Hospitality: The Contact Point of Ambivalence between Hosts and Guests

In all acts of hospitality—entailing the mutually affirming roles of the host and the guest—there is an underlying and inevitable uneasiness that underpins the act of appropriating the positionality of a host in order to receive or invite the guest. As Derrida posits, there is an inherent violence in the politics of inclusion/exclusion that ‘presupposes the social and familial status of the contracting parties’ (Derrida 23), a legal act enacted on the privileged part of the host in inscribing the delimiting boundaries of exclusion and finitude. In a paradoxical stance, the granting of hospitality to the figure of the foreigner ‘represented and protected by his or her family name, is at once what makes hospitality possible, or the hospitable relationship to the foreigner possible, but by the same token what limits and prohibits it’ (Derrida 23,25). As such, the threshold of admissibility—encoding closure and finitude—is instigated under the unarticulated law that cements the place, identity and the resulting consciousness of the host and guest. In the transnational global landscape with the decentering of economic activities that transcend physical localities and local markets, the phenomenon of deterritorialization inevitably leads to a confounding of the demarcations between the host and the guest, contiguous with that of the familiar and the foreign. This paper, in moving beyond the reductive binary between guest and host, is interested in examining the dynamics of hospitality as manifest in the diasporic condition—of being rendered a guest in a foreign land—through a sustained analysis of The Body by Hanif Kureishi which stands as a psychological correlative to the experience of a guest.

Detailing the plight of Adam who is in his mid-sixties and a physically deteriorating body, the invitation to migrate to a new body becomes actualized as he trades his ‘half-dead old carcass’ (Kureishi 1) with that of Mark’s  body that is ‘neither white nor dark but lightly toasted’ (Kureishi 27), thereupon assuming a new identity as Leo. The subsequent sense of entrapment in his new body as Adam/Leo soon discovers Mark’s body to be one that marks him visually as a ‘global abject’ explores the way in which an ostensibly hospitable space is being rendered hostile and alienating. Besides the acute sense of disorientation that is attendant to the operational procedure of changing a new body, the alienating experience, in large part, also stems quintessentially from the way in which the body exists as an externalized, objectified entity that invites reading and inevitably, categorization. As the transplant of subjective consciousness to a new body is foregrounded in its acute sense of disorientation, I would like to engage with Fanon’s notion of bodily schemas in Black Skin, White Masks—constitutive of the ‘corporeal schema’ that has been negated and replaced by the ‘racial epidermal schema’ (Fanon 85)—to highlight the way in which the diasporic experience is inevitably informed by the trauma of dislocation in a foreign and inhospitable space. In this trajectory of thought, all acts of hospitality are underpinned by a violence that manifests from the contact point of the external edifice of the body and the structural imposition of societal dictums that dictates a systematic and ontological negation of the guest’s body. Yet, as the site of hospitality is one of ambivalence, I would argue, the positions of both guest and host can be superimposed upon each other in times when their boundaries are confounded, it gestures towards a potential line of flight from the hierarchical, fixity of a guest/host discourse in revealing the exploitative system that implicates both figures in its violence.

To begin, as Adam’s subjective consciousness is dislocated to Mark’s body, there is already a certain interrogation of the ontological status of identity—being that which is simultaneously innate while inextricably determined by its externalized, tangible form. Contesting the sovereign notion of self-identity, of that which is to some extent cognizable, the reconfigured identity of Adam as Leo highlights an uneasy amalgamation of the mental consciousness of Adam and the physical body of Mark. The resultant violence in the irreconcilable split within the self of Adam/Leo’s body—of a singular site of subjectivity that has been split into multiple ones—is hence aligned with Fanon’s notion of the external form of the corporeal body as a site of contact between the two bodily schemas. The experience of the black man in the face of being labelled ‘look, a Negro!’ (Fanon 85) by a white child embodies an instance whereby the ‘racial epidermal schema’—the imposition of grids of subjectivity upon the body—disrupts the ‘corporeal schema’ of the black man. This violent brutality in the act that finds its correlative in ‘an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered [his] whole body with black blood’ (Fanon 85), emblematic of the systematic form of ontological negation that is enacted by the white gaze. Extrapolating from Fanon’s exposition of the traumatic clash of bodily schemas, Adam/Leo’s reconfigured self, alike the black man, undergoes a violent effacement of the self: ‘I became aware that I was without my body. It might be better to say I was suspended between bodies: out of mine and not yet properly in another’ (Kureishi 35). As such, even when the desire to ‘burrow inside’ and ‘live in’ the bodies of others (Kureishi 38) is actualized, for Adam, the inevitable subjective consciousness—constitutive of personal memories, history, and personality—is irreconcilable with the external imposition of subjectivity upon a body that is completely foreign to the self, alike the clash of the bodily schemas that the black man experiences. Hence, the act of leaving one’s own home—contiguous with the body—to inhibit a foreign space is undeniably a traumatic experience for the guest, one that forces him/her to straddle the consciousness of both his own history and the foreign space which exist in differing spatial and temporal realms.

