As If a Stranger at the Door: Hospitality and Tragic Form in Democratic Athens

This article reads Athenian tragedy within the discourse of hospitality to argue that tragedy functions as an institution of political theorizing. Onstage the drama of undecidability at the heart of hospitality plays out on foreign soil and at the threshold of identity and difference, enabling the Athenian audience to participate in the imaginative and ethical decision-making concerning its democratic identity that such aporia produces. The formal components of Athenian drama (skene, door, mimesis) make it possible to enact scenes of hospitality onstage while the political and ethical issues that hospitality represents give continued and substantial meaning to the form.