Propositions I: The Ceremonial Gift—Alliance and Recognition

This chapter examines the fundamental features of the ceremonial gift as well as its purpose. Marcel Mauss deserves credit for constituting the epistemological problem of the ritual gift based on the ethnographic documents available at the beginning of the twentieth century, and connecting them to the testimonies of ancient Indian, Roman, Celtic, Scandinavian, and Germanic literatures. While he was not the first to consider this phenomenon, he was the first to systematically gather the relevant data and propose a model according to which gift exchanges appear as a major social fact. He even called it a “total social fact.” Among the mass of data he collected through his readings, three sets emerge, each characterized by a term used by a population involved. These include the great cycles of gift exchanges (kula) in the Trobriand Islands, a Melanesian archipelago; potlach, the agonistic exchange among the native populations of the northwest coast of America; and the hau, which comes from an inquiry conducted among the Maori of New Zealand. What is at stake in the facts discussed by Mauss is an intense bond between parties, public prestige granted and gained, and the conclusion of an alliance. The alliance established or renewed in ritual exchanges involves the public life of the group; as such, it is a political alliance. The ceremonial gift is thus meant to be reciprocated, since an alliance is necessarily reciprocal.

Philosophy and Anthropology: With Lefort and Descombes

This chapter discusses the need to problematize more precisely the possible relationships between philosophy and social anthropology from the perspective of gift exchanges. In France, few philosophers have attempted this effort. Two of them seem especially interesting for this discussion because of their original relationship to Mauss's The Gift: Claude Lefort and Vincent Descombes. Their perspectives are very different. Lefort supports his reflection on the political realm and history based on the social sciences, whereas Descombes questions the validity of the concepts of those sciences, beginning with the concepts of society and social relationship. The question of the social bond is at the core of Lefort's and Descombes's inquiries. It is not enough to ask what unites a group, preserves its unity, and makes it view itself as forming a unique whole. Lefort examines whether seeking this bond entirely absorbs the energy of the members of the group and determines their choices and actions, while Descombes attempts to answer a more general question: How can an individual subject relate to another and view this relationship as being as evident and fundamental as their own existence? It is based on these kinds of questions that the exchange practices of traditional societies are chosen as providing the very model of the strong bond and the specific level that those authors seek to define.

Ricoeur: Reciprocity and Mutuality—From the Golden Rule to Agapē

This chapter addresses Paul Ricoeur's Oneself as Another (1992), in which he presents his most profound problematization of reciprocity through a questioning of the concepts of solicitude, promise, otherness, and attestation, among others. Ricoeur appears to distance himself from the concept of reciprocity, and instead he promotes the concept of mutuality. He views the former as leading to conflict, and the latter to benevolence. Ritual exchanges of “mutual” gifts should then be understood as exceptional moments that lead to “states of peace,” furthermore leading to the relationship of agapē. However, it is questionable whether one can accept Ricoeur's interpretation, which underestimates the element of struggle and differentiation that is a foundational factor in the ceremonial gift and underlies every bond of reciprocity, including the bond stated by the Golden Rule.

Marion: Gift without Exchange—Toward Pure Givenness

This chapter assesses how Jean-Luc Marion's approach to the question of the gift finds its primary source and resources in Husserl's phenomenology and—less ostensibly but perhaps more radically—in Heidegger's thought. Marion's entire phenomenological endeavor can be summed up in his statement: “As much reduction, as much givenness.” The term “reduction” must of course be understood here in the precise sense Husserl gives it. As for “givenness,” it becomes the key word that dominates Marion's work. Marion's approach can be described as moving along three major steps; a fourth step remains, however prospective—or suspended—which involves the outcome. The first step consists of his entire effort at articulating reduction and givenness; this leads to the verge of pure givenness. The greatest risks Marion takes are situated in his second step, since it consists of attempting a shift from pure givenness defined in strictly phenomenological terms to an analysis of the gift as a gesture among humans—that is, of an act by which a giver gives something to a recipient. The third step, continually foreshadowed by the second, comes closer to integration; the reduction of the gift to givenness being assumed achieved, the only remaining task is to grasp the identity of given and givenness. This leaves one on the edge of the fourth and highly hypothetical step of the experience of an excess of intuition—or rather an overflowing of intuition—part of what Marion calls saturated phenomena.

Propositions II: Approaches to Reciprocity

This chapter looks at different approaches to the subject of reciprocity. Whereas many philosophers tend to understand reciprocity as a form of equivalence and a return to the self, many theorists in the social sciences—economists included—view it as a synonym of generosity or a figure of altruism. This divergence should lead one to recommend a dialogue between the two fields to avoid such misunderstandings. But above all, this invites one to recognize that the concept of reciprocity is not well defined and that there is a need to clarify its status, which is at the core of philosophical reflections on the relationships with Others, norms of morality, the social bond, and ultimately the gift itself. The chapter then considers what sociology and anthropology can say about the question, since it comes under the purview of those disciplines to investigate the nature of the relationships observed among members of social groups and attempt to define them. In particular, it assesses two authors whose analyses on this point have marked the debates of the past few decades: sociologist Alvin Gouldner, author of a seminal article on the norm of reciprocity; and anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, whose book of record Stone Age Economics dedicates an entire chapter to defining the nature of practices of reciprocity.

