»Und … höchst anmutig sei das Danken.«

Abstract

Gift rituals are a constitutive part of every-day communication. Yet, where you are indebted to thanks and where thankfulness becomes a duty, thanking loses its grace. Thanksgiving degenerates to a means of payment in exchanging goods or even obeys the logic of compensation (F. Nietzsche). The beauty of effortless and not indebted thanksgiving arises by experiencing the analogy of divine χάϱις /gratia and human εὐχαϱιστία /gratitudo . First of all, giving thanks means ‘Thank God.’ The article takes up this biblical account by pursuing K. Barth’s weighting of thankfulness as a general category of theological ethics and by bringing it into dialogue with positions of the sociological and philosophical discourse on thankfulness (G. Simmel, D. Henrich). In doing so it pleads for a moratorium of interpersonal thankfulness: “Only the one who is ungrateful allows to be given a gift.” Not until thanksgiving has lost its implicitness and its unavailability, it can become a graceful “event” (J. Derrida).