Wishtank

Indebtedness and the Possibility of the Gift

by: Dan Briggs

Giving gifts is only rarely an outpouring of generosity or affection. Most are coerced, in one way or another. By giving the gift away, one creates obligations and forges alliances that can increase the power of the donor. The object received as a gift, the received object in general, engages, links magically, religiously, morally and juridically, the giver and the receiver.

Gifts are given and received in many types of everyday situations: to commemorate a special day, to forge friendships, to apologize, to show affection, etc. In the archaic lifeworlds that Marcel Mauss examines, reciprocity and interdependence become enacted and embodied through the concrete practice of gift-giving. The gift exchanged is a basic way by which individuals build and maintain everyday social and moral bonds. At the same time, the linguistic dimensions of the gift make possible a discourse which allows us to speak to these basic principles (i.e. we say, I owe you, Fairness is about give-and-take, The moral person is someone who is generous and gives to those who are deserving, etc.). Given our everyday familiarity with the phenomena, it seems that a clear understanding of the gift is commonplace and already given. The gift, as it appears, gives us no problem.

In spite of this assessment, this paper asserts that the internal logic of the gift retains at its core a mysterious and irresolvable paradox. Put bluntly: Unless we come to terms with the possible impossibility of the gift (a phrase I discuss below), I am willing to conjecture that we do not yet understand what the gift is. Furthermore, this paper will not aim to resolve or dissolve this paradox, but intends only to allow the paradoxical nature of the gift to become intelligible. We can describe this paradox in the preliminary form of a couple of questions: How can one present a gift to someone without forcing an obligation on to the recipient? And, how can one receive a gift without feeling indebted to the giver and feeling obligated to return the gift? Additionally, we must ask: What is the relationship between indebtedness and obligation? As I will show below, these concerns bear crucially on whether something like a gift is metaphysically possible.

This paper will proceed in three parts. First, I shall draw upon the work of Marcel Mauss and Jacques Derrida in order to explicate a reading of the gift as paradox. Second, I discuss the importance of distinguishing the concept of gift from that of commodity, and I consider the possible impossibility of the gift given our increasingly consumerized world. And third, I conclude by returning to Mauss and identify the heart of the gift’s paradox in a double reading of indebtedness.

First, it will be helpful to mention an initial methodological difficulty: the proper object of our analysis remains ambiguous. Are we to emphasize the thing given, the relationship created between the giver and receiver, the interrelationships among people and things, or something altogether distinct from these frameworks? Although my interpretation will waver across these possible approaches, it would be impatient to simply assert which one is correct until further in the investigation; for now I simply raise the issue as a question.

Marcel Mauss

The paradox of the gift
Although approaching it from different backgrounds, both Marcel Mauss and Jacques Derrida promote readings of the gift as paradox. In the Introduction to his seminal essay The Gift, Mauss remarks, “We intend in this book to isolate one important set of phenomena: namely, prestations which are in theory voluntary, disinterested and spontaneous, but are in fact obligatory and interested. The form usually taken is that of the gift generously offered; but the accompanying behavior is formal pretense and social deception, while the transaction itself is based on obligation and economic self-interest.”

Here Mauss identifies the contradicting motivations which underlie the act of giving, intending to undermine the ordinary notion of a gift as something generously given. The gift is not freely given, but, more accurately, we have no choice but to give. In another essay, Mauss identifies this paradox in terms of the two German translations of “gift” — “present” and “poison.” However, I believe that it is only with Derrida’s analysis of Mauss that the paradox of the gift becomes wholly intelligible.

Derrida writes: “For there to be a gift, there must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, countergift, or debt. If the other gives me back or owes me or has to give me back what I give him or her, there will not have been a gift. — This is all too obvious if the other, the donee, gives me back immediately the same thing.”

Derrida argues that the internal logic of the gift necessitates a one-way relation between the giver and the receiver. The gift must be given with no strings attached. In order to receive a gift, one must not receive with it a lack, an indebtedness to the other, for otherwise the gift is not only a present, but the poison of a forced and coerced obligation under the passive aggressive guise of a generous offering. However, if gift-giving is always entangled within systems of exchange, it is thus impossible to give or receive a gift without increasing the power of the giver. Derrida puts it most succinctly when he claims, “The conditions of the possibility of the gift (that some ‘one’ gives some ‘thing’ to some one other) designate simultaneously the conditions of the impossibility of the gift.” And already we could translate this in other terms: “these conditions of possibility define or produce the annulment, the annihilation, the destruction of the gift.”

Therefore, to give or receive a gift is at the same time to annul the gift’s givenness.

Jacques Derrida

Gift, not commodity

While other languages contain many different words for expressing the many particular nuances surrounding the “gift,” the English language allows us to articulate this phenomenon with only two words: “gift” and “present.” I’d like to suggest that both of these terms lead us to understand the gift as the thing which is bought and sold, wrapped in wrapping paper and given away. However, it is wrong to reduce the gift to the commodity. As Chris Gregory has argued, “Commodity exchange establishes objective quantitative relationships between the objects transacted, while gift exchange establishes personal qualitative relationships between the subjects transacting.”

