The Stranger as My Guest. Michel Agier
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be reabsorbed – would be an issue no longer – before he even crossed the threshold. To welcome a stranger, moreover, is necessarily to experience his intrusion. For the most part, we would rather not admit this […] This moral correctness presupposes that, upon receiving the stranger, we efface his strangeness at the threshold: it aims thereby not to have received him at all. But the stranger insists and intrudes. This fact is hard to receive and perhaps to conceive.1
The sense of intrusion that Nancy is trying to capture here emerges in the context of a highly complex heart transplant operation, followed by a raft of complications over a period of many years. The philosopher has drawn on this experience to produce a powerful work on identity and the stranger, on what is ours and what is different, on the inside and the outside that will be useful here (although any substantial analogies should be avoided). Let us see how this works.
The two concepts of guest and of stranger must not be confused if we wish to be able to describe, according to the anthropological tradition, what is meant by making the stranger a guest (‘[i]f he already has the right to enter and stay, if he is awaited and received, no part of him being unexpected or unwelcome’, then ‘he is not an intruder any more’). This also means that, for us, hospitality represents a test (‘[t]o welcome a stranger, moreover, is necessarily to experience his intrusion’). It is not a matter of behaving as though the stranger were not a stranger, so that ‘we efface his strangeness at the threshold’. It is, on the contrary, a matter of acknowledging, on the basis of the sense of intrusion experienced, the very political dimension of hospitality, which involved making the decision to offer the stranger a welcome. It is a solution to a potential conflict (hostility towards intrusion), but a temporary solution, which has a beginning and an end. For, ‘[i]f, once he is there, he remains a stranger, then for as long as this remains so […] his coming does not stop’, nor will it stop being ‘a disturbance, a trouble in the midst of intimacy’. We need therefore to step outside the space and time accorded to hospitality. Later, after many years – as Nancy tells us, speaking of the foreign body that was transplanted into his own and enabled him to live longer – the intruder ceases to be an intruder, but I myself have changed, I am both the same and another.
It is this combination of paradoxes, of tensions and ambiguities that is revealed by the gestures and the efforts made all over Europe, in the name of hospitality, in the face of what has been called ‘the migrant crisis’, which I identify as being, more fundamentally, a crisis of the nation states in response to the challenges posed by increased mobility.
From the year 2000 onwards, and especially since 2015, the majority of European countries have seen a divergence between national governments and some of their citizens on the subject of the welcome extended to migrants and refugees. On the one hand, governments have sought to demonstrate a certain protectiveness towards their citizens by portraying migrants as a threat to the security and identity of their countries, reviving a symbolic theme highlighted a few years ago by the American philosopher Wendy Brown2 – namely that of the strong (and masculine) state protecting the fragile (feminine) nation… Walls, expulsions, mass checks, a dissuasive police presence, all intended to reassure nervous inhabitants, and they were ready to give up some of their own freedom when confronted with the spectre of the dangerous stranger, who would thus be kept at a distance. In France in particular, the lack of enthusiasm or expertise demonstrated by government authorities in providing a dignified and peaceful welcome to migrants and refugees and the confusion provoked by the arrival of migrants to Paris, Ventimiglia or Calais – admittedly on a large, though by no means overwhelming or catastrophic scale – seem to have been both a response to, and a way of nurturing, a widely felt anxiety of the sort most clearly expressed by parties of the extreme right. In accordance with the supposed expectation of the population at large, there was a clear need to demonstrate all possible reticence and distrust towards the intruder, which meant not providing shelters, reassurance or food, all of which could have been made available, from a material and economic standpoint, without any special difficulty. And yet this same attitude provoked another section of the population to act in precisely the opposite manner. Some people felt deeply concerned by the state of the world and by the hostility displayed by their governments towards certain strangers (comments made by certain elites and images of neglect or of police violence). These people wanted to take action rather than remain indifferent, to show solidarity to the peoples or individuals in danger, the ones they 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