Thanks to you, great Shakespeare, you who can say everything, everything, everything just as it is—and yet, why did you never articulate this torment? Did you perhaps reserve it for yourself, like the beloved’s name that one cannot bear to have the world utter, for with his little secret that he cannot divulge the poet buys this power of the word to tell everybody else’s dark secrets. A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.
—Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, on Shakespeare’s representation of Abraham’s torment1
I will conclude by arguing that Shakespeare’s passionate religious search for the gift—a search organized around his response to Abraham and Genesis 22—produces the critical crux that has alternately fascinated and tortured critics of Timon of Athens: Timon’s sudden shift from a generous noble to a mad misanthrope. In this emphasis, I claim some affinity with G. Wilson Knight’s once well-known (if now rarely cited) and distinctive treatment of the play in his classic work of Shakespeare criticism The Wheel of Fire.2
Knight argues that Timon “only aspired to the infinite” and that this transcendent aspiration underlies the split character.3 Both Timon’s excessive giving and his misanthropy reveal a “primary energy” directing him away from the partial and finite world.4 For Knight, Timon is something of a Nietzschean superman, pushing past Christian thought. This portrait is consistent with Knight’s understanding of Shakespeare generally: he has, “always in morality’s despite, viewed Shakespearian tragedy as in some indefinable, Nietzschean, way an advance” over Christian belief.5 But Timon of Athens stands out. So powerful is its movement to the “infinite” that Knight suggests the play “includes and transcends” Othello, Hamlet, and King Lear.6 While in agreement with Knight’s suggestion about Timon’s movement shaping the play, and with his suggestion that the play should have a more central place in the canon, I will suggest that this transcendent movement resembles a Derridean deconstruction of Christianity more than it does a Nietzschean “advance” over Christianity.
Timon of Athens is a religious play in that it pushes not past Christianity to a Nietzschean sensibility but down through Christianity to the religious passion underlying Christianity, a religious passion expressed in Genesis 22. Indeed, the religious movement is so profound that the play struggles, even wavers, in its own Christian beliefs. In fact, this struggle allows room for Knight’s Nietzschean reading and, I would speculate, participates in the notorious noncompletion and nonproduction of the play.7 Shakespeare’s art, like Derrida’s philosophy, probes not “the event of Christian revelation but rather . . . [the] philosophical structure or possibility that underlies this event.”8
I turn, again, to Derrida’s brief pre-definition of religion in order to understand Shylock:
However little may be known of religion in the singular, we do know that it is always a response and responsibility that is prescribed, not chosen freely in an act of pure and abstractly autonomous will. There is no doubt that it implies freedom, will and responsibility, but let us try to think this: will and freedom without autonomy. Whether it is a question of sacredness, sacrificiality or of faith, the other makes the law, the law is other: to give ourselves back, and up, to the other. To every other and to the utterly other. (Emphasis added.)9
As suggested in the introduction, no other Shakespearean character gives himself up “to the other . . . and to the utterly other” in the way Timon does. No character pushes down through Christianity to its desire for the “other and . . . utterly other” in the way Timon does, forcing us to consider where that responsibility to give comes from. Shakespeare’s drama suggests a direction that many post-modern thinkers, such as Derrida and Levinas, have pursued. The obligation to give, the obligation to the other, does not come from anywhere: the obligation precedes everything else. And, for Shakespeare, that understanding of obligation derives from Genesis 22.
I will begin, however, not with Knight, Nietzsche, Derrida, or philosophy’s turn to religion, but with Coppélia Kahn’s sophisticated and influential essay that engages Marcel Mauss’s The Gift, the work that in part energized Derrida’s later “religious” activity.10 In a reading that employs both feminist-psychoanalytic criticism and new historicism, Kahn argues persuasively that a “deeply felt fantasy of woman and of power animates [Timon of Athens] and provides a paradigm for its strikingly bifurcated action.”11 The marked contrast between the generous Timon of Acts 1 and 2 and the later misanthropic Timon derives mainly from a psychoanalytic phenomenon: some men “can only deal with the idea of [the] mother by total identification or total dis-identification” (emphasis original).12 Timon behaves generously in the first part of the play because he identifies with the “seductively maternal female presence”—the “bountiful mother.”13 This identification, however, involves only one psychological stage; indeed, Timon enacts this first stage in such a way as to bring about the second: “total dis-identification” with the mother “in the form of an undiscriminating hostility toward all things human.”14 For Kahn, Timon’s early generosity, his giving, is aggressive, something like the potlatching practices Mauss considers.
For Mauss, the human propensity to give and to reciprocate helps to form and maintain any social system. “Potlatching” is a particular example of gift-exchange. To outdo a rival, a “big man” or chief might give, or “potlatch,” everything away, even to the point of self-destruction; the chief’s excessive gifts prevent any reciprocation and establish his superiority to rivals by demonstrating his different social position in the exchange network.
When Timon gives, acting out the role of the “bountiful mother,” he actually potlatches, and brings himself into a “world of masculine competition, of combat, aggressiveness, and wounds, in which he meets his downfall through the treachery of those he holds as comrades.”15 In the process, Timon creates a scapegoat, the mother, who (as the imagined initiator of this violence) “is held responsible for the outrages and terrors of the world men come to know.”16 His identification with the bountiful mother thus inspires the masculine ethos he truly desires—and it explains his striking misogyny.
The important underlying assumption regarding Kahn’s use of Mauss and gift theory is her understanding that Timon engages in potlatching. And, if we accept Mauss’s theory without critique, as Kahn does, Timon is potlatching. But Derrida’s work compels us to reconsider gift exchange writ large, because his work suggests that Timon might not really give at all; he may exchange—money for friends, for example—but he does not give. Why? Because for Derrida, again, there is no gift in gift exchange; there is only exchange. The gift is: “Not impossible but the impossible. The very figure of the impossible. It announces itself, gives itself to be thought as the impossible” (emphasis original).17 For there to be a true gift—and Derrida pointedly and characteristically puts this (im)possibility in parentheses (“if there is any” gift)—“there must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, counter-gift, or debt. If the other gives me back or owes me or has to give me back what I give him or her, there will not have been a gift, whether this restitution is immediate or whether it is programmed by a complex calculation of a long-term deferral or différance.”18 The circle, or economy, of exchange cannot be broken. Within the circle of exchange Derrida includes paying oneself back psychologically: “But the one who gives it must not see it or know it either; otherwise he begins, at the threshold, as soon as he intends to give, to pay himself with a symbolic recognition, to praise himself, to approve of himself, . . . to give back to himself symbolically the value of what he thinks he has given or what he is preparing to give. . . . [These processes] always [set] in motion the . . . destruction of the gift.”19 Nonetheless, people insist on the possibility of the gift. The deferral or delay of repayment in exchange practices allowed Mauss “to pass unnoticed over [the] contradiction between gift and exchange” in a work, Derrida notes, that talks about everything but the gift.20 Mauss argues that a delay between the giving of a gift and its reciprocation constitutes the gift, distinguishes it from other exchanges. Derrida admires the anthropologist’s effort to escape the economy of reason but ultimately refuses to accept the contradiction. Instead, Derrida offers a reading of a literary text, Charles Baudelaire’s “Counterfeit Money,” which neither submits to the tyranny of economic reason nor seeks false escapes from it, but suspends us at the desire—the impossible desire—to leave the economy of exchange, the economy of reason. He writes of the impossible that “The thing as given thing, the given of the gift arrives, if it arrives, only in narrative.”21
To see just how impossible this instance of the gift is, we have first to see the almost limitless limits of the circular economy of exchange that almost always annuls the gift. Despite the Christian admonition to work toward God in fear and trembling, without expecting anything in exchange, Christianity retains a “secret clause”: “that, seeing in secret, God will pay back infinitely more; a secret that we accept all the more easily since God remains the witness of every secret. He shares and he knows. We have to believe that he knows” (emphasis original).22 Perhaps instead of saying that Christianity retains a secret clause we should say that this secret sense of compensation permeates all Christian experience: God knows and God will pay me back.
