ideal of love: love of God, love of neighbour, finally love of

enemy. It is precisely in the confrontation between the moral ideal of

reciprocity and the supramoral ideal of love that Ricoeurs expression of an

economy of the gift rises to meaning. But this exploration of the economy of

the gift opens fertile directions for exploring poetic function of religious

discourse in revealing God. I will begin by addressing aspects of Ricoeurs

hermeneutical thought that offer the possibility for an understanding of what

he may be aiming at. Next, I will explore what the preceding analysis tells us

about the nature of ethical decision informed by Jewish and Christian

theological ideals. I will conclude by examining the possibilities opened for

theology by conceiving biblical texts as a species of poetic discourse.

I . G I F T O F M E T A P H O R A N D E C O N O M Y O F N A R R A T I V E

While we are led intuitively to oppose gift and economy, this intuition is

misleading. At least, since the publication of Marcel Mauss anthropological

study The Gift, it has become difficult, if not impossible, to think the terms

economy and gift apart from each other. Mauss argued that it is not the

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case that gift and economy are diametrically opposed, as we might suppose.

He claimed, in fact, that exchange systems based on mutual gift giving precede

and are the basis for modern, abstract, market economic systems.4 Still others,

following in Mauss footsteps, state the relationship more pointedly. Claude

Levi-Strauss, for instance, credited Mauss for recognising that gifting is

not a completely altruistic, disinterested activity, but he criticised Mauss for

failing to recognise the true nature of gifting: to initiate, in a veiled fashion,

a relationship of exchange. The gift disguises the true motives of those

engaged in economic exchange.5 More pointedly still, Pierre Bourdieu

suggests that gift and economy are both examples of social practices through

which systems of domination/authority are established and maintained.

In other words, both gift exchange and free market economic exchange are

economic practices, broadly construed. Both are employed to garner a shareof the material and/or symbolic capital that improves ones lot in the given

social hierarchy.6

At the other end of the spectrum are those who oppose the connection

made between gift and economy. Jacques Derrida was among the most vocal

critics of Mauss and others in this regard. Derrida did not claim that the gift

is unrelated to exchange; Mauss great insight stands: gift and economy are

related. But, he argued, they are related only as mutually exclusive concepts.

One cannot treat the gift, this goes without saying, without treating this

relation to economy, even to money economy. But is not the gift, if there

is any, also that which interrupts economy?7 The advent of the gift, if such

exists, interrupts the very possibility for a calculation of return, hence the

possibility of economy. Gift stands as the irreducible (and impossible) other

of economy, fundamentally an aneconomic phenomenon.

Like Derrida, Jean-Luc Marion seeks to preserve the gift from falling into

economy, but without reducing it to the impossible other of economy.

Marion argues that the gift can be disconnected from the horizon of

economic relations once it is reduced to pure givenness, i.e. through the triplephenomenological bracketing of givee, giver, and given object. Through this

bracketing the gift reveals itself, shows itself, as that which gives itself as gift.

Once the gift is so reduced, i.e. once it is understood within a phenomenology

of givenness, it becomes the principal mode of the apparation of all

phenomena: The exclusion of exchange and the reduction of transcendencies

finally define the gift as purely immanent. Givenness characterises it

intrinsically, not longer extrinsically . . .. This being done, we will observe

a decisive point: the way in which the gift gives itself coincides exactlywith the way in which the phenomenon shows itself.8 In a similar way,

Calvin O. Schrag argues that gift is other than economy. However, Schrag

attempts to set gift and economy in a relationship of transversality which

exhibits the interrelated sense of lying across, extending over, contact without

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absorption, convergence without coincidence, and unity without strict

identity.9 The gift is the transcendent other of economy which breaks in,

disrupts and reorients it.

