Après Ulysse: vers une poétique de l’hospitalité en Méditerranée. Par André Benhaïm

Abstract

Through the trope of Odysseus’s Mediterranean travels, André Benhaïm’s erudite book delineates a poetics of hospitality tethered to the figure of the migrant, the ‘passant de la Méditerranée d’aujourd’hui’ (p. 7), an absolute stranger whose endless intrusion redraws the very boundaries of community. Thinking in the wake of The Odyssey (‘après Ulysse’, a phrase to be read both chronologically and spatially) raises the question of how to construe the space of the Mediterranean beyond the framework of return proffered by Homer’s ­Odyssey. Après Ulysse adopts a francophone intertextual approach, weaving together the study of Mediterranean literatures in French with the Proustian intertext and an assortment of francophone Caribbean and Algerian authors in a transcolonial gesture. One of the book’s strongest contributions lies in its substitution of a future-oriented paradigm of hospitality (the search for another, more welcoming home, which here materializes through movement across the Mediterranean) for one of nostalgic return. By recasting ­Odysseus as an undesirable intruder in his own land, the book blurs the dichotomy between insider and outsider, same and other. It recalibrates the experiences of time pertaining to the welcoming of the other; the act of carving out space for their irruptive existence. In this argument, hospitality is a horizon of thought infused with concurrent poetic, political, and ethical currents. In Benhaïm’s lyrical prose, the liminal space of the Mediterranean stands at the intersection of all three. As a mnesic space, the sea carries the echo of multiple histories of displacement that bred hospitality — in both its conditional and unbounded forms. Odysseus here symbolizes poetic invention and the power of parole rather than the nostos of return. Hospitality, for Benhaïm, lies in ‘l’usage créatif de la parole libérée, et l’écoute, la sensibilité au mot inattendu’ (p. 65). Sophisticated analyses delve into the multiple incarnations of this po-ethics of parole in works by Albert Cohen, Albert Camus, Assia Djebar, and Edmond Jabès, as well as ancient Greek philosophers. From this survey three tropes emerge, each designating one ‘énigme à recueillir’ (p. 45), a series of clues to piece together to complete the quest into the fluid meaning of this ‘poetics of hospitality’ — namely, the refuge, the passport as shorthand for mobility, and the anticipated destination (p. 96). What is left aside, in this volume with its primarily francophone focus, is a capacious and nuanced reading of the Mediterranean in terms of its polyglossia beyond the strictures of French imperial history. A consideration of the rich theoretical corpus dedicated to the Mediterranean as concept across languages and disciplines might have further highlighted the realities of Mediterranean mobility beyond the merely textual, in a move more closely attuned to the political dimension reclaimed in the book. Further, the disregard for recent Mediterranean-focused criticism in francophone studies results in a somewhat truncated perspective, especially in relation to Camus whose examination might well count among the book’s most consummate close readings. This dexterous monograph will nevertheless leave its mark for its subtle theorization of hospitality and the poignant engagement with fraternité reverberating through its pages.