The Stranger as My Guest. Michel Agier
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Originally published in French as L’étranger qui vient. Repenser l’hospitalité © Éditions du Seuil, 2018
This English edition © 2021 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3988-8- hardback
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3989-5- paperback
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Agier, Michel, 1953- author. | Morrison, Helen (Langauge translator), translator.
Title: The stranger as my guest : a critical anthropology of hospitality / Michel Agier ; translated by Helen Morrison.
Other titles: Étranger qui vient. English
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA, USA : Polity Press, 2021. | “Originally published in French as L’étranger qui vient. Repenser l’hospitalité, Edition du Seuil, 2018 .” | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “A well-argued case for a new hospitality policy that welcomes foreigners as guests rather than treating them as aliens or enemies”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020028924 (print) | LCCN 2020028925 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509539888 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509539895 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509539901 (epub) | ISBN 9781509544929 (adobe pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Hospitality. | Immigrants--Government policy. | Refugees--Government policy. | Emigration and immigration--Social aspects. | Strangers.
Classification: LCC GT3410 .A4313 2021 (print) | LCC GT3410 (ebook) | DDC 395.3--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020028924
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020028925
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Acknowledgements
This essay is the result of various encounters. I would like to thank Patrick Boucheron and Alain Prochiantz for inviting me to take part in the symposium ‘Migrations, asile, exil’ (‘Migration, Asylum, Exile’) held at the Collège de France in November 2016, where my ideas on the social form and the politics of hospitality began to take shape. Cyrille Hanappe and the whole team at Actes & Cité invited me to participate in their project on ‘La Ville accueillante’ (‘The Welcoming City’) organised by PUCA (Plan Urbanisme Construction Architecture) and by Ville de Grand-Synthe, thereby allowing me to discover the practical issues around municipal hospitality. My thanks to the whole team. Alain Policar offered me the opportunity to explore cosmopolitanism, in the company of a range of philosophers, for an issue (201) of the journal Raison Présente for 2017 and for a symposium on the same subject, ‘Cosmopolitisme ou barbarie?’ (‘Cosmopolitanism or Barbarity?’) (Cevipof/Sciences Po, June 2018): I am deeply grateful to him. Reflections on the theme of becoming a stranger and cinematographic representations of the subject were presented at the Festival des 3 Continents/Cinémas d’Afrique, d’Amérique Latine et d’Asie (Nantes, October 2017). My thanks go in particular to Claire Allouche, the programme planner, and to Jêrôme Baron, the artistic director, for their invitation.
This essay is based on discussions held in the context of the Babels research programme (Agence nationale de la recherche, 2016–19): our focus was on what has been referred to as ‘the migration crisis’, and we drew on research conducted in the field, largely open workshops, and short essays published by Éditions du passage clandestine in the series ‘Bibliothèque des frontières’, which I codirect with Stefan Le Courant. I would like to thank the forty or so researchers, students, and representatives from the voluntary sector who together made up the Babels collective from which I drew the inspiration and the enthusiasm for this book. Finally, it was in the context of my course ‘Anthropologies de l’hospitalité’ (‘Anthropologies of Hospitality’), held at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales during the years 2016/17 and 2017/18, that the overall concept for this book gradually emerged. I thank the many people who participated in such a lively manner, and to my colleagues who brought us their own insight.
Finally, I would like to thank Bruno Auerbach at Éditions du Seuil for his attentive and perceptive reading of the French manuscript.
Introduction Hospitality When Least Expected
Since the stranger who is my guest, the one arriving now, is by definition an outsider, someone who has literally come from outside, there is always the risk that, in that first glimpse, no matter how distant or indistinct that person’s silhouette appears, he or she will be seen as an intruder by the people who witness that arrival, even though this would not be the stranger’s own perception. Hospitality represents a response to this ambiguity, to the doubts and uncertainties that stem from it. It is the moment where a single gesture can transform the stranger into a guest, even if he or she still continues to be a stranger to some extent, and therefore continues to embody certain elements of the intruder. It is through the various manifestations and experiences of this practice of hospitality (still to be defined in the details of its implementation, its impact and its limitations) that each individual gradually forms their own conception of the stranger, of the different rules and regimes and of the extent of their strangeness, and therefore of the relationship that can be forged with him or her, both during and beyond the initial gesture of hospitality. Whatever its limitations in time and space, this ‘space–time’ of hospitality is a vital element in determining the nature of the ensuing relationship.
The observations made by the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy on the intruder as a foreign body that is ‘grafted’ onto and into my own body provide the most concrete and comprehensive starting point from which to approach the problem, along with some ideas for its eventual solution:
Something of the stranger has to intrude, or else he loses his strangeness. If he already has the right to enter and stay, if he is awaited and received, no part of him being unexpected or unwelcome, then he is not an intruder any more, but then neither is he any longer a stranger. To exclude all intrusiveness from the stranger’s coming is therefore neither logically acceptable nor ethically admissible.
If, once he is there, he remains a stranger, then for as long as this remains so […] his coming does not stop: he continues to come and his coming does not stop intruding in some way […] a disturbance, a trouble in the midst of intimacy.
We have to think this through,