Given the complexity of these viewpoints, what could Ricoeur possibly

have meant by the phrase economy of the gift? He was hardly unaware of the

history of scholarship on the idea of the gift that stretches from before

Mauss and Levi-Strauss into the present with Bourdieu, Derrida, Marion

and Schrag, among others. Either the gift is of a piece with economy and

economy of the gift borders on tautology, or the gift is radically (impossibly)

aneconomic and economy of the gift is absurd. The fact that Ricoeur

presented the idea with little explanation, as if it were unproblematic and

unencumbered, makes its presence all the more jarring. There are, however,

resources in Ricoeurs thought that lend some perspective to this oddpredication of an economy of the gift.

The first place to look in uncovering the meaning of Ricoeurs strange turn

of phrase is his theory of metaphor. On Ricoeurs understanding, metaphor

functions on the basis of an impertinent predication: the metaphor presents

the hearer/reader with an absurdity at the literal level of the statement;

the metaphor therefore requires a suspension of the literal meaning so that

a figurative, and truly novel, meaning can emerge. Ricoeur argued that

metaphor is a semantic event that takes place at the point where several

semantic fields intersect. It is because of this construction that all the words,

taken together, make sense.10 The use of metaphor is a literary/rhetorical

strategy that plays on predicative impertinence in order to produce new

meaning.

This theory of metaphor gives us some initial purchase on the meaning

of the phrase economy of the gift. It is possible to think of gift and economy

as two distinct conceptual realities which function, or become meaningful,

on the basis of two different semantic fields. Unlike Bourdieu, Ricoeur was

reticent about consigning the gift to the field of economic practices. Thereis reason to preserve the difference even if the difference is not clear cut

in practice. The gift has a linguistic, conceptual and semantic context that is

distinct from economic relations. We have, then, two disparate semantic fields

that cannot be thought together except as distinct realities, or perhaps more

accurately, cannot be thought except together as distinct realities. In lumping

gift and economy together, perhaps Ricoeur was playing on the intersection

of semantic fields to see what gifts of meaning arise. But, what meanings

are we gifted with? In answering this question, we can look to Ricoeursunderstanding of the referential economy of narrative.

The move from metaphor to narrative is a natural one in Ricoeurs oeuvre.

The two function as partners, so to speak, in the production of semantic

innovation, one dealing at the level of rhetorical tropes and figures of

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discourse, the other at the level of literary genres and the synthesis of plots.

And, narratives function on the basis of a conflictual encounter similar to the

one that drives metaphor: the exchange of narrative discord and concord in

the synthesis of the plot. As Ricoeur understood it, a narrative plot, fictional

or otherwise, is a configuration of events. In the case of fiction, this is an

uncontroversial claim: a fictional narrative tells a story by composing

the event-filled lives of its characters into a complete work. Within the

plot, there are the twists and turns that move the plot toward its final

conclusion. Another way of putting it is that the plot transforms discordant

events, i.e. the twists and turns, into a concordant whole by the end of the

narrative, at least in the case of the realist novel. Just as the metaphor gives

new meaning through the impertinence of attributes at the literal level of the

statement, narrative offers new possibilities for consideration through theintroduction of discordant events which are brought into concord through

the narrative economy of the plot. The narrative therefore functions like an

extended metaphor.

The narrative plot is, then, a configuration of events that is engaged in the

act of reading. In reading a narrative, the reader becomes contemporaneous

with the narrative; the reader is invited to inhabit the story. This

understanding led Ricoeur to propose the idea of a threefold mimesis that

is enacted in the engagement with the narrative. Ricoeur coined the termmimesis"

to signify the expectations, biases and prejudices the reader brings

to the text; these aspects necessarily affect how the reader interprets the

narrative and serve as what he calls a narrative prefiguration. By mimesis,

he referred to the narrative configuration of the plot itself. The narrative

offers itself to be interpreted by the reader and, in so doing, opens

the kingdom as if : the narrative offers the reader a world that s/he can

inhabit as if it were reality. In other words, the narrative offers a possible

world, and a world of possibilities, that the reader can try out imaginatively,

on a trial basis. The narrativefictional or otherwiseis a space ofimaginative variation that gives rise to new thoughts and possibilities.

Finally, Ricoeur discussed mimesis, or refiguration, as the event whereby

the narrative invites the reader to reconsider his/her existence in light of the

narrative.