The reason for the persistence of secret economic calculation emerges in Derrida’s discussion of the secret clause in Christianity and his consideration of the “demonic mystery” in Jan Patocka’s Heretical Essays on the Philosophy of History, particularly Patocka’s “thesis on the origin and essence of the religious.” According to Derrida, for Patocka, religion exists only “once the secret of the sacred, orgiastic, or demonic mystery has been, if not destroyed, at least integrated, and finally subjected to the sphere of responsibility.” The “demonic mystery” here identifies the unknowable point at which the subject separates itself from unclear animal desire and passion, a “coming-to-conscience” of self. The work is thus very much connected to a long tradition of the history of consciousness (and conscience) in the West. In short, a demonic mystery that we tend to suppress persists in the history of human consciousness. This mystery constitutes a point before religion and philosophy, providing a common, unknowable origin for both. Patocka’s is thus a genealogical work that traces the human subject’s efforts to manage its unknowable origins, the abyss at the heart of human history. This effort is, then, not just a history or discourse of religion; it is also a consideration of the “genesis of responsibility . . . combined with a genealogy of the subject who says ‘myself,’ the subject’s relation to itself as an instance of liberty, singularity, and responsibility, the relation to self as being before the other: the other in its relation to infinite alterity.” For Patocka, “the subject of responsibility will be the subject that has managed to make orgiastic or demonic mystery subject to itself; and has done that in order to freely subject itself to the wholly and infinite other [God] that sees without being seen.” In this genealogy the demonic mystery becomes more secret (the “infinite other that sees without being seen”) than mystery. It becomes the sacred’s secret we do not want to admit.23
Patocka and Derrida describe the process by which the demonic mystery becomes a secret in quasi-psychoanalytic terms: conversion, incorporation, repression. What seems to draw Derrida to Patocka’s work is the circular economy of psychoanalytic exchange Patocka uses to describe this processing: the demonic mystery never disappears, only (ex)changes into something else. As John Caputo summarizes, the first conversion of the demonic mystery in European history occurs with the Platonic discovery “of the individual psyche, the spiritual freedom of the soul, which, having separated itself from dark passion and blinding bodily desire, turns within itself, in the freedom of an inner dialogue and inner ascent (anabasis) to the Good.”24 Derrida begins a close reading of Patocka: Platonism thus “incorporates” the demonic mystery, making it “more internal,” giving it the “form of an ‘interior dialogue of the soul.’” But Platonic anabasis retains “the form of a mystery . . . unacknowledged, undeclared, denied.” This first conversion, the first stage in the management of the demonic mystery, separates the self from the mystery but “retains within it something of what it seems to interrupt.” The second conversion, Christianity, represses the mystery, or, to put it another way, transforms mystery into a secret, as it were, of interiority. A very different self emerges with Christianity—a “mutation occurs” that represses, rather than incorporates the demonic mystery.25 Caputo explicates for us: The Platonic self established itself (the problem of agency is here an unresolvable problem of the demonic mystery) by creating a relationship to “the Good.” But in that, the Platonic Good itself is “a blind, mute object” that cannot see or know; the Platonic self is very different from the Christian self that emerges from the creation of a “one to one relationship to a personal God.”26 The demonic mystery, which Platonism left unacknowledged, is thus “sublimated into the supreme mystery of God’s infinite and mysterious transcendence”: the mysterium tremendum of Christianity so important to Kierkegaard and his understanding of Abraham.27
But the secret nature of this God also allows for the secret clause of calculation to persist. That God knows us without us knowing God allows for a secret sense of calculation to coexist with fear and trembling. Derrida discusses this secret clause primarily in relation to the Gospel of Matthew. In contrast to Abraham’s terrifying, impossible gift, Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount as reported in Matthew allows for a different economical relationship to God. Here, God will pay back gifts given in secret. Derrida focuses mainly on Matthew 6:1–4.
Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven.
Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.
But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth: That thine alms may be in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly.
Jesus here hints at an Abrahamic impossible gift—“let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth”—but immediately negates the gift, turning it into exchange: seeing in secret, God will reward the giver. Borrowing a phrase from Baudelaire, Derrida sees this as an effort to win “paradise economically.”28
Even the Christian divine remains in some sense ensconced in the circular economy of exchange: Christianity figures itself as aneconomic, but it very easily can “‘remain . . . what it ceases to be, a cruel economy, a commerce, a contract involving debt and credit, sacrifice and vengeance.’”29 In this, Derrida aligns himself with Nietzsche, who considers the sacrifice of Christ for the love of the debtor a “‘stroke of genius’” in the sense of a masterful connivance to escape, or obscure, Christianity’s own circular economy. Derrida quotes Nietzsche, giving a sense of the earlier philosopher’s rhetorical outrage at what he perceived as the critical gesture of Christian understanding:
that paradoxical and awful expedient, through which a tortured humanity has found a temporary alleviation . . . :—God personally immolating himself for the debt of man, God paying himself personally out of a pound of his own flesh, God as the one being who can deliver man from what for man had become unacquittable (unablösbar)—the creditor (der Gläubiger) playing scapegoat for his debtor (seinen Schuldner), from love (can you believe it? [sollte man’s glauben?]) from love of his debtor!30
For Nietzsche the secret Christian economy of exchange makes Christianity obsolete, hypocritical, a shell. Unlike Nietzsche, Derrida resists seeing only hypocrisy and foreclosing the possibility of the impossible. John Caputo writes that
it is so important to see that Derrida is not saying that The Genealogy of Morals is the final word on faith or Christianity. . . . Deconstruction, if there is such a thing, means to show that there is never a final word. Donner la Mort [The Gift of Death] does not conclude with a dismissal of faith, but with a deconstructive delimitation of faith as credit-mongering, of faith as an economic exchange. . . . [T]he point . . . is . . . not to undo faith but to insist on the an-economic character of faith, that faith is always a matter of the gift and giving.31
Derrida seems more interested in showing how quickly faith can become credit-mongering. He seems much more interested in keeping open the possibility of the impossible—escaping the economy of exchange if only in an impossible instant. For Derrida the gift, the Abrahamic instant, cannot be foreclosed. In conceiving of this impossible instance, it is important to note again that Derrida does not simply dispense with a general obligation toward others to fulfill the obligation toward God, the tout autre. Instead he seeks to “weaken the distinction” between the two.32 He admires Kierkegaard’s reading of the Abraham story in its insistence on the difficult sacrificing of general ethics, but he also finds compelling the work of Levinas, who insists on the ethical, the call of the Other as manifested in (other) individuals and, who, not surprisingly, concentrates on God’s second call to Abraham on Mount Moriah. “Perhaps,” Levinas says, “it is Abraham’s ear for hearing the voice [of the Other] that brought him back to the ethical order [that] was the highest moment in this drama.”33
In this impossible contradictory instant Derrida seeks to find a relationship between religious obligation and everyday ethical obligation. How is the story of Abraham and Isaac and the impossible instant of the gift of death to be of use to the ordinary, the everyday, even the nonreligious? In short, Derrida seeks to universalize, and to do so, he uses the apt phrase I discussed in the introduction: tout autre est tout autre.
