Romantic Hospitality and the Resistance to Accommodation

chapter two

If hospitality makes Rousseau uneasy, then the same could be said of Immanuel Kant, whose late writings in particular reveal conspicuous signs of discomfort when questioning the foreign and the strange. In this chapter, I focus on three scenes involving three of Kant’s most troubling guests. The first scene, drawn from Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, finds the philosopher imagining the strangely self-consuming habits of the solitary eater, a figure whose refusal to offer hospitality when he eats is both irresponsible and unhealthy. Kant’s disavowal of this unruly guest enables him to privilege a meticulous social practice of regulating the subject’s “bond” of hospitality: a practice of being responsive to the others with and on whom the subject dines. The second scene, also drawn from the Anthropology, features another of the text’s objects of abjection, namely, the Asiatic Turk, whom Kant deploys as a kind of conduit for gazing upon the nations of Europe from a foreign perspective, thus enabling himself to declare Germany the most hospitable nation on earth. The third scene involves the “foreigner” of the“Third Definitive Article”of Perpetual Peace: APhilosophical Sketch, where Kant lays out the laws and the limits of the stranger’s rights of visitation in the lands of others. I argue that a kind of auto-deconstructive thread runs through these three scenes of hospitality insofar as each contains its own impossibility : there is always another other who is forcibly disavowed in the welcoming gesture but who nevertheless returns to the scene of the welcome only to reassert its constitutive priority in the hospitable imaginaries of Kant’s texts. 61 chapter two The Rights of the Stranger Kant’s “Bond of Hospitality” In their own country, they [the Germans] are more hospitable to strangers than any other nation. —Anthropology (234) J 02_rights 3/1/07 12:09 Page 61 Whether it be the androcentric Kantian feast, the imagined Eurocentric community , or the theatre of international cosmopolitanism, Kant’s scenes of hospitality equally remind us of the subject’s responsibilities to the others who dwell both within and without the house of the self. i Eating, Tasting, Hosting: Toward a Philosophy of the Dinner Table The issue of the subject’s relation to itself provides the climax of the first of the Anthropology’s two parts,“On the Art of Knowing the Interior as well as the Exterior of Man.”As a way to prepare for that climax as well as to firmly situate the issue of self-relatedness within the sartorial rhetoric of hospitality and eating, Kant poses a curious question concerning the origin of the metaphor of taste:“How might it have happened that the modern languages particularly have chosen to name the aesthetic faculty of judgment with an expression (gustus, sapor) which merely refers to a certain sense-organ (the inside of the mouth), and that the discrimination as well as the choice of palatable things is determined by it?” (145). Despite its ancillary position in the text, the question plays a significant role in establishing the conditions for one of the text’s most elaborate and (for Kant) most pleasurable sketches of enlightened anthropological life, that of the cosmopolitan dinner party. In answer to the question why transcendental matters of taste are linguistically similar to those of an empirical or sensuous kind, Kant happily answers: “There is no situation in which sensibility and understanding, united in enjoyment, can be as long continued and as often repeated with satisfaction as a good meal in good company”(145). For Kant, taste is a faculty of “social judgment”[gesellschaftliche beurteilung] that manifests itself most admirably in the ability of a host to make an “acceptable selection” of dishes for his guests (143, 145). The last of Kant’s works to be published in his lifetime, the Anthropology presumes that matters of taste are metaphorically tied to the tongue because the tasting of food, seasoned with a disciplinary mixture of table etiquette, provides the optimal conditions for that partly sensuous, partly ethical, partly aesthetic feeling of “civilized bliss” (186). Promising pleasures that ground the faculty of aesthetic judgment, the dinner table confidently reclaims its position in the Anthropology as the privileged site for the tasteful advancement of sociality. If “eating together at the same table” is to be regarded as evidence of the “bond of hospitality” (188), then Kant’s representation of the “tastefully arranged dinner” (190), with all its various inclusions and exclusions, offers itself...