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October 4, 2002

Media Contact: Jan Jennings (858) 822-1684

UCSD LITERATURE PROFESSOR RECEIVES TOP FRENCH AWARDS
FOR BOOK, LE PRIX DE LA VERITE: LE DON, L’ARGENT, LA PHILOSOPHIE

Marcel Hénaff, philosopher, anthropologist, and professor in the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego, has been awarded two of France’s most prestigious literary prizes for his latest book, Le Prix de la Vérité: le don, l’argent, la philosophie (The Price of Truth: gift, money, philosophy).

For this book, Hénaff received the Grand Prix de Philosophie de l’Académie Française and the Prix de Philosophie de l’Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques. These are France’s top awards in the humanities.

Published in February 2002, Le Prix de la Vérité was launched with lengthy commentaries and an interview with the author in the literary journal Esprit. In newspaper and news magazine reviews, philosophers and social scientists have praised Hénaff’s insight and the mastery with which he reevaluated the history of gift-giving in anthropological and philosophical perspectives. Hénaff concluded that the gift-giving procedure is at the basis of any reciprocal recognition or social bond, and that it supercedes any economic exchange.

Hénaff also is the author of Sade, the Invention of the Libertine Body (English translation, 1999) and Claude Lévi-Strauss and the Making of Structural Anthropology (English translation, 1998). He received a doctorate in philosophy from Copenhagen University, Denmark, in 1980, and has been on the UCSD faculty since 1989.