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where there is such a gift and how it exceeds the gift “as such.” Through close reading of stories of twists and surprise in fantasy literature and medieval romance, such as
the Arabian Nights, and many others, I hope to shed light on the problem of
gift-giving and hospitality.
III. Chapters Arrangement
In my reading of the works by Derrida and Levinas, I suggest three controversial characteristics attributed to hospitality and gift-giving which are helpful in facilitating our theoretical discussion: being out of calculation, being out of subjectivity, and the deconstruction of chronology and logic. I will elaborate on these characteristics in chapter two: Background Theory. Relevant arguments from Marcel Mauss, Claude Levi-Strauss, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Martin Heidegger, and Slavoj Zizek will also be briefly reviewed. After the theoretical clarification, chapter III to chapter V explore three different literary sources to see how the givers give more than what they can give in the forms of gifts or hospitality, and how gift-giving and hospitality transform, with both redemptive and destructive potential, the originally assumed routes of lives.
Chapter three examines the secrets of ethics by relating to the analysis of humans and the unseeable God in terms of hospitality and gift-giving. My context of
discussions is from the Biblical stories of Abraham receiving God and sacrificing Isaac, and Lot exchanging daughters for foreigners. I draw on literary criticism from Derrida, especially from his opening chapter on Czech philosopher Patocka about a narration included in The Gift of Death. Derrida’s interpretation of Abraham
sacrificing Isaac in that book shows an intriguing difference from what is written in the Qur’an. In view of this difference, I plan to explore what Derrida has said and what may develop his argument further had he presented his readers with the different sculptures. Simply speaking, I suggest that the difference in the two scriptures on the
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event of Abraham and his beloved son posits the questions of “enclosure” and
“perfection” in literature in general. The Bible’s resistance to enclosure and perfection on the narration of Abraham sacrificing Isaac alludes to Derrida’s argument that ethical justification in any choice of fulfilling responsibility is actually never justified because no one can respond to the call or even the love of another without sacrificing the other other(s). He writes, “I am responsible to anyone (that is to say, to any other) only by failing in my responsibility to all the others, to the ethical or political
generality” (Derrida 2008: 71). That statement finds echoes in stories of Abraham and Lot when they are challenged with a seeming discrepancy between human laws and God’s command.
Chapter IV focuses on hospitality and gift-giving in inter-human relations. It highlights Levinas’s estranged ethical concern and the Derridian term “a pure
impossible gift” (as argued in Given Time: Counterfeit Money) in my interpretation of Shakespeare’s great tragedy King Lear. I suggest that by providing gifts for his three daughters in the starting scene in the form of sharing (giving away) his kingdom and power, King Lear (accidentally, unconsciously) gives himself a gift—a
new-born—even if this comes in the form of disappointment and disaster. I employ Bataille’s theory of transgression and Levinas’s ideas of subjectivity and existence in the world to interpret this famous work of literature. Insanity, as shown in the famous scene of wondering in the heath, implies going beyond the mundane, common, safe world, and that also recalls the unavoidable route inscribed in the "price" or "value" of genuine gift-giving and hospitality.
Chapter V concerns the idea of giving what one does not have in gift-giving and hospitality. The text concerned is the Arabian Nights,30 which abounds with reference
30 I will use the Arabian Nights hereafter for the Arabian Nights Entertainment or, One
Thousand and One Nights; or Alf Layla wa Layla. The value of rereading The Nights is unquestionable:
many scholars tend to bring the Semitic-east and the west into dialogue in terms of ideological impact
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to hospitality and gift-giving: the wonderful against the mundane as well as the imaginative against the prosaically and reductively rational. I select for discussion the famous starting scene in which the beautiful and erudite Shahrazad decides to tell stories to/for the much anguished king . I also discuss one of the most popular stories in The Nights, namely, “the Fisherman and the Jinni in the Jar” to reexamine the possibility of gift-giving in the hope of shedding new light on the problem in traditional module of giver-gift-receiver.
