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Full Description
Winner, French Voices Award for excellence in publication and translation.
When it comes to giving, philosophers love to be the most generous. For them, every form of reciprocity is tainted by commercial exchange. In recent decades, such thinkers as Derrida, Levinas, Henry, Marion, Ricoeur, Lefort, and Descombes, have made the gift central to their work, haunted by the requirement of disinterestedness.
As an anthropologist as well as a philosopher, Hénaff worries that philosophy has failed to distinguish among various types of giving. The Philosophers' Gift returns to Mauss to reexamine these thinkers through the anthropological tradition. Reciprocity, rather than disinterestedness, he shows, is central to ceremonial giving and alliance, whereby the social bond specific to humans is proclaimed as a political bond. From the social fact of gift practices, Hénaff develops an original and profound theory of symbolism, the social, and the relationship between self and other, whether that other is an individual human being, the collective other of community and institution, or the impersonal other of the world.
Contents
Translator's Preface vii
Preliminary Directions 1
1. Derrida: The Gift, the Impossible, and the Exclusion of Reciprocity 11
2. Propositions I: The Ceremonial Gift—Alliance and Recognition 30
3. Levinas: Beyond Reciprocity—For-the-Other and the Costly Gift 52
4. Propositions II: Approaches to Reciprocity 77
5. Marion: Gift without Exchange—Toward Pure Givenness 95
6. Ricoeur: Reciprocity and Mutuality—From the Golden Rule to Agape 124
7. Philosophy and Anthropology: With Lefort and Descombes 148
8. Propositions III: The Dual Relationship and the Third Party 169
Postliminary Directions 199
Acknowledgments 213
Notes 215
Bibliography 245
Index 253
