The Novel of Universal Peace

Abstract

If there is one thing the collected works of myth and scripture make perfectly clear, it is this: if a stranger comes to your door, you must offer him refuge, for gods have been known to arrive in tatters. Such hospitality to the outsider is, of course, a complicated wager. On the one hand, the innocent companionable gesture is seemingly compromised by the imminent rewards that attend the host who opens his home to divinity; on the other hand, every act of stranger-love chances the hostilities that are hospitality’s etymological brethren and constitutive burden. In other words, there is no hospitality without some measure of dispossession, and while the host might be amply compensated if the guest is indeed a god, there are no such assurances when the supplicant is but a stranger. This is not to say that all guests are rivals in the home—Penelope’s suitors on Odysseus’s doorstep—but it is to acknowledge that true hospitality must at once recognize and preserve the stranger’s difference, and therefore must knowingly hazard the uncanniness that follows from the home’s fateful reorganization.1 But what of the modern secular world, where gods are reluctant to call upon us, and the hospitable act must be justiWable in itself? Is an unconditional hospitality possible, much less desirable? Can one truly await the arrival of what Derrida calls “the absolutely unforeseeable stranger,” that interval without end, and not begin to feel the loss of security that home is supposed to represent? Is hospitality then an act of supererogation, exceeding not only what one is entitled to legally and owed morally, but what can be enforced by either state or citizen?2 Arguably, the fate of modernity as an ethico-political project is measured in the treatment of the foreigner. The long history of colonial bad faith has certainly taught us to be wary of the visitor who