On this same note, Mauss writes “Much of our everyday morality is concerned with the question of obligation and spontaneity of the gift. It is our good fortune that all is not yet couched in terms of purchase and sale. Things have values which are emotional as well as material; indeed in some case the values are entirely emotional. Our morality is not solely commercial — things sold have their personality even nowadays.

Thus, we must resist the tendency toward the materialistic interpretation of the thing exchanged. As Ralph Waldo Emerson writes, “It is a cold, lifeless business when you go to the shops to buy me something, which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith’s.”

Mauss was fortunate enough to assess that “all is not yet couched in terms of purchase and sale,” but this was him writing 80 years ago. However, this should give us pause to consider whether we remain of the same good fortune today. Since 1925, societies in every part of the world have become increasingly flooded with commodities. Post-World War II, most people live today in a world where it is impossible to be human without also being a consumer of superfluous material goods. With the increasingly relevant question of whether we live in an age of totalizing consumerization, today we must raise the paradox of the gift to a startling extreme: Can the gift qua non-commodity even survive in a world where nearly every thing is a possible candidate for an exchangeable commodity? In order to claim that all is not yet couched, we need to rediscover the gift, that which remains essentially distinct from a commodity.

Rediscovering the gift: Our essential indebtedness
One of the central themes Mauss discovers in the cultural phenomena that he examines can be roughly characterized as the spirituality of the gift. For instance, in the Maori worldview (New Zealand natives), when one gives a gift, one gives away what is in reality a part of one’s nature and substance, while to receive something is to receive a part of someone’s spiritual essence.

Maori Maori

Elsewhere, Mauss remarks, “In perpetual interchange of what we may call spiritual matter, comprising men and things, these elements pass and repass between clans and individuals, ranks, sexes, and generations.”

Given this spiritual interpretation of the gift, it is not strictly a physical thing that is given, but rather a type of spiritual matter which comprises men and things. The concept of spiritual matter characterizes the shared ontological ground of both humans and things and seeks to undermine the neat division between human and not-human. Mauss finds that in cultures who maintain such a perspective, the thing given is not inert. It is alive and often personified, and strives to bring to its original clan and homeland some equivalent to take its place.

The gift is first and foremost a pattern of spiritual bonds between things which are to some extent parts of persons, and persons that behave in some measure as if they were things. It appears that we cannot even approach the essence of the gift unless we can first understand what this can possibly mean.

For those consumers thoroughly conditioned by an individualistic desire to acquire private property, it may well be impossible to recognize the spiritual bonds initiated and maintained by the gift given. However, for now I will leave it an open question as to whether or not we are even in a position to possibly engage in this worldview, let alone whether it is a position one should attempt to hold. Instead, I now wish to conclude with a brief discussion on what is perhaps the most important value which we need to rediscover in order to understand the gift’s meaning: indebtedness to others.

The concept of debt is central to the paradox of the gift. For we can reword the paradox like this: To give, I must not make the recipient indebted to me, for, as Derrida argues, this would annul the gift. However, if it is true that I am always already indebted to others, then the gift given is always already given in vain. To put it another way, the gift inhabits a middle ground between the giver and the recipient while simultaneously involving both personalities. Given this interpretation, there is no such thing as the sovereign, complete individual who is free from her situated relationships, but rather we are always already indebted to others, and in various, often indirect ways.

No matter how expensive the gift, it is impossible to evade this indebtedness by paying off our debts. In order for there to be human experience whatsoever, this perpetual outstanding character of indebtedness weaves us into a shared group of human beings in the world. As Emerson writes, the gift, “to be true, must be the flowing of the giver unto me, correspondent to my flowing unto him.” We must recognize that the gift consists of spiritual matter, which consists of both thing and human. We must learn to ask the question: “How can you give me this pot of oil, or this flagon of wine, when all your oil and wine is mine, which belief of mine this gift seems to deny?”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

As the gift increasingly recedes into the commodity that is bought and sold within an individualistic and materialistic consumer society, we are becoming less and less able to understand the spiritual essence of the gift. Emerson claims, “The only gift is a portion of thyself.” In order to allow for the possibility of the gift, we must come to understand what it means not to give some thing, but how it is possible to give the gift of oneself. •

The following books were read in research for this essay:

Derrida, Jacques. The Time of the King. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. In The Logic of the Gift, Ed. Alan D. Schrift. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Gifts. From Essays, Second Series, 1844. In The Logic of the Gift, Ed. Alan D. Schrift. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Mauss, Marcel. Gift, Gift. Trans. Koen Decoster. In The Logic of the Gift, Ed. Alan D. Schrift. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies.Trans. Ian Cunnison. New York: Norton, 1967.

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