Since the external body becomes an, albeit arbitrary, absolute and deterministic marker, it becomes a contact point upon which there is a negotiation between the self’s relation to the world of other bodies: ‘you soon find that bodies can get very attracted to and repelled by other bodies, even—or particularly—when they don’t want to be’ (Kureishi 37). In fact, it is always a receptacle of external motivations and violence as in Adam’s realization that ‘if other people’s bodies get too much for you, you can stop them by stabbing and crucifixion. You can shoot or burn them to make them keep still or to prevent them saying things that displease you’ (Kureishi 38), the flippant ease of the words, in its self-ironizing gesture, accentuates the deterministic site of the body in its reverberation with imposed social dictums. When Adam/Leo works as a menial worker at a spiritual center, body encodes his status as a racial minority, subjecting him to both verbal and physical abuse from his sexually voracious supervisor Patricia, evidenced in her fetishistic act of ravishing him while ‘[digging] her fingers into [him], [scratching] and [kicking] [him]’ (Kureishi 93). As Adam/Leo becomes ‘a nobody’ (Kureishi 74)—rendered a politically and racially marginalized figure—he discovers that the body and its external appearance takes precedence in the constitution of self-identity, which eventually propels him to yearn back for his old body. As such, the host and gust relation seems to be quintessentially militant, compelled by the domination and annihilation of either party with pacifism and accommodation only existing as a form of gestural politics. Hence, evidenced in the acute state of entrapment and disorientation Adam/Leo experiences when inhibiting Mark’s body, the irreconcilable pair self/guest and the other/host asserts the basis of ineradicable hostility in seemingly hospitable acts that demands the ontological negation of the guest figure.

Though the clash of the bodily schemas that threatens the self-possessed identity of the guest takes place on the site of hospitality, it is nevertheless a productive site of negotiation that underscores the ambivalent positions of the host and the guest. The host figure that is signified by Mark’s body which provides refuge to Adam/Leo also finds its uncanny double in the spectral figure of the ghost—who in its abjection possesses a kind of unassailable power. As the identity of Mark is tied up inextricably with its physical form of the body, Adam in occupying that space, is thus subjected to the being haunted by Mark’s past—an affective manifestation of his memories and history: ‘it’s as if I have a ghost or shadow soul inside me. I can feel things, perhaps memories, of the man who was here first. Perhaps the physical body has a soul’ (Kureishi 51). Here, the logical order of the guest being the one who enters the home of the guest, is confounded, since the ghost of Mark seems to be, contrary to the autonomous host/guest relation, the one who inhibit Adam/Leo. The notion of belatedness as encapsulated in ‘of the man who was here first’ (Kureishi 51) throws the notion of usurpation that is inflected with a political dimension into high relief and by extension, the movements of colonialist usurpation. As such, there is always a difficulty in tracing back to the precise moment when the origin-ary moment in hospitality is initiated: at which point is the guest granted with the right of becoming a citizen? When, then, will he turn around to accuse the host of being a guest/ghost?

Further, though Derrida posits the authentic concept of hospitality to be rooted in the act of relinquishing mastery over the guest and the imposition of a conceptual judgment upon him/her, hence deconstructing the binaries between humanistic differences, the concept of belatedness, of time—which arbitrarily determine the positions of the guest and the host—asserts its primacy in relations of hospitality. The paradoxically over-determined and under-determined marker of time reveals the impossibility of Derrida’s proposition of a hospitality that maintains its own integrity—that hence eradicates the hostile alienation national boundaries evoke—in its utopic, all-encompassing stance. The disturbing figuration of the ghost, in being one that confounds the linearity of time, points to the amorphousness in determining the positions of guest and host in hospitable relations. The impossibility of locating and fixating the guest/host relation, signified by the figure of the ghost, also runs parallel to the relational notion of the term stranger. After the body transplant, Adam proclaims that ‘each time I saw myself in the changing-room mirror I thought a stranger was standing in front of me (Kureishi 45-46). The juxtaposing asymmetry of the possessive pronouns and the word ‘stranger’ (Kureishi 46), hence, encapsulates the immanently arbitrary nature in the notion of stranger, gaining its meaning only through difference and distinction. As Adam becomes a stranger to himself essentially because his host, Mark, is a stranger to him, the semantic polyvalence afforded by the notion of stranger asserts its own resistance to be fixated in a singular meaning, much like the elusive figuration of the ghost. Hence, the host-guest relation is one that is imbued with a sense of indeterminacy, the site of hospitality being one which its very ambivalence prevents the fixation of the positions assumed by the host and the guest, hence rendering itself to constant metamorphosis.

