ROBERTO ESPOSITO'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF THE GIFT

Abstract

Roberto Esposito has extended the deconstructive theory of the gift into political philosophy, theorizing the gift as the transcendental form of political obligation. In Esposito's philosophy of communitas, the munus consists of the single obligation to give, a logic of donors without receivers, yet it simultaneously establishes relations of reciprocity, mutuality, debt and gratitude. I argue that that indebtedness and reciprocity are not logically possible in a gift system where donors are bound by the single obligation to give (but not receive), as the donor has no other and the gift no recipient. These inconsistencies may be addressed by distinguishing two forms of gift in communitas: the impersonal gift characterized solely by the obligation to give to the gods/communitas and the reciprocal gift characterized by the obligations to give, receive and return the gift. Esposito's philosophy of communitas would additionally be strengthened by conceptualizing symbolic practices, specifically collective representations, as intrinsic to the munus. As impersonal gift, the munus is a symbolic practice through which the members of communitas represent to themselves their being-in-common. The munus operates as a vertical relation of expenditure made possible by the collective representation of the political we. The reciprocal gift, in contrast, constitutes differentiated social ties and networks: the being-in-difference of communal life. The distinction between the impersonal and the reciprocal gift gives rise to a minimal division between the political and the communal within the transcendental structure of communitas.

Keywords:

• Esposito
• gift
• community
• munus
• Mauss
• Derrida

Notes

Thanks enormously to the editors of this special issue of Angelaki, Greg Bird and Jon Short, for their generous and incisive comments on my draft. I am grateful for María del Rosario Acosta's interest in my work and will continue to think through her comments. I am indebted to Frank Pearce for ongoing conversations on the Durkheimian tradition. My colleague Hira Singh kindly alerted me to debates among historians of India about the status of land grants as gifts.

1 See the home page of La Revue du MAUSS, available <http://www.revuedumauss.com/> (accessed 5 Apr. 2013); my translation.

2 There is a fourth obligation in Mauss's The Gift (14–17) that has been much less discussed than the first three: the obligation to give to the gods. In this paper I later argue that the munus is an instance of the fourth obligation.

3 Although those in the dominant cultures of the Global North primarily associate gifts with dyadic transactions between individuals, gifts may involve vast networks of linked exchange, the classic example of which would be the kula rings of the Western Pacific that stretch thousands of miles. Gifts are given between states, kin groups and users of transnationalized digital communications; the reduction of the gift exchange to interpersonal dyads forms a fundamental misunderstanding of gift relations.

4 The norm of reciprocity has been contested for decades. Anthropologists currently accept that certain types of gift are not bound by the obligation to return. See the work of Godbout on gifts to strangers and Giesler on digital file sharing.

5 The “Introduction” to Communitas is subtitled “Nothing in Common.”

6 The failure to conceptualize the empirical object of study would be an elementary methodological error for any Durkheimian, and very surprising for Mauss given his long collaboration with Durkheim (Fournier). I set aside here the question of whether Derrida's claim is accurate.

7 The distance between the gift and exchange has widened in anthropology with recent interest in gifts to strangers (Godbout) and gifts that may only be kept (Weiner).

8 The collective representation of the political we may be desacralized while those of the gods are always sacralized. Where Durkheimians in the first half of the twentieth century identified the political with the sacred, contemporary work in that tradition explores the divergence of the political from the sacred, partly with the aim of aligning the political with a space of debate. Thanks to Frank Pearce for his observations on this topic.

9 The limits of the gift for theorizing political obligation have been debated among historians. Contemporary historians of India have been concerned about whether land grants made by Indian kings during the feudal period should be conceptualized as gifts or as feudal grants. See Thapar; Sharma.