Skip to main content

Conflicting hospitalities, infinite responsibility and the colonial stance

Few months back when I started getting hooked on the idea of hospitality and the project of an infinite hospitality as a stance against that of glorifying what one is (and being in general), I also into thinking about colonization. I was under the spell of a Nick Land's piece where he addresses the issue of the philosophy of colonization that emerged from Kant's take on the outer world and the very idea of a transcendental distinction. Colonization is the opposite of hospitality: it is the imposition of self instead of the opening of spaces in oneself for interruption. To be sure, the opposite of colonization is multiple because the demands for hospitality are infinite - in fact, it is always a cosmic struggle that one between hospitality (the broken self) and colonization (the expanding self). The choice for hospitality is a negative stance: a stance where no affirmation is made, no gesture of affirmation takes place. It is the negativity of availability. To be sure, the amount of availability that a being can afford is limited - as room for hospitality is always limited because one needs space to host. One cannot be pure hospitability - as nothingness is prey of being in an entanglement that began to surface in Plato's parricide. Hospitality is a necessary impossibility but also the room for conflict - different stances (nations, households, persons, parts of a person) get different demands and respond different to appeals of hospitality. The necessary impossibility is what makes it a denial, a negation: yes, the Mexicas were open to Cortez. They got destroyed, but they were open - and hospitable That is explored in my macehuales (anarcheological) fable in Being Up For Grabs.

The conflicting hospitalities are very much in evidence today with Trump's immigration polices and the resistance that has followed(federal state vs sanctuary cities, government vs universities, national institutions vs international bodies funded by nations, etc). It is not a matter of scale of hospitality - it a matter of different instances, different kinds of "chez soi", to use Derrida's phrase, that can host. Hospitality, as colonialism, starts out with a home (or a self, or a being). One moves towards affirming it and expanding it, making it go further; the other is based on letting it break, not on resigning, but on availability - on the other. Hospitality to the other opens a negative ethic, neither one of refusing to be nor one of refusing to perpetuate being, but one where negation is openness, negation is availability. The negativity is the negativity of the interruption. It is not a refusal or an elimination, it is a fracture - the negation provided by contingency.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hunky, Gunky and Junky - all Funky Metaphysics

Been reading Bohn's recent papers on the possibility of junky worlds (and therefore of hunky worlds as hunky worlds are those that are gunky and junky - quite funky, as I said in the other post). He cites Whitehead (process philosophy tends to go hunky) but also Leibniz in his company - he wouldn't take up gunk as he believed in monads but would accept junky worlds (where everything that exists is a part of something). Bohn quotes Leibniz in On Nature Itself «For, although there are atoms of substance, namely monads, which lack parts, there are no atoms of bulk, that is, atoms of the least possible extension, nor are there any ultimate elements, since a continuum cannot be composed out of points. In just the same way, there is nothing greatest in bulk nor infinite in extension, even if there is always something bigger than anything else, though there is a being greatest in the intensity of its perfection, that is, a being infinite in power.» And New Essays: ... for there is nev...
1 comment
Read more

Memory assemblages

My talk here at Burque last winter I want to start by thanking you all and acknowledging the department of philosophy, the University of New Mexico and this land, as a visitor coming from the south of the border and from the land of many Macroje peoples who themselves live in a way that is constantly informed by memory, immortality and their ancestors, I strive to learn more about the Tiwas, the Sandia peoples and other indigenous communities of the area. I keep finding myself trying to find their marks around – and they seem quite well hidden. For reasons to do with this very talk, I welcome the gesture of directing our thoughts to the land where we are; both as an indication of our situated character and as an archive of the past which carries a proliferation of promises for the future. In this talk, I will try to elaborate and recommend the idea of memory assemblage, a central notion in my current project around specters and addition. I begin by saying that I ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The underground of concepts: my talk at the Marxism and the Pittsburgh School Conference

In few minutes I'll be presenting this talk in the Marxism and the Pittsburgh School conference in the UCL. I can still change the text but this is how it looks like now. The underground of concepts: McDowell on the productivity of Anschauungen Hilan Bensusan 1. Jean-François Lyotard diagnosed the idea that concepts do the productive work of thinking as a deception. It is not through a dynamics of concepts that conclusions are reached and it is not with the decisive intervention of them that conflicts between alternatives resolved. Lyotard compares the pretense that concepts think with the mystification that capital works. He argues that “what works is not the concept, […] the concept is [like] capital which pretends to work, but which [only] determines the conditions of labour, delimits the outsides and insides, the authorized and the prohibited” (Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, p. 13). This diagnosis, frequently lost in the middle of an ampler argumentation around t...
Post a Comment
Read more