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The Philosophers' Gift

Reexamining Reciprocity
  • Translated by:
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2019

About this book

For philosophers, the gift fascinates because it demands disinterested generosity. Yet anthropology offers another view. Reciprocity, rather than disinterestedness, Hénaff shows, is central to ceremonial giving, alliance, and the social bond. From actual gift practices, Hénaff develops an original and profound theory of symbolism, the social, and the relationship between self and other.
Shows how philosophy, with its devotion to disinterestedness, has found itself unable to embrace the numerous social systems that are dependent on reciprocity.

Author / Editor information

Hénaff Marcel :

Marcel Hénaff (1942–2018) was Distinguished Research Professor of Literature and Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. His books in English include Sade: The Invention of the Libertine Body (Minnesota, 1999), Claude Lévi-Strauss and the Making of Structural Anthropology (Minnesota, 2001), and The Price of Truth: Gift, Money, and Philosophy (Stanford, 2010).Morhange Jean-Louis :

Jean-Louis Morhange is the translator of Pascal Baudry’s French and Americans: The Other Shore (Les Frenchies, Inc., 2005) and of Marcel Hénaff’s The Price of Truth: Gift, Money, and Philosophy (Stanford, 2010).Marcel Hénaff (Author)
Marcel Hénaff (1942–2018) was Distinguished Research Professor of Literature and Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. His books in English include Sade: The Invention of the Libertine Body (Minnesota, 1999), Claude Lévi-Strauss and the Making of Structural Anthropology (Minnesota, 2001), and The Price of Truth: Gift, Money, and Philosophy (Stanford, 2010).

Jean-Louis Morhange (Translator)
Jean-Louis Morhange is the translator of Pascal Baudry’s French and Americans: The Other Shore (Les Frenchies, Inc., 2005) and of Marcel Hénaff’s The Price of Truth: Gift, Money, and Philosophy (Stanford, 2010).

Reviews

Ryan Coyne, University of Chicago:
A significant contribution to debates on the gift that have played out within continental philosophy.

Rosalind C. Morris, Columbia University:
Marcel Hénaff asks why the idea of the gift and the demand for generosity has become a topic of such intense interest among philosophers of ethics in recent years. Returning to Marcel Mauss’s foundational text, he offers a probing and often critical reading of recent French thinkers, asking: Might the idea of the gift as a figure of absolute generosity be a lament about the absence of just institutions? In the end, Hénaff asks philosophy to relinquish its idealism in favor of what a more empirical anthropology teaches about the functions of giving in creating the social and institutional conditions necessary for being together among strangers. This book is his gift to politics.

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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
November 5, 2019
eBook ISBN:
9780823286492
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Main content:
256
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