Giving and Taking

Giving and Taking is a collective effort to establish the significance of the so-called non-pecuniary value of art and society. Markets and money are very crude measures when it comes to establishing the value of art and feelings. What exactly is being valued in the financial approach to culture, and what is being overlooked? Giving and Taking explores the layer of solidarity that exists between those participants in our world economy that nobody seems to address anymore, because we are blinded by the strict, formal axiomatics of money. With contributions by Peter Sloterdijk, Marcel Hénaff, Zygmunt Bauman, Joris Luyendijk, and many others. If we need an answer to what the real value is in society and in art – and we need that answer urgently – why not ask philosophers, anthropologists, aestheticians, sociologists, and others who have been addressing this issue for years This book presents an openminded quest that refuses to be lured into a single train of thought, but that instead traverses a network of discourses in order to find the way out towards, or maybe back into, a society that is not predatory, parasitic, or bluntly indifferent towards what it destroys.