Commentary

The gift is, first, an event. Social theories of the gift have often attempted to reduce the gift to a social institution: exchange, reciprocity. But then the gift becomes simply a delayed and misrecognised form of social exchange, to use Pierre Bourdieu's own terminology (1977). How can we think about the gift as a concept before its reduction to reciprocity? For Jacques Derrida, a gift cannot be reciprocated because a return always implies its opposite: interest, benefit, utility, accountancy, commodification. The time elapsed between gift and return (that strange concept: counter-gift) is a time that counts, transforming gift into debt, giver and receiver into subjects of an objectified exchange, and the gift into an object of exchange. The gift must be given without expectation to be returned, without intentionality; in fact, it should be forgotten in the very event of giving, because any memory or trace of the gift could turn it into debt. Jacques Derrida was not saying that pure gifts don't happen, that they are false consciousness, but that they must be forgotten as gifts. That is what he calls the aporia or impasse of the gift. The gift is not the thing given, but the event of giving; an event that gives itself and that must be forgotten as such. “The gift, like the event, as event, must remain unforeseeable ... It must let itself be structured by the aleatory; it must appear chancy or in any case lived as such” (Derrida 1992: 122