The Self Who Meets the Other: Deconstructing the “Well-Intentioned” Researcher Through an Ethic of Hospitality

This chapter will study hospitality to refugees and migrants from a somewhat unusual perspective. Its title hints at its peculiar approach: The Ethics of Mutual Hospitality, with an emphasis on mutual. It considers the migrant not only as the guest but also as the host, the receiver as well as the giver, the welcomed as well as the welcomer. Without this mutuality, hospitality risks being seen as a burden imposed on the natives or a patronizing act of charity, and migration as an opportunity for freeloading and a threat to the natives’ national security, economic prosperity, and cultural integrity. This chapter begins by expounding the biblical concept and practice of hospitality in the Hebrew Scriptures and especially in the life of Jesus. Next, this chapter examines the contemporary secular ethics of hospitality. This chapter follows with an exposition of the Christian ethics of hospitality. This chapter concludes by exploring how migrants can act not only as guests but also as hosts in the society in which they settle and in the church with which they form the Body of Christ.

Though Muslim-anarchists are active participants within “newest social movements” (NSMs) in settler-colonial societies as the US/Canada, as well as transnationally, little has been written on their maturing as a critical mass, or their ostracization within predominantly white anarchist scenes in North America. Anarcha-Islam, an example of ‘non-Western anarchism,’ fills this gap by re-imagining how the Holy Qurʾān and the Sunnah through the aḥadīth — the Prophetic practice and oral tradition — could be used to flesh out the theology, politics, and philosophy of an Islamic anarchism. I explore the possibilities of a new transnational politics grounded in an ethics of disagreement, friendship, and hospitality between these traditions. I suggest uṣūl al-dhiyafa and uṣūl al-ikhtilaf (a politics of friendship and an ethics of hospitality as well as an ethics of disagreements) in facilitating an appreciation of the similarities that bring these traditions together, while also valuing the differences that drive them apart.

This essay explores nature of Derrida's longstanding interest in relation between Levinasian ethics and Kantian moral and political philosophy. As early as 1964, in his very first work devoted to Levinas, Derrida turns his mind to this relation, expressing regret that systematic and patient confrontation had yet been organized by Levinas Kant in particular.1 Despite this lack, Derrida wants to demarcate early Levinasian ethics as at once profoundly faithful to Kant (for 'Respect is applied only to persons' Practical Reason) and implicitly anti-Kantian, lacking the formal element of universality, without pure order of law.2 Without answering his question in this early stage, Derrida asks, one hand, how it is that Levinasian ethics manages to escape Kantian underwriting morality and politics, and, other hand, in what respect Levinas's particularist ethics, insofar as it is presented as humanism, remains close to that of Kant's. Focusing Derrida's A Word of Welcome in Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas (1996),3 I will maintain that Derrida's analysis is motivated by more fundamental question, namely, nature of relation between ethics and politics. For Derrida, where Levinasian ethics appears as unconditional hospitality, Kantian politics offers conditional hospitality within boundaries of law. Hence, Derrida brings Levinas to Kant to explore ethics-politics relation by asking whether, in Levinas's ethics of hospitality might be discovered a legitimating foundation . . . able to found law and politics, within society, nation, State or Nation-State,4 that is, kind of conditional hospitality he sees in Kant. Derrida provides two responses. Immediately, he says no: one cannot deduce from Levinasian ethics, law or politics in some determined situation today. There is no relation of founding and founded between an ethics or first philosophy of hospitality and law or politics of hospitality.5 The remainder of his essay comprises his second response. Although one cannot deduce law or politics from ethics, there is something we can say about passage. First, derivation of politics or law from ethics is absolutely necessary. Ethics itself requires law. Second, derivation is irreversible: passage is from ethics to politics and not vice versa. Further, derivation is conditional. If politics is obligated by Levinas's ethical relation, law should be made on basis of an analysis that is each time unique.6 This means that we are required to think law and politics otherwise7 than way in which Kant thinks law and politics where morality and justice are equated with universality of law. Finally, where, for Levinas, there is no universality of law in Kantian cosmopolitical sense, there is law that Derrida wants to say holds universally, namely, that required law be irreversibly conditional upon ethical relation.8 This essay will examine each of these points in detail. Section one will explain in what sense law cannot be deduced from ethics, by detailing Derrida's reading of how it is that Levinasian ethics opposes formal deduction of Kantian politics from morality. Section two will explain what Derrida thinks we can say of ethical-political relation, and why, in finally arguing for universality of law's conditionally derivative nature, Derrida needs to leave Levinas who, rather than emphasizing universality of law's hold, provides determinate content to ethical-political, thematizing imperative as particular demand of Judaic humanism, universal only insofar as non-Jews affirm Jewish particularism. Following this structure, this essay will elucidate not only Derrida's answer to question of ethical-political via Levinas and Kant, but also his critical stance in regard to both.9,10 Derrida's First Response: Politics Cannot be Deduced from Ethics Derrida How Levinasian Ethics Cannot Found Politics Contained in Derrida's reading of Levinasian ethics are four propositions: (1) Ethical uprightness, and what Levinas calls freedom, is suffering that self experiences for suffering of Other in face-to-face relation. …