As the host-guest relation is one that is resigned in its tentativeness and conflictual motivations, the split of the singular site of subjectivity—from either the perspective of the host or guest—to multiple and overlapping sites of subjectivity serves to reveal a disingenuousness in conventional acts of hospitality, as true hospitality demands the abandonment of ‘either reciprocity (entering into a pact) or even their names’ (Derrida 25). The lack of complete sincerity in conditional acts of hospitality, thus, demands a disavowal of responsibility on the parts of both the guest and the host for purposes of concealing the undeniably performative enactment of the relationship, which is embodied in the purposefully rendered ambiguous notion of the invitation.  To begin, the criteria of invitation is foregrounded as the guest is endowed with the right, as well as the obligatory duties as part of the social pact, to the new and foreign space that she/he has no political (determined by the ancestral and cultural) affiliations with. With the privileging of the transnational imaginary—as urban networks and formations cover an extensive ground—the phenomenon of deterritorialization renders boundaries porous in accommodating cultural hybridization and migratory movements. The confounding of geographical boundaries and the attendant transience of political affiliations share a resonating parallelism with the ‘convenient’ transplantation of the brain/consciousness to a foreign body in The Body in the commonality of the ease in admittance to this new space. What, then, affords the right to the space of the Other? For Adam, his new body that endows him with revitalized physical energy is at the price of ‘a considerable amount, money that would otherwise have gone to [his] children (Kureishi 22), highlighting the way in which the ‘global elite’ exploits the abject body of the dispossessed through a ready mobilization of capital. In Derrida’s evoking of Kant in Perpetual Peace in extending the implications of the almost naturalized ‘right to hospitality in the cosmopolitan tradition’ (Derrida 27), he also expounds upon ‘the question of the question’ (Derrida 29)—the decision to interrogate the new arrival—that is at the heart of hospitality. If we consider the way in which the act of invitation, of inviting Adam to the new body, is animated by commercial and transactional desires, the cosmopolitan landscape and the foreigner that Derrida evokes is revealed in its latency to a structural exchange of capitalism: the ancestral names and genealogy are replaced by new props—that of capitalism.

Though Derrida posits that the fragile foundation of hospitality can achieve a form of reparation by unconditionally welcoming the foreigner in the integrity of a cosmopolitan tradition—avoiding any interrogatory act—I seek to highlight the notion of invitation as one that is permeated with ambivalence and disingenuousness, particular apposite to the modern landscape whereby previously demarcated places have been rendered porous in their boundaries. The enigma surrounding the guest hence begs the questions: is the guest invited? Will the guest still be granted to the right of hospitality if no invitation has been extended? At which point does the guest become a parasite? If Adam is construed to be ‘invited’ to Mark’s body through the intermediary figures facilitating the transaction, the hospitable relation is nevertheless imbued with unease and incompletion as the lack of consent from the passive figure of Mark looms at the backdrop. Though the right to inhibit Mark’s body is granted to Adam by capitalistic privilege, the silence of Mark, both literal and metaphorical, accentuates the double exploitation enacted upon Mark’s body. Adam being both invited and uninvited in a paradoxical stance—encapsulating the complex dynamics of hospitable relations—disturbs the centrality of the host figure as the one extending the invitation, throwing into high relief the permutable power dynamics of such a relation. As Adam finally settles on Mark’s body after ‘[considering] several bodies but kept moving, hoping for something better’, he entertains the thought that ‘[Mark] had seemed to choose [him]’ (Kureishi 27). While Adam’s perception borders on the irrational, its very absurdity asserts a certain recalcitrant spot in hospitable relations—accommodating the mysterious, unidentifiable and intangible entity that is the source of the invitation.

