The Novel of Universal Peace

The Imagination Gone Visiting

If there is one thing the collected works of myth and scripture make perfectly clear, it is this: if a stranger comes to your door, you must offer him refuge, for gods have been known to arrive in tatters. Such hospitality to the outsider is, of course, a complicated wager. On the one hand, the innocent companionable gesture is seemingly compromised by the imminent rewards that attend the host who opens his home to divinity; on the other hand, every act of stranger-love chances the hostilities that are hospitality’s etymological brethren and constitutive burden. In other words, there is no hospitality without some measure of dispossession, and while the host might be amply compensated if the guest is indeed a god, there are no such assurances when the supplicant is but a stranger. This is not to say that all guests are rivals in the home—Penelope’s suitors on Odysseus’s doorstep—but it is to acknowledge that true hospitality must at once recognize and preserve the stranger’s difference, and therefore must knowingly hazard the uncanniness that follows from the home’s fateful reorganization.¹

But what of the modern secular world, where gods are reluctant to call upon us, and the hospitable act must be justifiable in itself? Is an unconditional hospitality possible, much less desirable? Can one truly await the arrival of what Derrida calls “the absolutely unfore-seeable stranger,” that interval without end, and not begin to feel the loss of security that home is supposed to represent? Is hospitality then an act of supererogation, exceeding not only what one is entitled to legally and owed morally, but what can be enforced by either state or citizen?²Arguably, the fate of modernity as an ethico-political project is measured in the treatment of the foreigner. The long history of colonial bad faith has certainly taught us to be wary of the visitor who claims to have indigenous interests at heart, even as that same history has, on its far side, produced the inconsolable refugee whose very future depends on the generosity of others. Or recall Rousseau’s myth of the originary lawgiver, that impartial outsider whose office “gives the republic its constitution” but who “has no place in its constitution” (Rousseau, 69).³Here even the notoriously xenophobic Rousseau imagined the constitutive role of the foreign-founder who, in being welcomed, gives form to the social order that needs him and excludes him in a single fateful gesture. Today, as we reckon with the fact that, as Pheng Cheah argues, “neither human rights nor cosmopolitan solidarities can escape from being entangled within the field of instrumentality,” we are witnessing a resurgent interest in the evolution of cosmopolitan norms and communitarian ethics, especially within post-Westphalian legal models that preserve, however tenuously, the sovereign space of cross-border encounters (2006, 8).⁴Central to any eighteenth-century vision of a cosmopolitan future is the assurance of universal amity, secured by both broad republican governance and new forms of social intimacy.

Roused by the Treaty of Basle between France and Prussia (1795) and mindful of mass political resettlement, Immanuel Kant posited “universal hospitality” as a necessary precondition of world citizenship and the historical engine of an enduring peace to come. However, this right of temporary sojourn is less a consequence of political exigency and more, it seems, a problem of finite math, or as Kant writes, “Since the earth is a globe, [‘man’] cannot disperse over an infinite area, but must necessarily tolerate one another’s company” (2003c, 106).⁵Here, the inescapable future encounter with all others requires every individual’s forbearance since, according to Kant, a single infringement of the law of hospitality has profound repercussions, for “the universal community . . . has developed to the point where a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere” (107–8). Insisting that the promise of universal peace is “not fantastic and overstrained,” Kant details how a purposive nature “produc[es] concord among men, even against their will and indeed by means of their very discord...