Читать книгу Radical Hospitality - Richard Kearney - Страница 12

In a piece entitled “Humanity and Hospitality: An Approach to Theology in Times of Migration” (2018), René Dausner relates the continental debates on hospitality to concerns about immigration, power, and fear.⁹ His aim is to explore moral and religious contributions to the topic in light of Europe’s migration crisis. He rightly states: “Migration, that is to say the movement of people who have lost nearly everything except their bare life and who come to Europe in the hope of improvement, is one of the biggest ethical, political, and theological challenges of today.”¹⁰ Dausner frames his argument through the lens of recent protectionist practices in the upsurge of neonationalist movements in Europe, which, he argues, find their roots in the fear and scapegoating of the other. And this also applies to the United States, as evidenced by the populist influence of alt-right attitudes toward refugees and international trade, as well as an alarming disregard (under Trump) about climate change, among other global humanitarian crises.

Dausner rehearses the standard debate between “conditional” and “unconditional” hospitality, observing how for the former the host remains host and the guest remains guest. “The host remains the master of the house, the country, the nation, he controls the threshold, he controls the borders, and when he welcomes the guest he wants to keep the mastery.”¹¹ In other words, many hosts never fully relinquish “control” or “power” over the situation—cautiously keeping guests at a distance, despite letting them into their house. Kant’s observation about hospitality in his classic “Perpetual Peace” essay—canonical for all modern discussions of the topic—conforms to this cautious model (at least by Derrida’s account). Insofar as the guest behaves peaceably, the guest is granted the right to appear—that is, to visit; however, the guest is by no means granted the right to stay. This is to say that the rights of the guest end with the capacity to appear, but again, only if they behave peaceably. Thus, hospitality is conditioned by the disposition of the guest in the home of the host, contingent upon established house rules—a situation that obtains in the German state’s hosting of foreign workers (Gastarbeiter).

A crucial point here is that Kant’s rationale is by no means grounded in xenophobia, but guided by a quite practical sense of prudence: without a mutual recognition of the dignity of each other (the host included), the risk of pure hospitality is total impracticality, and therefore, by default, war. Kant’s account will be more thoroughly addressed in Part II, since there is perhaps more “unconditionality” in Kant’s position than meets the eye—especially when analyzed through the lens of moral psychology, and what type of disposition is involved in exercising the universal principle of right. To be “universal” is, generally speaking, to lack particular or partisan conditions.

Unconditional hospitality involves opening the door to the guest without question—even at the risk of the stranger “coming and destroying the place, initiating a revolution, stealing everything, or killing everyone” (Derrida).¹² This means that one’s door is actually open to whoever happens to enter, and with whatever motives they might have. It is marked by pure, radical openness. By Derrida’s account, unconditional hospitality is vital, because it serves as the condition for hospitality itself, for in order that hospitality exist, there has to be an absolute opening. It has to be unconditional and therefore impossible, that is, openly oriented toward the new, the unknown, the yet-to-come—what Derrida calls the “messianic.”¹³ We find here again the reasoning of the gift: hospitality of course being nothing other than the gift of one’s house, one’s bread, and perhaps above all, one’s self. But what, specifically, makes the messianic welcome impossible?

For Derrida, unconditional hospitality is marked by the transgression of all laws, rules, and grammars. It is—echoing Johannes de Silencio in Fear and Trembling—a teleological suspension of the “ethical,” that is, a relinquishing of the universal moral law—grounded in pure reason (Kant and Hegel)—for the sake of a higher end that somehow preserves the moral law in its execution. This paradox is not a cognizable contract or conversation, but rather a radical exposure. That is, an unconditional surrendering of oneself. Pure rupture. A blind leap. A form of faith. What Derrida and Caputo call “madness.”

Dausner ultimately follows Ricoeur in taking issue with the deconstructive model of pure hospitality, calling for another, more practicable understanding that does not forsake the law of hospitality itself: namely, “hermeneutical” or “linguistic” hospitality, that is, a type of hospitality rooted in conversation, exchange, negotiation—finding a common ground. This type of hospitality is not only possible but ethical. While conceding that hospitality always entails a risk, it seeks to protect certain occasions in which the host truly ought to say “no,” since this is both reasonable and responsible; and it requires the courage to discern (e.g., between violent invaders and needy refugees). These points will be fleshed out in both parts of this volume.