The attempt of Adam to expiate any potential guilt in the conjuring of such a thought that absolves him from being responsible for the disrespectful violence inflicted upon Mark’s body, is reminiscent of Derrida’s exposition of the disavowal of the accusation—of harboring the unspeakable secret of patricide—in the myth of Oedipus. As Oedipus ‘accuses without accusing anyone, he accuses something rather than someone’, the guilty, as Derrida posits, is ‘the unconscious (of) Thebes’ that is ‘rendered unforgivably guilty of Oedipus’s incest, patricide, and being outside-the-law’ (Derrida 39). As Oedipus pleads for the chorus ‘in the name of [their] hospitality’ to abstain from ‘ruthlessly [opening] up what [he] sufferred’ (Sophocles via Derrida 41), the guest, Oedipus, demands the right to be welcome in evoking the unconditional, Derridean notion of hospitality by the doubly significant gesture: firstly, he divests himself from his incestuous sin as the city’s unconscious is structured to ‘bound [him], in [his] ignorance’ (Sophocles via Derrida 41) and secondly, he asserts his right as a guest to not be interrogated. As the ‘decentering’ of sin occurs, in its evanescence, enabling for the ‘the seminal adventure of the trace’ (Derrida 292), Derrida’s metaphor of genetic indeterminacy is pertinent to the incestuous chain of events in the myth of Oedipus—the space of the city already priming its inhabitants to suffer from the over-determinism of biological kindship ties. The locating of the irreducible sin is eluded in the process of disavowing personal responsibility in host-guest relations, evidenced in the way in which Adam’s occupation of Mark’s body is, again in an absurdist fashion, dismissed as an ‘outing’ Mark has ‘has been waiting a while’ (Kureishi 29) by the doctor performing the transplant, highlighting the way in which the inherent unethicality in the procedure is sublimated through humor and dismissal.  

The process of sublimating the inherent violence that underpins the system of hospitality is also sustained in the appropriation of the maternal figure who ‘silently prepares the ground for hospitality between men’ (Aristarkhova 41). As she plays out the role of enticing and welcoming the guests to the site of hospitality, on the symbolic level, unknowingly allowing herself to be effaced on the empirical front, the promise of true hospitality is revealed to the guest to be an empty one: the space inhibited by the host is one that is subjected the prohibitory and precautionary laws inscribed by the phallus. Though Adam is ‘invited’ and enticed by the possibility of inhibiting the physically attractive body of Mark, his realization that Mark’s body is inscribed with the unredeemable acts of injustice inflicted upon him and the nostalgia for his loved ones compels him to realize in culminated despair that ‘[he] was a stranger on the earth, a nobody with nothing, belonging nowhere, a body alone, condemned to begin again, in the nightmare of eternal life’ (Kureishi 149). This seemingly hospitable space of Mark’s body which confounds the boundaries between the identities of the host and guest—hence promising Adam with the right to domination, even if temporary—conceals the inevitable violence of ontological negation. Further, apropos of the earlier mentioned relationality of the term stranger, Adam’s realization of his reconfigured identity as a ‘stranger’ also conjures the sense that both Adam and Mark are entrapped in this state of alienation to each other—Adam’s consciousness and Mark’s body being irreconcilable entities. Hence, as invitation is always imbued with the aura of the maternal, it promises the embrace and welcoming gesture of the host, concealing the insidious site of hospitality that is permeated with a latent violence.

Upon concluding, I would like to insist upon the site of hospitality as one that, in its ambivalence and indeterminacy, yields itself as a continually generative and dynamic space of negotiation between the guest and the host. The figuration of the ghost in The Body that encodes within itself a history (ancestry) underlines the spot of recalcitrance within all sites of hospitality—one that resists an attempt to order and condition it—gesturing us towards an un-cognizable uneasiness and incompletion that resides in all hospitable relations. Hence, as there is a dynamism that animates the system of hospitality in the mutual slipping of roles between the host and the guest, both figures are implicated in the irreducible violence that underpins all contact points of hospitality.

Works Cited

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Derrida, Jacques, and Anne Dufourmantelle. Of Hospitality. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UP, 2000.

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Derrida, Jacques. "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." Writing

and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Routledge, 1978. Print.

Kureishi, Hanif. The Body: A Novel. New York: Scribner, 2004. Print.

Silverman, Maxim. Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks: New Interdisciplinary Essays.           

Manchester: Manchester UP, 2005. Print.