Abstract

The problem of hospitality is coextensive with the development of Western civilization, occupying an essential place in virtually every religion and defining the most elementary social relations. But it also expresses a particular tension. Etymologically, the host is the "master," the one who "eminently personifies" identity: not only his own identity, but that of the group in whose name he acts. But as an accidental encounter with what can be neither foreseen nor legislated, hospitality also insists upon the primacy of immanent relations over identity. The ethics of hospitality is thus in conflict with the "laws of hospitality" that for so long dominated Western civilization, a heritage I identify with a trajectory extending from Pauline Christianity to Augustine to secular and political incarnations of hospitality, especially since the Enlightenment. Whereas these laws presuppose a positive representation of identity and a formalizable law regulating interpersonal relations, I argue that the ethics of hospitality represents the challenge of sustaining relation as "impossible," without any sign or principle to regulate its immanence. My analysis of hospitality as an exemplary "ethics of the impossible" is grounded in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, as well as in an analysis of the affinities between contemporary French theories of immanence and Judaism. ;I focus my analysis on an aspect of hospitality that its institutional forms have tended to eclipse: the role of the hostess. Precisely because the hostess is excluded from many versions of hospitality , I argue that her marginal position offers a unique perspective from which to interrogate the stakes of identity and ethics in these models. The hostess attests to the presence of something improper within the host's personal property, a foreign presence internal to his "eminent personification" of identity. I argue that the hostess's function embodies what Jacques Lacan calls "extimacy," the uncanny agency of that part of the subject that is irreducible to its symbolic designation. I explore these questions through readings of the Bible, Augustine's City of God, Immanuel Kant's "To Perpetual Peace," Pierre Klossowski's Les lois de l'hospitalite, and Jacques Lacan's Encore and Television