
























































Ricœur, Gift and Poetics


5

Elementa
Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology 
and Empirical Perspectives

3 
(2023) 

1-2

The Gift

Edited by Francesco Fistetti

Francesco Fistetti
Editorial – What Is the Gift Paradigm? A Reading Guide 7

First Section

Alain Caillé
Recent Extensions of the Gift 15

Jacques T. Godbout
The Enduring Relevance of Mauss’ Essai sur le don 43

Francesco Fistetti
The Gift Paradigm: Towards a Science of “total social facts” 59

Annalisa Caputo
Ricœur, Gift and Poetics 81

Second Section

Andreana Lavanga - Francesco Sulla
Praise as a Gift in the Relationship between Teachers 93 
and Their Students

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Anna Daniela Savino
The Gift of Desire: The “inner voice” between Neuroscience 105 
and Theory of Attachment

Various

Roberta Baldini - Maria Grazia Mada Logrieco
The Gifted Student: Gifts and Talents Development 125

Alessandro De Santis - Stefania Fantinelli
Digital Well-Being as a New Kind of Adaptation 135 
to the New Millennium Needs: A State-of-the-Art Analysis

Salvatore Iuso - Pia Marinaro
Education and Culture: Pluralism in the Age of Globalization 153

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81

Ricœur, Gift and Poetics
Annalisa Caputo
Università degli Studi di Bari “Aldo Moro” (Italy)

doi: https://doi.org/10.7358/elementa-2023-0102-capa
annalisa.caputo@uniba.it

Abstract

In Ricœur’s last works, we can find what he calls a poetics of love. Choosing the “dialec-
tic” path of a comparison between love and justice, Ricœur claims that justice lies in the 
rule of equivalence (give to each his own); the disorientation of love, instead, suspends 
the return, the equivalence, the exchange. Love does not say: “do ut des”, but rather (if we 
can transform the expression) it says “do ut dem”, to offer without expecting anything in 
return: this is what Ricœur calls a “first gift”. However, it is an expectation that is always 
open to the possibility of a “surprise”: the surprise of a “second first gift” able to fulfill the 
gratuity of the original act of donation. This essay questions this possibility of “mutual 
gift”.

Keywords: gratuity; justice; love; Ricœur; surprise.

1. Preliminary remarks

In Ricœur’s last works, we can find what he calls a poetics of agape or even 
more simply a poetics of love (Ricœur, 1996, pp. 23-40). Ricœur is aware of 
the risks underlying the decision to use this term (love), but also conscious 
of the fact that poetry does not have others, more appropriate to express 
the tension of his desire. 

“Talking about love may be too easy, or rather too difficult. How can 
we avoid simply praising it or falling into sentimental platitudes?” (Ricœur, 
1996, p. 23). How not to fall into exaltation or emotional banality? How 
to talk about the poetry of love, without, in so doing, writing a poetry, 
becoming a Poet? Ricœur chooses the “dialectic” path of a comparison 
between love and justice: “here by dialectic I mean, on the one hand, the 
acknowledgment of the initial disproportionality between our two terms 

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Annalisa Caputo

82

and, on the other hand, the search for practical mediations between them – 
mediations, let us quickly say, that are always fragile and provisory” (p. 23). 

Of this dialectic (Caputo, 2008) we only want to consider the crux: 
what does it mean to say that love is poetry (Caputo, 2013, pp. 231-256)?

2. The hyper-ethical language of love

Emphasizing the link between love and poetry means, above all, remem-
bering that love speaks, but it speaks a language that is different from the 
ordinary language of everyday life, logic and prose. The poetry of love is 
primarily a poetry of “praise” 1. 

From the uniform grey of everyday objects, from the anonymity of 
the everything, in which everyone is equal to everyone else, the “poet” 
(metaphorically speaking), i.e. the lover sees a gaze emerge that says: Love 
me! And of this appeal – so different from the imperative, but also from 
normal description of what it is – he decides to make poetry. An uncanny 
use of the imperative form (Hall, 2007), that can be understood – in its 
“scandalous” role – only starting from the link that precedes it. In a way, it 
is not the beloved who says Love me!, nor his/her lover, but love itself. 

