The Stranger as My Guest. Michel Agier
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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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