Through this threefold mimesis, the narrative produces reality. Put

differently, the narrative is genuinely productive of meanings by virtue of the

refiguration of possibilities and the invitation to the reader to inhabit and/or

adopt those possibilities. This, Ricoeur argued, is a function of poetic textsin general, understood in the broad sense of imaginative literary constructions:

To understand these texts is to interpolate among the predicates of our situation

all those meanings that, from a simple environment (Umwelt), make a world (Welt).



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Indeed, we owe a large part of the enlarging of our horizon of existence to poetic

works. Far from producing only weakened images of reality . . . literary works

depict reality by augmenting it with meanings that themselves depend upon the

virtues of abbreviation, saturation, and culmination, so strikingly illustrated by

emplotment. . .

. For some years now I have maintained that what is interpretedin a text is the proposing of a world that I might inhabit and into which I might

project my ownmost powers. In the Rule of Metaphor, I held that poetry, through

its muthos, redescribes the world. In the same way, in this work I will say that

making a narrative [le faire narratif] resignifies the world in its temporal dimension,

to the extent that narrating, telling, reciting is to remake action following the

poems invitation.11

This understanding of the function of poetic literary constructs offers the path

of least resistance to an understanding of what Ricoeur meant by economy

of the gift.

This narrative approach tells us much about the idea of an economy of the

gift because of the point at which this idea entered Ricoeurs conceptual

vocabulary: in his account of the theological (and primarily Christian)

narrative of salvation history. Ricoeur was not a theologian, and never claimed

to be one. He characterised himself as a philosopher who listens seriously to

the Christian message. As a hermeneutical thinker, Ricoeur was always

interested in the primary texts of this tradition, and he typically approachedthem as a special case of poetic literary constructions. The Christian narrative

of salvation history, as Ricoeur conceived it, is a secondary theological

discourse that is constructed over the foundation of what he calls originary

expressions of religious experience found principally scattered throughout the

biblical texts. These originary expressions form a polyphonous discourse that

functions to name God. In other words, the biblical texts are a collection of

literary genres and theological traditions from a range of different time periods

that attempt to give expression to the experience of the holy; these texts arenot univocal in their expressions but diverse. The narrative texts name God

differently than the prophetic texts, which in turn name God differently than

the wisdom literature. Nonetheless, they together serve to name God in the

fundamental attributes of creator and redeemer. But what is the status of these

names? How do they function?

In order to gain some perspective on what Ricoeur was doing, here

I propose a brief detour through the ideas presented by Calvin O. Schrag.

Like Ricoeur, Schrags attempts to come to grips with the nature of the

divine lead him to focus on the character of the gift, but in a more

pointed fashion. The issue for Schrag is the possibility of reconceiving

God outside of metaphysics and ontotheology, which in his estimation have

collapsed. Like Ricoeur, he turns to narrative as the productive mode in

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which the presence of God becomes manifest. Addressing the failure

of negative theology to finally break its moorings to a failed metaphysics,

Schrag states:

The ontological problematic in negative theology is compounded with a

semantic and epistemological problematic . . .. Set within the framework of

a search for the proper names of the Deity, negative theology is unable to avoid

the semantic and epistemological quandaries of an undecidability of meaning

and indeterminacy of reference. What is required is a shift of focus away from

a preoccupation with naming to the disclosing function of narration. Names will

indeed continue to play a role in our discourse about both our neighbor and our

God, but names do not comport meaning in and of themselves, decontextualized

from the stories that we tell about the entwined discourse and action that makeup the fabric of our communicative praxis.12

He argues that narration is disclosive of the presence of Deity independent of

metaphysics or ontology. This presence is disclosed in two fundamental

modes: ethics, as presented in the ideas of Emmanuel Levinas, and sacrament,

representative of the ideas of Jean-Luc Marion. While Schrag is appreciative

of Marions sacramental approach, particularly the distinction he draws

between icon and idol, he suggests that Marion may himself fall into a

more pernicious idolatry by making the Church, and particularly the

ecclesiastical representative, the bishop, the sole means of access to this

sacramental presence. Thus, it is the ethical presence that Schrag

favours: narrative is disclosive of the ethical character of God otherwise

than being.

