Phenomenologies of the Stranger: Between Hostility and Hospitality

2. Putting Hospitality in Its Place

2 Putting Hospitality in Its Place B R I A N T R E A N O R Hospitality . . . has to do with the ethos, that is the residence, one’s home, the familiar place of dwelling. —Jacques Derrida 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 ‘‘phenomena’’ already begs the question, or at least a question, the question of whether and to what extent these events actually take place. Thinking in the wake of Jacques Derrida it is impossible to ignore, for example, the excess of the call to forgiveness over the sort of forgiveness that actually takes place in concrete situations. In the case of hospitality, this excess is apparent in the seeming tension between the unconditional law of hospitality and laws that condition hospitality in actual practice. Thus, one significant question has to do with the relationship of the unconditional call to the conditioned response, and the nature of the tension between these competing demands. Do forgiveness and hospitality ever actually happen—that is, phenomenologically, do they ever ‘‘show up’’—or must we settle with ‘‘contaminated’’ or ‘‘perverted’’ forgiveness and hospitality because the events that these names harbor, or that haunt them, are always to come (a venir)? Are hospitality and related concepts ‘‘liminal phenomena’’ or ‘‘aporetic events’’? Are they possible, though dif- ficult, or impossible? These are complex questions and a good deal of 49 work has been done on the tension between the conditional and the unconditional ; however, in either case—whether hospitality, forgiveness, and gifts are ‘‘difficult’’ or ‘‘impossible’’—it remains the case that one of the things that ought to arise from our attention to these liminal phenomena is some insight into our actual conduct in the world. We would be remiss in our discussion of hospitality if we did not ask about actual hosts and guests, and actual moments of hospitality, if there is such a thing. So a second crucial question has to do with what hospitality actually looks like in practice. Whether hospitality is difficult or impossible, a philosophical account ought to have something to say about the way in which we actually receive strangers. These two questions—(1) the (im)possibility of hospitality and (2) what actual acts of hospitality, whether or not they are corrupted by their conditionality, look like—will be the guiding concerns for this inquiry. Although there are important similarities between the various liminal phenomena with which continental philosophy has been concerned—all, for example, arguably exhibit the aporetic structure that so fascinates Derrida —and the sphere of one (e.g., generosity) may sometimes overlap the sphere of another (e.g., hospitality), each phenomenon bears distinguishing marks that differentiate it from others. One way to make clear this difference is to focus on an aspect of a phenomenon that distinguishes it from other phenomena. In the case of hospitality, the most convenient and useful way to do this is to examine the relationship between hospitality and place. Hospitality is a virtue of place, perhaps the preeminent virtue of place. Indeed, hospitality is so deeply connected to place that it is defined by this association. Hospitality always happens in a place; it consists in giving place to another and, as such, occurs as part of a relationship between an implaced person and a displaced person. Only an implaced person can be hospitable. A displaced person, qua displaced person, can be generous, can be the giver of gifts, can be forgiving, and can be responsible, but she cannot be hospitable because she cannot give place to an other. A host is precisely a person who receives people into a given space or place as guests. Hospitality exists, if it does exist, in the relationship between host and guest. Hence the Latin hospes, which can mean both ‘‘host’’ and ‘‘guest.’’ When the host ceases to be a host (as when she herself is displaced) or when the guest ceases to be a guest (as when she becomes a naturalized citizen or member of the family), we can no longer speak of hospitality. These conditions, as well as many others, indicate just how placesaturated hospitality is. If we fail to understand place, we fail to understand hospitality. 50 Brian Treanor The Primacy of Place Although there are...