Always Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth

 

Don't look a gift horse in the mouth  

by TragicKittens on redbubble.com

 

 

I. 

 

One of the proverbial expressions I would advise people to consider carefully is: Never look a gift horse in the mouth [1]. 

 

Those who like to use this phrase think it impolite to treat a gift as one would a purchase by checking for flaws or critically considering the quality. One should, rather, accept the gift with good grace and gratitude and not question the giver's generosity. 

 

However, this displays a certain moral naivety. Because the giving of gifts is rarely an innocent act and should always be understood (at least in part) within the context of power, politics, and seduction ... 

 

 

II. 

 

Within the general economy of potlatch, for example, an individual expresses their sovereignty not by accumulating wealth but by giving it away; by their ability to endure loss and to place themselves outside of a restricted economy of utility. Their prestige is thus a form of symbolic power built upon contempt for riches and self-preservation.    

 

But the giving of a lavish gift, according to Bataille, is also an act of aggression and rivalry; a challenge to the recipient to either accept their indebtedness and social inferiority, or to reciprocate with an even more excessive gift. In other words, in accepting a gift, one is placed under an obligation [2].     

 

 

III. 

    

Jean Baudrillard considers the gift in somewhat different terms; namely, as an object with a purely symbolic value able to disrupt a system of commodity exchange based upon economic logic. The giving of an object of this kind allows the giver to turn the tables on a powerful subject; to confuse and disconcert them, so that they no longer know what to think or how to act. 

 

Recall, if you will, the case of the young woman who is amorously pursued by a wealthy older man who repeatedly tells her that her eyes are the most beautiful thing about her and has flowers delivered daily to her house. In the end, she sends him of one of her eyes in a little box tied with a lovely ribbon, the violence of the act leaving him shocked and speechless. 

 

For Baudrillard, this is an act of seduction (with the latter understood to be an ironic and fatal game of signs that divorces a subject from its power, rather than the persuasive play of desire). By taking the man's metaphorical fascination with her eyes literally and returning the object of his desire, she destroys the possibility of a normal romantic exchange of gifts and asserts her own sovereignty [3].  

 

  

Notes

 

[1] Saint Jerome popularised this proverb by including it in his commentary on Ephesians around 400 AD as the Latin phrase Noli equi dentes inspicere donati.

 

[2] See Volume I of Bataille's The Accursed Share, trans. Robert Hurley (Zone Books, 1991), where he develops his theory of general economy and discusses the notion of potlatch.  

 

[3] I might be mistaken, but I believe that Baudrillard refers to this story on several occasions in his work and each time gives a slightly different version. See, for example, Fatal Strategies, trans. Philip Beitchman and W. G. J. Niesluchowski (Pluto Press, 1999), pp. 120-21. 

 

 

On the Agony of Power II: The White Terror of World Order

Jean Baudrillard by Guillem Cifré

www.artisopensource.net

According to Baudrillard, domination becomes hegemony when the slave internalizes the master. But for this to happen, power must also absorb the negative - and that's problematic. For whilst the negative can certainly be swallowed, it can never be fully digested; rather, it starts to eat away at power from the inside in a cannibalistic manner. Justice is served in the form of auto-liquidation.    

Meanwhile, the external remnants of negativity - those things which have not yet been swallowed by hegemonic power, or have perhaps already been spat out - mutate into forms of evil that include chaotic weather events and suicide bombers.

The victory of the New World Order is, therefore, only ever apparent. It is obliged to fight a continual war on terror; at a military level, but, also, on a symbolic level as it seeks to liquidate all remaining values and to achieve a humiliating and nihilistic final consensus in which all is revealed as equally worthless and there is literally nothing left to disagree on. Baudrillard writes:  

"The terrorist's potlatch against the West is their own death. Our potlatch is indignity, immodesty, obscenity, degradation and abjection. This is the movement of our culture ... truth is always on the side of unveiling ... exhibition, avowal, nudity - nothing is true unless it is desecrated, objectified, stripped of its aura, or dragged onstage."

"This confrontation is not quite a 'clash of civilizations', but it is not economic or political either, and today it only concerns the West and Islam in appearance. Fundamentally, it is a duel, and its stakes are symbolic ... a universal carnivalization ... against all the singularities that resist it." 

Obviously Baudrillard is not advocating the most violent and reactionary forms of singular resistance, but invoking rather the most poetic of possibilities. However, there's still something troubling about his critique of Western modernity; one which is clearly related to a Romantic and irrationalist tradition of German philosophy that would include Nietzsche at his most Dionysian and Heidegger at his most politically compromised.
          

Indeed, I feel compelled to say that I infinitely prefer a demoralized and disenchanted world to one of sacrificial violence and fundamentalism and would much rather live in a hyperreal and extraterrestrial zone that has devoured its own logic and values than in those primitive regions of the world still living under strict religious law and the mythological authority of God.

Better the euphoric banality of the last man than the stupidity and savage cruelty of those who have yet to even enter history, let alone pass through it.

See: Jean Baudrillard, 'The White Terror of World Order', essay in The Agony of Power, trans. Ames Hodges, (Semiotext(e), 2010), pp. 67, 69.

  

The Case of Jacintha Saldanha

Potlatch is an archaic form of economic exchange, based on the notion of giving a gift of such value that the receiver is thereby humiliated and at the same time obligated. This can include the gift of life.

For it is not only possible to shame and to challenge an enemy via a spectacular display of wealth, but also by a senseless and violent act of sacrifice, including self-sacrifice or suicide.

And so we come to the case of Jacintha Saldanha: the nurse who killed herself after falling victim to a prank telephone call made by two Australian DJs who thought it funny and inconsequential to make a fool of someone. Now they know better.

For what this proud and honourable woman has done is turn the tables on those who would make her look naive and gullible in the eyes of the entire world. She has effectively rendered them speechless and powerless by making of her own life a sacrificial offering that has to be accepted with deep sorrow and regret, but which can never be returned. 

In refusing to be a figure of fun and by making exchange impossible, Jacintha Saldanha has extracted the object's revenge.

So who's laughing now? Certainly not Michael Christian or Mel Greig.