/lit/ - Literature

some more here from KK:
1/2

>For Mauss, pure gift is as inscrutable as the Kantian idea of freedom: when there is a gift, it is always reciprocated at a certain level. If one receives a gift, it has to be reciprocated; it is structurally impossible to receive it and leave it unreciprocated without feeling the sense of debt or guilt. That is, even if the receiver of the gift does not exchange things, another kind of exchange occurs—the exchange between the material gift and the psychological debt. That is why Mauss refers to the “double meaning of the word Gift in all these [Germanic] languages—on the one hand, a gift, on the other, poison.” When the material exchange does not take place, there is an exchange at a psychological level. Once gift-giving happens, the ensuing exchange cannot be stopped. There is no one-way gift-giving. A gift without reciprocation is impossible.

>Yet, even though it is a recovery, the mode X is not reciprocity as such. They are as different from each other as a nation and a world republic are. I suggest here reading the X as the Kantian transcendental ideal or pure gift. Like the de Manian sublime, as a cause of a world republic, the mode X is independent from exchange. Rather, as de Man’s “stony gaze” does, it marks a breakdown of all exchanges, which have been imagined to take place, for example, between the state and capital in the semblance of the nation. The X as pure gift is thus destructive to the trinity. It should be noted, however, that Karatani has pointed out that any community based on the X has never existed and that social movements beginning with the X lasted only momentarily. Or as Mauss suggests, there is no such thing as pure gift in reality. Pure gift never exists as such; it is always transformed into exchange. In consonance with Kant’s idea of freedom, Karatani therefore maintains, the X always remains ideal; if it is aestheticized—or sensibilized—it would be exchanged and result in forming or upholding the status quo of a nation.

pic rel because only a genius-monster like bataille would be prepared to find the secret horror that lies at the heart of gift-giving that is required to make it sustainable. what makes things valuable are not the gifts themselves, but the darkly romantic-erotic spirit in which they are given or received. all of this is necessarily veiled by formality in this way. it could well be in a way that what makes a gift seductive - that is to say, meaningful - is that it implicates people in a secret courtship.