This is, I think, what Ricoeur was aiming at when he discussed the narrative

naming of God. Creator and Redeemer are less proper names than ethical

presentiments of the character of divinity. They do not name Gods being as

much as they express Gods appearing. Citing Clifford Geertz, Ricoeur

asserted that all religious symbolism aims at joining the two ideas of a cosmic

order and an ethical order. And not just joining them, but reconciling them

in the face of the menace of their breakup that evil represents.13 For Ricoeur,

a notion of the giftedness of existence takes shape against the backdrop of this

naming of God. Existence unfolds within a range of significations that extends

from creation, the symbolic centre of the originary gift of existence, to final

redemption, the symbolism of the gift of unknown possibility; creation

and redemption are, in turn, claims about an ethical presence at the heart

of cosmic order. The foundation for this symbolic spectrum is the God

narratively named as the source of both. This connection between gift and

ethics deserves more attention.



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I I . N A R R A T I V E , M O R A L I M A G I N AT I O N A N D E C O N O M Y O F T H E G I F T

Strictly speaking, the symbols of creation and redemption and the

presentiment of giftedness that they give rise to are not ethical, but

supramoral, as Ricoeur puts it. This supramoral quality becomes moremanifest as the gift is exposed to the idea of moral reciprocity, i.e. as it comes

into contact with economic rationality in its moral manifestation of justice.

If we take the golden rule as the most general practical expression of moral

justice, we can recognise in this rule a dimension of economic rationality

broadly conceived as reasoning that functions on the basis of a calculation

of returns, reciprocation, or, as I will say shortly, a logic of equivalence. At its

most basic, the golden rule asserts that I ought to perform the good for others

that I would like for myself; one might suggest that there is, implicit in this

statement, a hope that the good I perform might be reciprocated by the other,

though this is not explicit. The supramoral quality of the biblical symbols of

creation and redemption is manifest in the fact that they reveal existence as

a gift that cannot be reciprocated. The God who is poetically named in the

narratives of creation and redemption is the God with whom humans cannot

hold reciprocal relations; the gift of existence, original and redeemed, cannot

be returned to the giver. These two ideassupramoral gift of existence and

moral economy of the golden ruleoperate as the two semantic fields that

Ricoeur sought to bring together in the notion of an economy of the gift.This notion finds initial expression, therefore, in the exchange between two

biblical ideals that seem entirely opposed to each other: the golden rule and,

what Ricoeur conceived as the supramoral expression of the gift, the love

command.

Before I can address the manner in which these two ideals conspire to give

rise to an understanding of the economy of the gift, however, it is necessary

to pause and explore, once again, the configuring power of poetic literary

constructs. In his writings on the issue of religion, Ricoeur always privilegedreligious discourse over religious experience. This is not to say that the religious

is more a linguistic phenomenon than an experiential one; Ricoeur

withheld judgment on this question: What is said is only this: whatever

may be the nature of the so-called religious experience, it comes to language,

it is articulated in a language, and the most appropriate place to interpret it

on its own terms is to inquire into its linguistic expression.14 Ricoeur also

privileged written discourse over spoken discourse. Again, this was principally

for methodological reasons. Interpretation is less an issue in the situation

of speech; if there is a question of meaning, I am free to ask my interlocutor

what s/he intends. The speaker has, among other things, the benefit of

ostensive reference to make his/her point clear. Such is not the case for

written discourse, most especially when the writer is no longer available for

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questioning. This is quintessentially the case for Ricoeurs example of the

originary expressions of the encounter with the holy, the Jewish and Christian

biblical texts. The claim that the engagement with the text requires the detour

through interpretation because of lack of direct referential markers to ground

meaning does not, however, entail the stronger claim that the text lacks all

referential markers. In fact, Ricoeur argued that texts do employ reference in

revolutionary ways that make them fundamentally important carriers of

meaning. Texts do this by first suspending the immediate ostensive reference

of the face-to-face encounter, and with ostensive reference, the authors

original intention in composing the text; while the authors intention

need not be irrelevant, it is no longer the deciding factor in determining

the texts meaning. Through this double suspension of immediate reference

and authorial intention, the written discourse becomes an autonomous entitywhich projects a world of possibilities in front of itself . Through the

