Marcel Mauss' 'Essai sur le don' (1923--4) has become one of the central non-philosophical references of contemporary French philosophy. Deleuze (and Guattari) and Derrida, to cite only two, engage with the concept of the gift explicitly and repeatedly. Gerald Moore shows how the problematic of the gift drives and illuminates the last century of French philosophy. By tracing the creation of the gift as a concept, from its origins in philosophy and the social sciences, right up to the present, Moore shows its central importance for a poststructuralist understanding of the relation between philosophy and politics.