The related concepts of the gift and the instant (both figures for the impossible) and the shibboleth tout autre est tout autre will come up again shortly, but in order to see a more immediate connection to Timon, the focus here should be given to Abraham’s break with humanity. In responding to the call of the other, God, the impossible, “a duty of hate is implied.”34 Derrida quotes Kierkegaard, who quotes Jesus’ statement in Luke 14:26: “‘If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and his wife and children and brothers and sister, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.’”35 In creating the sudden split between the two Timons, Shakespeare actually reveals their proximity. Timon’s misanthropy, or hate, is implied in his giving. Not in the sense that he gives—or, we should say now, exchanges—aggressively, but in that his attempts at truly giving, or moving outside the circular economy of exchange, in the first part of the play are passionately, profoundly religious. Impossibly so. And so, too, is his misanthropy religious, a necessary renunciation of the circular economy of exchange that pervades all worldly activity and disallows the impossible gift. His efforts at giving are efforts, not unlike Abraham’s, to respond to the call of the tout autre; they are efforts that take him—almost—outside general ethics.
Drawing again mainly on Fear and Trembling, Derrida points out that Abraham’s “absolute responsibility” to the call of the tout autre contradicts his general responsibility to other people. Abraham cannot tell anyone of the call from the Other that prompts his actions. That would negate his responsibility to the wholly Other; in telling people, Abraham would be seen as acting in exchange for something. We recall, from the Introduction, Caputo’s reading of Genesis 22 in context: Abraham’s gesture is no sacrifice: he does not give to God in exchange for God’s favor. He does not have that luxury, that secret sense that he will be compensated. At the instant Caputo’s Abraham responds to God, he must also be a murderer, a crazed murderer like the Abraham of the Wakefield cycle play, at odds with general ethics:
In order to assume his absolute responsibility with respect to absolute duty, to put his faith in God to work, or to the test, he must also in reality remain a hateful murderer, for he consents to put to death. In both general and abstract terms, the absoluteness of duty, of responsibility, and of obligation certainly demands that one transgress ethical duty, although in betraying it one belongs to it and at the same time recognizes it. The contradiction and the paradox must be endured in the instant itself.36
Abraham’s sacrifice without sacrifice occurs only in this impossible instant: “Like the gift . . . [the instant] remains irreducible to presence or to presentation, it demands a temporality of the instant without ever constituting a present.”37
Knight offers a comparable conclusion. In the second part of the play, he argues, we do not see simple bitterness and betrayal represented but are granted a view of, and through, “a great soul’s love”: “We see not with the vision of man, but henceforth with that of the aspiring spirit of love that has scorned mankind forever.”38 For Knight, Timon’s break with humanity remains a Nietzschean existentialist, agnostic act. Although he does not say so explicitly, Knight seems to see in Timon Zarathustra’s “gift-giving virtue,” the highest virtue of the “higher man,” indicated by that person’s willingness to give all away, thus obliterating all values and all relationships with others. Given the impossibility of the gift, the impossibility of truly engaging the other without putting someone or oneself in debt, Nietzsche and Zarathustra prefer the Dionysiac joy of destructive expenditure.
In order for Knight to come to his Nietzschean conclusion about Timon, however, he has to obscure a moment or an impossible instant in the second part of the play—Flavius’s exchange with Timon the misanthrope—where Timon does, again, look “with the vision of a man,” and not a “higher man.” Knight has to downplay an instant when Timon’s Nietzschean movement to the infinite halts. The possibility of truly giving without subordinating oneself to the other or subordinating the other to oneself (or, as Timon might have it, “What beast couldst thou be, that were not subject to a beast?” [4.3.348–49]) emerges in an impossible instant which is decidedly not Nietzschean. It is Abrahamic and can be termed “religious” only in that the gods—or a playwright looking to God—provide it.39 This chapter points, then, to this impossible instant of the gift in Act 4 when Timon simultaneously responds to “every other and to the utterly other.”
There is much evidence to suggest that Timon sought an impossible escape from the circular economy; that he, too, sought to keep the possibility of the gift—the possibility of the impossible—open. Nevertheless, although Timon seeks the gift, he finds, for the most part, exchange. The play opens with a metatheatrical joke about the “magic of bounty” (1.1.7), a joke about the creation of something out of nothing. When the Merchant and Jeweler appear onstage with the Poet and Painter, the Poet remarks: “See, / Magic of bounty, all these spirits thy power / Hath conjured to attend! I know the merchant” (1.1.6–8). The play calls immediate attention to the falseness of magical bounty—the creation of something from nothing. The Merchant and Jeweler are actors working, the Poet acknowledges; these are characters directed onstage, not conjured. This demystification of “bounty” or gifts continues throughout the play. But Timon still believes in something like magical bounty, the existence of something not generated by an economy of exchange. And throughout he seeks this something—the gift—even as Shakespeare simultaneously reminds the audience that things do not appear magically, they are not freely given; things are produced, usually in exchange for something else—even art. Poetry comes, the Poet tells us, from “recompense” (1.1.17). Audiences see the Poet working quickly as he prepares to meet the wealthy Timon and can only smile at his wry remark about the origins of poetry: “A thing slipped idly from me / Our poesy is as a gum which oozes / From whence ‘tis nourished” (1.1.22–24). They see that work produces poetry, and it appears not magically but when exchanged for something else—in this case, Timon’s favor. When the Painter asks, “When comes your book forth?” the Poet answers, “Upon the heels of my presentment [to Timon], sir” (1.1.28–29).
Even though the Poet’s work does accurately portray Timon’s fortune changing, the Poet’s character and his sly and slimy dismissal of spontaneous creation make him a less-than-reliable guide to the play’s central concerns. While the Poet’s work has literal accuracy, Timon’s is no simple story of a fall from great heights. By giving the Poet such foresight, the playwright seems to be cautioning his audience: do not read the play this way; Timon is something more. The Poet’s and Painter’s less-than-admirable return to the play in Act 5 confirms their lack of credibility. Timon’s desire for something outside the economy of exchange captures our attention far more than the Poet’s and Painter’s willing and enthusiastic embrace of that economy.