confluence of literary structuresplot, literary and rhetorical figures,

intertextual reference, etc.the text appeals to the reader. We have already

encountered this tendency above in our discussion of the interaction between

mimesis

and mimesis: the narrative presents the reader with a world of

possibilities and invites him/her to inhabit that world. What the reader

engages, then, through the hermeneutical interaction with the text is what

Ricoeur called the world of the text or the issue of the text.Ricoeurs ultimate interest was what the text engenders in the imagination

through the act of reading, and here we impinge on some of the more

revolutionary aspects of his thought. He wished to unfold the hermeneutical

aspects of what Immanuel Kant called the productive imagination. Kant

discussed the productive imagination as a form of norm-governed invention

(i.e. the imagination functions on the basis of schema that determine the

bounds of imaginative variation) and as a power that gives form to human

experience (i.e. the productive imagination takes the raw data of experience

and synthesises them into a meaningful structure).15 Ricoeur paraphrased

Kant to mean by the productive imagination, among other things, the power

of redescribing reality.16 The writing and the reading of fiction manifest,

in Ricoeurs estimation, the hermeneutical dimension of the productive

imagination: Fiction is my name for the imagination considered under

this double point of view of rule-governed invention and a power of

redescription.17

Somewhat surprisingly, at least on an initial pass, Ricoeur saw this work of

redescription of the productive imagination to be closely linked to the

originary expressions of the experience of the holy at work in the biblical

texts. These biblical texts then function as a powerful redescription of reality;

when the reader engages these texts in a serious manner s/he is asked to



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consider reality from the perspective of this redescription and, in fact, to

participate in the power of redescription.

. . . I would like to consider the act of reading as a dynamic activity that is not

confined to repeating significations fixed forever, but which takes place as aprolonging of the itineraries of meaning opened up by the work of interpretation.

Through this first trait, the act of reading accords with the idea of a norm-

governed productivity to the extent that it may be said to be guided by a

productive imagination at work in the text itself. Beyond this, I would like to see

in the reading of a text such as the Bible a creative operation unceasingly

employed in decontextualizing its meaning and recontextualizing it in todays

Sitz-im-Leben. Through this second trait, the act of reading realizes the union of

fiction and redescription that characterizes the imagination in the most pregnant

sense of this term.18

To read the biblical texts is to participate in the redescription of reality

initiated by the text and completed in the reader. What the texts offer to the

imagination is, among other things, a moral redescription of reality brought

about through the interaction of the ideal of the golden rule and that of the

love command.

Once again, the golden rule is, in Ricoeurs estimation, the most general

account of justice and the foundation of the moral concern for reciprocity.

Indeed, he favoured the golden rule over more formal principles like

Kants categorical imperative because it institutes a norm of reciprocity that

pays attention to the concrete aspects of action: acts, actors/suffers and effects.

The most remarkable thing . . . in the formulation of this rule is that the

reciprocity demanded stands out against the background of the presupposition

of an initial dissymmetry between the protagonists of the actiona

dissymmetry that places one in the position of agent and the other in that

of patient. This absence of symmetry has its grammatical projection in

the opposition between the active form of doing and the passive form ofbeing done, hence of suffering or submission.19 Again, the golden rule is

the moral expression, par excellence, of the economic concern to equalise

relations. The golden rule commands that I extend the good actions I desire

for myself to the other; implied is the expectation that s/he recognises the

same principle and responds in like manner. The good I perform for the

other I expect in return. There need be nothing cynical in this recognition.

It is simply the case that just relations conform to a logic that is economic

in the broad sense.The commandment to love ones neighbour presents us with a very

different ideal. At first, it seems that the love command is simply a restatement

of the golden rule; am I not commanded to love the neighbour as myself ?

