The Politics of Gift-Giving and the Provocation of Lars von Trier's Dogville Dany Nobus

Film-Philosophy, 11.3

November 2007




The Politics of Gift-Giving and the
Provocation of Lars von Trier’s Dogville
Dany Nobus
Brunel University

In one of the most memorable scenes of Lars von Trier’s Dogville (2003), the ‘beautiful
fugitive’ Grace (Nicole Kidman) is visited in her improvised shelter at the restored Old Mill
by three of the township’s women. In what she announces as a moment of ‘girl talk’, Vera
(Patricia Clarkson) discloses to Grace that Martha (Siobhan Fallon), the pious spinster who
runs the mission house ‘until the new preacher arrives’, saw Grace having sex in the apple
orchard with Vera’s husband Chuck (Stellan Skarsgård). Although the viewer knows that
Chuck has been taking advantage of Grace ever since the moment he brutally raped her on
the floor of his own house, he seems to have defended himself to his wife when she
confronted him about the events by saying that it was Grace who had made advances
towards him, and “not for the first time”. Vera exonerates her husband, whom she
describes as ‘a withdrawn and primitive man’ who is ‘at heart’ ‘loyal and good’, but she is not
prepared to forgive the ‘seductress’. And so she decides to teach her a lesson, if only
because ‘she believes in education’, by smashing the collection of seven tiny china
figurines which Grace has purchased during the happy months in Dogville from Ma
Ginger’s (Lauren Bacall) ‘expensive shop’, with what little money the town’s inhabitants
had given her in return for her totally ‘unnecessary’ physical labour. Yet Vera does not just
throw Grace’s collection to smithereens in one single destructive act. Instead she presents
Grace with an ethical and emotional challenge: she will destroy two of the figurines and if
Grace is capable of demonstrating her knowledge of the doctrine of Stoicism, which Grace
has been teaching to Vera’s children, by holding back her tears, she will stop. As soon as the
two figurines are broken before Grace’s eyes, the gangster’s daughter, who ‘in her lifetime
had had considerable practice constraining her emotions’, herself breaks down and ‘for the
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first time since her childhood’ gives free rein to her tears. Mercilessly, Vera proceeds to
breaking the remaining five figurines, after which the three women leave the Old Mill.
This scene, in which the town of Dogville once again bares its teeth, is the only
moment in the film when one of Dogville’s inhabitants shows some form of allegiance to
the principle of ‘Dictum ac factum’ (‘no sooner said than done’) – the hackneyed words of
Terence’s self-tormentor, which are inscribed on the cross beam at the entrance to
Dogville’s abandoned silver mine, like a programmatic mission statement or a perennial
reminder of a bygone prosperous era, when there was no need for moral rearmament and
acceptance was not an issue. Yet the scene proves also crucial when Dogville’s fate is
sealed at the end of the film. For the memory of it comes back to Grace when she decides
that ‘if there’s any town this world would be better without’ it must be Dogville (thereby
echoing Chuck’s confession that he would not miss the town ‘if it fell into the gorge
tomorrow’), and her father accordingly instructs the mobsters to shoot everyone and burn
the whole town down. In light of what she experienced at the Old Mill during the night of
‘girl talk’, Grace feels that Vera deserves special treatment. Grace: ‘There’s a family with
kids. Do the kids first and make the mother watch. Tell her you’ll stop if she can hold back
her tears.’ Grace’s command, here, appears as extraordinarily cruel, heartless and
inhumane, especially against the background of her unusual, almost inhuman ability to
forgive, and the friendship she has built up with Vera during the happy days in Dogville.
How can the passionate destruction of a collection of seven ugly little figurines, however
fragile they may have been and however hard-won their acquisition may have felt, justify
the cold-blooded assassination of seven beautiful children, who are, if not entirely
innocent perhaps, at least entirely free of blame for the deplorable actions of their
parents? Grace’s ‘sadistic’ command appears all the more cynical as she calmly justifies it to
her father with the words: ‘I owe her [Vera] that’. What did Vera ‘give’ to Grace that could
possibly justify Grace’s decision to repay her own debts in this cruellest of fashions? Unless
we interpret Grace’s words as a prime example, not of the doctrine of Stoicism but of the
‘dog’s philosophy’ called Cynicism, it is hard to define the nature of Grace’s indebtedness to
Vera, for it seems that instead of having been given something by Chuck’s wife during that
night of ‘girl talk’ in the Old Mill, the angry woman rather took something precious away
from her.
In what follows, I wish to use the circumstances and dynamics of the nocturnal
scene of destruction at the Old Mill and the subsequent scene of carnage at the house of
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Chuck and Vera in Dogville as a springboard for developing some reflections on the
‘politics of gift-giving’, and the relationship between friendship and hostility in the
exchange of social goods. The term ‘springboard’ is no doubt too vague, here, because I
intend to approach the two scenes, and the film as a whole, as a radical provocation, thus
distinguishing my approach from the traditional methodology of ‘application’, in which a
work of art is used in order to exemplify a certain theoretical construction. As it happens,
‘provocation vs. illustration’ in itself constitutes one of the key ‘moral’ antagonisms of von
