Abstract
One of philosopher Slavoj Zizek's most admirable moves is his insistence on the gift's debt-erasingness. But it seems his - and not only his - passion for the gift's gratuity - exemplified by the figure of Christ - obscures what is genuinely ingenious about the gift and the gift of the Christic that it is dual, duplicitous, double-sided; both gratuitous and circular, both debt-erasing and debt-arousing. To be sure, what is required in an age of an all-calculating capitalism is a remembering and re-affirmation of excess. And yet, in an age of unparalleled ecological squandering, what is also required is a re-commitment to reciprocity. Christianity's Geniestreich therefore appears to lie in its both/and.
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