Читать книгу Radical Hospitality - Richard Kearney - Страница 13

In her book Hospitality in a Time of Terror: Strangers at the Gate (2018), Lindsay Balfour approaches the subject of immigrants from a cultural, rather than theological or economic perspective. She probes hospitality in a post-9/11 world, underlining the dialectic of hosts and guests in a variety of cultural productions, including film, literature, art, and public memorials—a point that will be explored in some detail in Part I of this volume. She asks: “What does the post-9/11 cultural archive suggest about ways we engage or disengage with in the lives of others, and how might these texts and artifacts bring us closer to an understanding of both the possibilities and the dangers of hospitality now?”¹⁸

In conversation with Edward Casey, Balfour opens with a moving description of “Strangers Gate” in Central Park, which is an entrance to the park commemorating and paying homage to the history of immigration in New York City.¹⁹ Unique to the United States—especially in cosmopolitan spaces like New York City or Los Angeles—is the fact that the “nonnative” status of its “citizens” is almost ubiquitous. What does it really mean to be a “native” in the United States? The United States is among the most heterogeneous countries in the world, comprising immigrants from every corner of the globe, a country founded by those fleeing various forms of persecution, ultimately in search of a better life, opportunity, and above all, freedom. It seems reasonable to suggest, along with Balfour, that in a strong sense almost all North Americans are “nonnatives”—a point one ought to remind oneself of in the wake of gated communities, advanced security systems, and conservative discourses demanding a bigger and better wall at the southern border. We currently live in an age marked by acts of violence and hate that are fueled by xenophobia—a phobia that frequently finds its roots in radical misunderstandings. These misunderstandings are often grounded in a lack of “conversation”—a point we hope to address in the present volume, suggesting conversation is the moment when hospitality in theory turns to hospitality in practice.

Balfour rightly claims that hospitality is anything but a uniform phenomenon: “hospitality has never been a stable, uncontested, or purely altruistic figure. What hospitality is is an intricate structure of ethics, violence, promise, threat, and impossibility that has been worked through, tested, and struggled over for millennia.”²⁰ Much like a “Platonic form,” hospitality is something that we all know, at least to some extent; but the moment we try to capture it, to delimit it, to define it, it falls through our finger tips—and we are left wrestling with the interplay between its unconditional and conditional manifestations. What we know perhaps even better than what hospitality is is what hospitality is not: closing borders, refusing to grant asylum to those fleeing genocide, and asking the vital questions: Am I really my brother’s keeper? Why is a stranger my problem? What do I owe strangers who finds their roots beyond my nation’s borders? The crucial point here, we argue in this volume, is that each and every one of us, at some time or another, has been both guest and host. Hospitality is built into the very fabric of who we are. Beginning with birth, we are hosted, nurtured, cared for, guested.

In the same vein, Krista Tippett conducted a revealing dialogue with Cuban American engineer and poet Richard Blanco, who, as an immigrant himself (coming to America from Cuba by way of Spain), has spent much time meditating on the meaning of place, home, exile, refuge, and belonging. When asked where he finds hope and joy in what many describe as an era of despair, closed doors, and hostility toward the stranger, he responds:

One of the most beautiful things that I see, and it happened first with the ban on Muslims and whatnot, that people, at least in my lifetime, for the first time, were standing up for something that didn’t affect them directly. That is a democracy.… We are stepping up and realizing that the quality of life, the virtue of this country, depends on every human being’s story, to a certain degree; that our happiness depends on other people’s happiness, and we’re moving from a space of dependence to realizing our interdependence.²¹

Existentially speaking, hospitality, grounded in this sense of interdependence—echoing recent discoveries in physics pointing toward collaboration rather than competition—is simply part of our constitution. And it often reveals itself in the face of radical injustice, such as in the Trump administration’s immigration ban in 2017. It is in such moments of despair that we cannot help but find ourselves drawn toward the other-as-oneself, pulled by a “fraternity” that is always and already the case. That is, drawn toward others who are in fact strangers, but are nonetheless worth speaking and fighting for. Daily images of such fraternity from around the world are a testimony to the intrinsic desire we have to host, protect, include, and be with others.

The dialogue ends with a reading from Blanco’s “Declaration of Interdependence,” which opens his book How to Love a Country. The end of the piece is worth quoting in full:

We hold these truths to be self-evident … We’re the cure for hatred caused by despair. We’re the good morning of a bus driver who remembers our name, the tattooed man who gives up his seat on the subway. We’re every door held open with a smile when we look into each other’s eyes the way we behold the moon. We’re the moon. We’re the promise of one people, one breath declaring to one another: I see you. I need you. I am you.²²

Although it might be true, as Blanco points out, that we are the cure for hatred caused by despair, we cannot deny that we are also the cause. And here again we return to the core debate between conditional and unconditional hospitality—and hospitality’s ostensible impossibility. The challenge is to find a middle way between a model of calculated exchange and a hyperbolic model of incalculable rupture. For hospitality to be hospitality, we need a special kind of “symmetrical asymmetry” where each person gives more than she receives and receives more than she gives—without why. A reciprocity of nonreciprocity between host and guest. Where host and guest become interchangeable without ever losing their inimitable, unique singularity. Hospitality does not occur in a market place where things are bought and sold in contractual negotiations of supply and demand, credit and debit, scarcity and surplus. Real hospitality occurs beyond the walls of economic calculation; it is not about who owes each other what but about what is beyond investment and debt.

This renders hospitality a rather frightening experience, at times, because one cannot always anticipate what is to come—among the most terrifying of possibilities being the emptying of the self before the solicitation of the other. But, as we hope to show below, with death often comes birth—to borrow Hannah Arendt’s term, natality—meaning that hospitality’s deconstruction of the self frequently entails a reconstruction of both the self and the other. Part II will probe why this process—the disruption of oneself by the other—is, psychologically speaking, so terrifying, and will attempt to unravel what precisely makes it appear so impossible, and in what sense that impossibility is nonetheless possible.

In kilter with Balfour’s timely study, this volume seeks to work through and beyond theoretical quandaries of deconstruction and rethink questions of the “stranger” in practice. This means engaging with hospitality through the arts and media more than ever in a “culture of fear” framed by the threat of anthropogenic climate change.²³ The question of ecological change is also one of hospitality. How do we host nonhuman others? How do we honor our role as guests on this earth, as shepherds and stewards of its endangered species—animal, mineral, and vegetal? This discussion is central to an environmental ethics of hospitality toward trees, rivers, ecosystems, and all sentient beings that now find themselves in increasing danger. As sea levels inevitably rise, those displaced from homes that have been swallowed by the oceans will simply have no place to go. This is to say that they will have no choice but to “knock on their neighbor’s door,” asking for food, water, and refuge. But what will it take to open the door?

Our ultimate aim in this volume is to apply text to action, that is, to translate philosophies of hospitality into some concrete examples drawn from our contemporary world, especially relative to issues of conflict resolution, cathartic commemoration, interconfessional dialogue, and, finally, classroom pedagogy regarding immigration, diversity, tolerance, and peace.