This book proposes a transnational feminist approach to Italian screen studies, by focusing on screen narratives that center female experiences of migration from the last twenty years. Progressive discourses and images of hospitality and welcome permeate the Italian cinema of migration. Though these discourses aim toward an ethic of unconditional hospitality, as theorized by Jacques Derrida, they come often short in the face of the perceived threats to national identity, class status, or hierarchies of desire, which migrant characters pose to Italian-born protagonists. As postcolonial, feminist, and queer critics have argued, hospitality can thus reinforce power hierarchies and binaries. The book focuses particularly on the gendered dimension of hospitality, and specifically on its connection to female sexuality, the maternal, and domestic labour. Each chapter offers a case study of one specifically gendered aspect of hospitality, through a theoretically informed close reading of a cluster of films. The book closes with a consideration of first- and second-generation migrant directors, wh push the borders of Italian national cinema and expand the Italian film tradition in transnational and global directions, thereby exploring, representing, and constructing new ways of being Italian today. They move beyond the paradigm of hospitality—they are no longer guests but claim ownership of their Italian home, on screen as on the streets of an Italy that can increasingly be only understood within a transnational framework. The ethics of hospitality that has informed the work of Italian filmmakers has given way to a more “anarchic,” creative, and hopeful framework.

This paper is informed by a one-year research project which looked at supervisory practices and student experiences in the context of fully online Masters programmes. In these programmes, students are often based in different country locations to their dissertation supervisors, and some may never visit the university campus. The research project examined supervisory practices and processes across four online programmes in the social sciences and medical education, including workshops with supervisors, and explored the Masters dissertation experiences of eighteen graduates who had studied on one of the four selected postgraduate programmes taught fully online from the University of Edinburgh. In this paper, we focus on the recurrent theme of ‘connection and disconnection’ which emerged from our analysis of interviews with recent dissertation students. This theme is considered in relation to student accounts of positive experiences of support and continuity in supervisory relationships, juxtaposed with reports of disconnection and isolation during the dissertation process; experiences which were often accepted by graduates as an inevitable part of working on an independent research project. Building on Ruitenberg's (2011) work on 'an ethic of hospitality' (situated by Ruitenberg as an alternative to the ‘ethics of autonomy, virtue and care’ (p.28) in education), we explore these experiences within the theoretical framework of 'hospitality at a distance'. We propose that ‘hospitality at a distance’ is a useful framework in the context of distance education supervision, where home and host, the ‘at-home’, might be contested, and, we suggest in this paper, where we might need to rethink what it is to, ‘leave space for those students and those ideas that may arrive’ (Ruitenberg 2011 p.33) from beyond the campus. We also suggest that achieving ‘success’ in dissertations at a distance may involve accepting the instability of relations between student and supervisor, that are marked not only by power dynamics, expectations, and performances of student and teacher identities (as all supervisory relationships are), but also by the varied and shifting conceptions of home, welcome, and ‘belonging’ that accompany the distanced encounter.

