The Philosophers' Gift: Reexamining Reciprocity (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780823286461)

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, H駭aff 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, H駭aff 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.

Author: Marcel H駭aff
ISBN-10: 0823286460
ISBN-13: 9780823286461
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Language: English
Published: 11/05/2019
Pages: 256
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.88lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.61d