Politics of the Gift: Exchanges in Poststructuralism (review)

This challenging analysis of the gift, which begins with Marcel Mauss's seminal work and continues with Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze, Heidegger, Nancy, and the like, has a misleading title. Had it been called 'Philosophy of the Gift', or otherwise conjured up French abstract theorization of the gift, the uninitiated reader might be better prepared for the meat inside. How then does this intelligent thinker justify the term 'politics'? Moore concludes as a philosopher: 'The respective sites of philosophy and politics are perhaps the same after all, kept apart only perspectivally, by the minimal difference between virtual and actual, aneconomy and economy, the gift and its sacrifice' (p. 197). I shall be flat-footed and predictable in pointing out one gap, even in such a philosophical account: namely, that the considerable contribution to the 'politics of the gift' made by feminist writers or other female theorists is accorded only passing mention. Sixty-nine works are cited often enough to be given an acronym — not one by a woman. It is true that the Introduction opens with Nicole Kidman (playing Grace, 'a beautiful young runaway', in Dogville), but maybe that confirms my point. I shall risk what may be mocked as political correctness by pointing out that the theorization of the gift (with some roots in colonial ethnography) could also be related to issues around ethnocentrism and racial politics. In the penultimate paragraph of the book, for instance, there is an opportunity to do this as Moore cites Derrida's response to the question of whether the Australian government should apologize for persecution of aboriginal peoples. However, Moore's commentary on this immediately veers into the philosophical question 'what is it to apologize?', swerving away again from the context of the political question in hand. For me, the beauty of Derrida is his ability to keep the decisive compromises of politics (including in their most urgent contemporary guise) ethically in play with his rigorous analysis of what the words mean, but this requires keeping difference between politics and philosophy. It would be fairer, however, to Moore's complex treatment of twentieth-century continental philosophical (and anti-philosophical) history, and its intersection with psychoanalysis and social science, to focus on what it does do. This is to position 'the French philosophical moment' as something which has at least one origin in Mauss, and which is 'defined in relation to Bataille's response to Kojève', known for his 'anthropologization' of Hegel (p. 194). At least one origin, as Moore is too sophisticated to be trapped in a single genealogy, and Nietzsche (sometimes via Foucault) is critical to his account. For Moore then, the excess of the gift 'ungrounds' essence, 'revealing politics and economics as responses to the absence of foundational metaphysical structures' (p. 197). Politics must then affirm ungrounding: 'a politics of the gift is both more and less than revolutionary' (ibid.), breaking free of the circle and yet showing the impossibility of beginning again.