By way of a discussion of the deliberately hard case of humanitarian intervention, this article considers the merits of an alternative cosmopolitan ethics to that of liberal cosmopolitanism, one which founds its universalism on an ethics of hospitality rather than the rights of man. Jacques Derrida describes the ethics of hospitality as defined by an unconditional welcome which nonetheless must become conditional in order to function. This leads to a profound paradox — an ‘undecidability’ — in the practice of the ethics of hospitality, the implications of which need to be better understood if the ambition of ‘another cosmopolitanism’ is to be realised. Interrogating the ethics of hospitality and the undecidability to which it gives rise in relation to humanitarian intervention, it is argued that responsibilities to others, which sometimes imply intervention, must always be kept in tension with openness to the coming of the Other, which limits intervention. Far from being blind or paralysing action, such ‘bounded undecidability’, it is suggested, actually defines the site of responsible, just decisions in humanitarian intervention.

Early childhood education is an institutional introduction of children to the world, making it essential for policymakers, educators and society to find the best way to provide such an introduction. Following a new policy in Saudi Arabia, daycare centres have been renamed ‘hospitality centres’, bringing a set of duties and rights rooted deep in the ethics of hospitality. However, empirical research on nursery provision is generally lacking in Saudi Arabia. Therefore, this study examined the experiences of children and caregivers in two children's hospitality centres in the capital city of Riyadh. Through in‐depth, semi‐structured interviews and field observations, the authors observed and listened to the experiences of educators and children in two of the new hospitality centres. Open and focused coding of the interviews and structured observations helped to identify the way the ethics of hospitality manifested itself in the daily experiences of the caregivers/hosts and the children/guests. The results demonstrated the complexity of the situations in which the ethics of hospitality encountered reality.

The contours of Emmanuel Levinas' notion of ethical subjectivity gesture towards a radical alterity that lies beyond the cognitive spaces of the Cartesian 'intentional self'. The radical intervention of Levinas and Derrida within the climate of poststructuralist and postmodernist thinking signal a significant departure from the Enlightenment project of 'humanism' that was deeply imbued within what constituted a 'return' to the fashioning of the anthropocentric sovereign 'self'. The Levinasian post-humanist ethics of 'hospitality' gesture towards a kernel of radical alterity, messianicity and an impossible act of 'waiting'. The chapter would take up Samuel Beckett's seminal text, Waiting for Godot and attempt to read it in the light of ethicality and radical alterity vis-a-vis the theoretical contours of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida's thinking on the ethics of hospitality and messianicity. Godot as the radical 'other' resists co-option within the normative registers of 'Symbolic' language and the cognitive 'intentional self'. Vladimir and Estragon's endless waiting for the transcendental 'Godot' becomes an ethical act as it marks a subjective movement towards a differential space of 'un-becoming' that is akin to the Levinasian notion of the gift of 'pure hospitality'. The chapter would consequently attempt to understand how this ontological departure from the ipseity of the egological 'self' towards a radical and differential 'other' marks Beckett's notion of the 'post-human' whose ethical moorings differ significantly from the other contemporary literary practitioners of postmodernism and poststructuralism. The chapter would conclude by attempting to locate Beckett's text within the Blanchotnian aesthetics of negation: one that evokes the un-doing of the teleological spaces of the letter/litter of literature and retroactively opens up a messianic kernel of 'be-ing' and 'be-coming' which lay outside the confines of normative literary hermeneutics.

This article integrates family therapy in contemporary child and adolescent mental health services as an evidence‐based practice. An integrative practice model is proposed where contextual approaches like systemic and narrative therapy complement and enrich individual problem‐focused models such as biological psychiatry and cognitive therapy. This is based on an ethic of hospitality towards all therapy discourses and the following best practice guideline: ‘To make optimum space for a systemic and narrative understanding contributes to evidence‐based practice in a contemporary mental health service.’ After discussing some dilemmas of integrative practice, I illustrate the therapeutic process by a detailed example of integrative family therapy with a depressed suicidal adolescent.

