Guest lecture - Present/Presence: Disrupting Gift Theory

Literary scholar Alexandra Urakova and biophilosopher Margrit Shildrick will tease out theoretical possibilities that the synonymous and generally dismissed term “present” tentatively suggests. A key idea inspired by Derrida emphasizes the relation of the gift to the present as a relation “to the presence of the present” (1992, 10). In order to unpack the meanings of the term, they will discuss a little-known nineteenth-century text, “About Presents” (1845) by American sentimental author Caroline Mathilda Kirkland, who made one of the first attempts to draft a theory of presents and gifting. Then they will move to the seemingly unconnected realm of contemporary organ transplantation, which is at the center of Gift of Life discourse and which reiterates many earlier patterns in a striking and almost uncanny way. Powerful crossovers that include nineteenth-century sentimentality and biosentimentality, keepsake and keepsafe (graft) invite us to rethink the gift/present as a form of entanglement on both intracorporeal and extracorporeal levels.

Alexandra Urakova is a literary scholar specializing in nineteenth-century American and comparative literature and cultural anthropology. Her recent publications – Dangerous Giving in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2022) and The Dangers of Gifts from Antiquity to the Digital Age (co-edited with Tracey A. Sowerby and Tudor Sala, 2023) – explore the dark side of gift exchange in literature and beyond. 

Margrit Shildrick is known for her research covering postmodern feminist theory, bioethics, critical disability studies, body theory and posthumanism. Her most recent publication – Visceral Prostheses: Somatechnics and Posthuman Embodiment (2022) – traces the significance of the biophilosophical and embodied conjunction of microchimerism, immunology and corporeal anomaly. She is currently doing research for a collaborative project which addresses the gift relation as one of posthumanist entanglement, not exchange.