However, the biblical texts, particularly the Christian gospels, place a wrinkle

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In articulating this clash of logics, Ricoeur turned to a particular narrative,

what we might call a root narrative in Christian salvation history, the

gospel of Matthews sermon on the mount. The demands to turn the other

cheek, to offer the cloak as well as the coat, to walk the second mile, to lend

without expectation of return seem to contradict, indeed to overturn,

the concern for reciprocity demanded by justice. This confrontation is

amplified by the verses which introduce these sayings: You have heard that

it was said, An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But I say to you . . .

(Matt. 5.3842). This But I say to you. . . introduces a rule for extravagant

action, undergirded by a logic of superabundance, which seems to bring the

concern for equivalence to an end, just as, in Jacques Derridas estimation,

the gift exists only as the moment of immoderation, unmeasurability and

disproportionality that interrupts and disrupts economy. Ricoeur argued,however, that these two logics do not contradict each other; rather they serve

as mutual correctives.20 At this point, the practical import of the biblical

redescription of reality comes to fruition.

The logic of equivalence that serves to establish moral justice at the same

time threatens the perversion of justice: while the spirit of the rule guards

against undue self-interest, there is nothing in the rule itself to guard against

the tendency to pervert it in the interest of individual utility. The rule

to treat others as you would like to be treated too easily succumbs to the

calculation of personal interest: how must I act toward others to get what

I want? Worse still, there is nothing inherent in the golden rule to

combat the desire to return evil for evil. The golden rule, left to its own,

can be used to support a utilitarian calculation or a reactive reciprocity of

retribution. Equally perverse and immoral, the demand to forgo reciprocity

encountered in the superabundant logic of the love command too easily

inclines toward a misinterpreted self-degradation in the face of the object

of love. The vulnerable in society are made to bear the brunt of a love

that leaves physical and emotional scars, and too often on claims ofbiblical precedent: a woman cherishes her husband by remaining submissive

in the face of beatings; children honour their parents by remaining quiet

in the face of physical and emotional neglect; the slave obeys his master

as a show of love for God. In other words, equivalence inclines toward

self-interest, superabundance toward self-negation without the correcting

effect of the other.

Within the symbolic spectrum that names God as creator and redeemer,

existence is presented as a gifted affair: existence is a gift of an original andever-renewing creation; its redemption is the gift of final reconciliation,

at least within the bounds of Christian understanding. The corrective moral

impetus of the economy of the gift is grounded in a preexistent awareness,

poetically configured by the biblical texts, of the giftedness of existence.

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Within this poetic redescription of reality, love is not the antithesis of

reciprocity, but its principal expression: imagination is opened to the

possibility that love of neighbour is the appropriate response to a love of

which I am the beneficiary. At the same time, the fact that one is the

beneficiary of love preserves against the misinterpretation that love demands

self-negation. As a creature, one is heir of the assertion of value that Genesis

attaches to all creation, and hence worthy of respect. Love is a response to this

inheritance, not a denial of it.

Ricoeurs treatment of the economy of the gift has served as a sort of test

case for addressing the manner in which he used figurative and poetic

discourse to reap theological ends. In the final section of this paper, I will offer

some more general reflections on the place of the poetic in Ricoeurs

understanding of the religious.

I I I . P O E T RY A N D T H E O L O G Y

That Ricoeur saw a profound connection between poetic expression and

religious discourse is without question. For the most part, however, he was

unwilling to follow this insight to its most radical conclusions. Indeed,

Ricoeur frequently displayed discomfort in addressing theological matters,

and more particularly, the possible theological presuppositions behind his own

philosophical project. There is reason, however, to press Ricoeurs insights

a bit farther that he might have been willing to do himself. This final section

will attempt to do just this.