Bringing together poststructuralist ethical theory with late Victorian debates about the morality of literature, this book reconsiders the ways in which novels engender an ethical orientation or response in their readers, explaining how the intersections of nation, family, and form in the late realist English novel produce a new ethics of hospitality. Hollander reads texts that both portray and enact a unique ethical orientation of welcoming the other, a narrative hospitality that combines the Victorians’ commitment to engaging with the real world with a more modern awareness of difference and the limits of knowledge. While classic nineteenth-century realism rests on a sympathy-based model of moral relations, novels by authors such as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Olive Schreiner present instead an ethical recognition of the distance between self and other. Opening themselves to the other in their very structure and narrative form, the visited texts both represent and theorize the ethics of hospitality, anticipating twentieth-century philosophy’s recognition of the limits of sympathy. As colonial conflicts, nationalist anxiety, and the intensification of the "woman question" became dominant cultural concerns in the 1870s and 80s, the problem of self and other, known and unknown, began to saturate and define the representation of home in the English novel. This book argues that in the wake of an erosion of confidence in the ability to understand that which is unlike the self, a moral code founded on sympathy gave way to an ethics of hospitality, in which the concept of home shifts to acknowledge the permeability and vulnerability of not only domestic but also national spaces. Concluding with Virginia Woolf’s reexamination of the novel’s potential to educate the reader in negotiating relations of alterity in a more fully modernist moment, Hollanders suggest that the late Victorian novel embodies a unique and previously unrecognized ethical mode between Victorian realism and a post-World- War-I ethics of modernist form.

Derridean hospitality is seen to undergird ethical teacher–student interactions. However, hospitality is marked by three aporias that signal incommensurable and irreducible ways of being and responding that need to be held together in tension without eventual synthesis. Due to the sociopolitical materiality of race and the phenomenological difference that constitutes racialized bodies, educators of color in interaction with white students are called to live the aporetic tensions that characterize hospitality in distinctive ways that are not currently emphasized in the discourse on the educator’s responsibility as it is informed by an ethic of hospitality. The asymmetrical nature of hospitality is reconfigured through the terms of eros and hospitality’s link to education aimed at social justice is posited to be stronger than is currently suggested in the educational theory literature.

In this paper, I argue for the impossible possibility of an ethical dwelling with technology. In arguing for an ethical comportment in our dealing with technology, I am not only arguing for the consideration of the ethical implications of technology (which we already do) but also, and more importantly, for an ethics of technological artefacts qua technology. Thus, I attempt to argue for a decentering (or rather overcoming) of anthropocentric ethics, urging us to move beyond any centre, whatever it may be—anthropological, biological, etc. I argue that if we take ethics seriously we must admit that our measure cannot be that of man. To develop the argument, I use an episode in Star Trek where the fate of the highly sophisticated android Commander Data is to be decided. I show how the moral reasoning about Data remains anthropocentric but hints to other possibilities. I proceed to use the work of Derrida and Levinas (with some help from Heidegger) to suggest a possible way to think (and do) an ethos beyond traditional ethics—an ethics of hospitality in which we dwell in a community of those that have nothing in common.

