Ways of relating: hospitality and the acknowledgement of otherness

Abstract

This paper considers the relevance of the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida to geography's engagements with both mainstream moral philosophy and poststructuralist theory. This relevance lies in the way in which their work unsettles the ascription of normative value to relations of proximity and distance. Distance is usually understood to be a medium of moral harm or indifference. In contrast, Levinas presents distance as the very condition of responsibility. Grasping the significance of this argument requires an appreciation of the temporality of responsibility and responsiveness that both Levinas and Derrida emphasise. They present an alternative way of understanding the relationality of subjectivity and social processes. Through a schematic exposition of key themes in Levinas' work, prevalent understandings of the spatiality of relations are shown to harbour their own forms of indifference and moral harm. The full effect of Levinas' reconsideration of the value of relations between proximity and distance is bought out in Derrida's recent writings on hospitality. For both thinkers, there is no natural geographical scene for the cultivation of responsibility. Rather, their shared focus upon temporality emphasizes the degree to which responsibility is motivated in response to the activities of others. The implication of this argument is that critical analysis should be reoriented towards practices that shape individual and collective dispositions to acknowledge the claims of others.

Living through the tsunami: Vulnerability and generosity on a volatile earth

“…In Levinas's own words (1987: 78-9): `the encounter …at once gives and conceals the Other'. As Barnett (2005) has stressed, what Levinas means by proximity or distance in this context is not a simple, measurable degree of spatial contiguity but a more complex sense of difference that manifests itself through a unsurpassable rupture in the continuity of space and time (see Levinas, 1991, p.82). It is about the formation of a bond, a relation that enfolds within itself the condition of strangeness, the non-relation of unshared and incommunicable experience, even as it opens up the very possibility of being-together.…”

“…As Clive Barnett (2006) observes, it is largely taken for granted amongst the intellectual left that `ordinary people' engaged in everyday activities are complicit with major power holders in the propagation of inequity and injustice. This too might be viewed as a `default assumption', and it is one for which geographers tend to profess a special affinity, given their disciplinary aptitude for tracing connection and causality across distance (see Barnett, 2005., Barnett and Land, 2007). In this regard the critical geographical narrating of the tsunami tends to be one in which the event is an occasion for unmasking and disclosing a pre-existing nexus of less-than-desirable social and spatial interdependencies.…”

Rethinking responsibility and care for a postcolonial world

“…Responsibility is another term that has gained wide currency within geography with the special issue of Geografisker This line of thinking has also been elaborated and nuanced through the work of a range of other writers in geography (Barnett 2005;Barnett and Land, 2007;Bosco, 2007;Brock, 2005;Jazeel, 2007;Noxolo et al, 2008;Popke, 2003;Sparke, 2007b). Some of these discussions of responsibility have centred around addressing inequality, in particularly the responsibilities of richer countries and people towards those who are less wealthy or distanciated, often evoked through the figure of the ‗distant stranger' (Patai, 1991;Corbridge, 1993Corbridge, , 1998Smith, 2002).…”

“…For instance, a recent special issue on geographies of generosity (Geoforum 2007, 38) takes as its starting point a critique of the politico-moral underpinnings of responsibility and care as calls to political action. Barnett andLand (2007, p.1073) argue convincingly that geographies of care and responsibility over distance are linked by a similar ‗wrongheadedness' about motivations to political action. They suggest that formulations of geographies of care often start from the assumption that relatively privileged people do not care about ‗distant strangers' and should be made to care through reasoned arguments, whilst geographies of responsibility often assume that revealing causal links between the actions of relatively privileged people and the suffering experienced by many others globally will lead to a greater sense of political responsibility.…”

“…Towards this, Barnett andLand (2007, p.1073) suggest ‗the adoption of a less exhortatory, more exploratory' programme of research around the everyday practices of caring and responsiveness.…”