Blood math

The text takes the form of a dialogue-a series of spoken fragments develope d in correspondence by Phelan and Heathfield and written in an interleaved structure. The performance of this dialogue employed slide imagery and a mu sical score, and the correspondence was pursued through a game of spelling in which the participants gradually chalked out a word on a board. Each let ter of the word stands for a thematic concern elaborated in the speaker's w riting. Working from various anthropological, psychoanalytic and philosophi cal discourses on the nature of the gift, the dialogue examines the place o f performance within various economies of cultural and personal exchange. W riting letters to one another, the authors move through the intertexts of B eckett, Boltanski, Heidegger, Nabokov and Franko B. The resonance of the ac t of giving is explored as it is played out in the relations between langua ge and loss, calculation and love, memory and the object, the body and sacr ifice, the arts of living and the arts of death. Aside from its conceptual address the presentation explores possibilities within the practice of perf ormative writing and opens the form of the scholarly paper.