The problem of the relation between ethics and politics in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas is, above all, the problem of a singular justice: can there be an abstract principle or law that does justice to the absolute singularity of the other who faces me? Levinas has often suggested that, left to itself, politics becomes tyranny insofar as it is an impersonal justice which judges according to universal rules, without regard for the singularity of this other. Justice, he argues, is able to retain a meaning--that is, to remain just-only where it is oriented to and by the ethical relationship, only where it is checked and criticized starting from the ethical relation to a face.' But is such an ethically informed politics possible if "ethics" indicates a relation to transcendent alterity, or to unmediated singularity, and "politics" refers to a relation under the law, necessarily mediated, abstract, and universal? Can there be an ethical politics, or do the terms of this relation exclude one another with a rigor and systematicity whose logic would be unbreachable? In Adieu a Emmanuel Levinas,2 Jacques Derrida extends his recent reflection on the political (undertaken in such works as Of Spirit, Specters of Marx, and Politics of Friendship) through a consideration of the problem of ethics and politics in Levinas's thought. The volume is composed of two essays: the first, titled simply "Adieu," was delivered at Levinas's funeral in December of 1995; the second, "A Word of Welcome," was the opening address one year later at a conference in homage to Levinas held at the Sorbonne. In this latter address, Derrida proposes a re-reading of Levinas's ethics as a meditation on "hospitality" and "the welcome," and takes as his guiding concern the relation between an "ethics of hospitality" and a "law or a politics of hospitality" (Adieu 45). As is well-known, Levinas's thought devotes far less attention to the problem of the political than it does to the question of the meaning of the ethical. While a redescription and reinterpretation of the ethical relationship as a relation to absolute alterity is undeniably central to Levinas's two major works, comparatively little is said in these same texts about the political relationper se, or about the central themes and questions of political theory. It is often asked, in consequence, whether Levinas's ethics can serve as the ground for politics, and what sorts of determinate political institutions and systems would be consistent with or derivable from his description of the relation to the Other. The originality of Derrida's manner of posing the question of the relation of ethics to politics consists, first of all, in abandoning this canonical form of the question and the figure of a "legitimating foundation" on which it depends (Adieu 45). Derrida writes, Let us assume, concesso non dato, that there is no assured passage, following the order of a foundation, following the hierarchy of founding and founded, of principial originarity and derivation, between an ethics or a first philosophy of hospitality, on the one hand, and a law or politics of hospitality on the other. Let us assume that one cannot deduce from Levinas's ethical discourse on hospitality a law and a politics. (Adieu 45-46) The idea here is not simply to dismiss the possibility of grounding politics in ethics; nor is it to claim that Levinas's rethinking of the ethical, in particular, cannot serve as the ground for a determinate politics or political theory. Indeed, Derrida admits that the question of such a foundation in relation to Levinas's thought is "surely serious, difficult, and necessary" (Adieu 45). However, he also argues that in this canonical form, the question is overdetermined, since it occludes any understanding of the relationship between politics and ethics in terms other than those of a foundation. Derrida's suspension of the question of a foundation is effectively an attempt to see the question of the relation of ethics to politics as itself "suspensive" (Adieu 45), that is, as permitting no resolution that would establish the primacy of one term over the other. …

Richard Powers’ (2009) Generosity delves into the pursuit of the elusive “happiness gene” and its associated bioethical dilemmas. The narrative centres on Thassadit, an Algerian refugee in the USA, whose profound happiness contrasts with her traumatic past in post-colonial Algeria. This analysis argues that Thassa is not recognized as an individual but is instead defined by preconceived notions of refugee identity and becomes an object of scrutiny for scientists and media grappling with the paradox of post-colonial trauma and happiness. Employing a critical post-colonial lens, the study explores the portrayal of the “stranger” and associated stereotypes, the roles of the colonial and scientific gazes, and finally, the construction of the refugee identity in relation to Derrida’s ethics of hospitality. It examines identity construction through narratives of labelling, fixity, and belonging, exposing the intertwined neocolonial gaze, biased scientific discourse, and media sensationalism as oppressive forces that mutually reinforce orientalist and objectifying practices.

With the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, teaching online became a norm for universities in Canada. Besides the challenges of teaching topics that may be impossible to be taught online, a major issue that the mandatory physical distancing brought is the relationality between teachers and students. In order to investigate how educators were making sense of such changes, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 education professors across Canada. In light of Derrida’s and Ruitenberg’s ethic of hospitality, this paper explores how the abrupt shift to online education unveiled the nature and challenges of hospitable education, especially in the online context. The implications of online instruction to professors’ relationality, however, are also instrumental in illuminating the complexities and ambiguities of a teacher’s responsibility even in what could be considered the “normal circumstances” of face-to-face instruction.