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Academic journal article Philosophy Today. Who could ever think of the gift as a giftthat-takes?
Who else but man, precisely the one who would like to take everything? But as Derrida himself notes in the foreword to this work, the problematic of the gift has been at work in his texts "wherever it is a question of the proper appropriation, expropriation, exappropriation , economy, the trace, the name, and especially the rest, of course, which is to say more or less constantly. One reader of Derrida who has not failed to attend to this problematic is Helene Cixous.
And following Cixous's own oblique suggestion, I would like to begin by re-reading several of Nietzsche's reflections on economy, exchange, and the giving of gifts.
By bringing Nietzsche and Cixous into dialogue on these points, we will be able to examine the exchange model and the definition of subjectivity in terms of the acquisition of property that accompanies this model. In so doing, we will experiment with another model, one based on an economy of generosity that in different ways is suggested by both Nietzsche and Cixous.
In the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche traces the genealogy of the modern moral concepts of guilt and bad conscience back to their economic roots in "the oldest and most primitive personal relationship, that between buyer and seller, creditor and debtor. Schuld, which translates both debt and guilt, thus operates within a strange logic of compensation that seeks to establish equivalences between the creditor and the debtor.
Like guilt, obligation, and punishment, Nietzsche also locates the origin of justice in the relationship between creditor and debtor.
The characteristic of exchange is the original characteristic of justice. Each satisfies the other, inasmuch as each acquires what he values more than the other does. The retreat from experience, i. Those who follow now, distinguishing the various epistemologies, in fact only distinguish the various ways dumb bodies speak to determine one another.
That means, of course, that this is a philosopher who has been subject to more than ordinary misunderstanding. Now that Nietzsche has set the record straight, mankind need never again, though it probably shall, fall prey to the violence of nihilism.
And our new Greeks, inspired by Nietzsche, will be exactly as were our old Greeks, those who will show men that they are ignorant of justice! It is highly to be recommended for seminars. Its chief defect is that it does begin, after a time, to sound like a training manual for the ministers of wounded spirits.
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“The drama Nietzsche has written is for the future Greeks.” This somber note is the tonic both for the major and minor elements of Alderman's Nietzsche's Gift. pages ; 24 cm. Includes bibliographical references (pages ) Nietzsche's masks: On reading Nietzsche -- The camel, the lion, and.