When Timon first appears, the playwright quickly displays his generosity or, as I will try to show, his desire for the Abrahamic gift, the impossible. Timon offers to pay the debt of Ventidius (who, by the way, deserves help—has earned something in exchange for his deeds). Timon sees his own gesture as liberating: “I’ll pay the debt and free him” (1.1.109). The messenger, however, in a striking and quick contrast, reveals the nature of this gift. Not only is it (the offer to pay, the gift) not liberating, but, at least from the messenger’s point of view, it is an exchange, and a potentially aggressive exchange at that. “Your lordship,” he says, “ever binds him” (1.1.110). As the messenger sees it, Timon pays the debt in exchange for some kind of everlasting obligation.
Timon’s next demonstration of generosity follows quickly. He offers to pay for his servant Lucilius’s marriage (again, another deserving person who “hath served long” [l.1.151]). Timon does this, he says, because “‘tis a bond in men” (1.1.153). But he has secured only another debtor, another person bound by exchange, as Lucilius’s response shows: “Never may / That state or fortune fall into my keeping / Which is not owed to you!” (1.1.158–60).
Here is a place, perhaps, to rearticulate the difference between my argument and Kahn’s. Timon does not engage in aggressive exchanges (even, as Kahn suggests, unconsciously); instead the playwright creates a character who truly seeks the pure gift without exchange. Timon struggles to identify the true nature of his efforts in this world of exchanges. When Ventidius seeks to repay his debt, Timon refuses, not out of unconscious aggressiveness but because he seeks something other than exchange.
VENTIDIUS: I am bound
To your free heart, I do return those talents,
Doubled with thanks and service, from whose help
I derived liberty.
TIMON: O, by no means,
Honest Ventidius. You mistake my love
I gave it freely ever, and there’s none
Can truly say he gives if he receives.
If our betters play at that game, we must not dare
To imitate them. Faults that are rich are fair.
(1.2.5–14)
Here Timon voices the Derridean desire for the true gift, including a suggestion in “there’s none / Can truly say he gives if he receives” that the gift is the impossible. Productions frequently require that everyone onstage stand at this important moment while calling Timon a “noble spirit” (1.1.15).
To the extent that Timon could be said to have a flaw here, it could be termed “hubris” rather than “potlatch.” He not only seeks to give, but he also believes he truly gives, not realizing the truth he voices: there’s none that truly give. He puts himself in relation to God(s), not human beings, seeking to eliminate any dissymmetry between them, acting perhaps, as a distant cousin of Richard II. Apemantus points out the religious movement, simultaneously exposing and demystifying the role Timon has assumed: “It grieves me to see so many dip their meat in one man’s blood; and all the madness is, he cheers them up, too. I wonder men dare trust themselves with men” (1.1.40–43). Timon is clearly figured here as Christ, a god who gives truly, absolutely, without exchange. Apemantus demystifies the figure, however, even as he raises it. Timon is not Christ; human beings cannot give absolutely.
In that Timon’s giving precipitates his fall, the tendency to find some fault remains strong even for those who are, like me, predisposed to admire that giving. But, as Knight makes clear, Shakespeare simultaneously pushes an audience toward two opposed responses, suggesting again and again that something extraordinary—extraordinarily positive—exists in Timon’s giving, even as that giving dooms him. Simply put, Shakespeare offers very little opportunity to condemn Timon’s giving and much more opportunity to praise it. “Credible references to Timon’s nobility [and the nobility of his giving] are continual throughout,” Knight tells us, citing numerous testimonies: “We hear of his ‘good and gracious nature’ (1.1.57); his ‘noble nature’ (2.2.218); that ‘he outgoes the very heart of kindness’ (1.1.286).”40 In addition, we see Flavius, Timon’s honest steward, saying “he is so kind” (1.2.199) and “he does too much good! Who dares to be half so kind again?” (4.2.41). Knight summarizes the effort to dignify Timon: “The poet unfalteringly directs our vision: to ignore the effect of these massed speeches condemning Timon’s friends and all but deifying Timon is to blur our understanding, to refuse the positive and single statement of this the most masterfully deliberate of Shakespeare’s sombre tragedies.”41 Perhaps Knight overstates his case in trying to link praise for Timon to the play’s artistic greatness, but Knight’s description of the poetry’s direction seems almost irrefutable. For Knight, Timon’s giving reveals his “primary energy” directing “him to the infinite and ineffable”; early in the play, this generosity reflects his superhuman nature in the same way his misanthropy—his aversion to everything human—will reflect that nature later on.42 In that Knight takes into account the extraordinary quality of his giving in understanding Timon’s nature, his argument has much explanatory power. But Knight neglects to explain why giving would be the chosen vehicle for expressing this nature.
Derrida’s work prompts us to focus on Timon’s giving as such rather than on the character’s essence. Timon seeks to give; that he remains trapped in a world of exchange condemns the world, not his efforts. In fact, all his efforts in 1.2 leading up to Apemantus’s reference to Christ’s sacrifice try to distinguish the gift from exchange. These efforts culminate in Timon’s first long speech. Not long after Apemantus’s allusion to Christ’s sacrifice, a lord voices a desire, as Ventidius has just done, to engage Timon in exchange: “Might we but have that happiness, my lord, that you would once use our hearts, whereby we might express some part of our zeals, we should think ourselves forever perfect” (1.2.84–87). Timon, again, refuses and offers a more explicit and telling explanation of why he refuses exchanges: because “the gods themselves have provided that I shall have much help from you” (1.2.88–90). Timon sees his primary exchange relationship as with the gods, not other human beings. Or, to be more precise, Timon sees his exchange relationships with people as (pre)determined by the gods. The extent to which the others will pay him back (or have always already paid him back) is the gods’ doing. If this is antisocial or aggressive or ostentatious or hubris, Derrida’s work suggests that an antisocial quality persists in any religious belief, in any engagement with the wholly Other.
Such is the aporia of responsibility. . . . The ethical can . . . end up making us irresponsible. It is a temptation, a tendency, or a facility that would sometimes have to be refused in the name of a responsibility that doesn’t keep account or give an account, neither to man, to humans, to society, to one’s fellows, or to one’s own.43
We have a responsibility to others (ethics) and another, absolute responsibility to the tout autre (in this case, gods). And the two, as Genesis 22 revealed long ago, can be contradictory. This, in part, explains Timon’s sometimes confusing generosity, the way he simultaneously seems to love others but, in that love, to distance himself. His belief that the gods will “provide” that other people pay him back, for example, prompts Timon to ignore his friends’ efforts to repay him. As Flavius will say later, Timon’s bounty “makes gods” but “mar[s] men” (4.2.42). The contradictory responsibilities exposed here help us understand the relationship between Timon’s early philanthropy and later misanthropy. Timon’s speech suggests the more explicit misanthropy to come: “O you gods, think I, what need we have any friends if we should ne’er have need of ‘em? They were the most needless creatures living, should we ne’er have use for ‘em, and would most resemble sweet instruments hung up in cases, that keeps their sounds to themselves” (1.2.94–100). The others have no intrinsic value outside their exchange relationship with Timon, an exchange relationship, again, determined by the gods.