Postliminary Directions

This concluding chapter examines how certain developments of phenomenology show an attempt to transform the description of the appearing of phenomena, understood as “givenness,” into a manifestation of a gesture of giving, and thus, through a gradual process of transfer, to shift from the field of knowledge to the realm of an enigmatic oblativity capable of being granted religious as well as moral valence. The position presented in this chapter keeps a distance from this kind of amalgamation. By establishing a clear distinction among different orders of the gift that cannot be placed on the same level, it makes it impossible to view the determinations of one of those levels as relevant to an assessment of the others. The chapter then argues that reciprocity involves forms of logic or requirements situated in different fields of questions that should not be confused with one another. It was thus necessary to present propositions and to engage in a reconstruction.

Propositions III: The Dual Relationship and the Third Party

This chapter explores the gift relationship. Whether private or socially instituted, the gift relationship appears to embody certain exemplary dimensions of being-with-others and living-together. However, a reflection on this type of gesture or procedure brings to the fore a number of unresolved problems and, for this very reason, occasions a number of misunderstandings. The main difficulty has to do with the indeterminacy of the very term, gift, too often used with respect to profoundly heterogeneous situations. This indeterminacy encourages a tendency to privilege the sense of the word sanctioned by an age-old religious and moral tradition that appears based on common sense and tends to be viewed as the standard by which the other forms of gift can be assessed: the unreciprocated generous gesture. However, this ontology is of little help when one attempts to answer questions such as the following: Who gives what to whom, under what circumstances, and for what purpose? This question concerns intersubjective as well as social relationships. It is therefore crucial to clarify the status of the partners involved and the nature of the “thing” that is offered by one to the other or that circulates between the two partners. Although dual by definition, the relationship of reciprocity cannot be reduced to a one-on-one interaction: It necessarily includes a third element, a thing from the world, which can sometimes be a mere word, or even—when the institution is already in place—an easily recognizable gesture.

Levinas: Beyond Reciprocity—For-the-Other and the Costly Gift

This chapter focuses on Emmanuel Levinas's conception of reciprocity, which allows one to understand what is at the core of his conception of the gift. For him, the gift is always—or rather cannot be anything else than—unconditional oblation, boundless largesse toward Others. This conception precludes any idea of exchange—be it generous and festive—and probably explains why Levinas never discusses the ritual gift Mauss discusses, defined by the triple obligation to give, accept, and reciprocate. Only the first obligation could make sense to Levinas, whereas the third can only turn the gesture of giving toward what he calls the economy, the Same, and happiness. The chapter then determines if it is possible to free reciprocity from the malediction Levinas seems to cast on it, and if the theoretical difficulties he raises might not fall away once a different perspective opens up on the relationship between the Self and Others, without in any way erasing the ethical responsibility of the Self.

Preliminary Directions

This introductory chapter provides an overview of how philosophers have understood the concept and practice of the gift. For philosophers, the only true gift is the unreciprocated gift. According to them, to expect that Others return a gift, to call on reciprocity, amounts to pulling back the movement of giving toward oneself, thus canceling the disinterested intent that alone gives meaning to the gesture of offering. This view, however, is not shared by all philosophers; neither does it inform all of their actions. Stated in those terms, this very demanding requirement of generosity might remain out of the reach of the very thinkers who express it. This radical claim, however, is not pure bravado. Its primary purpose is to activate critical awareness. By denying the donor any expectation of a return, it aims to proclaim that the gift as a gesture can never be identified with a commercial transaction. This requirement thus amounts to resisting giving in to self-interested considerations and to reject the domination of an economy directed almost exclusively toward maximum profit and return on investment—in other words, everything philosophers tend to call exchange, without realizing that this word also carries a wealth of noneconomic meanings. The chapter then shows how philosophers tend to understand reciprocity exclusively as self-interested exchange, as opposed to the requirement of unconditional giving that entails—at least implicitly—a rejection of self-interest.

Derrida: The Gift, the Impossible, and the Exclusion of Reciprocity

This chapter discusses Jacques Derrida's Given Time (1992), which presents an aporia of the gift that has made its mark and has occasioned many commentaries and a few refutations. The aporia of the gift according to Derrida can be summed up as follows: Giving is always understood as a relationship between a giver and a receiver, an exchange that generates a debt and in the final analysis remains within the confines of economic reciprocity; in this, the gift becomes the opposite of what it claims to be. To escape this logic, for the gift to be truly a gift, Derrida claims, the giver would have to be unaware that he is giving, and the receiver unaware of the giver's identity. Starting with those requirements, Derrida proposes a critical reading of Marcel Mauss's The Gift (1990), a writing where the obligation to give, receive, and reciprocate established by ethnographic inquiries is understood as the core of the gift relationship. Derrida's purpose is not to reject those data, but to dispute the validity of the term “gift” as designating a gesture that presupposes or even mandates the requirement of reciprocity.