![]() ![]() ![]() This process of disincarnation takes the form of fierce linguistic, economic, and political processes of dehumanization, on both personal and state-orchestrated levels. Hospitality violently, albeit surreptitiously, transforms the guest into a ghost, not unlike Oedipus who, Derrida shows, “presents himself as a spectre” (654) in the last abode where he is to be secretly buried. Such is the case in the garden of evil in George Saunders’s “The Semplica-Girl Diaries” (2012), in which inanimate immigrants hanging on a line exemplify the cruel devitalization and “commodification of the Other” (Manzanas Calvo and Benito Sánchez 178). Developing Derrida’s concept of “hospitality, hostility, hostpitality” (45), Ana Manzanas Calvo and Jesús Benito Sánchez demonstrate that “hospitality can cannibalize the Other in a radical act of incorporation that apparently dissolves limits and demarcations” (84). In contemporary society, however, this ultimate gift of the self-whereby hospitality stands out as “more than human, always engaging the divine it is a god who is welcomed, a god bought by gifts, a mysterious Other” (Schérer 129)-is ruthlessly shattered. This is what leads Schérer to posit that “hospitality has and is an economy, in the full sense of the word, because it constantly reestablishes the production and circulation of a flux that would otherwise petrify and impoverish itself” (126). Hospitality was the ultimate gift, a gift that transcended the laws and materialized in the food or horses often bestowed upon the guest when he departed. Indeed, hospitality in the Middle Ages was compulsory as anyone who was sedentary was likely to turn into a pilgrim: vagrants and beggars who transgressed the social order always found a protective threshold and a right of passage in medieval society. In Claude Raffestin’s formulation, “hospitality is a right that warrants the transgression of limits without entailing violence” (166 qtd. ![]() ![]() As a result, the commutative essence of the relationship between host and guest-whereby, as René Schérer argues, the host “acknowledges, through and thanks to the figure of the guest, his own exilic self” (40)-is perpetually jeopardized. In welcoming the other, the host not only shares his home and power, but also entitles the guest (if only temporarily) to his own power as despot-etymologically, “the master of the house who lays down the laws of hospitality” (Derrida 149)-while reasserting his own domination. The foreigner shifts from the position of an endangered, alienated subject to one who is included within the protective folds of the polis and the home. Derived from hostis, the foreigner and potential enemy, the hospes or host welcomes the guest, implying an intricate relationship between receiver and received, insider and outsider, as well as a compensatory relation since both hospes and hostis derive from the Latin verb hostire: “to treat as equal,” “to compensate,” “to pay back” (Grassi 35). Hospitality is a complex, paradoxical concept whose etymology foregrounds an aporia. Re-Membering Hospitality in the MediterraneanĬonvened by Yasser Elhariry, Isabelle Keller-Privat, Edwige Tamalet Talbayev ![]()
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