were seeing arriving in their immediate neighbourhood, coming across their mountains, onto their coasts, into their streets. As a result, it has become possible – and by no means uncommon – to join forces and criticise states from a standpoint of hospitality, at a societal, community-based or micro-local level. This politicization of hospitality is, as we shall see, an alternative way of defining the ‘politics’ of hospitality and of understanding the contemporary meaning of a practice at once ancient and constantly transforming.
The entire history of hospitality demonstrates that, through a gradual process, the responsibility – on a family, community, or local level – for the duties of hospitality has been distanced from society and instead delegated, and at the same time diluted, within the functions of the state. That responsibility has been replaced by the rights of asylum seekers or refugees. Subsequently these rights have themselves ended up being diluted in the politics of control over borders, territories and movement and are now so far removed from any general principle of hospitality that they have become virtually unrecognisable. This is what lies behind the ‘resurgence’ of hospitality that, in what might be described as a complete reversal of direction, goes from politics to society and from the latter to the private, domestic world.
So how do we go about rethinking hospitality in this new context? In order to grasp both what has been lost and what is now emerging, to understand the meaning of actions carried out in the name of hospitality associated with solidarity and politics, it is important to understand hospitality, in its current form, against the background of how it has long been portrayed by history and anthropology. We need to begin with a critical examination of the notion of ‘unconditional hospitality’ advocated notably by Jacques Derrida in the mid-1990s. Not that I fail to acknowledge the scale and the power of what, in the context of public debates, this strong injunction (‘unconditional welcome’) represents, but the conditions in which this ‘unconditional’ law is formulated and the impact it has, both on the host societies and on those to whom welcome is extended, need clarification.
Even though hospitality implies provisionally giving up some share of what by rights belongs to the host for the benefit of the guest (space, time, money, goods), we will need to identify the limits, both social and political, of this voluntary and unbalanced relationship, particularly when it is offered on an individual or local scale. What are these limits? Is it possible, desirable, and enough to make the stranger my guest in a world that is theoretically open and globalised but that, where human rights are concerned, remains closely tied to the national context? What impact can such a principle have in the light of the crisis faced by states confronted with contemporary migrations? A shift of focus from the standpoint of a local resident, citizen of a given national territory, who is offering welcome towards that of the individual who arrives, remains for a time, then stays or moves on – will lead us into a philosophical domain that is already rich, albeit still poor from a political point of view: that of cosmopolitan life.
Finally, a consideration of hospitality within a global context will logically take us to the central role occupied today by the ‘stranger’ – the one who becomes the guest within the relationship established by hospitality, the one who disappears as that absolute other, nameless, unreal and dehumanised (an alien) in the geopolitics of contemporary crises, or the one who arrives at my door today or tomorrow and who embodies the most ordinary, widespread and universal condition of the contemporary world. We will need therefore to rethink together the three principles of mobility (the outsider), of otherness (the stranger) and of belonging (the foreigner) in order to reflect on the stranger who is in all of us, to a greater or lesser degree; and, by doing so, we will place ourselves in a better position to understand our proximity to the radical, absolute and dehumanised stranger (alien) who is embodied in the other, but who, in a different historical context, could just as easily be myself.
The stranger who arrives at my door is the one who is there now, in my street, outside my house, the one I cannot leave to die of hunger or of cold without intervening in some way.
The stranger who arrives at my door is also a reference to this condition, increasingly widespread throughout the world, which means that we live in more than one society, in more than one culture, and which requires us to think differently about societies, cultures and each person’s place within the world.
A final word before embarking on this journey, whose purpose is to explore and link theories and fields, philosophy and anthropology. Hospitality is an agreeable subject, and one on which a consensus is generally reached. For me, there are two reasons for this. The first is that we feel better about ourselves when we are able to see ourselves as welcoming and generous. The second is that hospitality calls on concepts of integration and focuses on an exchange of gift and counter-gift, of relationships and shared experiences. It is therefore a concept worth thinking about, yet one that it is difficult to put into practice. It is ‘elusive’, wrote René Schérer in 1993, in a text as erudite as it is flamboyant and indispensable to any consideration of hospitality; it ‘slips from our grasp as soon as we try to restrict it to a single form, to capture it in an unequivocal sense. It is private and public, present and absent, welcoming and hypocritical; it takes many different forms and often appears precisely where it is least expected’.3 For a more accurate portrayal, it should therefore be described in more concrete terms, whereupon it would inevitably transpire to be less beautiful, less kind, less consensual perhaps. But a discussion of the practice and politics that go under the name of hospitality might well lead us to implement concepts and conceptions of a better life for everyone, a peaceful life, and a life that is more egalitarian on the world scale. That would already take hospitality to another level.
Notes
1 1 J.-L. Nancy, ‘The Intruder’, in J.-L. Nancy, Corpus. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008, pp. 161–2.
2 2 W. Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. New York: Zone Books, 2010.
3 3 R. Schérer, Zeus hospitalier: Éloge de l’hospitalité. Paris: La Table Ronde, 2005, p. 19.
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