The commandment to love is love itself, commending itself, as though the 
genitive in the “commandment of love” were subjective and objective at the 
same time. (Ricœur, 1996, p. 27)

Love can not be commanded. It is recommended. “Allow yourself to feel 
loved!”. In fact, the language of love is able to awaken the primeval beauty 
in things and in others. His speaking is a new creation that says: “Let it 
be!”. It projects the self beyond itself. That is why an authentic “poetic” 
relationship can never be written by one person. Praise attracts praise. 
Poetry attracts poetry. The offering of oneself, the gift attracts the gift 
(Wall, 2005, pp. 130-136).

Then, where is the difference between the lover and the “merchant” 
(this is the word used by Ricœur: 2005)? It is again a question of language, 
of style. The poet “gives”, but his gift is not one of the market, it is not 
an exchange. It is the “hyperethical feeling” (Ricœur, 1996, p. 33) of a 
broad economy of the gift, which has quite different forms of expression 
than the forms with which men justify their actions. It is not the norm 
of daily “prose”. It is the exception of the gesture that oversteps normal-

 1 In several passages Ricœur connects this poetry of praise to the hymn. See, in par-
ticular, The Hymn to the Charity of Paul of Tarsus, 1 Cor. 13.

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ity, to return it to its original momentum. In this sense, love is always 
illogical. Its logic is “different”, “poetic”. In fact, it cannot be enclosed in 
grammatical, syntactical, or stylistic rules. We can try to explain a poem 
“logically”, but – even assuming that we can understand it – in schematiz-
ing it we reduce it, we remove its fingernails, we prevent it from having on 
us the impact that its linguistic and conceptual distortion wanted to have. 
This is the economy of the gift, in the poetics of love: “it develops a logic 
of superabundance that, at first glance at least, opposes itself to the logic 
of equivalence that governs everyday ethics” – writes Ricœur in Love and 
Justice (Ricœur, 1996, pp. 33-34) 2.

In relation to this “logic of superabundance”, even more radically, in 
The Course of Recognition; I believe it is possible to consider Parcours as a 
last phase of Ricœur’s thinking, beyond those usually proposed by scholars 
(Greisch, 2001; Agìs Villaverde, 2006). Ricœur says that superabundance 
is not even a logic. It is an A-logic. And mind you: Ricœur does not contrast 
the love-poetry only with the “logic” of violence or that of mercantilism, 
or liberal individualism, but more radically he also contrasts love with the 
“logic” of justice, which – even if it were a perfect prosody – would never 
reach the heights of the hymn of praise.

In fact, even the best justice lies in the rule of equivalence. Give to 
each his own is the classic formula that unites the just to the equal. And it 
is “logical” that it be so. It would be impossible to live in a world in which 
the equivalence of equality did not support social and legal constraints. 

The philosophy of Ricœur is neither subversive, nor a-moral. It pushes 
morals to “give more”. In fact, man is not only a rational animal, nor even 
just a political animal, but – just for this reason – he is also a poet of the 
hyper-ethical. Man not only needs to be recognized as an “each”, the same 
as all others (in social practices, judicial systems, governmental institutions, 
distribution of goods), but also, and even more fundamentally, he needs 
be recognized as the “beloved”, as a “You” different from all other selves 
(chosen for his uniqueness and singularity). In this sense, just as love can 
never supplant and eliminate the need for justice, the prose of justice can 
never level love’s poetic yearning (Theobald, 1995; Garapon, 2006; Ponce 
de Leão, 2006). The poetry is a gamble that raises man from the horizontal 
logic of reciprocity, from the quietist dimension of the equivalence, to the 
disorienting economy of superabundance. 

“To disorient without reorienting is, in Kierkegaardian terms – Ricœur 
points out – to suspend the ethical. In one sense, the commandment to love, 

 2 For Ricœur, the “crazy” apex of this love is to love our enemies, as is proposed in the 
evangelical agape.

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as hyperethical, is a way of suspending the ethical […]” (Ricœur, 1996, 
p. 37; emphasis added). 

The disorientation of love suspends the return, the equivalence, the 
exchange. “Love” does not say: do ut des, but rather (if we can transform 
the expression) it says do ut dem. I give because I must give. “To offer with-
out expecting anything in return”: this is a “first gift” (premier don). “Une 
générosité […] sans égard pour l’obligation ainsi engendrée de donner en 
retour: générosité libérée des règles d’équivalence régissant les relations de 
justice” (Ricœur, 2005, p. 337). 