Here, however, with this complicated speech, we need to pause. While this speech reveals the contradiction between Timon’s responsibility to the tout autre and his responsibility to other people, it may seem to contradict the contradiction at hand. One might say that Timon does not seek the gift here—the impossible instant when tout autre est tout autre—but instead demonstrates a hyperinterest in exchange relationships, collapsing all others into that relation, dissolving their very existence. His friends would be “the most needless creatures living” outside an exchange network, and he weeps for joy that all are so thoroughly interwoven in this network, brothers commanding “one another’s fortune” (1.2.104–5).
One needs to recall, however, that the gift is the impossible, accessed most quickly through the difference between itself and exchange: the gap between gift and economy that is not “present anywhere.”44 In order to first think the gift, to seek the impossible one must “give [oneself] over to and engage in the effort of thinking or rethinking a sort of transcendental illusion of the gift.”45 The gift may become known, Derrida points out, as something of a simulacrum. And that simulacrum in the form of the gift’s other—the exchange economy—is exactly what Timon provides in this first long speech. We note that Timon imagines a divinely inspired exchange network where the gods provide the help from others. The divine gift, the impossible, thus makes possible this economy of exchange, but, at the same time, it renders Timon’s imagined economy inert; that is, the circle of the economy of exchange does not turn here because Timon ultimately exchanges with no one. We see Timon’s desire for the gift in his imaginary creation of a perfect exchange network, one that exists only in a static, hypothetical form.
Timon does not fully recognize the simulacrum for what it is, and thus, not surprisingly, the reader may misapprehend his position as well. He does not recognize that thinking the gift through exchange, through the simulacrum, only partially realizes his desire for the impossible. (Mauss thought through the gift—hence the title of his book and the reason for Derrida’s admiration—but produced only a description of exchange). Timon has some insight; he seems to realize the incompleteness of his exchange system when he demonstrates some sense that his responsibility to the gods who have provided does not absolve him completely of his responsibility to others: “Why, I have often wished myself poorer, that I might come nearer to you” (1.2.100–101). Without the “others,” his friends, there is no absolute, complete, wholly Other—for tout autre est tout autre. A lack, a desire, a wish remains.
Similarly, Timon’s belief in a “bond in men” does not contradict his desire to break free of this world and the circular economy of exchange. At one moment he can express this bond and, at the same instant, demonstrate a tendency to limit bonds by denying any fully reciprocal relationship. He interrupts those who would establish reciprocal bonds.
FIRST LORD: We are so virtuously bound—
TIMON: And so am I to you.
SECOND LORD: So infinitely endeared—
TIMON: All to you. [To servants.] Lights, more lights!
(1.2.228–31)
Timon believes all are in his position, looking elsewhere. His is a free-flowing bounty, and, as Flavius says in yet another testimony for Timon, “Being free itself, it thinks all others so” (2.2.240).
But the material world for Timon has little value. In a gentle rebuke, Flavius complains: “O my good lord, the world is but a word. / Were it all yours to give it in a breath, / How quickly it were gone!” (2.2.157–59). To quote Derrida again, this looking to the wholly Other involves a responsibility “that doesn’t keep accounts or give account.” Timon, Flavius tells us,
takes no account
How things go from him nor resumes no care
Of what is to continue. Never mind
Was to be so unwise to be so kind.
(2.2.3–6)
When Timon’s creditors begin calling, he displays little concern. Interestingly, he remains confident not because he knows credit has been earned, not because of his faith in the functioning of an earthly exchange network, but because of the “bond in men,” which is, in fact, what he perceives as a common relationship to the gods: “Why dost thou weep? Canst thou conscience lack / To think I shall lack friends?” (2.2.179–80). Timon has yet to comprehend the illusory nature of his exchange network. He is an Abraham who thinks God will “provide”—without any fear and trembling.
But when we consider that Timon’s giving produces distance between himself and his fellows and simultaneously elicits credible praise, it becomes clear Shakespeare is interested in more than Timon’s naïve misunderstanding of an exchange network or Timon’s malfunctioning within it. The playwright seems determined to concentrate our attention on what Timon truly seeks outside the exchange network. Schematically or intellectually, however, locating a true gift—as opposed to a simulacrum—is no easy (read: impossible) task even in this most schematic and intellectual of Shakespeare’s plays. If Timon seeks the gift, he must avoid exchange. But the centripetal force of the exchange economy exerts a tremendous pull. For example, Timon accepts “four milk white horses” from Lucius because they are given “out of free love” (1.2.183, 182), but clearly this must be considered more of an exchange. And Timon does seem to claim membership in the exchange network by insisting on being repaid for his gifts in one notable instance early on (2.2.196–200). He may look to the state, not to other people, and, like Coriolanus, insist on standing apart; but certainly this, too, counts as some sort of participation in the exchange network. Learning that the Senate has already refused him, Timon, unlike Alcibiades, does not seek immediate vengeance. He looks to the gods: “You gods, reward them” (2.2.219).
We have a hint at the pervasiveness of exchange pressing on the playwright: to clarify the truth of his efforts at giving, Timon cannot seek exchange; but the economy of exchange makes Timon waver. These early moments of response to his new situation do not render his earlier giving inauthentic; on the contrary, his wavering in exchange highlights the difficulty of his efforts to truly give, a difficulty he did not fully grasp—a psychological or spiritual condition not unlike that of John of Gaunt and Richard II early in that play. It is perhaps more accurate to say that here Timon begins to experience the magnitude of the circular economy of exchange that—as we recall from the Gospel of Matthew—makes all of Christianity waver.
At this moment in the play, Shakespeare creates an odd scene, one that succeeds intellectually while failing dramatically, that seems designed to force an audience to consider its own entrapment in the circular economy of exchange. The scene seems constructed to demonstrate how enclosed we all are in this economy and how blind we are to it. In 3.2, Lucius discusses Timon’s situation with three Strangers. He begins by claiming he would help Timon; he would return the “small kindnesses” Timon gave him (3.2.21). Almost immediately, however, Servilius appears and tests that claim, asking Lucius to help Timon. Lucius fails miserably and slinks offstage (3.2.45–61), his last line invoking a particularly pathetic view of exchange processes. In order to make himself look better, he asks Servilius to tell Timon that he would help but that he has no money—a lie. Servilius agrees, and Lucius offers a favor in exchange—“I’ll look you out a good turn, Servilius” (3.2.61)—suggesting that he will repay Servilius for helping him lie about his exchange practices. The three Strangers, like a modern audience at intermission, are left to contemplate what they have seen.
