Phenomenologies of the Stranger
Between Hostility and Hospitality
Publication Year: 2011
Published by: Fordham University Press
Title Page, Copyright
Acknowledgments
We wish to express our gratitude to those who so generously helped in the preparation of this volume, especially the assistants of the Guestbook seminar and conference held at Boston College in 2009 where most of the papers in this...
At the Threshold: Foreigners, Strangers, Others
This volume plays host to a number of texts that serve as ‘‘phenomenologies of the stranger.’’ Who is the stranger? When and how does the stranger appear? And why does the question of the stranger matter so much, to philosophers...
Presentation of Texts
The texts in this volume play host to a number of encounters with the strange. They ask such questions as: How does the embodied imagination relate to the Stranger in terms of hospitality or hostility (given the common root of...
1. Strangers at the Edge of Hospitality
Strangers at the edge? Where else would they be? The edge is their place—or equally their non-place, since the edge is no place to be: no place to be comfortable, to be identified, to have the status of a citizen or homeowner...
2. Putting Hospitality in Its Place
For the past several decades, continental philosophy has exhibited an ongoing concern with what we might call liminal phenomena, among them friendship, the gift, mourning, responsibility, forgiveness, and hospitality. Of course, to call these...
3. Things at the Edge of the World
Confronted by the snake, an emissary of the strange, D. H. Lawrence is conflicted from the beginning, switching in a trice from fear and hostility to wonder and hospitality. Eventually, he throws a log at the snake, declaring, ‘‘And immediately...
4. Hospitality and the Trouble with God
God is trouble. The name of God is the name of trouble, the name of a disturbance. It solicits us and visits itself upon us, like an uninvited stranger knocking on our door. It is a provocation and an interruption...
5. The Hospitality of Listening: A Note on Sacramental Strangeness
Among the most promising-seeming possibilities for an ethics linked to theology—always a risky proposition—is that of regarding the world as sacramental. A sacramental sensibility seems, potentially at least, a way to a valuing of some aspects of the world...
6. Incarnate Experience
This essay concerns different kinds of experiences that pertain to corporeality. In particular, I appeal to descriptions that suggest and illuminate a unique mode of corporeal experience that is distinct from what we usually understand as embodiment...
7. The Time of Hospitality—Again
How does someone dreaming, wondering about half-forgotten stories in dead languages, (something about a boy who seeks hospitality from Death only to find that Death is not at home and awaits him . . .) find a door, at least a narrow passage to slip into the discursive...
8. The Null Basis-Being of a Nullity, Or Between Two Nothings: Heidegger’s Uncanniness
At times, reading a classical philosophical text is like watching an ice floe break up during global warming. The compacted cold assurance of a coherent system begins to become liquid and great conceptual pieces break off before your eyes and begin...
9. Heidegger and the Strangeness of Being
It was sheer serendipity that brought us together, but there we were. The original question was innocent enough: ‘‘How are we to understand hospitality?’’ Even when sharpened into ‘‘What can phenomenology tell us about welcoming...
10. Progress in Spirit: Freud and Kristeva on the Uncanny
In the penultimate chapter of Strangers to Ourselves (1989), Julia Kristeva distills the ‘‘political and ethical impact of the Freudian breakthrough.’’1 Surfacing at the close of an invigorating cultural (and classically Kristevan) romp through political...
11. The Uncanny Strangeness of Maternal Election: Levinas and Kristeva on Parental Passion
In his essay ‘‘The Uncanny,’’ Sigmund Freud describes the uncanny as what is concealed and frightening in the familiar and agreeable or vice versa.1 He moves from discussing animated dolls, the Sandman’s fear of losing his eyes as castration anxiety...
12. Being, the Other, the Stranger
If philosophizing is not merely a matter of attending to everything, including things that are of no vital concern to us, but rather requires that one become conscious of what one is doing when one engages with questions, then we must start by recognizing...
13. Words of Welcome: Hospitality in the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas
Emmanuel Levinas signals the importance of hospitality for his approach to ethics and religion about two-thirds of the way through his first major work, Totality and Infinity: No human or interhuman relationship can be enacted outside...
14. Neither Close nor Strange: Levinas, Hospitality, and Genocide
At the outset of Totality and Infinity, Emmanuel Levinas defines the Other (l’Autrui)—the overarching theme of all his work—in terms of the stranger. He writes: The absolutely other is the Other. He and I do not form a number...
15. Between Mourning and Magnetism: Derrida and Waldenfels on the Art of Hospitality
Plutarch recounts a scene in the life of the Athenian lawmaker Solon (sixth century BC), when another Greek sage, Anacharsis, has come to visit: ‘‘Anacharsis, coming to Athens, knocked at Solon’s door, and told him, that he, being a stranger...
16. The Stranger in the Polis: Hospitality in Greek Myth
By the gates of Thebes the stranger has no name. For to be given a name, or to give oneself a name, is to identify oneself as someone, and therefore as not a stranger anymore. Naming the stranger amounts to depriving him of his strangeness and appropriating...
E-ISBN-13: 9780823249220
Print-ISBN-13: 9780823234615
Print-ISBN-10: 0823234614
Page Count: 256
Publication Year: 2011
OCLC Number: 732958802
MUSE Marc Record: Download for Phenomenologies of the Stranger
