The Hostess: Hospitality, Femininity, and the Expropriation of Identity (review)

Reading Tracy McNulty's The Hostess might lead one to believe that a kind of crisis of hospitality has occupied a central position within the Western cultural and intellectual imaginary for thousands of years—and that this crisis continues to profoundly effect narratives of identity, systems of belief, political and social structures, and sustained ethical inquiry. If this compelling claim is to be accepted, one might then be struck by the apparent audacity of a book which attempts to contribute something almost entirely new to the study of hospitality. What, after all, can a return to this question hope to contribute to a path of ethical inquiry already well-worn by thinkers no less accomplished than Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger, and Emmanuel Lévinas? McNulty suggests in her brief sketch of these thinkers' various philosophical confrontations that "every ethics is fundamentally an ethics of hospitality" (xv), that almost any critical interrogation of selfhood, property, and intersubjective relations has in some way responded to the challenge posed by the injunction to hospitality. What, then, have these commentaries variously forgotten, excluded, ignored or misunderstood? What, in the discourse of hospitality, has been left out in the cold?

McNulty's response to this provocation is no less startling for its seeming simplicity: each of these meditations on hospitality—on the home and on homeliness, on the openness of the self to the other, on the threat of dispossession posed by the guest—has failed to adequately account for the feminine. The hostess, according to McNulty, occupies a constitutive place within the selfhood of the host, a place in which the host is non-identical to himself, wherein his mastery and autonomy are necessarily compromised. The hostess is thus she who maintains the host's openness to alterity; her presence is the necessary precondition for the hospitable ethical relation. The intimacy with which the hostess is tied to the host—the master of the home—is essential to this formulation, since it is precisely the strangeness within, this "presence of something improper within the host's personal property," that establishes the structural inevitability of the foreign within the self and that therefore demands hospitality (xxviii).

It is important to bear in mind that "the feminine" and female agency cannot be conflated with female subjectivity—a charge leveled here against Lévinas—although McNulty does suggest that the two cannot simply be delinked within a historical or literary analysis of the role of the feminine in the hospitality relation. Instead, McNulty designates the feminine as that which exceeds the subject's symbolic existence—that which Jacques Lacan calls "extimacy," the uncanny foreignness within the subject, his non-identity to himself, which threatens his sovereign existence.

In order to argue that this historical, philosophical and psychical exclusion of the feminine is constitutive of the hospitality relation, McNulty turns to a set of seemingly disparate texts, drawing each of them together under the banner of a common onto-theological tradition. Her first chapter concerns the history of the Israelites and performs a kind of genealogy of the specific conditions under which the institutionalization of hospitality, its juridical codification, forecloses the radical openness to the unexpected and the unknown that characterized the nation's initial relation to the divine. McNulty's brilliant reading of the biblical foundations of Judaism privileges the incredulous laughter that escapes from Sarah once she hears from an unknown (sacred?) guest that she and Abraham are to have a son. This laughter establishes a distance between Abraham and the divine in that the disbelief it betrays—a skepticism which emerges not from Abraham himself, but from the hostess whom he possesses—bears witness to the guest's unrecognizability and thus also to God's unknowability. McNulty thus echoes Lévinas in her isolation of respect for the guest's opacity, strangeness, and non-domesticability as the precondition for an ethics of hospitality. However, she demonstrates that, within the Judeo-Christian tradition, this injunction to non-knowledge...