新世紀的喬伊斯：政治、文本、倫理─感官新樂園：從《尤利西斯》看身體政治與慾望經濟
Date Issued
2004-01-31
Date
2004-01-31
Author(s)
DOI
912411H002045B13
Abstract
The circular path of giving-in-order-to-get-back revealed by Joyce’s texts, to
a certain extent, justifies what Jacques Derrida has said on gifts: the simple
intention to give suffices to annul the very concept of the gift, for the donor’s
intention to pay himself with symbolic recognition, to praise himself, to
approve of himself, to gratify himself with some sort of symbolic equivalent,
has already defied the spirit of the gift, which is not supposed to get anything
in return. The gift economy laid bare by Joyce is also in tune with Pierre
Bourdieu’s analysis of gift exchange; namely, it is the collectively maintained
and approved self-deception that makes us assume gifts as free from any
ulterior motives. Instead of using Joyce’s texts to demonstrate the cogency
of Derrida and Bourdieu’s theories, my project probes into the gift economy
Joyce presents from the following aspects: If the gift is “the impossible” for
Derrida as it always returns something to the donor rather than reaches the
donee in a unilateral way, does Joyce’s gift economy imply similar ideas? If
Joyce’s texts deconstruct the gift economy by showing how it is far from
being disinterested, has Joyce offered any reason to account for the
calculative dimension of gift-giving? Moreover, if the circular structure of
economy necessitates the return of the gift to its donor, does the gift always
reach this destination and thus nullify itself?
According to my exploration, I find that Joyce has not demolished the gift
economy altogether by comparing gift-giving to self-congratulatory
beneficence or usurious calculation of advantage, for he depicts Leopold
Bloom as one who is willing to help the needy, one who generously spends
the majority of his money on gifts during the Bloomsday. Though Bloom’s
acts of giving are not free of self-interest, Joyce’s presentation of the gift
economy does not so much frustrate our expectation of genuine generosity as
enables us to recognize the reason why gifts can hardly be disinterested: it is
because the gift is invested with the donor’s desire, specifically the desire to
redraw the boundaries between the recipient and himself that the act of
giving is not immune from calculation. As Mary Douglas suggests, “if we
persist in thinking that gifts ought to be free and pure, we will always fail to
recognize our own grand cycles of exchanges, which categories get to be
included and which get to be excluded from our hospitality.” In other
words, more profound insights into calculation and generosity can be
expected if we penetrate how the motion of the gift economy is affected and
even propelled by the economy of desire. Thus, in addition to laying bare
how the gift economy presented by Joyce is far from being disinterested, my
project dwells on the relation between gift-giving and desire so as to grasp
the intricate mechanism of the intersubjective economy.
Subjects
James Joyce
economy of desire
acts of giving
gift
Publisher
臺北市：國立臺灣大學外國語文學系暨研究所
Type
report
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