IV. Expectation
To discuss “the other” by describing an aporia which resists theoretical
disciplines is perhaps already to betray the idea of other and aporia. As an academic, I am trained to present an argument with textual expositions, so that it is objective on its own terms as well as by the standards of impartial judgment. Nonetheless, thorny questions remain: How am I to describe the process of a subject approaching an
“other” that is no longer its (always be careful of the possessive case) other in hospitality and gift-giving? Can I show the obliqueness in personal relations among my characters under discussion: Abraham, Lot, King Lear, Shahrazad, the Demon, or the Jinni? Will I be able to show what goes against the grain of the imperatives in common hospitality and gift-giving? There are no easy answers. I could but humbly expect to show how the other is approached in hospitality via face-to-face with the absolute other in literature. My theoretical support comes from Derrida’s argument that “there is no culture that is not also a culture of hospitality” (Derrida 2002: 361) because “hospitality is the deconstruction of the at-home” (364), and that it is the process of a subject approaching “an other than itself that is no longer its other” (362).
on literary heritage. I do not intend to solve problems regarding different versions of The Nights. The different wording of the narration does not affect my following discussion because basically there are of stable and reliable frames.
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The Derridian phrase “an other than itself that is no longer its other,” I believe, is the best annotation for the absolute other—i.e., an otherness that cannot be related within a possessive case; otherwise the other is not remote or alienated enough to be literally
“other.”31 The Derridian arguments also lead us to Levinas’s claim that even if we can ascribe the other into relationship at all, “here is an obliqueness that goes higher than straight forwardness” in relations involving you, I, and he because this relation is asymmetry and un-in-ferable (Levinas 1998a: 178). Levinas has more to say on the third pronoun “he,” and will explain it later in the chapter exclusively on theory.
In addition, I want to show how the impossible is lived via giving an impossible gift. The idea of an impossible gift comes from Derrida, who says that "a gift is something you do without knowing what you do, without knowing who gives the gift, who receives the gift, and so on"(Derrida 1999: 60). This “do without knowing”
pertains to a phenomenological impossibility of gift-giving. Put differently, we may say that full formalization in gift-giving is not the impossible; rather, it is the experience of the impossible, and it remains in a sort of intermediary stage.32 Therefore, to certain extent, this phenomenological impossibility is suspended. In some literary works, the phenomenological impossibility of gift-giving actually makes the face-to-face with the absolute other possible, given that gift-giving disturbs the immobile nothingness in a one-person isolation which generates possibilities or alterity in the daily lives of people. Last but not least, my speculation is that though he never formally wrote on gifts, Levinas would have stated firmly that there would be serious and genuine gifts had he been enquired.33
31 If interested, cross-refer Levinas’s words on the absolute other at The Provocation of Levinas 88, 103, 109, 111, 144.
32 I modify Spivak’s comments on Derrida on Justice and Gift in “Responsibility,” Boundary 2, Vol. 21, No. 3. (Autumn, 1994), 22.
33 In his comments on his good friend Levinas, Maurice Blanchot notes that gift-giving means an alterity in Levinas’s context which suggests “the transcendence of another person, the infinite relation of the one person to another [that] obligates beyond any obligation” when it manifests a
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“detachment, a disinterestedness which is suffered, patient responsibility [for the other] that endures all the way to ‘substitution,’ ‘one for the other’” (Blanchot, Writing of the Disaster 109). Levinas’s contends that the imperative of welcoming the other (l’autri) and being responsible for the approach of the neighbor is something “beyond a simple exchange of signs,” and interestingly, he terms it the “gift”
(Levinas 1998a: 14).
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26
BACKROUND THEORY
I. Ethics of the Third in Hospitality and Gift-Giving
Gift-giving and hospitality are as old as history. People give gifts or offer
hospitality as a symbolic action of love or an amiable pretext of practical exchange. In the context of Levinas’s theory, “love” is not an assumption and an investment in the
“I”; it is rather Love without Eros. In other words, it is the sacredness of human relationships through which God may pass (Levinas 1998a: 68; Levinas 1987b:
Richard A. Cohen, “Translator’s Introduction” 24).1 Whether it is inspired by
affection or by careful calculation, gift-giving and hospitality open up an arena of the invisible, absent other. This conclusion is reached after a comparison between Jacques Derrida and Immanuel Levinas regarding their thoughts on hospitality and gift-giving.