Trier’s film and, as I shall argue, it is the dogged determination of Tom Edison Jr. (Paul
Bettany), the town’s amateur-philosopher, moral lecturer and self-crowned “miner of the
human soul”, to illustrate the human problem and his failure to be provoked which brings
unrest to the township of Dogville and which finally makes it go to the dogs.
It seems to me that the two aforementioned scenes, when read in conjunction, not
only capture the essence of von Trier’s exploration of ‘goodness’, in what is to be the first
part of the director’s ‘USA Trilogy’, but also provoke a serious re-consideration of the
notions of acceptance, tolerance, hospitality and solidarity, which political theorists and
sociologists have identified as central principles of a democratic society. It is not my
intention to discuss the way in which ‘gift-giving’ operates within different political
systems (democratic vs. dictatorial; egalitarian vs. class-based), but to investigate the way in
which ‘gift-giving’ is conditioned by politics. One should understand the notion of politics,
here, in the same way as Derrida uses it, with reference to Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics, in
his Politics of Friendship, notably as a configuration of socio-economic governance which
involves the creation, production and manufacturing of something, such as a system of
exchange (Derrida 1997[1994], 8). In this vein, I shall explore the ‘politics of gift-giving’
along five distinct yet interlocking dimensions: 1. the object of the gift; 2. the act of giving;
3. the giver (donor) and the recipient (the donee); 4. gift-giving as a symbolic system of
exchange; and 5. the significance of gift-giving for discursive transformation. These five
dimensions by no means exhaust the process of gift-giving as a means of social interaction.
Indeed, additional aspects of gift-giving might be distinguished and investigated, such as
the meaning of the gift (and giving), the intentions of the donor and the purpose of gift-
giving. If I have decided to set these aspects aside, it is not because they lack importance,
but because I believe they connote social-psychological and cultural mechanisms, which as
such occupy a secondary role within the ‘politics of gift-giving’.
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It is universally agreed that the process of gift-giving requires the presence of a
gift. Without an object that qualifies as a gift, there is no such thing as an act of giving. Yet
this is probably where the agreement ends. Ever since Marcel Mauss published his seminal
essay on the gift in the mid-1920s (Mauss 1990 [1923-24]) sociologists and anthropologists
have found it much easier and much more convenient to focus their research on the
systems of exchange in which gifts operate, and on the motives that condition gift-giving,
than on the object of the gift as such, thus taking their lead from a rather peculiar
oversight in Mauss’s own work. For as Derrida pointed out in Given Time: 1. Counterfeit
Money: ‘[A] work as monumental as Marcel Mauss’s The Gift speaks of everything but the
gift: It deals with economy, exchange, contract (do ut des), it speaks of raising the stakes,
sacrifice, gift and countergift—in short, everything that in the thing itself impels the gift
and the annulment of the gift’ (Derrida 1992[1991], 24). The problem of researching and
defining what constitutes a gift-object has recently been demonstrated by Aafke E Komter
in her empirical study on Social Solidarity and the Gift. Before presenting the results of her
work into the patterns and profiles of gift-giving, Komter asks ‘What exactly is to be
considered as a gift?’, to which she responds with the answer:
Using the respondents’ own definition of what they experience as a gift is
apparently a good approach. However, this would imply another type of
research than we had in mind. Because we were mainly interested in the
sociological patterns of gift giving and in the psychological motives
underlying these patterns, and not primarily in the subjective definitions of
“gifts” as opposed to “nongifts,” we distinguished several giving objects or
giving activities, material as well as nonmaterial: presents, monetary gifts,
hospitality (inviting people to dinner or letting them stay in one’s house). Our
idea was that, in spite of obvious differences between them, practices such as
ritual or spontaneous gift giving, offering help or care, or hospitality to other
persons have one very essential aspect in common: all these gifts are imbued
by the subjective experience of being given out of free will and are not being
dictated by any economic rule such as fair exchange or barter. (Komter 2005,
39)
Although this passage exemplifies social scientists’ inclination to concentrate on
the sociological and psychological mechanisms governing practices of exchange, rather
than the object of the gift, it nonetheless provides us with at least three interesting angles
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on the gift as object: 1. What constitutes a gift is conditioned by subjective experience.
Whose subjective experience is not entirely clear. It could be the subjective experience of
the giver, that of the recipient, or both; 2. The subjective experience which enables the
identification of an object as gift is tantamount to its being experienced as the product of a
free will, that is to say, the experience rests on an evaluation of the nature of the act (of
giving) which carries the object; 3. Gift-objects can be material or immaterial and may
cover the entire spectrum from economically valuable goods such as money to exclusively
social activities such as hospitality.

