Let's look more closely at this money, and at money -- and fake money -- in eneral. The philospher Jacques Derrida, in his 1991 book Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, turns to the etymological root of the word 'economy' and finds it has two parts: oikos, Greek for 'home', and nomos , Greek for 'law'. This second part, nomos, itself breaks down into the laws of distribution (nemein) and of partition (moira, which also means 'lot' or 'destiny'). Besides the values of law and home, of distribution and partition, economy also implies 'the idea of exchange, of circulation, or return'. Goods and products are exchanged and circulated, as is money itself, and in venturing money people hope that they will get at least as much back again, if not more. Pondering these facts, Derrida begins to suspect that 'the law of economy is the -- circular -- return to the point of departure, to the origin, also to the home'. Waxing mythical, he talks of the 'odyssean' nature of economy, suggesting that 'Oikonomeia would always follow the path of Ulysses' -- Odysseus and Ulysses being two names for the same Homeric hero whose destiny or moira dictated that he embark on a twenty-year-long adventure that would end with his return to his own palace.

The Odyssean circuit, the path of Ulysses: this is exactly Haddock's path, the loop he follows, his destiny. Born several generation after a partition was made and lots assigned (one ship to each son), and several-plus-one generation after another, cruel lot was handed out -- a cruel lot which nonetheless left his ancestor richer to the tune of one stately home -- Haddock sets out around the world in order to return to the point of departure, which is the home itself. The home that he returns to was not the one he left but rather that left by -- and to -- Sir Francis: his circuit is a trans-generational one. And it is money, the treasure, that sends him on this path that leads back to the home (the home whose butler, incidentally, has a name straight out of Homer's Odyssey: Nestor).

For Derrida, economy raises another question: the gift. As a phenomenon that also involves exchange and circulation, the gift is both tied to economic systems and a contradiction of these systems: giving is opposed to buying and selling; it is 'free'. On top of that, the language of the gift lies at the heart of our philosophical and general ideas, so much so that we take it for granted and hardly even notice it. To say something exists in German we say Es gibt, 'it gives': Es gibt ein Mann, 'there is a man', or, to quote the great philosopher Martin Heidegger, Es gibt Sein, 'there is being'. In English we say something or someone is 'present', and the horizon within which they exist is 'the present'. So fundamentally does the structure of giving underpin our categories of thought and of existence, Derrida concludes, that we cannot even properly say that one person or subject gives a gift to another subject: rather, 'subject and object are arrested effects of the gift, arrests of the gift' -- freeze-frames, as it were, taken from the gift's fundamental movement from 'the zero or infinite speed of the circle'.

What does the gift give? Tim. Turning to the anthropologist Marcel Mauss, whose studies of Melanesian and Pplynesian tribes form the basis of his 1950 book The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, Derrida notices Mauss's observation that 'in every possible form of cociety, it is in the nature of a gift to impose an obligatory time limit or term." A gift, says Mauss, obliges and, since the obligation cannot be acquitted or returned immediately (if it were, the gift would not be a gift but simply form part of a normal economic exchange), a delay is set in place, an interval of indebtnedness. Gratitude is owed, and that debt must not be forgotten: it must be repaid before too long. Thus past and future tenses open up around the 'present' of the gift.

Haddock's time opens up with the gift: the gift from Louis XIV to Sir Francis of a château and the gift from Tintin to the Captain of the model ship that puts him onto it: a double staggered gift, a gift within a gift. From Tintin's gift a whole past era unfolds, and the immediate furture is devoted to looping back to catch up with that past and dig it up within the present. In the Caribbean, Haddock find himself awash in time itself -- tewntieth-century time with its meridian set a Greenwich, seventeenth-century time with its meridian in Paris: noon and two o'clock overlaid even as Haddock and his entourage, to borrow Baudelaire's line again, look for noon at two o'clock.

For Derrida, though, neither Haddock's nor Mauss's gifts are proper gifts. According to him, a real gift should not impose conditions and indebtedness; it should be genuinely 'free'. But in order to function in this way, the gift would have to be unrecognizable as a gift, that is, it would have to cancel or annul itself, to undergo 'radical forgetting' -- not just overlooking but an absolute erasure that places it outside of time itself. Otherwise, it is only a partial gift, one that, in obloging the recipient and making them owe, takes more than it gives. Normal gifts are 'bad' gifts, Derrida says; they are unhealthy. As Mauss himself points out, the Latin word for 'gift', dosis, is a transcription of the Greek dosis, 'dose of poison', just as the German word for poison is (wait for it) Gift -- etymological and cross-linguistic links that lead Derrida to write of 'the poisoned gift of which legacies are made'.

P. 122-125

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