On the gift - Irina Dumitrescu in TLS:
‘Walking through Bonn’s Christmas market last week I took note of how little had changed, despite the past few years’ upheavals. There were stands offering mulled wine, Rhenish potato fritters and sausage in all its greasy iterations. The gift stores were the same, too: one booth sold striped woollen socks, another handmade tree ornaments, and a third offered old-fashioned brushes and brooms. Then there were the tooth-breaking sweets: candied almonds, stale gingerbread hearts with sugar letters spelling “I love you”, great wheels of nougat. I always wonder who wants these items, year after year, but maybe desire isn’t the point so much as tradition.’
(…)
‘And one never went to a doctor’s office without a little something, ideally hard liquor. But the value of many of these prizes only held in that world. Years later, standing in a Toronto drugstore, I realized that the Fa soap my parents had raved about was on the lowest, cheapest shelf.’
(…)
‘This is a dark view of giving, but in his classic book on creativity, The Gift, Lewis Hyde proposes another way of looking at it. He notes that many cultures insist that gifts be circulated, not turned into commodities or hoarded up as capital. Gifts become more valuable, and more nourishing, when they are passed on to others. “What is given away feeds again and again”, Hyde writes of this paradoxical quality, “while what is kept feeds only once and leaves us hungry.” For him this is how artistic talent works too. The artist receives inspiration, transmutes that gift into a work and passes it on to an audience. “The gift must stay in motion”, writes Hyde, and as long as it does the artist will always have enough to keep creating.’
(…)
‘In the end, a gift’s only value is the pleasure of giving it.’
Read the column here.
Can you write about the gift without mention without Marcel Mauss, who wrote ‘The Gift’?
A gift can be social deceit or sheer self-interest or a way of binding people to each other. The idea that the gift is first and foremost meant to give joy to the giver can only be properly understood if we agree that the true meaning of sales is to bring joy to the seller.
He knows what he is selling, the buyer doesn’t really what he is buying.
But Derrida and Levinas claim that the true gift is not reciprocal, the ‘I’ should not be part of the transaction that is not really a transaction anymore, according to Marc de Kesel who wrote a book about the gift, in Dutch ‘Niets dan liefde, het vileine wonder van de gift’, roughly ‘Nothing but love, the villainous wonder of the gift’.
The killer can give life to its victims, he can spare his victim by saying, ‘I will kill your neighbor instead of you’.
States where the death penalty still exists can give the gift of life to the condemned by saying, ‘we won’t kill you, you just spend the rest of your life in prison.’
Giving is often less innocent than selling. At best the gift is honey with which you try to catch the fly.
But catching flies still is an honorable and important endeavor.