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 tradition that starts with Plato’s distinction between ideational forms and phenomena.104 He critiques the idea of Being as presence, insisting that nowhere around us—nowhere around the lecture hall in which his audience is gathered—can Being be pointed to. Heidegger asks, “Is Being at all?”105 To this grammatically constrained question, he responds that if matter is a thing that is, then neither time nor Being is matter.106 So instead of saying “Being is,” which would characterize Being as a kind of situated, human matter, Heidegger lands on “There is Being.”107 In the following paragraphs I rely on Indo-European semiotics to draw a path from Heideggerian Being to gifting.
In German, the phrase “there is” (es gibt) translates literally to “it gives.” For example, Es gibt eine Katze auf der Strasse means, “There is a cat in the street,” or more literally “It gives a cat in the street.” That the “it” that gives is not identical with the cat is indicated by the genus: neuter for the “it” and feminine for the cat. In Latin, Heidegger notes about two-thirds of the way into his lecture, the predicate pluit, the present-tense third-person singular of the verb “to rain” (pluere), takes no subject.108 In Latin, it isn’t that “It rains,” in other words. There is no “it” that rains. There is only “Rains!” This expression in English, however, is unintelligible to the point of being obscure. The question is, What is it that rains? What rains? The reader who is thinking “Rain rains” is on the right track. This insight is helpful in the following transition from weather to Being. In Heidegger’s phrase “There is Being,” the “there is” (es gibt) must be translated as “it gives.” “There is Being” and “It gives Being” are synonymous. “It gives Being” is the statement that brings gifts and gifting into Heidegger’s lifelong project.
The three-pronged assertion that “It gives Being” raises at least three questions. First, what “it” is the subject? Who or what is acting in the phrase? In pursuit of this question, Heidegger cautions his audience not to resort to the implied divinity of a metaphysical supposition. There is no higher “indeterminate power” that bestows life upon humanity and then sits back to observe.109 Second, what is given? What is the substance of the gift? In response, Heidegger brings together the first and second questions, suggesting that we stop thinking of “Being as the ground of beings,” and instead focus our attention on the giving.110 It is not that Being as some immaterial substance (such as God) gives life on the planet (i.e., being with a lowercase b) to humans. Rather, what gives and what is given is Being. Heidegger writes, “As the gift of this It gives, Being belongs to giving. As a gift, Being is not expelled from giving.”111 Or, to reference the earlier grammatical excursion of “Rains!” (as opposed to “It rains”), “Gives!”
Developing the idea of “Gives!” and asking a third question—Where, or how, does the giving take place (or time)?—I turn to the concept that Heidegger discusses toward the end of the lecture: appropriation. With this concept, Heidegger suspends the term that is “simply too bogged down with metaphysical connotations” and offers what editor and translator Joan Stambaugh calls an “activity.”112 Appropriation is an event (Ereignis); it is not an event or the event of a singular occurrence so much as it is that occasion is a possibility. When Heidegger explains appropriation as allowing time and Being to “belong together,” he characterizes appropriation as a condition of “eventing.”113 This eventing, specifically, is a gifting event: “Giving and its gift receive their determination from Appropriating.”114 The “it” in “It gives Being” is appropriation, which is to say that the “it” is not a presence but an event that enables “the realm in which presence is extended.”115 In appropriation, then, Being “vanishes.”116 Again, there is no “it” that like an immanent divinity watches its gift from afar. “It” is neither revealed nor remnant after the giving. Indeed, “after” the giving misconstrues the event as such. Heidegger notes that in the giving, “the sending source keeps itself back and, thus, withdraws from unconcealment.”117 He concludes by discarding the idea that appropriation either “is” or “is there”; instead, “appropriation appropriates.”118 Or indeed, “Rain rains.” In English, it would make no sense to say that Being “be’s.” The present tense, the realm of what is present, demands that a translation move “to be” into the realities of “is.” But if we were to tentatively permit the phrase “Being bes,” then a way to explain the nature of that act or event would, in reference to Heidegger, be as gifting. To Heidegger, the gift is the event of Being. Moreover, this event must by necessity concern us beings. It gives all the “There is” around us, as we are the “constant receiver[s] of the gift given by the ‘It gives present.’”119
Lewis Hyde: Artistic Talent (1983)
Lewis Hyde uses the notion of a gift to theorize the relationship between art and artists and between artists and their audience. He embraces the gift’s affordance of social connectivity and authenticity, referencing various gift-exchange cultures, including the ones studied by Marcel Mauss.120 To Hyde, art begins with inspiration, the “initial stirring of the gift.”121 The individual inspiration to make art is “a gift [that] we do not get by our own efforts.”122 Art, then, depends on the artist’s gift both in the sense of artistic talent and in the sense of a core substance from which art emerges. Hyde writes, “All artists work to acquire and perfect the tools of their craft, and all art involves evaluation, clarification, and revision. But these are secondary tasks. They cannot begin (sometimes they must not begin) until the materia, the body of the work, is on the page or on the canvas.”123 The gift involved in artistry, in other words, is “stuff”; the gift-stuff is molded and perfected in accordance with the artist’s gift-as-talent.124 This inventive process, to Hyde, is enigmatic and excessive. He notes, “A gift—and particularly an inner gift, a talent—is a mystery. We know what giftedness is for having been gifted, or for having known a gifted man or woman. We know that art is a gift for having had the experience of art.”125 Through the experience of art, artists’