FIRST STRANGER: Do you observe this, Hostilius?
SECOND STRANGER: Ay, too well.
FIRST STRANGER: Why, this is the world’s soul,
And just of the same piece
Is every flatterer’s sport. . . .
O, see the monstrousness of man
When he looks out in an ungrateful shape!—
He does deny him, in respect of his,
What charitable men afford to beggars.
THIRD STRANGER: Religion groans at it.
(3.2.64–68, 75–79)
Religion, though, might do more than groan at the rest of the First Stranger’s commentary.
FIRST STRANGER: For mine own part,
I never tasted Timon in my life,
Nor came any of his bounties over me
To mark me for his friend; yet I protest,
For his right noble mind, illustrious virtue,
And honorable carriage,
Had his necessity made use of me,
I would have put my wealth into donation
And the best half should have returned to him,
So much I love his heart. But I perceive
Men must learn now with pity to dispense,
For policy sits above conscience.
(3.2.79–90)
Note that the First Stranger would engage only in exchange, thus repeating the false claims of Lucius. The playwright sets in motion here, potentially, an infinite regress of strangers, viewers, audience members, who, in watching Timon’s plight, insist that they would, if they had to, . . . exchange! And, the playwright hints, they would “exchange” like Lucius. Each successive Stranger would miss the point of the gift, thus missing entirely the impossible point of religion. Note, too, how comfortably ensconced the Strangers are within their own parameters of religion—“Religion groans at it”—not seeing that Shakespeare and, ultimately, Timon are pushing deeper down through religion to what Derrida calls a “religion without religion.”
The next scene immediately highlights the absurdity of exchange and exchange rules. Sempronius refuses to help Timon because of a perceived insult:
I was the first man
That e’er received gift from him.
And does he think so backwardly of me now
That I’ll requite it last? No!
(3.3.18–21)
Even those critics who stress Timon’s poor judgment must concede that, in comparison, Timon sounds reasonable. One servant remarks that Sempronius “was my lord’s best hope” (3.3.37). This is as much as men can do: “now all are fled, / Save only the gods” (3.3.37–38). In this play, Timon seeks to give like gods, in a giving that dwarfs the absurd economy of exchange. But, as Nietzsche shows, that absurd economy traps people, impedes even their understanding of God’s relationship to human beings. The circular economy of exchange, which underlies the economy of sacrifice, persists at the heart of Christian belief. Lucius’s servant remarks soon after that Timon “should the sooner pay his debts, / And make a clear way to the gods” (3.4.76–77). Aghast at the exchange logic, Timon’s servant exclaims: “Good gods!” (3.3.77). Lucius’s servant offers a mocking response: “We cannot take this for answer, sir” (3.3.78). From the Nietzsche-like perspective the play approaches at moments, the last place one could escape the economy of exchange would be with the “Good gods.” The logic of exchange is embedded most deeply in Christ’s sacrifice. Certainly this is one of the play’s great moments of dark humor.
The next stage action, near the turning point of the play, makes the moment more poignant. Timon enters, “in a rage” (3.4.79sd), literally and figuratively trapped—as Nietzsche says of Christianity—in a structure of his and its own making.
What, are my doors opposed against my passage?
Have I been ever free, and must my house
Be my retentive enemy, my jail?
The place which I have feasted, does it now,
Like all mankind, show me an iron heart?
(3.4.80–84)
At the center of Christianity, hidden by its outward beneficence, Nietzsche suggests, lies something like an “iron heart”: the circular economy of exchange invoked most clearly in the Gospel of Matthew. Shakespeare and Timon find themselves trapped, surprisingly, in what always threatens to reduce itself to just another cruel, vicious economy. Timon, near madness, sees no way out; escape seems impossible.
Shakespeare interrupts the action at this point to reintroduce Alcibiades. The dramaturgy may strike some as odd, unanticipated, but it seems less odd when we note that the scene involves a similar explicitly cynical discovery about the cruel economy of exchange. And, more important, the scene seems less odd when we consider Shakespeare sketching out, via a drawn contrast between Alcibiades and Timon, responses to and possible escapes from the circular economy of exchange. Alcibiades cannot “pawn” (3.5.84) his worth for a soldier he believes unjustly accused. But Alcibiades, discovering one of the glaring cruelties of exchange networks—that from time to time people will not pay back what is owed—does not, like Timon, go mad. He seeks revenge—payback. Here the playwright shows one possible response to the economy of exchange. It seems Timon will follow suit in the next scene. In Timon’s early moments of madness and rage, he wavers closest to the Gospel of Matthew, seeming most deeply ensconced in the economy of exchange. He seems bitter because he is owed something; and his early efforts at truly giving could therefore seem hypocritical or inauthentic. Revenge, payback—whether his or Alcibiades’s—only recuperates and reinforces the economy of exchange; unlike the true, impossible gift, it does not interrupt its cycle. At Timon’s last supper, he reacts not with divine forgiveness, not with turning the other cheek, but with rage and madness, throwing “lukewarm” soup in the guests’ faces (3.6.88). He is not a man giving absolutely.
Before the soup tossing, Timon offers an odd grace in which, instead of praise and thanks, he offers advice in the future tense to gods to come:
You great benefactors, sprinkle our society with thankfulness. For your own gifts, make yourselves praised; but reserve still to give, lest your deities be despised. Lend to each man enough, that one need not lend to another; for, were your godheads to borrow of men, men would forsake the gods. (3.6.70–75)
This is a fascinating and surprising speech. It is surprising not in the sense that Timon offers advice to the gods—we have already seen how Timon sees his responsible relationships with gods rather than people—but surprising in that we see Timon, who at least appeared to have sought the true gift, advising a Matthew-like calculation—and secrecy. “Reserve still to give,” he tells the future gods, keep something hidden or secret. Remarkably, we see something of Patocka’s genealogy of the demonic mystery: the ancient Greek looks forward to the creation of the Christian God, who sees in secret and will repay debts. As Caputo points out, the Greeks and Romans were “bereft of the idea of a personal God who sees our secrets, who knows what is in the heart of the individual and constitutes us as persons.”46 The secret Christian God keeps something from men and, simultaneously, creates a secret, dissymmetrical relationship between God and human beings. The gift determines this relationship: human beings cannot exchange with gods. If gods allow this, to use Timon’s formulation, people would forsake the gods. The gift, the impossible gift, determines God.
Having simultaneously indulged and exposed this calculation and the secret sense of compensation that (will) exist at the heart of Christianity, Timon quickly renounces it. Unlike the revenging Alcibiades, and still trapped in the circular economy of exchange, Timon seeks other alternatives, namely, misanthropy:
Therefore, be abhorred
All feasts, societies, and throngs of men!
His semblable, yea, himself, Timon disdains.
Destruction fang mankind!
