I think that part of the point of a gift economy is that the bonds of
explicit debt and credit are loosened: the important thing is to
acknowledge one's gifts as gifts, and to make a gift of them to
others. "Freely ye have received; freely give".
Still, it's a gift *economy*, which is to say that gifts *circulate*
("what comes around, goes around"). Derrida wonders in _Given Time_
whether a gift is really a gift if one can always be sure that what
has gone around will in due course come around again - in order to be
truly a gift, the gift has to disappear at least temporarily from the
horizon of gift exchange, be exposed to the risk of being truly lost.
The gift has to pass out of sight of the hearth. In a certain sense,
then, "gift economy" is a contradiction in terms: the gift must be
heterogenous to the law (nomos) of economy in order to be a gift, it
must bring with it (or carry off with it) something from outside the
law.
Dominic
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