The Conditions of Hospitality: Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics on the Threshold of the Possible

Notes

185 Notes Introduction: “Taking Place”—Conditional/Unconditional Hospitality Thomas Claviez 1. For a very informed critical analysis of the mutual influence of Levinas and Derrida, especially as regards the concept of hospitality, cf., among others, Still, Derrida and Hospitality. 2. For a closer analysis of the connection between the polis and Aristotle’s ethics, cf. Claviez, Aesthetics & Ethics, 53–111. 3. That Irigaray’s notion of reciprocity is based upon not only a gendered, but also a biological distinction between the sexes, is also a point made by Still, Derrida and Hospitality, 133–35. 4. For further discussion of the French emigration laws, cf. Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism , 16–17. 5. On this, cf. Claviez, “Democracy: À Dieu, à Venir, or au Revoir?” 108–11. 6. On the history of this projection, cf. Claviez, “What Is a European?” 7. If anything, conviviality as “practice interrupting the norm” should alert us to the fact that, contrary to Levinas’s and Derrida’s radical hospitality, the “hospitality industry” that has developed around what Craig Calhoun (2002) has so aptly termed “frequent-flyer cosmopolitanism,” characterized by its increasing homogeneity , is designed to protect us from any otherness/Otherness we might encounter , giving us the illusion of “being at home” wherever we are. Which begs the question why we leave home in the first place . . . 8. There is a fine irony in the fact that, if Hobbes’s metaphor holds, we are all wolves to each other—which implies that we are basically the same; wolves usually do not attack each other. Moreover, the treaty that he presumes would help 186 ■ Notes to pages 8–36 overcome this “state of nature” is highly unstable: Who would trust a wolf signing such a treaty? And what is worse: With such a treaty, the contingency of wolf-like human nature is not only locked out, it is encapsulated inside society as well. One could, however, argue that Hobbes’s formulation “homo homini lupus” indicates a difference between wolves and man. That, however, then begs the question what “man” in a Hobbesian context can still mean. Hospitality—Under Compassion and Violence Anne Dufourmantelle 1. “Autrui qui se révèle précisément—et de par son altérité—non point dans un choc négateur du moi mais comme le phénomène originel de la douceur.” Levinas, Totalité et Infini, 161. Transcending Transcendence, or: Transcendifferances: Limping Toward a Radical Concept of Hospitality Thomas Claviez 1. For a compact assessment of this debate, cf. Mouffe, Deconstruction and Pragmatism. 2. Cf. Rorty, “Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth,” 13. 3. Cf. Claviez, Aesthetics & Ethics, 31–35. 4. Cf. Llewelyn, “Am I Obsessed by Bobby?” 236. 5. And it is in this instance, when Irigaray (2008a 2, 15) reconnects the two transcendences with an “is,” that she comes dangerously close to essentialize “man” and “woman” into the one “universal dialectics that supersedes all others,” as when she claims that “one difference at once appears as universal: sexual, or better, sexuate , difference,” or urges us to “take charge of what woman really is and what is proper to her.” Such an approach reduces the potentially infinite number of transcendences to two that structure all the others. 6. Cf. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 129–31. 7. Cf. Žižek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters,” 134–89. What defines monsters , if anything, is that they are “improper” and thus “incalculable” in the many senses of the term. 8. This is Cheah’s rather Machiavellian conclusion, as I read it; cf. Cheah, Inhuman Conditions, 178. 9. Cf. Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, 29. 10. Cf. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 68. 11. It seems, at least, to enrich our Bildung to read Kafka. 12. Cf. Žižek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters,” 137–39; Butler, Kritik der ethischen Gewalt, 58–61. This concept of exposure, however, forms, if slightly modified, the basis for Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of an alternative community based not on the sameness ensured by the nation or culture, but by the shared exposure to otherness. Cf. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 25–29. 13. Cf. Claviez, Aesthetics & Ethics, 31–35 and 202–18. Notes to pages 37–65 ■ 187 14. I assume that, from a Lacanian perspective à la Žižek, the “Parliament of Things” that Latour outlines and opts for at the end of We Have Never Been Modern cannot but constitute...