(4.3.20–23)
At the exact moment that Timon renounces the world and his place in it, however, he must forgo the temptation of the gods—now simultaneously Greek and Christian in that they have indeed kept something, gold, in reserve—to accept reward for his giving. But he can be no “idle votarist” (4.3.27). The price of faith, as Caputo says, has risen sky-high. He cannot accept the gift of the gods’ gold in exchange for his own giving. Despite his wavering and his indulgence in small-scale revenge, Timon has not been seeking a Matthean sacrifice all along. He has not been calculating. He has been seeking instead Abrahamic sacrifice—sacrifice without sacrifice, the gift, the impossible—which can come only in an impossible instant when, like Abraham, he remains bound to God and humanity.
Here—in Timon’s renunciation of the economy of exchange, in his refusal to believe the Gospel of Matthew that he will be or should be secretly compensated for his earlier giving—lies the religious movement of his misanthropy, a movement that corresponds precisely to his efforts in the first half to seek the impossible gift outside exchange. He now simply pushes forward toward the gods in more authentic fear and trembling, without any trace of exchange. The dramaturgy has no further use for the simulacrum—the gifts that are not gifts in the first part. In refusing the temptation to take the gold and reenter the economy of exchange, he quite distinctly does not renounce the gods. On the contrary, he continues to address them, to move toward them: “Ha, you gods! why this? what this, you gods?” (4.3.31). In his first speech after the soup tossing Timon exhibited a similarly contradictory movement away from and toward religion. Having denounced “Piety and fear, / Religion to the gods, peace, justice, truth” (4.1.15–16) and called for confusion to live (4.1.21), Timon suddenly addresses the gods: “The gods confound—hear me, you good gods all” (4.1.37). In this seeming contradiction, we see the movement to “religion without religion” or the religious passion underlying religion displayed earlier in the Stranger scene.
Much critical attention has been given to Timon’s critique of gold in these moments (most famously by Marx), but one can read these lines more generally as a critique of the circular economy of exchange. “This,” the vague repeated pronoun that Timon rants at here, certainly points to gold, but it also includes the general economy of exchange he now has to refuse. It is this economy that he, like Nietzsche, says “knit[s] and break[s] religions” (4.3.35). It is this circular or sacrificial economy—not just gold—that has supported and weakened Christianity. As we progress with Timon in his religious misanthropic movement, we shall see that the enemy to avoid is not gold but circular economies of exchange.
It is no wonder that Knight, in his historical moment, sees a Nietzschean figure here, but this is where both Knight and Nietzsche leave Timon: in the bleak, but apparently honest, world of Acts 4 and 5. They leave him pushing, with Alcibiades, toward the “infinite and ineffable” part of the creation of a new world. According to Knight, Timon—in good Nietzschean fashion—realizes the pettiness of this world and aspires to something more while abandoning a relationship with the wholly Other, the impossible, in this world.47 Knight forecloses the possibility of the Abrahamic gift. For Knight, in refusing to submit to the economic calculation available in Christianity for consolation, Shakespeare became de facto Nietzschean.
But Shakespeare, much more like Derrida in this matter, does not foreclose the possibility. He continues searching for the possibility of the impossible, sketching out impossible responses to the seemingly all-encompassing economy of exchange. Having had Timon renounce the possibility of reentering the circular economy of exchange and thus refusing cyclical revenge, Shakespeare brings Alcibiades back onstage for contrast (4.3.49). Timon announces to Alcibiades that he has been born again: “I am Misanthropos and hate mankind” (4.3.54).
In the process of making this announcement, however, he immediately engages another philosophical, theological, and dramatic problem. In separating himself from the world, Timon comes close to simple misanthropy (the inverse, perhaps, of his simpler faith in the gods who provided his friends in Act 1). Shakespeare confronts dramatically something like the religious problem of the “knight of faith” which Kierkegaard confronted philosophically. Abraham, the knight of faith, simultaneously a murderer and a man of God, is inscrutable. He cannot be recognized. For Abraham to proclaim himself, to tell Sarah and others of his torment, would negate his religious faith and turn him into a simple tragic hero sacrificing something (in exchange). His murderous hate must be authentic, not part of a bargain. Something of this Abrahamic problem of inscrutability resonates in Timon’s notoriously contradictory epitaph. It is contradictory, presumably because Shakespeare could not choose from his options in Plutarch, and therefore left things muddled. The epitaph contains Abraham’s bold confidence, announcing his devotion to the test (“Here I am”) while simultaneously suggesting the nontragic figure who cannot be known, who must act in a singular movement toward God that others cannot see.
Here lies a wretched corpse, of wretched soul bereft.
Seek not my name. A plague consume you wicked caitiffs left!
Here lie I, Timon, who, alive, all living men did hate.
Pass by and curse thy fill, but pass and stay not here thy gait.
(5.4.70–73, emphasis added)
Timon, like Abraham, is no simple tragic hero; maybe, like Abraham, he is not a tragic hero at all. The primary point here, though, is that Shakespeare has to distinguish Timon from Apemantus and address the misanthropy implied in any true faith. The standard-issue misanthrope appears on cue.
Most tellingly, Apemantus misjudges Timon’s complete renunciation of the economy of exchange. Not knowing that the gods have provided Timon with the means to reenter the economy, Apemantus scoffs at Timon:
If thou didst put this sour cold habit on
To castigate thy pride, ‘twere well, but thou
Does it enforcedly. Thou’dst courtier be again
Wert thou not beggar.
(4.3.242–45)
Then Apemantus reveals the logic of his own misanthropy, a logic very different from Timon’s. For Apemantus, misanthropy gives back something in exchange, the solace of misery that Edgar finds, momentarily, as Poor Tom:
Willing misery
Outlives incertain pomp, is crowned before:
The one is filling still, never complete,
The other at high wish. Best state, contentless,
Hath a distracted and most wretched being,
Worse than the worst, content.
Thou shouldst desire to die, being miserable.
(4.3.245–51)
Timon counters that Apemantus’s misanthropy is “enforced” by his own nature and suggests that, because he has known good fortune, Timon has more justification to hate humanity (4.3.252–79). As with Alcibiades and Timon, Shakespeare seeks to draw a distinction between Apemantus and Timon. Opting out of the exchange economy can bring no rewards; such a strategy, like revenge, simply recuperates the cycle. Timon, in authentic fear and trembling, can seek no such comfort. At two notable points, in fact, Apemantus tries to establish something like a misanthropic exchange network by offering food (4.3.287, 310). True to form, true to his search for the gift, Timon refuses on both occasions.
The distinction between Timon and Apemantus in these moments is not entirely clear either in close reading or in performance. Shakespeare persists, however, drawing a more distinct contrast between Apemantus’s more standard misanthropy and Timon’s religious misanthropy. A somewhat Socratic question from Timon exposes the differences between the two and points toward his target—the circular economy of exchange. “Wouldst thou have thyself fall in the confusion of men,” he asks Apemantus, “and remain a beast with the beasts?” (4.3.329–30). Apemantus answers yes, suggesting a materialist or existentialist worldview. For Timon, however, this is no solution, only more of the same. The natural world repeats and does not interrupt the circular economy.
