A gift-giving virtue is highest virtue. -Thus Spoke Zarathustra Who could ever think of gift as a giftthat-takes? Who else but man, precisely one who would like to take everything? -The Laugh of Medusa Following appearance in 1991 of Jacques Derrida's Donner le temps, theme of gifts and gift-giving will no doubt take a more central place on critical scene. But as Derrida himself notes in foreword to this work, problematic of gift has been at work in his texts wherever it is a question of proper (appropriation, expropriation, exappropriation), economy, trace, name, and especially rest, of course, which is to say more or less constantly. I More specifically, I would say that gift was a largely unrecognized but central and recurrent Derridean theme in his texts of seventies ranging from Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles, in which giving of woman is joined to Heidegger's question of proper, property, and gift of Being, through La carte postale, in which he addresses issues surrounding giving and gift in terms of envois and their failure to arrive at their destinations, giving and return of fort/da in Freud, giving/theft of letter in Poe, and es gibt of Sein and Ereignis in Heidegger. One reader of Derrida who has not failed to attend to this problematic is Helene Cixous. In Laugh of Medusa, upon introducing the whole deceptive problematic of she suggests in a footnote that reader re-read Derrida's text, `Le Style de la femme,' in which he identifies gift, in Nietzsche, as the essential predicate of woman.2 In following remarks, I would like to examine Cixous's comments on giving, property, appropriation, generosity, and exchange-what I am here calling logic of gift. And following Cixous's own oblique suggestion, I would like to begin by re-reading several of Nietzsche's reflections on economy, exchange, and giving of gifts. By bringing Nietzsche and Cixous into dialogue on these points, we will be able to examine exchange model and definition of subjectivity in terms of acquisition of property that accompanies this model. In so doing, we will experiment with another model, one based on economy of generosity that in different ways is suggested by both Nietzsche and Cixous. In second essay of On Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche traces genealogy of modern moral concepts of and bad conscience back to their economic roots in the oldest and most primitive personal relationship, that between buyer and seller, creditor and debtor.3 The moral concept guilt is shown to originate in economic-legal notion of a debt as something that can and should be repaid. Schuld, which translates both debt and guilt, thus operates within a strange logic of compensation that seeks to establish equivalences between creditor and debtor. Like guilt, obligation, and punishment, Nietzsche also locates origin of justice in relationship between creditor and debtor. This primitive contractual relationship made possible comparative evaluations of relative worth, and it allowed primitive society to arrive at the oldest and naivest moral canon of justice [Gerechtigkeit], beginning of all `goodnaturedness,' all `fairness,' all `good will,' all 'objectivity' on earth (GM II, 8-by which Nietzsche means jus talionis: an eye for eye. Justice, for Nietzsche, originates between parties of approximately equal power.... The characteristic of exchange is original characteristic of justice. Each satisfies other, inasmuch as each acquires what he values more than other does. One gives to other what he wants to have, to be henceforth his own, and in return receives what one oneself desires. Justice is thus requital and exchange under presupposition of approximately equal power position.4 As society evolved, creditor-debtor relationship extended from a moral guideline among individuals to standard governing relationship between individuals and community itself, which now stood in relation to its members as a creditor to its debtors (GM II, 9). …