One could easily conclude from these ideas that the main reason why the gift-
object escapes clear definition is that within a social system of exchange everything (and
nothing) can potentially function as a gift, provided the donor, but especially the donee,
interprets the object in a certain way. A gift, then, becomes any object that the giver
and/or the recipient interprets as a gift. Hence, the object of the gift does not even need
to be collapsed onto the (im)material, ostensibly detachable object that is transferred
from the donor to the donee, because it may very well coincide with the donor as such. As
Hannibal Lecter would no doubt have said whenever a dinner guest asked him what to
bring: ‘Just bring yourself!’. Yet if all of this seems plausible, it still does not do justice to the
complexity of the object qua gift. For how can any donee (but the same is no doubt true for
the donor) ever arrive at the conclusion that an object is given out of free will? How can a
recipient (and a giver) determine that an object is not given as part of an economic system
of exchange — as a loan, in return for something already received, or perhaps as a payment
towards the reduction of an incurred debt. More radically, how can anyone calculate that
the given object does not require its return? It is well-known, here, that in Mauss’s
conception of the gift, the practice of gift-giving cannot be divorced from the principle of
do ut des (I give for you to give in return). As Mary Douglas reminded readers in a recent
exchange in the Times Literary Supplement, this implies that for Mauss there is no such
thing as a ‘free’ gift, although this fundamental ‘contamination’ of the gift has never
stopped anyone from thinking that a ‘true’ gift should always be free (Douglas 2005, 15).

The question as to whether Mauss was correct in arguing that no gift is ever
entirely free continues to divide scholarly opinion, and has often generated vehement
discussions about the extent to which a human being is capable of relinquishing
selfishness in order to express ‘real’ altruism. Freud (1912-13, 1930a[1929]) believed that
human beings only ever perform unselfish, altruistic acts as a result of their compliance
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with the suppression (renunciation) of the drives that is enforced by the constraints of
social life. Altruism and sociability are but secondary, neurotic formations built upon the
remnants of a primary, hostile set of impulses. This idea has received support from
orthodox Darwinians, who have argued that altruism runs contrary to the principle of
natural selection (which essentially requires creatures to follow their self-interest), yet
hard-core socio-biologists such as E.O. Wilson (1975) have revalorised altruism as a
genetically controlled, adaptive feature of human nature, which implies that the ‘free’ gift
(including self-sacrifice) constitutes a necessary biological factor for the maintenance of
community life.

Whichever perspective on ‘free’ gifts and altruism is closer to the truth, neither of
them dispels the fundamental paradox that reigns over the gift-object. If there is no such
thing as a ‘free’ gift, but everyone believes that a gift should be free, then it is not only
clear that a genuine gift does not exist, that we can never offer and receive real gifts, but
that we are forced to deceive ourselves with the thought that a gift is free in order to be
able to give and receive. But if a ‘free’ gift does exist, if something can really be given for
nothing, then the resulting truthful identification of the object qua real gift would in itself
reduce its quality, because its sheer recognition as gift will inevitably induce experiences
of gratitude (and debt) on the part of the receiver and self-approval (and narcissistic
gratification) on the part of the donor. As Alvin Gouldner put it: ‘There is no gift that brings
a higher return than the free gift . . . For that which is truly given freely moves men deeply
and makes them most indebted to their benefactors’ (Gouldner 1973, 277). Remarkably,
Gouldner remains reluctant to give up his belief in the existence of the ‘free’ gift, despite
the fact that his assertion clearly indicates that the ‘freest’ gift is simultaneously the ‘un-
freest’ gift, since it attracts the highest rewards.

