Month: February 2012

• February 29, 2012

  ‘Therefore, I tried the hammer…’: On how not to receive a gift

  The impetus for the following letter was a guffaw. Last week I ordered a copy of Hubert Dreyfus’s Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time and, by mistake, had had it shipped to my conversation partner’s residence.  Here: a non-gift for you! Thanks! In his turn, he had mailed the book to me. On Monday,…
• February 28, 2012

  Gift economy explained, justified, and defended

  Gift Economy Explained 1. Suppose A gives B a gift wholeheartedly. (By “wholeheartedly,” I mean without reserve or hesitation, without holding back or misgivings. Positively, I mean: “giving forth freely or receiving plentifully.”) 2. Then B receives the gift wholeheartedly. 3. It follows that B is goodly indebted to A. The debt is lighter, not…
• February 27, 2012

  On a good friend being a good introducer

  One of my friends, Dougald Hine, told me once that a good friend is someone who senses when to introduce who to whom. (I take him to be talking about action, not about grammatical constructions.) Let’s parse this statement. First of all, an introduction is not a recommendation, i.e., not a “should” statement, but a…
• February 25, 2012

  Now think fast!: Brief reflections on the making of ‘Despatches from the Invisible Revolution’

  The very idea of the book is undergoing a paradigm shift before our eyes. For the life of me, I can’t tell exactly what a book is, what it is supposed to do, how it is meant to loop into or out of our cultural moment, or what purpose it will likely serve in the…
• February 24, 2012

  Hospitality in actu: A search term poem

  First Digression Last night I dreamed I was surfing idly on the internet. Pretty quickly things got dicey. When I entered search terms or a URL into Google Chrome, I was immediately re-directed to a page of ads. “No,” I thought. “This can’t be right.” No, that’s not quite it. It was rather that “andrewjtaggart.com”…