Through readings of figures including Marcel Mauss and Claude Levi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, Politics of the Gift argues that what we understand as philosophical poststructuralism emerges from a renegotiation of philosophy's relation to politics and economics in twentieth-century France. It shows how this renegotiation was enforced by the rise of social sciences, such as anthropology and psychoanalysis, which created a crisis in philosophers' sense of their own legitimacy, forcing them to move beyond the traditional hierarchy of the academic disciplines.