Following Derrida in Given Time, the only possible conclusion seems to be that the
gift-object is the ‘very figure of the impossible’:
The simple identification of the gift seems to destroy it. The simple
identification of the gift as such, that is, of an identifiable thing among some
identifiable ‘ones’, would be nothing other than the process of the
destruction of the gift. It is as if, between the event or the institution of the
gift as such and its destruction, the difference were destined to be constantly
annulled. At the limit, the gift as gift ought not appear as gift: either to the
donee or to the donor. It cannot be gift as gift except by not being present as
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gift. Neither to the ‘one’ nor to the ‘other’. If the other perceives or receives it,
if he or she keeps it as gift, the gift is annulled. 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 gratify himself, to congratulate himself, to
give back to himself symbolically the value of what he thinks he has given or
what he is preparing to give. (Derrida 1992[1991], 14)
It is worth noting, here, that Derrida does not exclude the possibility of the social
exchange of gifts, whether ritualised or spontaneous, but rather emphasizes the
impossibility of an object’s continued existence as gift, that is to say as something which
does not presuppose or imply a return, from the moment it is identified as such. In other
words, an object can only be exchanged as gift for as long as it is not appreciated as a gift-
object.

To the best of my knowledge, Derrida does not tease out the implications of his
account of the gift-object for the act of giving, nor for the relationship between the giver
and the receiver, and the way in which a social system enacts and reproduces patterns of
gift-giving. In addition, Derrida builds his argument around the idea that as soon as an
object is identified as gift, the gift is annulled because of the effect of restitution that this
identification produces, whether in the form of a self-congratulatory, narcissistic
gratification (on the side of the donor) or as guilt-ridden gratitude (on the side of the
donee). Yet this process of mutual indemnification only works if there is some form of
economic equity between the value of the gift-object and the value of the compensatory
rewards that it attracts. If the value of the gift-object, or if the cost of the identification of
an object qua gift outweighs the profits that it generates, then it is difficult to see how the
gift could be annulled. In other words, it seems entirely possible to conceive of the
persistence of the gift-object, despite the inevitable force and sum of its returns, if we
accept that the value of the gift-object, when it is recognized as such, and the value of its
(present or anticipated) effects do not de facto cancel each other out, which is exactly
what Derrida seems to assume in his economy of gift-giving. I would even dare to go a step
further and propose that it is not so much the gift-object that represents the impossible,
but rather the equality of measure between the cost of the gift-object (not its actual
financial cost, of course, but the expenditure involved in its perception as gift) and the
value of its resultant benefits. The fundamental disparity, the impossible complementarity
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between the former and the latter is thereby less a function of the actual or attributed
weight (personal significance, socio-economic value) that they carry, than of the temporal
(and logical) order that separates the two events. The value of the gift-object’s resultant
benefits may either fall short, or over-indemnify or occasionally match the cost of the
object’s identification as gift, yet this does not exclude the impossibility of complete
complementarity, because the identification of the gift-object will always occur first, as a
point of departure, before the occurrence of whatever benefits it attracts. For this reason, I
venture to propose that the gift, apart from being the ‘very figure of the impossible’, in its
unavoidable attraction of returns (which is, in a sense, Derrida’s reformulation and
radicalisation of Mauss’s idea that there is no such thing as a ‘free’ gift), is also, and perhaps
more fundamentally the ‘very figure of loss’, owing to the temporal impossibility of the
cost of the gift-object being annulled by the value of its returns.

