Playing, Giving, Devoting to

Play and gift both acquire their value by creating a distance with the material, utilitarian and functional reality. Both establish a relation of reversibility and friendship with the other through rivalry. Finally, both play and gift produce space for freedom of action since the result is open-ended and indeterminate. Both are a risk and a bet. But one is prone to be 'caught' by the gift or the game, to fully devote oneself to it only because there is a beyond to the gift and the game which is of the same nature as that which the German phenomenological tradition calls the 'gifted,' Gegebenheit, i.e. the fact that a whole array of those things which are the most precious to us (starting with life itself, nature, air, etc.) are as if given to us. It is also in order to participate in this domain of the gifted and the grace, if only to experience it ever so fleetingly, that one gives and plays. That one devotes oneself fully. Adapted from the source document.