Abstract
This article argues for a view of the gift as an affective network and investigates how Dave Eggers’s practice of publishing second editions works to produce this network. Framing my discussion of the gift with Sara Ahmed’s work on affective economies, I suggest that the gift, like affect, is best understood as a surplus effect of circulation. I argue that Eggers negotiates the gift’s double bind by emphasizing the impossibility of identifying a “pure” gift or an authoritative “original” edition; his double editions show how the gift survives through the surplus values generated by their ongoing circulation. Eggers's symbolic and material gift network ultimately depends on the uncertainty and mystification emblematic of Eggers’s anxious aesthetic and mode of recirculation, adding to critical conversations that position Eggers’s aesthetic within movements of new sincerity or post-irony.