Exteriority is Not a Negation But a Marvel: Hospitality, Terrorism, Levinas, Beowulf

In Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas Jacques Derrida argues that Levinas’s philosophy, especially in Totality and Infinity, has bequeathed to us an “immense treatise of hospitality.” According to Derrida, although “the word ‘hospitality’ occurs relatively seldom in Totality and Infinity, the word ‘welcome’ is unarguably one of the most frequent and determinative words in that text.”1 At the very outset of Totality and Infinity, Levinas writes about the Other as the “Stranger [l’Etranger]…who disturbs the being at home with oneself [le chez soi].”2 In the wake of this disturbance, the ethical subject “is incapable of approaching the Other with empty hands,” and by way of “conversation” she welcomes the Other’s “expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it.”3 The welcoming [accueillance] of the expression of the stranger-Other is a welcoming of a teaching [enseignement] that “comes from the exterior” and in which “the very epiphany of the face is produced.”4 This is a “face” that is not a material face, per se—the specific physical visage of a specific person—but is, rather, an “exteriority that is not reducible… to the interiority of memory,” an expression of being that “breaks through the envelopings” and facades of material form, exceeds any possible preconceptions, and calls into question the subject’s “joyous possession of the world.”5 At the same time, because “the body does not happen as an accident to the soul,” the physical face is the important “mode in which a being, neither spatial nor foreign to geometrical or physical extension, exists separately.”