The Gift of Death

Context and Aims

The Gift of Death (Donner la mort) is a philosophical work by Jacques Derrida, originally delivered as lectures in the early 1990s and later published in French in 1992. It forms part of Derrida’s broader engagement with themes of ethics, responsibility, and religion, and is often read alongside his writings on hospitality, forgiveness, and the gift, such as Given Time and Acts of Religion.

The work engages a range of interlocutors—most prominently Søren Kierkegaard, Emmanuel Levinas, and the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka—to explore what it means to be responsible in a world where decisions are always partial, situated, and bound up with death. Derrida situates these questions within a specifically Christian history of Western thought, arguing that even “secular” ideas of interior conscience and responsibility inherit key structures from Christian theology.

Responsibility, Secrecy, and Singularity

A central claim in The Gift of Death is that responsibility is inseparable from secrecy. For Derrida, any genuinely responsible decision involves the selection of one duty, person, or cause over innumerable others. This prioritization cannot be fully justified by universal rules or transparent reasons; it retains an irreducible secret dimension, because it exposes the subject to singular demands that no one else can experience in the same way.

Derrida draws on Patočka’s analysis of the “care of the soul” and Kierkegaard’s reading of Abraham in Fear and Trembling to develop this point. In the biblical story, Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac in obedience to God exemplifies a conflict between absolute responsibility (to God as wholly other) and ethical responsibility (to other human beings, including Isaac). For Kierkegaard, Abraham becomes a “knight of faith” by suspending the ethical; Derrida uses this as a paradigm of how singular decisions can never be fully reconciled with public, communicable norms.

From this perspective, every act of responsibility is also an act of irresponsibility: in choosing to respond to one person or obligation, we inevitably fail to respond to others. The subject is thus “guilty” in advance, not simply because of moral transgression, but because finite attention and action cannot encompass all demands. Responsibility, then, is structurally linked to sacrifice and exclusion.

Derrida connects this logic to death in two ways. First, each person’s death is radically singular and non-substitutable; no one can die in my place in the sense of fully taking over my mortality. Second, responsible decisions have the power to “give death”—to expose others to harm, abandonment, or literal death—through choices that favor some over others. Modern political and bureaucratic structures, Derrida suggests (drawing in part on Kafka), often distribute this deadly responsibility in diffuse ways, making it difficult to identify a single culpable subject.

Christian Legacy and the Gift

The Gift of Death also functions as a meditation on the Christian heritage of Western ethics. Derrida argues that key modern notions—such as inward conscience, the emphasis on interiority, and the idea of a relationship to a transcendent, invisible God—derive from Christian transformations of earlier religious and philosophical traditions. Under Christianity, responsibility becomes tied to an unseen God who “sees in secret,” producing a new kind of secret interiority and self-scrutiny.

Within this framework, Derrida raises questions about the gift. A pure gift, he suggests (in continuity with Given Time), would require that:

• the giver not recognize it as a gift (or as owed anything in return),
• the recipient not recognize it as a gift (to avoid reciprocity or gratitude that would turn it into an exchange),
• and that no third party acknowledge or record it.

Once a gift is recognized, calculated, or reciprocated, it becomes part of an economy of exchange rather than a free, unconditional giving. This leads to an apparent paradox: the moment one knows one is giving, the purity of the gift is compromised.

In The Gift of Death, this paradox is placed in relation to death and sacrifice. Derrida explores how one might “give death”—for instance, by sacrificing oneself or another—and whether such acts can be understood as gifts to God, to a cause, or to the future. The Christian figure of Christ’s sacrifice and the Abraham story again serve as touchstones.

At the same time, Derrida reflects on modern capitalism and technoscience, where gifts seem subsumed into systems of exchange, calculation, and risk management. He suggests that contemporary structures of responsibility—in global economics, politics, and technology—both inherit Christian motifs of sacrifice and conscience and also transform them into impersonal systems that make responsibility harder to locate.

Reception and Influence

The Gift of Death has been influential in debates about post-structuralist ethics, political theology, and continental philosophy of religion. It is often cited as evidence that Derrida’s work, contrary to some earlier interpretations, has a substantive ethical dimension concerned with justice, responsibility, and the other.

Commentators sympathetic to Derrida argue that the book offers a powerful account of the tragic structure of ethical life, showing why moral decisions cannot be reduced to rule-following or utilitarian calculation. They see Derrida’s emphasis on secrecy and singularity as illuminating phenomena such as conscience, martyrdom, testimony, and political decision.

Critics, however, have raised several concerns. Some contend that the portrayal of responsibility as always conflicted and secret risks paralyzing action or undermining concrete moral guidance. Others question the historical claims about Christianity’s unique role in forming modern responsibility, arguing that Derrida overstates Christian distinctiveness or underplays non-Christian influences. In addition, some theologians see his treatment of Abraham and sacrifice as philosophically suggestive but theologically imprecise.

Despite these debates, The Gift of Death remains a key reference point for discussions of ethical decision, the meaning of religious inheritance in secular societies, and the limits of calculative rationality. It is widely used in graduate-level courses in philosophy, theology, religious studies, and literature, often as an entry into Derrida’s later work on ethics, politics, and religion.