The gap, the jump is from the logic of the market (including the fair-
est market) to the “sans prix” (Hénaff, 2002), that is the “without-price” 
of poetry: in-utility, anti-market. Here Ricœur, inevitably – as a philoso-
pher – can not but remember the pricelessness of philosophy, much akin in 
its in-utility to the anti-market of poetry (Ricœur, 2005, pp. 339-341). 
There are, Ricœur points out, things that can not be bought and sold. One 
of these is the poetic experience (and the artistic experience, in general). 
Another of these is thought and its freedom, its ability to challenge, pro-
voke, and criticize what exists.

“Le spectacle qu’offre l’histoire est celui d’une défaite croissante du 
sans prix, refoulé par les avances de la société marchande”. But there are 
oases of resistance in which the non-tradable “remains” in its specificity of 
“without price” (Ricœur, 2005, pp. 343-344).

Love, returning to the poet, is without price. This “saves” the gift of 
the poet, distinguishing it from that of the merchant. In this case, “I give” 
is a surplus: an superabundance that, however, is not closed in on itself, 
but responds, in turn, to a previous overabundance and calls again, in a 
circle, for further overabundance. This is what protects the poetics of love 
from the risk of the detachment of superiority. To the masters of suspicion, 
who insinuate doubt (… this gift is not a gift, but poison because it crushes 
the other in a debt that can never be reciprocated and which harms his 
dignity; Ricœur, 2000, p. 621. On this subject, distinguishes two phrases 
in Ricœur’s writings from the 1960s: “masters of suspicion” and “herme-
neutics of suspicion”; Scott-Bauman, 2009, p. 58), the poet responds with 
the fragility of his desire, a desire that Ricœur, in a strong and original 
manner, called “optative”.

3. The optative of mutuality

The poet is a man of the optative: “ce mode qui n’est ni descriptif ni nor-
matif ” (Ricœur, 2005, p. 354), but a desiderative mode. For the poet, 

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I want does not mean that it must be so. It means “I would like it to be so”: 
a tightrope between what it is and what I would like it to be. The poetic 
form of “love me!” is not a “command”. It is the “desire” that the other 
might experience the beauty of the priceless gift of self, and – in turn – 
become a poet of praise (not an insolvent debtor). Ricœur writes: from the 
do ut des to the “I give so that (pour que) you give” (Ricœur, 2005, p. 355). 
But this “so that”, this pour que can only be optative. 

Perhaps, to be less ambiguous than the Ricœurian expressions may 
seem, the poet should say: “I give … I would like for you to give, too”; “I 
gave you a gift … I would like for you to do the same”. Even more radi-
cally, the lover should not even say Love me!, but he should say, Love!, where 
the emphasis is once again on “You” and not on “I”. In fact, the desire of 
the giver, if it is really superabundant, it is not even that you could love me, 
but that you can love. If the object of the love of the “You” becomes a third 
party (not me), this does not make the giving of the You less worthy, nor 
would the gratuity be less abundant, nor would the movement of mutual 
disclosure be less effective.

Although, in the poetic optative, hope remains, hidden, non-invasive: 
the hope that you can, with your poetry, respond to mine; that your super-
abundance may actually address my desire for you. In this sense, the pos-
sible reciprocity, is not, would not be exchange, but mutual recognition, 
mutuality (mutualité ). Reciprocity, Ricœur points out, “tourne au-dessus 
de nos têtes”; mutuality “circule entre nous” (Ricœur, 2005, p. 355). In 
mutuality there is no “exchange” of gifts, understood as “something” that 
objectively passes from one to another and from another to one. There is 
no horizontality of the “right” reciprocity (on the same level). There is the 
asymmetry of a dual superabundance, because the interest-free gift each 
time falls from a gap in altitude, from the height of pricelessness (p. 366). 
Marcel Henaff (2004, pp. 326-337) defines “reciprocity” as the way in 
which Ricœur breaks the Cartesian circle of egology.

“La générosité du don suscite non pas une restitution, qui, au sens 
propre, annulerait le premier don, mais quelque chose comme la réponse à 
une offre. À la limite, il faut tenir le premier don pour le modèle du second 
don, et penser, si l’on peut dire, le second don comme une sorte de seconde 
premier don” (Ricœur, 2005, p. 350). It is a fragile mutuality, as fragile as 
the identities on which it is based, and as “fragile” as the poetic thread that 
supports it.

