Dreaming the Impossible: Derrida on the Gift of Witnessing

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Published: Dec 31, 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.12681/syn.44014
Keywords:
Dream Gift Giving Death Witnessing Derrida Justice Secrecy Responsibility Ethics Testimony Witness Deconstruction Deconstruction at large Ants Faith Economy of exchange Unconditional responsibility Event and singularity Opacity Sovereignty
Anthie Georgiadi
Princeton University
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3346-7817
Abstract

Reading closely a passage from “Ants,” a lecture Jacques Derrida delivered in 1990 at Université de Paris 8, this essay traces his thought about the nature of the gift. Starting with his proposition that “the gift must be given like a dream, as in a dream”, the essay shows how dreaming becomes, for Derrida, another name for giving beyond intention, reciprocity, or calculation, and even beyond reason. The dream interrupts both the order of knowledge and the circle of exchange within which every aspect of life tends to be inscribed in the sociopolitical imaginary of the West and, by extension, as a lever to open the question of justice, to invite response and to affirm the task of responsibility. Examining the constellation that ascends in Derrida’s lifelong work between the dream, the secret, and the gift, the essay argues that the only thing or non-thing that could ever possibly be given as a gift is nothing more and nothing less than the act of witnessing. To give, in Derrida’s political imaginary, is to bear witness; to dream of a justice that remains always to come and is hospitable to the other and to the language of the other, and—above all—of a justice that begins and ends with a politics of faith and an ethics of unconditional responsibility.

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Author Biography
Anthie Georgiadi, Princeton University

Anthie Georgiadi is a PhD Candidate at Princeton University’s Department of English. She holds a BA in English Language and Literature and an MA in Comparative Literary Studies from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. Her academic interests lie in interdisciplinary studies, and her research is focused on literary and cultural theory, contemporary, world, and postcolonial literature, migration, media, and photography studies. Her dissertation “Tidal Bodies, Islanded Thoughts” examines the relation between emplacement, sensoriality, and thought in archipelagic literatures from the 19th century to the present and explores the alternative modalities of thinking and of being in the world these texts have to offer in response to the lasting and increasingly expanding legacies colonial modernity left behind.

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