The Gifting Logos. E. Johanna Hartelius
important that I begin with a declaration of my own assumption: gifts are messages. As I explain in the next section, which deals directly with the gifting logos, my concern is with the rhetoricity of gifting and with the presence of gifting rhetoric in activities that are typically thought of as unrelated to gifts. Operating from this position, I am relieved of the burden of determining whether there really is such a thing as a gift or whether one can really give or receive a true gift. Because gifts are messages—because gifting is a rhetorical practice—the determination must depend on the event of the message rather than on a transcendent, absolute standard.
Friedrich Nietzsche: The Curse of Wisdom (1883–1885)
In the parable of Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche theorizes the gift in two forms. From Zarathustra himself, who leaves his mountain and “goes under” to impart wisdom to humans, the gift of wisdom is unreceivable.72 Humans do not understand.73 In response to Zarathustra’s unintelligible message, the people laugh; hating him, they treat him like a jester.74 Lamenting this, Zarathustra asks himself, “They receive from me, but do I touch their souls?”75 By definition, Zarathustra’s gift cannot be received. That this is so is reflected in the failure of his project, which ultimately does not generate a cohort of “overhumans.” The humans are unable to receive the gift they really need. They are incapable of grasping Zarathustra’s insight that gifted wisdom cannot be wisdom in any true sense. With reference to the tenth and sixteenth chapters of the Gospel of Matthew, Zarathustra exhorts his followers to “lose me and find yourselves.”76 Nietzsche insists that the gift of wisdom cannot be received when wisdom is understood as a perspective on the folly of the social world.77
Within the social world—this is the second form in which Nietzsche theorizes the gift—gifting is self-interested manipulation, driven by pride and shame. Giving gifts is a selfish drive in pursuit of the “gift-giving virtue” that puts in the eyes of the gifter a “goldlike gleam.”78 That humans stuff themselves (with material or symbolic goods) so that gift-giving love can flow out of them as from a well is deeply selfish.79 To help a person out of pity by bringing her a gift brings her only shame. Such charity turns into a “gnawing worm” of indebtedness.80 In other words, regarding gifts within the social order, Nietzsche aligns with theorists who emphasize the political dictates of gifting. The saint who appears early in the story underscores the sociality of gifting, explaining to Zarathustra that people do not believe that hermits bring gifts since their “steps sound too lonely through the streets.”81 Givers of gifts are not lonely but belong in society. Important to note here, of course, is that to Nietzsche this belonging is deplorable, even nauseating.82 The overman might value friendship, but he does not stomach the collective.83 And the gifts with which humans administer their pity and persuasion are efficacious only there.84
Nietzsche’s theory of the gift in both forms explicated here posits desperation as a motive. Zarathustra’s impulse to give away his wisdom reflects how, as a cup that overflows, he “wants to become empty again,” which is to say that he “wants to become man again.”85 With his gift still intact, he is something other than a man. His gift (of wisdom) is onerous, setting him aside from the humans. He is like a bee burdened with too much honey. The gift is a compulsion, however, and Zarathustra discovers that his wisdom cannot be received. He complains that his “happiness in giving died in giving.”86 The humans’ system of gifts, as demonstrated in Zarathustra’s lectures, is inextricably tied to the meanings of virtue, which entail punishment, justice, and reward—all of which are learned from fools and liars.87 Those who give do so in an effort to control the actions of those whom they pity. Those who receive begin to resent the experience of obligation. Givers and receivers alike, Nietzsche intimates, are drawn to and trapped in sociality. There, humans can actually wield gifts in a symbolically coherent way, in contrast to the wisdom-gift that Zarathustra offers. The trouble is that the ways in which they wield the wisdon gift only recommit them to good and evil.88
Marcel Mauss: In Praise of the Noble Expenditure (1925)
In the most widely cited ethnography of gift exchange in “primitive”/“archaic” cultures, Marcel Mauss identifies the functions of gifting for the social order.89 He examines gifting habits as the “total social phenomena” of the Samoan, Maori, Andaman, and Melanesian peoples, encompassing religious, moral, economic, and legal institutions. To trace the history and cultural force of these social phenomena, he relies on the concept of “prestations,” which indexes a protoeconomic arrangement “between clan and clan in which individuals and groups exchange everything between them.”90 Within prestations, material objects circulate “side by side with the circulation of persons and rights.”91 Geographically distant cultures, Mauss demonstrates, rely on institutions that “reveal the same kind of social and psychological pattern. Food, women, children, possessions, charms, land, labor, services, religious offices, rank—everything is stuff to be given away and repaid.”92 As gifted stuff circulates, power is managed as “property and a possession, a pledge and a loan, an object sold and an object bought, a deposit, a mandate, a trust; for it [the gift] is given only on condition that it will be used on behalf of, or transmitted to, a third person, the remote partner.”93 Gift exchange cultures, according to Mauss, depend on a circulation system that produces social capital.
The social capital generated by gift exchange may be understood in Mauss’s analysis as agglutinating and manipulative. The agglutination happens as prestations form internal and intergroup bonds. In addition, it happens as a function of the symbolic relationship between a gift and a giver, or donor. Mauss notes that in Maori culture, an object that is given away “still forms a part of” the donor, affording him or her “a hold over the recipient.”94 Regarding the Brahminic law of Hindu cultures, Mauss explains, “Nowhere is the connection between the thing given and the donor, or between property and its owner, more clearly apparent than in the rules relating to gifts and cattle.”95 Social hierarchies emerge through an exchange of gifted stuff, and participants articulate identities as a function not only of their relation to each other, or their efficacy within the exchange, but also of their personal relationship to stuff. Gift exchange, according to Mauss, allows prestations to manipulate one another in societies that “have not yet reached the stage of pure individual contract, the money market, sale proper, fixed price, and weighed and coined money.”96 He writes, “The agonistic character of the prestation is pronounced. Essentially usurious and extravagant, it is above all a struggle among nobles to determine their position in the hierarchy.”97
Notwithstanding the description of gift exchange as a struggle, Mauss’s project is optimistic, animated by what seems like either exoticism or nostalgia. He claims that modern societies, if they take heed of the lessons of a simpler place and time, may be on the precipice of realizing “a dominant motif long forgotten.”98 Thankfully, we are not yet full fledged as “homo oeconomicus.”99 Indeed, writes Mauss, “It is our good fortune that all is not yet couched in terms of purchase and sale.”100 In a call to repentance, he insists, “We should come out of ourselves and regard the duty of giving as a liberty, for in it there lies no risk.”101 “We should return to the old and elemental,” he asserts, and rediscover “those motives of action still remembered by many societies and classes: the joy of giving in public, the delight in generous artistic expenditure, the pleasure of hospitality in the public or private feast.”102 Mauss’s study, which set the tone for twentieth-century ethnographies of nonmonetary value systems, idolizes gifting. He places it in cultural systems that, for the reader, are impossibly far away. Still, he nostalgically orients those cultures toward the reader, making them exemplary rather than unintelligible.
Martin Heidegger: The Ereignis of Being (1962)
Martin Heidegger’s treatment of the gift appears in a publication that he completed late in life, having more or less abandoned the metaphysical ontology of his famous Being and Time.103 In a 1962 lecture titled “Time and Being,” while “groping his way out of metaphysics,” Heidegger emphatically rejects the Western