Gifts are Creative Works
The writer Lewis Hyde says that creative works are gifts. But the reverse is also true.
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It’s the time of year when, for those of us who live in countries and communities where Christmas is celebrated, we face the prospect of an explosion of gift exchange. This gift-giving raises all kinds of practical issues (as I asked in my last piece, what do you get a man like Uncle Pedro?). But it is also philosophically puzzling. Why do we do it? What’s going on in this frenzy of giving and receiving gifts?
In the last piece, I wrote about what could be called the paradox of gift-giving. On the one hand, gift-giving has the appearance of free exchange; but on the other hand, it is bound up with all kinds of obligations. But this philosophical excursion into the world of gift-giving left us in an uncomfortable place. Because according to the philosopher Jacques Derrida, for there to be a gift at all, it would be necessary this escape the economy of gift and counter-gift, this whole notion of exchange. A true gift is a gift where you get nothing back because when you get something back, you are no longer talking about a gift, you are talking about exchanging one thing for another. But where in the world can you find a gift such as this, a gift free of mutual obligation, free of any counter-gift, free of calculations about exchange?
The argument seems a compelling one. It is also unsettling because if you follow it through, it looks as if everything is on the brink of collapsing (or as if it has already collapsed) into the logic of economic reason. And it forces us to ask if there is any space for something apart from self-interest.
So in this piece, I want to get more practical about gifts, to find a way out of this impasse. Because if you look more closely, it is not clear that Derrida’s account really matches how gifts work; and his notion of the gift doesn’t really map on to how we experience gift-giving. For Derrida, the only true gift would be the gift that left no trace, that effaced or erased itself, so undercutting the logic of exchange. But arguably, such a gift is no gift at all.
Why is this the case? Think of it like this. If you give me a gift, I not only want to get something out of it myself (it’s nice to be given gifts)…
