Meanings and Materialities
Meanings and Materialities
Exhibition 6–15 June
Open every day 12:00-18:00Frédéric Vandenberghe
Marcel Mauss’s seminal Essay on the gift is a gift to posterity. Some interpretations of the classic text by anthropologists (Lévi-Strauss, Marshall Sahlins), philosophers (Bataille, Derrida, Ricoeur), sociologists (Bourdieu, Gouldner, Caillé) and psychanalysts (Lacan) are better known than the text itself. In my paper, I will draw on a century of productive reception (Wirkungsgeschichte) of the Essay to uncover the generative grammar of the gift. I will show that the gift is structured around three complementary polarities - obligation vs. freedom; egoism vs. altruism; and peace vs. war - that constitute the gift as a system of paradoxical implications.
Frédéric Vandenberghe is professor of sociology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and fellow at the Max Weber Kolleg in Erfurt. He has published widely on the history of ideas and various aspects of social theory in English, French and Portuguese. He’s one of the editors of MAUSS International. In English, he published A Philosophical History of German Sociology (2009), What’s Critical about Critical Realism? (2014) and co-authored with Alain Caillé For a New Classic Sociology (2021). He’s currently working on a book on political hermeneutics that analyses the situation in Brazil under Bolsonaro and another one on Anti-utilitarian social theory.
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