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Politics of the Gift: Exchanges in Poststructuralism

Online ISBN:
9780748671861
Print ISBN:
9780748642021
Publisher:
Edinburgh University Press
Book

Politics of the Gift: Exchanges in Poststructuralism

Published online:
20 September 2012
Published in print:
25 April 2011
Online ISBN:
9780748671861
Print ISBN:
9780748642021
Publisher:
Edinburgh University Press

Abstract

Politics of the Gift stages a series of dialogues between major 20th-century figures to show how the concept of the gift serves as a driving thematic and problematic of recent French thought. Through readings of work by Marcel Mauss, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, amongst others, it also and moreover shows the concept of the gift to be a nexus through which rival discourses of phenomenology, anthropology, politics and psychoanalysis coalesce into the broadly consensual paradigm of what has become poststructuralism. Moore traces the ‘inheritance’ or the ‘becoming’ of the gift as a concept, from its heterogeneous origins in philosophy and the nascent social sciences right up to the role it plays in deconstruction. The book locates the origins of French poststructuralism in a ‘crisis in philosophy’, an increasingly ‘antiphilosophical’ mood that results from the perceived failure of philosophers via-à-vis the politics of liberal modernity. Disillusioned with the Marxian critique of political economy, but no less enamoured with the humanism of ‘Anthropology’, and facing constant accusations – exemplified by the so-called ‘Heidegger Affair’ – of dangerous indifference toward the institutions of democracy, we see how two generations of thinkers were forced to renegotiate the traditionally hierarchical relationship between philosophy and politics, so as to stave off the threat of being eclipsed by changes in the intellectual landscape. French poststructuralism emerges from this as the sustained attempt to think politics beyond the horizons of both political economy and phenomenology, in terms of an impossible exchange.

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