The Agency of the Foreigner

Our discussion of the stranger and hospitality has been primarily focused on the agency of the host. And with good reason, as it is from the position of host that the ethics of encountering a strange other takes place—for the most part. However, it seems to me that the discourse of hospitality demands a more robust formulation, especially when we take into consideration the events of Hurricane Katrina, the Tsunami that hit East Asia, and most recently the earthquake in Haiti. While Derrida’s discussion of hospitality extends from the idea of a Messianism, that is to say, the indeterminable arrival of the absolute Other, it seems in light of these aforementioned events that Derrida has overlooked the possibility that the Other’s arrival—that which calls forth this ethical situation—may in fact require us to assume the agency of the foreigner. In other words, the mode of hospitality may be flipped and require that a person leave the comforts of the home he or she has sovereignty over and gift him or herself to the strange other without any qualifications. The other may reject the gift or may take advantage of it, but just as with the host, one must accept this vulnerability if they are to give just heed to the other’s strangeness. I am not proposing a reformulation of the stranger in its many manifestations. As we have decided, strangeness is always already imminent in a number of different persons. Rather, I am suggesting that we must also consider the positive ethical implications that come along with the agency of a foreigner. It is he or she that provides the host the opportunity to resign his or her sovereignty, thus allowing the ethical experience of an absolute welcome to occur—‘if there is such a thing’. Moreover, it is an ethical gesture in its own right to offer oneself over to the other when he or she needs your help—or perhaps even when you yourself need help. Therefore, it would seem the offering of the foreigner to the host is an indispensable component of any account of hospitality and to consider this alternative mode of agency is to fully appreciate the reciprocal agency that hospitality requires.

Disappearances

Well it's Valentines day, and my baby left me. She just went to do errands, but all the same, it got me thinking about disappearances.

Thinking about Baudrillard's piece in conjunction with Oedipus, there seems to be a structural kinship between these narratives of disappearance. As Derrida sketches out for us, Oedipus doesn't allow Antigone to know his final resting place. It is a secret, one which prevents her mourning from taking its natural course. She mourns for her inability to mourn, an indefinite mourning, almost a ghostly mourning; to borrow J.C. Mellencamp's formulation, a mourning which goes on long after the thrill of dying is gone. Without any localized point of grief to organize his rites of departure, Oedipus continues to haunt Antigone, haunt Thebes, haunt the text. He is, I want to say, everywhere because he is nowhere.


Oedipus is not unlike the Twin Towers in this respect. After the events of 9/11, what Baudrillard would call one of many deaths of the Real, several things happened:
1) The fall of the towers led to the radical multiplication of their image-- in newscasts, in homemade memorials, in magazines. In conversation, too, I suppose. I remember I was in my sophomore year high school math class when the first plane hit, and to be honest, I didn't really know what the World Trade Center was. I had probably seen the Twin Towers, but I hadn't really thought about them until they were on fire. And like some sort of amoeba, the image of the towers was reproduced at an alarming rate upon their destruction, their division. Most illustratively, kids in my high school (kids in lots of high schools) began to fold $20 bills in such a way that, somehow, an image of the burning towers would appear (see attached picture). The image of the Towers, then, did not only spread across space, but across time as well. As we discussed in class, prefigurations of 9/11 are everywhere, in movies like Fight Club, which Baudrillard uses as evidence of the inevitability of this event to end all events. As seen in the image of the $20 bill, the system's downfall was inscribed within itself. I see this a bit differently, though. Has the system died? Not at all. The World Trade Center was destroyed, it has disappeared, but the hegemony of capital was not affected. Capital didn't die, it was resurrected without having to die, now charged with the energy of the real, sanctified as a sort of deathless martyr. So I disagree with Baudrillard here (but I also feel like I am being more Baudrillardian than he is, so maybe I am just reading him wrong): The system did not portend its own death so much as its resurrection. Less like a snake shedding its skin than a skin shedding its snake, the system built its own destruction within itself, and carried on after its death as if it were part of the plan--the most important part of the plan. In this sense, the symbolic behavior of capital has mirrored exactly the religious designs of the terrorists: The system anticipated its own demise, but also penned the terms of its resurrection. In other words, the symbolic freight of death itself was utilized by both parties in question. With the disappearance of two buildings in New York, capital's symbolic capital has been extended, renewed, reborn, baptized, galvanized, and sanctified. Where before 9/11 it was just business, now it's sacred, now it's religion. As Baudrillard wrote, "I set out to produce a Requiem, but it was also, in a way, a Te Deum" (p. 52, n4).

2) Following the radical proliferation the Twin Towers was their erasure. Films released shortly after 9/11 cut scenes that featured shots of the Towers. Spider-man was the most famous example. More poignantly, the Towers were erased from movies and television shows films before 9/11. (You can read a little bit more about that here: http://www.entertainmentnutz.com/tv/tvbites/destroying_a_memory/ , and for a more neutral take, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_audiovisual_entertainment_affected_by_the_September_11_attacks). This is, in a way, a second disappearance, an erasure of the past. Maybe ironically (and maybe depending on whether you are a Marxist philosopher or a Fortune 500 CEO) the idea was that images of the Twin Towers would be upsetting, and thus these films and shows would lose dollars. A third disappearance, we could say, is the continued absence of a memorial or monument or even new set of towers at 'Ground Zero". The combined effect of these three difference sorts of disappearances is a sort of rapture: the transcendence of capital. Like Oedipus, the symbolic power of capital is, by virtue of its disappearances, its deathless death, everywhere felt. Like Antigone, we cannot so much mourn and move on as mourn our inability to mourn, which has taken the form of the interminable 'War on Terror."

Zach Smith