Romantic Hospitality and the Resistance to Accommodation (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Romantic Hospitality and the Resistance to Accommodation Ian Dennis Peter Melville. Romantic Hospitality and the Resistance to Accommodation. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier UP, 2007. 210 pp. $65.00. It would seem that everything about hospitality makes everyone involved uneasy. Not surprisingly, because the difference between hosts and guests, like all differences, is apparently predicated on, and risks falling back into, an indescribable violence. This would be enough, of course, but it surely also contributes to the general discomfiture that every aspect, feature, or term associated with the hospitable has a troubling tendency to undermine itself, to be its own opposite. If hospitality is also, as it were, hostility, it isn’t really what it is. Peter Melville makes this general claim with some insistence in his selective survey of writings on the subject by eminent Romantics: “The texts of Rousseau, Kant, Coleridge and [Mary] Shelley [End Page 173] theorize the failure of the hospitable relation from a suspicion that, after all is said and done, hospitality is itself structurally impossible” (12–13). This deconstructive approach picks up from Jacques Derrida’s late work on the topic of hospitality and is informed as well by Emmanuel Levinas, Tilottama Rajan, Paul de Man, Julia Kristeva, Walter Benjamin, and Jacques Lacan, among others. Melville asserts a “two-pronged thesis. The category of the Romantic stranger, or guest, points to ‘an internal difference that constitutes’ the host’s own self-dividedness. The scene of Romantic hospitality doubles as a scene of self-welcome.” But, on the second prong, this at the same time also unhelpful guest “unsettles” the host, “frustrating its reception of difference as self-difference” (9). (Melville as guest, host, other, or subject, seems at times to be a person but has a tendency to become an “it.”) The two prongs, in short, suffer the same fate as any other binary under this kind of scrutiny. Chapter 1 engages in “Unsettling Rousseau,” discussing Emile, the second Discourse on Inequality, and the late prose poem, Le Lévite d’Ephraïm. Melville plausibly claims that “the place of the guest-host relation in Rousseau’s work is as troubled—indeed, as unsettled—as was his own personal experience of hospitality” (24). This seems ultimately to be good. We learn, through Rousseau’s writings, that “if there is a violence necessary to the practice of welcoming the other, then hospitality becomes ethical precisely when we acknowledge its impossibility. It is then, and only then, when we can begin, without ending, to be responsible to and for the exclusions by which we proceed” (47). This is announced as one of the theses of the book and is indeed repeated in similar terms. Chapter 2 discusses Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View and Perpetual Peace, also late works. “If hospitality makes Rousseau uneasy, then the same could be said for Immanuel Kant” (61). And is “a kind of auto-deconstructive thread runs through” Kant’s scenes of hospitality, which mainly focus on dining, “insofar as each contains its own impossibility” (61). Kant in this respect resembles Derrida, for “at the heart” of the latter’s “inquiry lies an uncertainty as to what eating means. Does one consume a plant, a painting, or another person?” (65). The present review will have achieved little if it does not allow its readers to identify a fairly familiar critical method they will tend either to find productive or not. Let us not quibble with either predilection. But it might be observed that Melville at times seems to strain the technique, even by its founder’s standards: [End Page 174] “Men of taste” in the Anthropology “are not only interested in having a meal together but also in enjoying one another” (187). The main course of the good meal in good company is the company itself. The dinner party appears “only as a vehicle” for “social enjoyment,” says Kant, and as such is essentially anthropophagic or cannibalistic in nature (187). (67) The phrasing and page references here might lead one to wonder if Kant actually said something like this. “[E]ssentially ... cannibalistic?” Of course, he didn’t. Mary Gregor’s 1974 translation of this passage—Melville uses...