What are the implications of this for the act of giving, the relationship between the
giver and the receiver, and the way in which a social system enacts and reproduces
patterns of gift-giving? If Derrida is right in claiming that the gift is the ‘very figure of the
impossible’, and we accept the aforementioned thesis that the gift is the necessary
precondition for the act of giving, then common sense no doubt dictates that the act of
giving is equally impossible, at least in its identification as a ‘giving act’. But perhaps we
must not let ourselves be guided by common sense and be too quick in formulating
conclusions. Why would it be impossible to give something that is in itself ‘the very figure
of the impossible’? Why would the impossible gift-object by definition make the act of
giving it into an impossibility? Wouldn’t it be possible to conceive of an act of giving that
maintains the impossibility of the given object, i.e. that does not de facto presuppose the
identification of an object as gift? Wouldn’t it be possible to conceive of an act of giving
without there being an actual gift?
During the 1950s, Lacan famously defined love as ‘giving what you don’t have’
(Lacan, 2002a [1958], 243; see also Lacan, 2002b [1958], 276), thereby implicitly borrowing
a phrase from Heidegger’s discussion of ‘The Anaximander Fragment’ (Heidegger, 1950
[1946]). In this formula, love appears as the epitome of the ‘impossible gift’, yet at the same
time it is by no means impossible to engage in the act of giving it, to actively give someone
or something one’s love, indeed to make love to someone or to love something. We could
even go so far as to say that the act of giving love is essentially predicated upon a refusal or
an avoidance of the identification of the object as a gift. If love were to be perceived and
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ascertained as a gift-object by one or more of the loving parties involved, then the act of
loving would instantly be annihilated and re-integrated within an economically
sanctioned process of commodification and exchange – reduced to the provision of a
social service. The act of loving simply does not tolerate the object of love being identified
as a gift, neither by the lover nor by the beloved. The act of loving does not hold up to the
beloved responding to the lover’s love with the words ‘Thank you for that!’
However, the possible co-existence of an act of giving and an unidentified gift-
object – stronger still, the radical dependency of an act of giving upon the non-
identification of an object as gift – should perhaps not necessarily be restricted to the field
of love. And indeed Lacan himself does not appear to have privileged love, here, since he
also considered this dynamics to be operative in the passions of hate and ignorance (Lacan,
2002a [1958], 252). How far the conjunction can be extended beyond the realm of the
passions remains to be seen, yet the phenomenon of love demonstrates clearly how the
act of giving can be crucially dependent upon the impossibility of the gift-object, on the
object of love not being identified as a gift that as such would elicit self-esteem and
gratitude. Of course, following Derrida, we also need to acknowledge that the refusal to
identify the love-object as a gift is precisely what allows it to persist as a pure,
uncontaminated, free gift-object and what makes room for the act of love to be
recognized as an act of giving. Again, I believe we could go a step further here and argue
that, conversely and paradoxically, it is this type of non-identification of an object qua gift
which can make it possible for an act of giving to acquire the connotation of love. The
extent to which an act of giving can be experienced as performed with love is inversely
proportional to the degree with which the giver and the receiver identify the object as a
gift and, by implication, congratulate themselves on it or feel the need to express their
gratitude to the other.
If we accept that the gift-object, apart from being the ‘very figure of impossibility’,
is also and perhaps more fundamentally ‘the very figure of loss’, then common sense offers
less clear-cut answers as to its implications for the act of giving and the relationship
between the donor and the donee. If the gift’s returns are incapable of annulling the cost
of its identification, for reasons of temporality more than anything else, then how does this
uncompensated expenditure affect the process of gift-giving? How does it affect the way
in which the donor and the donee relate to one another, before, during and after the gift
has been given? At this point, I wish to return to Lars von Trier’s Dogville, in order to
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expose myself to the provocation of the two scenes, of the nightly ‘girl talk’ at the Old Mill
and the moonlit ‘sadistic’ infanticide in the house of Vera and Chuck, that I singled out at
the beginning of my text as paradigmatic depictions of the politics of gift-giving.
The most difficult question posed by these two consecutive scenes is no doubt that
of the adequacy and justifiability of the compensation (retaliation, revenge) which Grace
decides to inflict upon her ‘friend’ Vera. How can the destruction of seven tiny ugly
figurines warrant the assassination of seven beautiful children? Why must the passionate
breakage of a series of inanimate objects, irreparably damaged yet not necessarily
irreplaceably lost, be repaid with the dispassionate murder of a series of living subjects,
irreparably wounded yet also ever so irreplaceably lost? Why does Grace ‘owe’ Vera this?
And how can we make sense of what she says immediately afterwards: ‘I am afraid she
[Vera] cries a little too easily’? Of course, this is what Vera herself confessed to Grace when
Grace went to see her in order to baby-sit for little Achilles, as part of Tom’s ‘Trojan horse’-
plan for ensuring that Grace ‘wins over’ the sympathy of Vera’s grumpy husband: ‘I cry too
easily, both in sorrow and in joy’. But if it is indeed the case that Vera cries too easily, then
the ethical and emotional predicament imposed by Grace becomes entirely futile, for she
knows in advance that her ‘friend’ will not be able to hold back her tears and will thereby
be forced to see the rest of her children die as a result of her own weakness and
vulnerability.
To grasp the extent of von Trier’s provocation it is worth recalling what the voice-
over says when Grace is forced to witness how Vera smashes two of the seven figurines on
the floor of the Old Mill: ‘But as the porcelain pulverized on the floor it was as if it were
human tissue disintegrating. The figurines were the offspring of the meeting between the
township and her. They were the proof that in spite of everything her suffering had
created something of value’. Despite, or perhaps by virtue of the hardship Grace has had to
sustain, the seven figurines have acquired great emotional and symbolic value. She has
come to regard them as the progeny of her loving communion with Dogville. In this
respect, von Trier seems to suggest that Vera’s seven children are in fact but a small
‘compensation’ for the seven little figurines, because they have much less emotional and
symbolic value (the children are physically neglected and socially deprived) and they have
not even been born out of a loving relationship—as Tom explains to Grace when he
introduces her ‘to the town he loves’: ‘Chuck and Vera have seven children and they hate
each other’. Hence, when judged in terms of the emotional and symbolic value of the
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