The HBS hosts invite Michael Naas to make himself at home on the podcast.
There are two popular ideas about hospitality that seem to be at odds with one another. The first is an understanding of a bygone era in which our ancestors were frequently forced–- through battles, famines, the search for water, etc.–- to move frequently and, for many of them, regularly. Under such conditions, the virtue of welcoming a guest was prized among many other virtues. “Tomorrow I might need this hospitality,” leads one to provide it to the one from elsewhere, to the stranger or the traveler.
The second emerges with the rise of the nation-state. Each country has a right to its “territorial integrity” and therefore to decide who is let in and who is not. At the rise of the nation-state, many thinkers of the “law of nations” saw that hospitality was necessary because otherwise nation-states could not co-exist, or not peacefully.
There also seems to be a personal or individual and even corporate relation to hospitality. Hotels are in the “hospitality industry,” and people are praised for being “great hosts.” We say things like, “make yourself at home,” or “welcome,” meaning “no matter how hard your journey, you have come to a place where you will be well.”
And yet, we want to “build that wall!” or prevent those who are fleeing violence or climate disasters from coming into “our” country. Hospitality is a dicey business. So, in this episode, we are talking with Michael Naas (Professor of Philosophy, DePaul University) about the complicated question of hospitality.
In this episode, we discuss the following thinkers/ideas/texts/etc:
- Jacques Derrida, Hospitalite, Volume 1 and Volume 2
- Émile Benveniste, Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society
- Kant’s concept of “regulative ideal”
- Fracisco de Vitoria and his text De Indis
- Étienne Balibar on “cosmopolitics.” For an English language engagement, see Emily Apter’s post
- Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus
- Pierre Klossowski, Pierre my Neighbor
- The bibical story of Lot and his daughters in Genesis 19: 1–38
- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
- Francisco de Vitoria, On the American Indians
- Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
- The life of Dolly (the cloned sheep)
- Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning
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