Читать книгу Radical Hospitality - Richard Kearney - Страница 10

Hospitality is a term often heard in today’s world but seldom addressed in the Western history of philosophy. While implicit in Levinas’s discussion of host and hostage and the overcoming of war in Totality and Infinity (1961), or again in some of Ricoeur’s later thoughts in On Translation (2003), the concept of hospitality per se never received a full philosophical treatment by these or other continental thinkers.⁵ In fact, the first real attempt to engage the subject philosophically in a single volume was, arguably, Jacques Derrida’s reflection on the subject, Of Hospitality (1997), a short essay that was less a sustained systematic argument than a summary transcription of two lectures delivered at L’École des Hautes Études in Paris in 1996. Derrida’s sortie into the subject—ranging liberally from Oedipus Rex to our postmodern cyber world—takes the form of an experimental commentary with his seminar interlocutor, Anne Dufourmantelle, and is marked by Derrida’s quintessentially quizzical style. It reads as fragmentary exchanges rather than a sustained analysis of the subject. And while Julia Kristeva’s Strangers to Ourselves (1988) offers rich psychoanalytic and literary resources for an understanding of the stranger, she rarely raises the question of hospitality head on. There is much about strangers as guests but little about the hosts needed to welcome them in the first place, especially in today’s inhospitable environment. And there is almost nothing on what it really means to be a host in practice.

But in addition to addressing the contemporary philosophy of hospitality in its own right, we also consider it important to frame our analysis in the context of recent discussions of related interest—namely (1) the phenomenology of the gift; (2) the theology of sacred economy; and (3) the postapocalyptic culture of welcome.