Therefore, I argue that the ethical concern of Derrida and Levinas, which I term
“ethics of the third,” is indispensable to the understanding of their seemingly elusive argument on hospitality and gift-giving. The conception of “the third” challenges any convenient relationship between the first and second person voices. As Derrida observes in his reading of Levinas, the situation of the third person and of justice underlines our analysis of the question of existence, subjectivity, foreigner, host, giver, receiver, etc. (Derrida 2000: 5). Pointing out a third element in any comprehending I-thou relationship is critical (Levinas 1987b: 94), especially in the social activities of gift-giving and hospitality. The third element is critical because genuine hospitality and gift-giving activate imagination of an ethics other than sacrifice or exchange in order to eschew the pitfall of self-centered exchange or self-sacrificed altruism which
1 It has also been pointed that “love is the culmination of Levinas’s discourse with the Other.”
Steven Gans, “Levinas and Pontalis,” The Provocation of Levinas 88.
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is still appropriated in a self-centered subjectivity. By ushering in the “ethics of the third” implied in the amiable social activity of gift-giving or hospitality, we admit simultaneously the impasse in human relations and recognize its necessity to be realized in human communions. If human beings’ subjectivity is activated in their functions for each other, hospitality and gift-giving reveal a desire of intimacy which oscillates between a repudiating heterogeneity and an all-absorbing homogeneity.2 It is this desire for the impossibility in a commensurate relationship that Derrida wants to pursue, and it is this desire we want to illustrate via the angle of “the third” element in this paper. Genuine gifts or hospitality cannot be given unless it is for the sake of an invisible, the third, “the absolute other.” Insofar as the generosity is for the third, the absolute other, the fundamental gap between the ideals of genuine gift-giving and hospitality and the vagaries of practicing them can be sutured. The third must not be present, must not be visible, and must not converse with us, directly or plainly, with an all-comprehensible language, because that language would be “our” language. The third reveals the possibility of love in gift-giving and hospitality by exposing the illusion of reciprocity and, at the same time, allows for a genuine relationship outside the limits of contracts, laws, and yet it is still willing to give, to offer. Bearing within itself the trauma of existential impasse, gift-giving and hospitality, on the one hand, witness the aporia accompanying them, and on the other hand, make the impossible possible as long as they do not foster a visible, seeable, calculated, and possible relationship. It is this knowing the impossible yet refusing to endorse it makes genuine gift-giving and hospitality what they are.
I use God, or the “absolute other,” to import the illusiveness of what we are undertaking in the discussion. In the following discussion I will assess “the third”
2 The subject can never do enough, because doing enough would require that the subject knows the other’s needs as one knows one’s own, and it is precisely this reduction of the other to the same that Levinas would avoid.
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with the conception of God as developed in Levinas’s prominent article: “God and Philosophy.”3 Sometimes, although the term does not appear in the literature
discussed, it is the other selves who are actually involved even if they are not pointed to directly in any comprehensive I-Thou correspondence. For Levinas, the other selves remind the reader of an invisible face of the third, i.e., the face of God. God is an idea that needs definition, and for the time being we will take its ontological meaning tentatively. Levinas proclaims that the absolute other is beyond any direct approaching or indicating system (1986: 354), and he also implies that the absolute other is ethically experienceable via relations with the third because of love. The dialectics between love, sacredness, and other possible momentums will be articulated in details as we develop our discussion.
II. Literature Review A. Hospitality
1. Derrida: absolute hospitality. Hospitality, as commonly expected, has no concern for “the third” because common hospitality is an issue of unwritten contract:
a contract between guest and host, between foreigner and citizen. Not satisfied with the common hospitality of unwritten regulation, Derrida develops his contention for the aporia of hospitality first with the foreigner’s question—that is, the dialectics between the inside and the outside—and then with the absolute other in his later argument made in 1997.4 In the core of these arguments, a consideration of the
genuineness is involved, which may be termed as the “radical,” the “pure,” or
sometimes the “absolute.” It connects “the impossibility of the possible” as well as“the possible of the impossible” (Derrida 2002: 386) with hospitality.
3 Collected in Levinas Of God Who Comes to Mind, 1998.
4 This critical quest starts as a process from his speech, Of Hospitality, 1996, (published in 2000), to the chapter entitled “Hostipitality.” in Acts of Religion, 1997, 2002.9n.
