Can Hospitality Be Cosmopolitan?
摘要
As Europe’s cultural origins are seemingly contradicted by restrictive State policies toward non-Europeans and by the perception of a Europe turned fortress, hospitality risks becoming unintelligible. Historical hospitality’s oft-ritualized social practices contrast against unconditional hospitality, whose very existence is uncertain. This chapter leaves behind these models in order to read hospitality through the question of cosmopolitics. Through a comparative reading of Immanuel Kant and Jacques Derrida, this chapter analyzes political hospitality alongside its underlying conditions and the rights of others. It focuses on the newly imaginable rights and practices of hospitality when it comes to the “concrete other,” who is caught in corporeal or emotional identities, evokes the figure of the foreigner, unknown but made of flesh and blood, and who today is widely criminalized, invisibilized, assimilated to hostile fluxes, and relegated to their exclusion. This other-subject leads to a renunciation of a hospitality that would be reduced to community affiliation or national belonging.