Return to Saussure

Gift and Counter-gift. AI image “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” (Acts 20:35) Introduction: From Exchange to Recognition Theories of exchange and accounts of recognition have largely developed along separate trajectories. In anthropology, Marcel Mauss is read as providing a foundational analysis of gift practices, centered on obligations that organize circulation beyond market logic. In philosophy, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is taken to elaborate a theory of subject formation grounded in recognition. Each tradition has produced its own conceptual vocabulary and interpretive framework, leaving their proximity insufficiently explored. This separation obscures a shared concern. Both approaches address the conditions under which relations between individuals become either reciprocal or asymmetrical. What appears in Mauss as a cycle of giving and returning, and in Hegel as a movement of recognition between self-conscious beings, can be read as distinct formulations ...

The  Universal Provider. AI image To C. Félix Thesis When the State becomes the universal provider, it monopolizes the position of the giver, thereby rendering the counter-gift impossible and blocking symbolic reciprocity . The result is a structural form of domination grounded not in extraction, but in the impossibility of return, and a corresponding erosion of social relations. Introduction: The Problem of the Unreturnable Gift Accounts of the Soviet Union—and, more broadly, of state socialist systems—typically foreground its economic structure: the abolition of private property, the centralization of the means of production, and the redistribution of goods through the State. Such analyses, however, remain largely confined to the framework of political economy. They risk overlooking a more fundamental dynamic—one that operates not at the level of production, but at the level of exchange. If the focus shifts from ownership to reciprocity, a different problem emerges. Wh...