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Derrida contends that in many of Plato’s dialogues, it is often the foreigner who asks questions, to the extent of challenging the ruler’s legitimacy. The foreigner shakes up the authority of the paternal logos “as though the Foreigner had to begin by contesting the authority of the chief, the father, or the ‘master of the house’” (2000: 5).
Derrida’s argument on hospitality focuses on the possibility of questioning the authority and of imagining beyond the expected, rather than referring to any altruist concept. For Derrida, the question of the foreigner, as a question of hospitality, intertwines with the question of being (2000: 21).
In Derrida’s discussion of hospitality, there are two different laws involved. One is the unwritten agreement of common hospitality, the other is Immanuel Kant’s idea of the sublime and unlimitedness, also called the Great Law of Hospitality, which is to subvert all the contract-based laws of hospitality. The Great Law of Hospitality is to welcome all, to welcome the other, and it rejects the common laws of hospitality, for the former is a Law pointing to an Other unknown.5 Kant expands the cosmopolitan law to encompass universal hospitality without limit—such is the condition of
perpetual peace among all men (2001: 20). According to him, each man is in principle connected to another man when hospitality is performed or assumed. As Derrida points out, Kant has shifted stress of hospitality from the host’s right of residence to
the guest’s right of visitation:
We are speaking here, as in the previous articles, not of philanthropy, but of right; and in this sphere hospitality signifies the claim of a stranger entering foreign territory to be treated by its owner without hostility. The latter may send him away again, if this can be done without causing his death; but, so
5 See also Kantian sublime and Lyotard’s discussion of the sublime in The Analytic of the Sublime.
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long as he conducts himself peaceably, he must not be treated as an enemy.
It is not a right to be treated as a guest to which the stranger can lay
claim—a special friendly compact on his behalf would be required to make him for a given time an actual inmate—but he has a right of visitation. This right to present themselves to society belongs to all mankind in virtue of our common right of possession on the surface of the earth on which, as it is a globe, we cannot be infinitely scattered, and must in the end reconcile ourselves to existence side by side: at the same time, originally no one individual had more right than another to live in any one particular spot.
(Kant, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay, 1972. 137-38; Recited Derrida 2001: 21-22)
Kant’s argument contributes to shifting our attention to the right of the guest; that is, from the duty (devoir) of hospitality to the right (droit) to hospitality. Kant excluded hospitality as a right of residence; he limits it to the right of visitation (Derrida 2001:
21). Kant frames the problematic of hospitality more on the right of visitation (Besuchsrecht), rather than of residence (Gastrecht). Counting as progress at first sight, however, Derrida reveals the potential threat coming from a state sovereignty based on the law and the state police. For Derrida, there is an always possible perversion of the law of hospitality, which Kant seems to pledge unconditional, because obscure and difficult remain when this pledge depends on judging the public nature of the public space (22). All these questions undertaken become a dialectics between the master and the guest. As soon as a guest is granted a right of residence, the guest is taken a posit of the master, which will then start a new confrontation of his/her (unwelcomed) guest, the immigrant, the refugee, etc. Therefore, Kant’s ethical
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philosophy also raises suspicions that it is simply idealism.6
If it is only a traditionally judicial matter, hospitality is but a fixed provision waiting to be executed as if it is an obligation. In a nutshell, it is but a reciprocal covering—an action for the sake of “the same”: the host understands what he is ready to understand, and welcomes whom he is able to welcome. The host and the guest are so mutually acceptable and communicable that they cannot make the welcome
“genuine” and thus there is “general problematic of relationships between parasitism and hospitality” (Derrida 2000: 59). A contracted, conditional hospitality is no more than a kind of parasitism in human relationship. Therefore, referring to Kant but not satisfied with Kant, Derrida tries to elaborate on the Hospitality which performs and transforms more than the existing laws can allow and control. No one can forever stay at home. No one can forever be at home physically as well as ontologically—in
“genuine” and thus there is “general problematic of relationships between parasitism and hospitality” (Derrida 2000: 59). A contracted, conditional hospitality is no more than a kind of parasitism in human relationship. Therefore, referring to Kant but not satisfied with Kant, Derrida tries to elaborate on the Hospitality which performs and transforms more than the existing laws can allow and control. No one can forever stay at home. No one can forever be at home physically as well as ontologically—in