Steinbock - It’s not about the gift : from givenness to loving

Its Not about the Gift

London New York

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: HB 978-1-78660-825-3

ISBN: PB 978-1-78660-826-0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Steinbock, Anthony J., author.

Title: It's not about the gift : from givenness to loving / Anthony J. Steinbock.

Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018014822 (print) | LCCN 2018018768 (ebook) | ISBN 9781786608277 (Electronic) | ISBN 9781786608253 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781786608260 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Generosity. | Gifts.

Classification: LCC BJ1533.G4 (ebook) | LCC BJ1533.G4 S74 2018 (print) | DDC 128/.4--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018014822

TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

For my sister, Teresa

Its Not about the Gift is a strange title for a work that seems to deal explicitly with the problem of the gift. Certainly, the matter of the gift, of giving, of gift-giving is nothing new. We are long familiar with it from simple everyday exchanges with others (birthdays, Chanukah, Christmas, Eid, etc.), to practices of giving alms to the poor, to unspoken spontaneous acts of generosity, to stylized exercises of bonding in diverse cultures, to religious characterizations of God in the Abrahamic tradition.

In liberation theology, the gift and gift-giving are seen as challenges to capitalism because generosity contradicts the logic of capital.

Philosophically, the matter of the gift has assumed new proportions by virtue of the works of Jacques Derrida and, in particular, his reading of Marcel Mausss cultural anthropological study on the potlatch and the gift. Is the gift and gift-giving mired in the circulation of exchange, and for essential or structural reasons? Does the gift as such, which is completely unconditional, eclipse its own possibility in an essential economy? Ensuing discussions and debates between Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion on the given, the process of being-given, and the saturated phenomenon have further raised the stakes in these philosophical investigations bearing on the gift. They bring with them the broad swath of the phenomenological tradition, which they presuppose, and the pervasive phenomenological concept of givenness. In particular, they retrieve Heideggers thoughts on the Event, the It gives or Ereignis, and Husserls phenomenological reduction to givenness.

I do not wish simply to recapitulate these discussions, which are already established as the canon of contemporary literature on the gift. Nor do I intend to rehearse those trenchant commentaries that contributed for us their own decisive insights and advanced our understanding of the central issues surrounding the problematic of the gift. I do however want to take up some of these key figures in the discussion and propose the following: The discussions of the gift are really not about the gift, or should not be mistaken to be about the gift. The gift is not the point because the gift only becomes the gift in the context of interpersonal loving.

From a different angle, the gift becomes a gift in humility, which is how we receive ourselves in loving. Derrida is correct to this extent, namely, when the gift is the end of giving, it disappears as such; when it is the object of giving, it cannot appear. This does not mean for me, however, that the gift is the cipher of the impossible. Rather, the gift becomes what it is only when it is the surplus, excess, or remainder, as it were, of interpersonal loving and not the object of loving. Moreover, the gift fully becomes the gift in the intertwining of the religious, moral, and aesthetic dimensions of experience, as de-limited vertically, as opening to and inter-implicating these other dimensions in their distinctive ways.

It is only in what we could call a natural attitude perspective that the discussion of the gift is about the gift, and as if it were the entry point and the goal of the deliberations, as if the entire issue were self-evident, even in our so-called deconstructive or phenomenological analyses of the gift. What is unnoticed in all this discourse about the gift is that it is not about the gift. For the gift to have appeared at all, it could not have been about the gift. My peculiar position is to intervene in the talk of the gift through selective interpretations that approach the problems of the gift and givenness, with the proviso that it is not about the gift. More specifically, I intervene in the contemporary discussion of the gift through a set of critical readings in which I situate in each instance the gift in interpersonal and inter-Personal relations.

I ask the readers indulgence while I trace this problem of the gift through different styles, voices, approaches, and traditionsgoing from a phenomenological analysis, to expositions and critiques of Heidegger, Henry, Marion, Derrida, and in an admittedly curious move, back to Maimonides. The latter move is curious because this early medieval rabbinic scholar has not been part of this contemporary discussion. Yet it is Maimonides who offers us distinctions and discernments that bring the contemporary conversation forward. The guiding thread running through these accounts is the insight that what is at stake in the gift is our relation with others. Our relations with others are revealed in many ways, interpersonally, in what I have called moral emotions, but most profoundly through loving. By loving, I understand a dynamic movement toward the emergence and flourishing of what is possible within this movement of being-becoming, given through value. Loving as movement is an improvisational, free, creative, positive affirmation, as generative of and beyond the givens in a personal manner. Loving then participates the other such that what is given is already revealed as beloved.

I treat the phenomena of loving, hating, and the beloved in a subsequent work. Here, I want to move from the gift to loving (loving, from which the gift originally emerges) in the following way. By offering a careful phenomenological analysis of the experience of surprise, I tease apart the gift from how it is usually accepted as tied to the surprise. Chapter 1 works through the ways in which the emotion of surprise accepts reality, believing what I cannot believe, articulating its temporal presuppositions of expectation and suggesting that the gift becomes the gift, not by being surprising, but by it being received in the moral emotion of humility. Humility, which is not given in a direct first-person reflection, is the way that the gift becomes gift without its being the object of an intention. Humility is the way in which I receive myself in lovingwithout I, Myself becoming an object of the reception, or the gift becoming the object of interpersonal loving.