Some of the texts studied here are explicitly presented as gifts. Serres dedicates Genesis to Annette Gruner Schlumberger. A grateful acknowledgement is made to the Bollingen Foundation for a grant that made the translation of Auerbach's Mimesis possible. Baudelaire dedicates Le Spleen de Paris to Arsène Houssaye. Under these circumstances, writing itself becomes a gift. In Given Time, Derrida discusses the economics of gifting as restituting, giving, offering, assigning, destining and dedicating:

By giving it to be remarked, the dedication situates ... the dative or donor movement that displaces the text. There is nothing in a text that is not dedicated, nothing that is not destined, and the destination of this dative is not reducible to the explicit dedication. The name of the dedicatee - or donee - supplies no more proof of the effective dedication than the patronymic name of the signatory (juridically identifiable by civil law) exhausts the effective signature, if there is one (87).

The dedication is the trace of an event: contingent and unnecessary. The books would not be any less if there were no dedications. However, they do leave a mark that recognizes and can be recognized as something that joins the book and the author to some other.

A causal relationship between the book and the one to whom it is dedicated is implied. The dedication joins and separates different writers and different texts. It also amounts to the declaration: "the book is not entirely mine. Its origins belong, to some extent, to another and I officially offer it up in a spirit of gratitude and generosity."

Just as Auerbach recognizes that his book owes its existence to a particular library available to him during a period of his life when he was free to write, dedications hint at how the texts have come into being. Influences on a writer are generally untraceable but some are and some are made explicit. Often these are cited as those forces that have driven a writer to "the point of writing" (Mimesis 557).

Peter Basile