Gift, Exchange and a Little Extra Feeling

I am currently reading In Defense of Lost Causes by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek. The book examines revolutionary terror--from the French Revolution's Reign of Terror to the Iranian Revolution--and asks what, if anything, was good about such grand Causes, or, in Zizek’s words: “. . . while these phenomena were, each in its own way, a historical failure and monstrosity . . . this is not the whole truth: there was in each of them a redemptive moment which gets lost in the liberal-democratic rejection.”

The book isn’t written in a style that I care for much. So far, long rambling sentences in thick paragraphs have digressed from digressions for pages on end, affording only occasional glimpses of something directly pertinent to the book’s stated topic. Nonetheless, much of the wandering is interesting and, no doubt, in some labyrinthine way all tied together.

I’m not far enough into the book to comment on the larger issues, but I found one passage in a section called “Gift and exchange” to be amusing:

“So, as in potlatch, the exchange between the analyst and the analysand is between two incommensurable excesses: the analyst is paid for nothing, as a gift, his price is always exorbitant (typically, the patients oscillate between complaining that the price is too high and bouts of excessive gratitude—‘how can I ever repay you for what you did…’”

The passage is about psychoanalysis, but it leapt out at me because I had just experienced something similar during my wife’s six-week postpartum checkup at the women’s clinic. We had prepared little chocolate bars announcing and celebrating our son’s birth to give out to acquaintances and I had brought one along for the doctor.

I handed it over, saying, “It isn’t much for your trouble, but we brought a little something to say thank you,” and I was in earnest, but inside, I was also thinking, “I don’t really owe you anything, since you’ve charged us enough in fees to deliver ten babies!”

Nonetheless, scenes like this play out frequently in life, when we pretend as if someone has done something for us out of the goodness of his or her heart and we freely express our gratitude through some gesture or other when really all that has occurred is a formal exchange. They do what they do because they are running a business and we pay because we want their service.

Or is that all that has occurred? After all, presumably my doctor does what she does because she cares about women and babies. Aren’t I really expressing gratitude as something extra in addition to my payment in return for this feeling as something extra the doctor has appended to her services? Indeed, my wife went into labor on our doctor’s day off, but she cut her dinner plans short in order to come deliver the baby.

The Japanese expression kimochi dake (feeling only) comes to mind. I may not be offering much in return for what I received, but I wish to offer something, however trifling, to express my feeling of gratitude, something a check (or debit transaction) could never do. In addition to the formal, required exchange of services for money, there is another, voluntary exchange of feeling.

That may not have much to do with lost causes, but it is an insight into “Gift and exchange.”