Meanings and Materialities
Meanings and Materialities
Exhibition 6–15 June
Open every day 12:00-18:00Alexandra Urakova
Alexandra Urakova is a researcher at the Tampere University and a docent in North-American Studies at the University of Helsinki. She is the author of Dangerous Giving in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) and a co-edited volume The Dangers of Gifts from Antiquity to the Digital Age (Routledge, 2022). Her research interests traverse different disciplines and fields, including literary and cultural studies, cultural anthropology, gender and sexuality, intellectual history, and material culture history. She is particularly interested in modern histories and theories of gifting; sentimental gift culture and rhetoric; possessive individualism, dispossession, and fragility of ownership.
(together with Margrit Shildrick)
What would gift theory have been like if it were called “a theory of the present” instead? Co-authored by a literary scholar and a biophilosopher, this paper teases out theoretical possibilities that this synonymous and generally dismissed term tentatively suggests. A key idea is inspired by Derrida who in Donner le Temps (1991) emphasizes the relation of the gift to the present as a relation “to the presence of the present.” Firstly, the paper discusses a little-known nineteenth century text “About Presents” (1853) by American sentimental author Caroline Mathilda Kirkland who made one of the first attempts to draft a theory of gifting. We argue that Kirkland conceptualizes the gift as a present by emphasizing its momentous value on the one hand, and its lasting presence sustained by the obligation to keep, on the other. Then we move to the seemingly unconnected realm of contemporary organ transplantation which is at the center of Gift of Life discourse and which reiterates many earlier patterns in a striking and almost uncanny way. Powerful crossovers include sentimentality and biosentimentality, keepsake and keepsafe (graft), the ghostly presence of the donor in the gift and the recipient as the gift’s hostage. Thinking of the transplanted organ through presence, acknowledging the presence of the other in one’s system allows us to tease out the possibility of rethinking the gift/present as a form of entanglement on the intracorporeal level as opposed to debt and exchange.