For this reason, every authentic gift is a “risk”. One assumes the risk 
of being rejected, of not being recognized, not being accepted, appreciated. 
You accept the possibility of misunderstanding and ingratitude. For this 
reason, every authentic gift is an expectation: “attente, qui peut être indé-

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finiment différée, voire perdue de vue et franchement oubliée”. However, 
it is an expectation that is always open to the possibility of a “surprise”: the 
surprise of this “second first gift” able to fulfill the gratuity of the original 
act of donation (Ricœur, 2005, p. 351). For this reason, every authentic 
gift is “un espace d’espérance”, “une onde d’irradiation et d’irrigation qui, 
de façon secrète et détourneée, contribue à l’avancée de l’histoire vers des 
états de paix”: is the hidden counter-current in the history of violence. For 
this reason, each authentic gift “est […] ce qu’est par ailleurs l’hymne au 
plan verbal” (p. 354), it is the poetry of the optative: gratuity that evokes 
gratitude and gratitude that evokes new gratuity (Olivier Abel speaks of 
a “reconnassance inquiete”: Abel, 2004, pp. 45-57). It is (Kemp, 2006; 
Villela-Petit, 2007) reconnaissance! The French language is one of those 
where “gratitude” can also be said with the word “recognition”. There is 
no construction of identity if “I” am not recognized as such, if “I” am not 
watched and loved in my uniqueness. However, there is no real recognition 
that does not provoke gratitude in “me”, for being freely known, recog-
nized, and watched and loved. Recognition arouses gratitude and, as men 
who are recognized and grateful, we are capable – in turn – of gratuity. 

This is the paradoxical aspect of the phenomenology of the gift, 
which does not – as you might think – move from gratuity to gratitude, 
but from gratitude to gratuity. That means, basically, that no one is ever 
an absolute “first” giver, but every act of love is always a response, always a 
“second first gift”. 

We might ask, then, how is it possible to create (or that it be created, 
originally) a gift of response, if it is true that there is no First, as the initial 
giver. Here, the response of the last Ricœur bifurcates in two directions. 
The first direction leads to what we might call the poetics of a philosophy 
without an Absolute. The second direction leads to what we might call the 
poetics of a theology of the overabundance of the Absolute. Maybe we should 
say: in the question of the “gift”, in some way, Ricœur crosses his two 
research directions: the philosophical and exegetical/theological. It is no 
coincidence that the end of Ricœur’s intellectual Autobiography, recalling 
precisely this “challenge” of meeting/convergence between a “philosophy 
without absolutes” and “biblical faith”, says: “Le petit livre bilingue Liebe 
und Gerechtigkeit. Amour et justice (1990) indique la direction à suivre 
pour relever ce défi” (Ricœur, 1995, p. 82).

This second leaves its traces in what Ricœur himself calls “exercises 
of biblical exegesis” or of “apprentice theologian”, where Genesis is reinter-
preted as the original donation of existence (LaCocque & Ricœur, 1998, 
pp. 57-101); the commandment to love our enemies as the apex of the 
poetics of love, in agape; the law and justification as a gift of freedom and 

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liberation; eschatology as the possibility of awakening the unfulfilled prom-
ises of history. In this way, the God of hope and that of creation are, at the 
two ends of the economy of the gift, the same God (Ricœur, 1996, p. 32), 
but the poetry of this God is never ultimately expressible in human prose. 
It is barely graspable by the stutterings of exegesis and theology. Absolutely 
unthinkable for, and in, the fragile links of philosophical research 3. 

In this sense, in a manner consistent with the existential premises of 
his hermeneutic phenomenology, that of Ricœur is the poetry of a philoso-
phy without an absolute. And the question about the First Giver remains 
unanswered, or better, with a response suspended in the epoché 4. 

It is necessary to feel loved, so as to feel recognized and be grateful. 
But this “primality” of love does not necessarily have to be linked to a 
transcendent origin.

That there is something else at the origin of our life is a phenomeno-
logical datum. That I haven’t created myself is a phenomenological datum. 
That man is not a self-centered and self-based subject, but the recipient 
of a gift, an inestimable object of transmission (“inestimabile objet de la 
transmission”: Ricœur, 2005, p. 288) is a phenomenological datum. That 
the self is the result of an overabundant lineage of love, is the gift of the 
transmission of life (given by parents, indicated on the family tree, rooted 
in the history of our ancestors …) is a phenomenological datum. Beyond 
these phenomenological data, begins the enigma of origin, which is the 
enigma of one’s birth and life. It is the miracle of birth (H. Arendt), which 
in its incomprehensibility and unspeakability, makes each man “priceless”, 
worthy of praise: possible poetry - poetry of the possible (Vanhoozer, 1990; 
Treanor & Venema, 2010; Verheyden & Hettema, 2011). The miracle of 
gratuity that – although it can never cross the drift of history – offers in 
the gift the space for a “suspension”: “clearing” (Ricœur, 2005, p. 355; 
Lamouche, 2008, pp. 76-87) in which the “forest” of the “endless struggle 
for recognition” thins out and becomes a place of reconnaissance (Henri-
ques, 2005, p. 250; Ricœur, 2005, p. 274). Will there ever be a poet and a 
poetics able to correspond to this enigma of the origins? The fragile word 
of the philosopher stops on this question. Which is also a threshold of 
astonishment. Thaumazein … that is surprised by its own existence and its 