Recall that Ricoeur posed the love command as the practical manifestation

of the gift symbolised by the creation-redemption spectrum. That the

narratives of creation, and perhaps even more so redemption, are fictitious,

i.e. not literally true, does not impede one from interpreting his/her own life in

light of this description of reality. The lack of literal verity of the biblical

narratives, parables, prophesies, etc., was never a problem for Ricoeur. Muchof his thought about the religious was an attempt to refute simplistic, literalistic

and fundamentalist treatments of the biblical texts. While biblical discourse is

not literally true, it is not meaningless. In Ricoeurs mind fiction has never

been reducible to untrue; in many cases, fiction and the poetic in general is

more true than fact. The poetic gives rise to a dimension of meaning that is

simply not available at the level of non-poetic, descriptive, apodictic, ordinary

language expressions. The genius of religious discourse, a genius it shares with

poetry in general, is its power of redescription. Description; the religious, like

the poetic, is revelatory because of this power.

But if the symbolic discourses of creation and redemption are not literally

true, if they are poetry, what of the foundation upon which they are inscribed?

If creation and redemption are merely poetic fictions, does the God who is



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biblically named as creator and redeemer actually exist? Here, Ricoeur

equivocated and, to my mind, stepped away from exploring the more radical

implications of his own ideas: in a sense, he answered this question both yes

and no. In doing so, he came close to falling into the kind of fundamentalist

assumptions that he criticised elsewhere. I quote Ricoeur one last time at

length:

[I]t seems to me that this referential function of poetic discourse [i.e. that second

order, symbolic reference let loose by the suspension of direct reference] conceals

a dimension of revelation in a nonreligious, nontheistic, nonbiblical sense of the word,

yet a sense capable of furnishing a first approximation of what revelation in the

biblical sense may signify. To reveal is to uncover what until then remained

hidden . . .. Revelation, in this sense, designates the emergence of another

concept of truth than truth as adequation, regulated by criteria of verification and

falsification: a concept of truth as manifestation, in the sense of letting be what

shows itself. What shows itself is each time the proposing of a world, a world

wherein I can project my ownmost possibilities. Hence, naming God, before

being an act of which I am capable, is what the texts of my predilection [i.e. the

biblical texts] do when they escape from their authors, their redactional setting,

and their first audience, when they deploy their world, when they poetically

manifest and thereby reveal a world we might inhabit.21

It is not immediately clear why Ricoeur wished to distinguish between a

non-religious, non-biblical form of revelation and a properly religious and biblical

revelation. The closest he came to offering a justification was to state that

biblical discourse is religiously revelatory because its subject matter is God,

while poetic discourse in general is not limited to naming God. But this is not

a very satisfactory answer. He seemed to introduce the distinction religious

and non-religious precisely to avoid addressing the nature of the God who is

named figuratively by discourses that seem to function like poetic, fictional

discourses in general.Ricoeur cannot be blamed for succumbing to the impulse to separate off

the biblical texts from poetic discourse in general. He did not invent the

distinction, and, not being a theologian, he was likely not comfortable

overturning it. What might happen, however, if we take his insight that

religious discourse poetically names God and jettison the notion that religious

texts are different from non-religious ones? There are reasons to be concerned

about this proposition. Foundational claims about the divine nature serve

to restrict imagination; in essence they authorise a particular naming of God.

De-authorising (de-authorialising) these foundations could definitely make

religion an unstable force; it might take the religious out of our control. This

might be precisely what is needed, however. After all, if we have an authorised

set of names for God, if we can limit and control the name of God,

202 W. DAVID HALL


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does this not place God under our control, make God subservient to our

wishes? This, theologically construed, is idolatry.

Modern theology is full of voices that have urged us to think beyond the

inherited categories we use to conceive God. Paul Tillich called us to take

courage and to transcend theismthe conception of God as a being among

beings, the attempt to trap God within the shallow categories of our own

understanding. Karl Barth warned us not to mistake our own projects, the

gods to whom we have constructed the tower of Babel, as the God

who confronts us in the word of divine righteousness. And, more recently,

Jean-Luc Marion has brought to our attention the idolatrous nature of the

God of Being. The true God, the God without being, is beyond Being.

Perhaps, it is time to recognise God as otherwise than being as Schrag would

have us consider. Ricoeurs ethical and theological redescription of realitybrought about by the poetic dimensions of religious discourse, if taken to its

more radical conclusions, may disclose this God to us without trapping it in

the metaphysical and ontological categories we are striving to shed.