If thou wert the lion, the fox would beguile thee. If thou wert the lamb, the fox would eat thee. . . . Wert thou a bear, thou wouldst be killed by the horse. Wert thou a horse, thou wouldst be seized by the leopard. . . . What beast couldst thou be, that were not subject to a beast? And what a beast art thou already, that seest not thy loss in transformation! (4.3.333–50)
The misanthropy of Apemantus holds no interest for Timon, who sees the flaws not just of humanity but also of the world. In fact, he implies here that solutions may be found not in noting man’s proximity to animals (“thy loss”) but in searching for man’s proximity to the impossible, the other world. Timon has left behind neither humanity nor God but is pointing to the impossible instant when he is responsible to both.
When the Bandits approach Timon, we still see Shakespeare sketching out the pervasiveness of the economy of exchange. Thievery, like the natural world, does not interrupt the cycle. Taking, like giving, is illusory, embedded in cycles of exchange. Timon returns to a now-familiar syntactical pattern:
The sun’s a thief, and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea. The moon’s an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun.
The sea’s a thief, whose liquid surge resolves
The moon into salt tears. The earth’s a thief,
That feeds and breeds by a composture stol’n
From general excrement. Each thing’s a thief.
(4.3.441–47)
Timon seems nearly mad here, confronting the circular economies that nearly ensnared him in Act 3.
No one would claim these are great dramatic scenes, but this is, in part, because Shakespeare has been working out a very difficult—impossible—idea. He has set the stage for an interruption of these cycles, an instance of the gift. In order to see this, we must turn to a moment that Knight, in his engagement with Timon’s superhuman character, passes over rather quickly: the remarkable last interaction between Flavius and Timon. Knight does see
the beauty of a blade of grass beneath the architrave of a cathedral. The finite virtue of simple humanity is asserting its right to stand within the vaulted silences of the eternal which scorns all limit, all failure. Timon stays for a moment his onward passionate adventure, pauses to proclaim one honest man: though the edifice of his creed of hate be a mighty thing, the blade of grass, rooted in the strength of a mightier, splits one stone of the foundation.48
But there is more here than passing beauty and “finite virtue.” And Knight, judging by the poetic quality of his prose if not the emphasis in his essay, realizes it.
In the moments after the Bandits depart, the last moments of Act 4, the good Steward approaches and offers Timon money. The gesture clearly moves the misanthrope. “Had I a steward / So true, so just, and now so comfortable? / It almost turns my dangerous nature mild” (4.3.495–97). Despite his skepticism—“Let me behold thy face. Surely, this man / Was born of a woman” (4.3.498–99)—Timon is moved:
Forgive my general and exceptless rashness,
You perpetual-sober gods! I do proclaim
One honest man—mistake me not, but one;
No more, I pray—and he’s a steward.
How fair would I have hated all mankind,
And thou redeem’st thyself! But all, save thee,
I fell with curses.
(4.3.500–506)
But having proclaimed Flavius true, Timon returns to doubt and misanthropy:
But tell me true—
For I must ever doubt, though ne’er so sure—
Is not thy kindness subtle, covetous,
A usuring kindness, and, as rich men deal gifts,
Expecting in return twenty for one?
(4.3.511–15)
In short, Timon doubts Flavius’s gift; he suspects the economy of exchange. Flavius, now like Timon in Act 1, seeks to distinguish his gift by positioning it in relation to exchange.
For any benefit that points to me,
Either in hope or present, I’d exchange
For this one wish: that you had power and wealth
To requite me by making rich yourself.
(4.3.523–27)
Therein lies a striking reversal in the logic of the gift. If circular exchange processes (almost) always negate the gift—the impossible—Shakespeare creates a scene where the gift (of Flavius) negates exchange, makes exchange impossible. The one thing Flavius will exchange is impossible. He cannot exchange his gift for wealth for Timon because Timon already has wealth: “Look thee, ‘tis so” (4.3.528). And, moreover, Timon has wealth because the gods “have provided” gold in secret; as Flavius told us early in the play, Timon alone had “no power to make his wishes good” (1.2.196, emphasis added). The gift of the gods makes the gift of Flavius—in the form of a gesture toward another—the possible. In this instant, the impossible of the religious is possible. The gift only “flashes” here, a “phoenix,” before turning again to a “naked gull” (2.1.32, 31); this is the gift itself—without the aid of a simulacrum as in Act 1. It does appear. This moment is not one of dramatic brilliance either (although it could be emphasized in production). Indeed, Knight suggests introducing Flavius before the Bandits because the Bandit scene is more climactic.
John Jowett, in a serious and engaging response to my focus on this impossible instance, suggests that the Steward’s “altruistic” distribution of the last bit of money in an earlier scene “challenges” my argument because here, “the play shows not so much a moment of contact with the religious ‘utterly other’ as a direct, humdrum, effectual, and symbolically potent moment of altruistic charity.”49 Nothing in my argument suggests the absence of everyday altruism, but Jowett is on to something in contrasting the two moments involving the Steward. The distribution scene does, I think, highlight the “impossible” (non) exchange with Timon, and this, too, could be highlighted in production. It is entirely unclear, for example, from the existing texts, how anyone receives the Steward’s gesture. Do they receive this distribution as an act of altruism? Or do they take the gesture in a different way?
This is a flawed, incomplete play, with a lonely hero who never looks heroic and sacrifices without sacrifice. And it is so, I think, because it probes so deeply into the possibility of the impossible. This moment is religious in that it exposes the philosophical structure of religious possibility—the gift—that makes religious revelation possible. It is religion without religion, a passion for or movement toward the impossible without insisting on the trappings of a particular tradition. It locates the passionate “wish” of Flavius between “hope” and “present,” between—linguistically and philosophically—“exchange” and “requite.” In the space of the gift—the impossible—appears a passionate wish for and toward the other individual (in the Levinasian sense) and the sense of the wholly Other (in the Kierkegaardian sense) both the other and the utterly other, as I said at the outset. Timon, who has been seeking the wholly Other all along, finds it here in the figure of Flavius’s impossible gesture. He discovers, at least as much as is possible, a pure obligation or ethics toward the other, one not grounded in any economy of exchange but grounded in itself alone: a religion without religion. This obligation to the other precedes everything else. Timon suggests something of the primacy of this obligation early on, again perhaps without fully understanding it: “We are born to do benefits” (1.2.101).
Here, in the seventeenth century, tout autre est tout autre. If Shakespeare does, like Derrida, weaken the distinction between the position of Kierkegaard and Levinas on the matter of Genesis 22, we should consider that the distance between Shakespeare and ourselves lessens. And it does so in a way that the historical narrative currently preferred by academics—from a religious world to a nonreligious world—could never have predicted. For the relationship between ourselves and the early modern world is not simply the relationship between a religious world and a nonreligious one; it involves a relationship between one kind of religious world and another.
In other words, when Shakespeare points to the future he does not—and is not obligated to—simply point to a twentieth-century American understanding of the secular; at moments, he points elsewhere, to a more complicated future, one inextricably linked to the ancient past of Genesis 22.