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6 ive me a break!" This expression appears to be an imperative or a request. \J In colloquial English, it can be either, or it can be uttered with various degrees of irony as a complaint, an objection, or a reproof. I want to begin by considering it in a relatively serious way, by asking what it means to ask some one to give, and to give a break. According to some analyses in a certain dis course on the gift (for example, in Nietzsche, Bataille, Levinas, and Derrida), the gift is always a break of some sort. It is an interruption, an excess, an incal culable intervention. It breaks with a circle or cycle of economic exchange, of debt and credit. A true gift (to borrow one of Emerson's terms) cannot be one that was anticipated or one for which return is expected. In one sense, then, reading very literally, "give me a break" is a tautology, for it says "give me a gift," where the gift is understood as rupture and disruption. Or perhaps the break requested is for me, for the speaker of the phrase, who asks for special consideration; while it may be recognized that there are a set of laws or rules in place that all are expected to follow, the speaker appeals to his or her special circumstances, including perhaps a relation to the one addressed. So it can be come a demand for justice, for that absolutely unique justice that escapes rule and law. More specifically, in terms of common usage, the expression is fre quently a request for time, for freedom from some constraints or expectations, possibly a petition to be released from a deadline, or from some constrictive schedule. It asks for a break in time, a break from or interruption in a rigorous agenda; it asks for something like an intercalary day, as in the time given at New Year's in Babylon when there was a festive day that did not appear on the calen dar, but that was understood to be available for carnivalesque reversals of and variations on normative social codes. The gift and time?these two themes come together in recent texts such as Derrida's Given Time (1992), but also in Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "Gifts" (see Emerson 1990), which I propose to read. "Give me a break," then, seems to encapsulate much of what current thought has to say about the gift. And yet, if we now attend to the phrase as request or demand, rather than to its presumed object, the break, it begins to seem not tautologous, but self-contradictory, for surely there is something deeply prob |