There is reason to be concerned about the ramifications of abandoning

the foundations, of giving free reign to our naming; it could result in

a cacophonous, chaotic confusion. Then again, it could offer us an image of

regenerate humanity that is bigger than our sectarian biases and cultural

political bigotry. It could result in the regeneration of theological discourse

that is truly informed by the gift, in a discourse about transcendence that

breaks into and disrupts our preconceived notions and idolatrous tendencies.

There is, at the very least, reason to hope.

Centre College, W. Walnut Avenue, Danville, KY , USA

R E F E R E N C E S1 Paul Ricoeur, Ethical and Theological

Considerations on the Golden Rule in

Mark I. Wallace (ed.) Figuring the Sacred:

Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, trans.

David Pellaur (Minneapolis: Fortress Press,

1995), pp. 30001. Revisions for this article

were completed shortly after Ricoeurs death,

and it is with some sorrow that I have had

to go through and change my analyses ofhis thought to the past tense. My hope is

that these reflections do justice to breadth

and depth of his work. I am accutely aware

that I stand on the shoulders of giants.

2 Ricoeur took up this this topic again,

and in a similar vein, more recently in

History, Memory, Forgetting, trans.

Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer

(Chicago: University of Chicago, 2004),

pp. 47986.3 Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and

Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Indianapolis:

Liberty Fund, 1981), pp. 2627.4 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions

of Exchange in Archaic Studies, trans.

W.D. Halls, introd. by Mary Douglas

(New York: W. W. Norton, 1990).



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5 Claude Levi-Strauss, Introduction to the

Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. Felicity Baker

(London: Routledge, 1987).6 Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice,

trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press, 1990).7 Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit

Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago:

University of Chicago, 1992), p. 7.8 Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward

a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans.

Jeffrey L. Koskey (Stanford: Stanford

University, 2002), p. 115.9 Calvin O. Schrag, God as Otherwise Than

Being: Toward a Semantics of the Gift(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University,

2002), pp. 4041.10 Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-

Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of

Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny,

Kathleen McLaughlin, and John Costello

(Toronto: University of Toronto Press,

1977), p. 98.11 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 1,

trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and DavidPellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1984), pp. 8081.12 Schrag, God as Otherwise Than Being,

pp. 8788.13 Ricoeur, Ethical and Theological Considera-

tions on the Golden Rule, p. 299.14 Paul Ricoeur, Philosophy and Religious

Language in Mark I. Wallace (ed.)

Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative,

and Imagination, trans. David Pellauer(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), p. 35.15 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement,

trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis:

Hackett Publishing, 1987), pp. 265300.16 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, pp. 6671.

17 Paul Ricoeur, The Bible and the

Imagination in Mark I. Wallace (ed.)

Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative,

and Imagination, trans. David Pellauer

(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), p. 144.18 Ibid., p. 145.19 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans.

Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of

Chicago, 1992), p. 219.20 Schrags idea of transversal relationship is

instructive here. Similar to Ricoeur, he

suggests that the gift is theologically

understood properly in the command to

love the neighbour without concern

for reciprocation. Schrag then arguesthat the gift traverses conceptions of

justice and democracy as a corrective:

Justice itself becomes transfigured and

transvalued by dint of the presence of

the gift. So we have a justice that is no

longer simply symmetrical and reciprocal.

It is now justice informed and vitalized

by asymmetry, as is also the democracy,

which is the socio-political expression

of justice. Admittedly, this is a justiceand a democracy that is yet to come. It

has an eschatological orientation. . .. The

gift of love as the asymmetrical dimension

in all justice and democracy is the future

as the possible. But the future as the

possible is that which can be preenacted

in our communicative praxis as the

moment that announces both the logos

and the kairos (Schrag, God as Otherwise

Than Being, 142).21 Paul Ricoeur, Naming God in Mark I.

Wallace (ed.) Figuring the Sacred: Religion,

Narrative, and Imagination, trans. David

Pellauer (Minneapolis: Fortress Press,

1995), pp. 22223, emphasis added.

204 W. DAVID HALL

the economy of the gift

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