Dausner concludes by invoking Levinas’s account of ethics and the religious experience of the alterity of the other—understood by Levinas as the irruption of the impossible in the possible. And here he also cites the Greek counterpart to hospitality, philoxenia, which entails not only hospitality to strangers, but love of the strange: a love that is “understood as an imitation of God.” This in keeping with Matthew 25: “For I was hungry and you gave me food; I was thirsty and you gave me drink; I was a stranger and you took me in.… Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.” In hospitality, by this reading, we approach God (in the image of God, given by God)—paradoxically bridging the gap between the possible and the impossible.

In a series of analyses in his Action and Contemplation series (2019), Richard Rohr further explores the theological aspects of hospitality in relation to what he calls a “gift economy.” Paralleling the debates on gift, giving, and givenness in continental phenomenology, Rohr and fellow theologians apply the question of the gift to a discussion of a sacred economy of sufficiency and hospitality versus a capitalist economy of scarcity and competition. One of the virtues of such analyses is to provide a material contextuality regarding particular empirical goods that sometimes remain abstract, if not actually “bracketed,” in phenomenological studies.

A gift economy is one that challenges the dominant ideology of consumer capitalism. It promises a departure from free enterprise market systems based on competition, scarcity, and greed in favor of a countercultural economy based on social interaction. Such a postconsumer economy of the gift promotes a covenant that serves the common good. While a purely mercantile system violates neighborly relations by stratifying power relations according to money, self-interest, investment, entitlement, and surplus, the gift economy advocates a relationship to goods as gifts that circulate between interchangeable hosts and guests. This creates a social space where monetary exchange—where everything and everyone is treated as a “commodity”—becomes a process of reciprocal hospitality between citizens enjoying rights of equal opportunity and distribution. It opens a space where strangers become neighbors.

In such an alternative “sacred” economy, hospitality becomes a practical moral value operating with a chorus of collaborating agents—from food hubs and cooperatives to communal social enterprises, climate change movements, and health and education activism. Within the framework of such an ethic of hospitality, neighborliness ceases to be some nostalgic remnant of bygone days and becomes an indispensable value for human flourishing in the present and the future. It recognizes that the free market consumer ideology has produced a deep social disorder—dating back to the economic policies of “enclosure” (the privatizing of common land) and “capital” (the centralizing of wealth into the hands of the few while monetizing every human person as a “wage earner” with “use,” “exchange,” and “surplus” value). So where the market ideology commercializes everything at an impersonal national or global level, the gift economy proposes a countermove toward the restoration of “the commons”—a shared culture of reciprocity serving the common good, understood as common health, wealth, nourishment, education, and justice.¹⁴

While the hospitality ethic argues there is always enough for everyone—if properly distributed and circulated—the scarcity model claims there is never enough. The former sponsors an ethics of shared collaboration and contribution over an analytics of competition and calculation. The mindset of scarcity sees things as objects to be coveted and acquired rather than as gifts to be received and passed on in a circle of sufficiency. And sufficiency here does not mean a quantity or amount of anything but rather a sense that there is more than enough to go around, if justice be done. It is all a matter of existential set and setting: “When we live in the context of sufficiency, we find a natural freedom and integrity. We engage in life from a sense of our own wholeness rather than a desperate longing to be complete. We feel naturally called to share the resources that flow through our lives—our time, our money, our wisdom, our energy, at whatever level those resources flow—to serve our highest commitment.” From this comes the conviction that “sufficiency as a way of being offers us enormous personal freedom and possibility.”¹⁵

An economy of hospitality, in sum, is one that values abundance over affluence, gratuity over greed, compassion over unfettered consumption, goods over commodities. Rohr cites the following critique of free enterprise capitalism: “While it is good at generating wealth is it is not so good at spreading it around … the profit motif appeals to our acquisitive nature. It nourishes greed and can make us callous to the suffering of others.… Left to its own devices, free enterprise capitalism would ruin the environment and let people starve … (so) while it may be a remarkable engine for driving economic growth, an engine is not the same as a steering wheel.”¹⁶ The steering wheel, Richard Rohr and Arthur Simon agree, should be a gift economy based on public justice and affording priority to the principle of sufficiency over scarcity.

Ironically, one of the theological virtues of gift economies is not only to restore a positive incarnate “materiality” of giving and receiving, hosting and guesting, but also to confirm some of the most radical material findings of modern science. For contrary to a conventional scientific understanding of nature as competitive, more recent discoveries of astrophysics and microphysics reveal a powerful role for mutuality, synergy, coexistence, and cooperation. Survival of the fittest is being replaced with survival of the most hospitable!¹⁷ So what might first appear as a mere utopian ideal or messianic promise is in fact a view of things that consorts with the deepest workings of our physical universe. A gift economy may not be so “impossible” after all.