we have been given is supposed to be given away again, not kept.”127 On this point and throughout his analysis, Hyde dictates a gifting ethic, distinguishing between true and false gifts.128
Gifted art in Hyde’s romanticizing theory is described in terms of erotic “fertility.”129 Gifted works, he writes, “circulate among us as reservoirs of available life.”130 With this pregnant metaphor, Hyde foregrounds the production of art as continuously generative, motivated by eros. Art multiplies; gifts beget more gifts. As with biological reproduction, at least in its most romantic interpretation, the “sentiment” of the transaction is vital to the result.131 In the transcultural gifting myths that Hyde analyzes, the abundance of gifts ceases as soon as the gift’s value is calculated. After the calculation, self-interest and greed undermine the spirit of the gift, stunting its generativity. Moreover, the characters involved in gifting narratives are drawn into dramas in which a gift multiplies itself with the help of human interlopers. In other words, the gift, as Hyde presents it, assumes its own agency, reproducing copiously with the help of human bystanders. He explains, “Wherever property circulates as a gift, the increase that accompanies that circulation is simultaneously material, social, and spiritual; where wealth moves as a gift, any increase in material wealth is automatically accompanied by the increased conviviality of the group and the strengthening of the hau, the spirit of the gift.”132 In this process of increase, the gift is the central force (as spirit) and the outcome, in Hyde’s case primarily as art. Increase is a function of the virtue with which participants engage the gift.
A central tenet of Hyde’s gifting ethic is that true gifts are entirely distinguishable from commodities.133 This is an illustration of his highly idealistic view of the gift’s function in creativity. To Hyde, art that is intended for market value does not remain a gift.134 The artist who “hopes to market work that is the realization of his [sic] gifts cannot begin with the market. He must create for himself that gift-sphere in which the work is made, and only when he knows the work to be the faithful realization of his gift should he turn to see if it has currency in that other economy.”135 Whether art that is not a realization of any gift within the artist may begin with the market is unclear. Plausibly, such art is neither true nor a gift. To Hyde, the gift sphere and the market are incommensurate. Indeed, he characterizes this dichotomy along the distinct lines of eros and logos; the former is “unanalytical and undialectical,” whereas the latter is predicated on value assessment.136 Logos is “the money of the mind [that] destroys the gift.”137 Using Mauss’s notion of gifting in a circular exchange but rejecting the value management of its economic logic in a way that foreshadows Derrida (see next section), Hyde writes, “The gift is lost in self-consciousness. To count, measure, reckon value, or seek the cause of a thing is to step outside the circle, to cease being ‘all of a piece’ within the flow of gifts and become, instead, one part of the whole reflecting upon another part.”138 The moment when an artist reflects cerebrally on a work of art in progress, the gifted materia is jeopardized, just as a gift loses its giftedness in the moment when market value is estimated. Awareness of the gift in art forecloses the possibility of both art and gift. In critical response to Hyde, my contention about the gifting logos is that it is possible to define logos as a “principle of differentiation,” as he does, but, instead of rejecting it, I insist on a connection between logos and gifting. Doing so enables an investigation on how symbolic differentiation brings together rhetorical invention and gifting.
Jacques Derrida: Always Already Annulled (1992)
To study the gift, if such a thing there be, Jacques Derrida deals in absolutes, wholly rejecting what most of us would call a gift. He offers an account that, perhaps consistent with Derridean deconstruction, contains much more information on what gifting is not than it does on what the true gift is. Most emphatically he argues that “gifts” in ordinary life are trapped by “common language and logic” in a structure of three: “A gives B to C.”139 This structure, Derrida announces, is what produces “the annulment, the annihilation, the destruction of the gift.”140 As soon as something is identifiable as a gift, the “giftedness” of that thing is destroyed.141 In that moment, debt dominates the exchange and the relationship of the parties. Expectations and norms of reciprocity creep in and destroy the purity of the potential gift. Writes Derrida: “From the moment the gift would appear as gift, as such, as what it is, in its phenomenon, its sense, and its essence, it would be engaged in a symbolic, sacrificial, or economic structure that would annul the gift in the ritual circle of the debt.”142 The circle symbolizing the economics of the gift is anathema to Derrida’s gift, which must be understood as “aneconomic.”143 Put another way, Derrida understands the gift as invaluable: infinitely precious but beyond evaluation. This makes his theory of gifting open to alternative definitions of value, which becomes useful in my later chapters.
In his essays on the gift, Derrida responds directly to Mauss, whom he accuses of “speak[ing] blithely” about gifts in a circle of exchange.144 Mauss, he claims, “never asks the question as to whether gifts can remain gifts once they are exchanged; [nor] does [he] worry enough about this incompatibility between gift and exchange or about the fact that an exchanged gift is only a tit for tat, that is, an annulment of the gift.”145 In Derrida’s view, all of Mauss’s ideas are complicit in the annulment of the gift: the potlatch, the transgressions, and the surpluses that manage the social hierarchies of “prestations.”146 Derrida first addresses the complications of syntax and then the moment when Mauss “excuses” himself, which Derrida uses to pivot the argument to “the triple and indissociable question of the gift, of forgiveness, and of the excuse.”147 With reference to syntax, Derrida asks, simply put, how a single word (such as “give” or “gift”) could mean so many different things.148 Giving one’s word in the form of a promise, he suggests, cannot reasonably be grouped with other symbolic acts like giving a ring.149 Relatedly, Derrida questions the extent to which the verb of giving actually couples with the noun gift in an intelligible way.150 Finally, deconstructing the premises of Mauss’s project and targeting the argument that “evolved” societies ought to return to the gifting ethics of archaic societies, Derrida aptly characterizes Mauss’s agenda as a “Rousseauist schema.”151
The gift, a Derridean impossibility, takes place only on the condition of the exchange circle’s interruption.152 Derrida writes, “A gift could be possible, there could be a gift only at the instant an effraction in the circle will have taken place, at the instant all circulation will have been interrupted and on the condition of this instant.”153 In this interruption, the madness of the gift sends nomos and logos into “crisis.”154 Logic and reason, norms and culture, are infinitely exceeded when a gift is given that does not forge a structure of expectation and debt. With the notions of effraction and interruption, Derrida pursues something other than simple humility or altruism. He notes, “If there is gift, the given of the gift (that which one gives, that which is given the gift as a given thing or as act of donation) must not come back to the giving (let us not already say to the subject, to the donor).”155 Derrida considers the possibility of a gift wherein giver and receiver are radically remote, separated from one another in anonymity. The gift is not recognized as such by either participant, and both forget the whole thing as soon as it happens.156 Such a gift is not only boundless and immeasurable but impossible and untheorizable.157 With the help of Heidegger, Derrida presents the gift as a giving event that overtakes all.158 Doing so, he discounts those human practices in which participants interpret what they are doing as gifting, disallowing those practices as not-quite-good-enough-to-be-gifting, or worse, as delusional simulations. Nevertheless, his conclusions leave open the possibility that a gift could be a submission without expectation and without gratitude, rhetorically constituting a social form.
The Gift in Rhetorical Studies
The notion of a gift has long been
