Gifts for No One or Anyone: Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida on <i>Personne</i>

In Parages, Jacques Derrida writes that the ‘Donner – le temps’ seminar ‘led up to’ a study of Maurice Blanchot’s La folie du jour. That study is the improvised fourteenth session of Donner le temps II. Derrida turns to La folie du jour to treat in more explicit terms the structure of the ‘ récit’ which was particularly relevant to his reading of Charles Baudelaire’s récit ‘La fausse monnaie’ earlier in the seminar, but which is almost entirely absent from the sessions included in Donner le temps II. This paper proposes one possible reason for Derrida’s insistence on Blanchot in the seminar and for thinking the gift: La folie du jour’s narrator, which is not someone determinate, but personne (which, in French, can mean either an indeterminate ‘no one’ or a substitutable ‘anyone’ depending on the context). I argue that the aporetic structure of the gift is best expressed when the gift’s subject and object are indeterminable and substitutable, which is the case when the gift is given to or received from an impersonal personne (to or from no one or anyone).