 3 It is the famous end of Paul Ricœur Soi-même comme un autre: “sur cette aporie de 
l’Autre, le discours philosophique s’arrête” (Ricœur, 1990, p. 409). 
 4 It should be noted that the Poetics of the last Ricœur are not necessarily related 
to the theological-transcendent dimension (as in Philosophie de la volonté ), but it becomes 
more ethical-existential. For this reason, we do not totally agree with a number of scholars 
who, in a latent manner, risk turning the terms “poetic” and “transcendence” into syno-
nyms (Nkeramihigo, 1984; Steven, 1991; Jervolino, 1995; Thomasset, 1996).

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possibility to be, even without knowing how or why. Beyond every how 
or why: “without any meritoriousness: […] only being a human being” 
(S. Kierkegaard; Ricœur, 2000, p. 656). The philosophy of the last Ricœur, 
with Kierkegaard, defiantly continues to think and to invite us to think 
that “it’s great to be men”. The end of La memoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, links 
this Kierkegaardian praise of existence to the expression of the Song of 
Songs: “l’amour est aussi fort que la mort”.

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Oxford University Press.

Riassunto

Nelle ultime opere di Ricœur, possiamo trovare quella che lui chiama una poetica del-
l’amo re. Scegliendo la strada “dialettica” di un confronto tra amore e giustizia, Ricœur 
sostiene che la giustizia risiede nella regola dell’equivalenza (dare a ciascuno il suo); il di-
sorientamento dell’amore, invece, sospende il ritorno, l’equivalenza, lo scambio. L’amo re 
non dice: “do ut des”, ma piuttosto (se possiamo trasformare l’espressione) dice “do ut 
dem”, offrire senza aspettarsi nulla in cambio: questo è ciò che Ricœur chiama “primo 

Elementa. Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology and Empirical Perspectives – 3 (2023) 1-2 
https://www.ledonline.it/elementa - Online ISSN 2785-4426 - Print ISSN 2785-4558

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Annalisa Caputo

90

dono”. Tuttavia, si tratta di un’aspettativa sempre aperta alla possibilità di una “sorpre-
sa”: la sorpresa di un “secondo primo dono” in grado di soddisfare la gratuità dell’atto di 
donazione originale. Questo saggio si interroga su questa possibilità di “dono reciproco”.

Copyright (©) 2023 Annalisa Caputo 
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How to cite this paper:
Caputo, A. (2023). Ricœur, gift and poetics. Elementa. Intersections between Philosophy, 
Epistemology and Empirical Perspectives, 3(1-2), 81-90. doi: https://doi.org/10.7358/elementa-
2023-0102-capa

Elementa. Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology and Empirical Perspectives – 3 (2023) 1-2 
https://www.ledonline.it/elementa - Online ISSN 2785-4426 - Print ISSN 2785-4558

https://doi.org/10.7358/elementa-2023-0102-capa
https://doi.org/10.7358/elementa-2023-0102-capa
https://www.ledonline.it/elementa 

	Elementa_3-2023-1-2_00b_Sommario.pdf
	Editorial
	What Is the Gift Paradigm?
A Reading Guide

	First Section
	Recent Extensions of the Gift
	The Enduring Relevance
of Mauss’ Essai sur le don
	The Gift Paradigm: Towards a Science of “total social facts”
	Ricœur, Gift and Poetics

	Second Section
	Praise as a Gift in the Relationship between Teachers and Their Students
	The Gift of Desire: The “inner voice” between Neuroscience and Theory
of Attachment

	Various
	The Gifted Student: Gifts and Talents Development
	Digital Well-Being as a New Kind
of Adaptation to the New Millennium Needs: A State-of-the-Art Analysis
	Education and Culture: Pluralism
in the Age of Globalization





