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A gift

Not read my PHILOSOPHY FOR LIFE yet? Check out this review, by Marko Zlomislic, which may persuade you to do so:
There are lots of things in Zlomislic's perceptive review with which I agree, and lots of things which I would take issue with. But I take most of these latter to be 'Yes, and..' rather than 'Yes, but..' criticisms. In other words, they are things that I would have gone into myself, had my book been twice as long. I accentuated the positive vis a vis Chomsky and Tolkien, for instance - as Zlomislic does, I could easily have accentuated the negative too (and I have done, elsewhere in my writing, vis a vis Chomsky). I am happy to let the reader judge for themselves which of Zlomislic's points of disagreement with me may point to a genuine problem with what I am saying in the book.
One exception, one thing that Zlomislic says that I will take issue with here: While I have also written much more about Derrida and about forgiveness elsewhere, too, I specifically disagree with Zlomislic's praise of Derrida on forgiveness. Derrida has written brilliantly about 'the gift', but his writings on 'the forgift' are not up to scratch. To argue that forgiveness is a gift that one gives to oneself, is, as I have argued, in the end to fail to present the reader with a discussion of forgiveness at all. For forgiveness, if it is to be forgiveness, must be once more a gift that one gives to the other, not merely to oneself. (And that is what makes its status mysterious, and its achievement paradoxical, extraordinary.)
Let me know what you think of my book, and / or of Zlomislic's reivew. And: If you really like the book, why not buy it and give it to a friend?!...
 

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