Receiving Words : Towards a Poetics of Hospitality

The present paper deals with the question of whether hospitality might be thought as a scene of translation. But who is the guest, and who is the host in translation? How can hospitality be conceived from a perspective of translation? Ultimately, hospitality exhibits an ambivalent, even aporetic pattern. Every stranger, every guest, however welcome they might be, must eventually submit to the host’s house, its law, and its language. Constantly oscillating between amity and hostility, possibility and impossibility, hospitality is always undermined by a moment of violence. In its double bind and ambiguity, hospitality seems to reflect the process of translation as receiving and absorbing, accommodating, and incorporating the Other. By means of an Amerindian perspective, an ethics of translational hospitality – a xenosophy – is to be outlined, seeing translation no longer as a unidirectional and hierarchic economy, but rather as a form of nomadic, cannibal conviviality, an act of mutual transformation.