American Hospitality

No Marigolds in the Promised Land: On American Messianic Hospitality Anthony Reynolds New York University … this is indeed about the Messiah as hôte, about the messianic as hospitality, the messianic that introduces deconstructive disruption or madness in the concept of hospitality, the madness of hospitality, even the madness of the concept of hospitality. – Derrida, Hostipitality Derrida, “Hostipitality,” Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2001), 362. No marigolds in the Promised Land. There’s a hole in the ground where they used to grow. Any man left on the Rio Grande Is the king of the world as far as I know. – Steely Dan In her well-known poem “The New Colossus,” Emma Lazareth describes her messianic vision of Lady Liberty as the “Mother of Exiles,” who raises her torch in “world-wide welcome” and offers the following words to all immigrants entering the United States through New York Harbor: "Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, / I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" The stark contrast between this poetic vision of American hospitality, which entered into the American national identity very early on, and the prevailing attitude toward immigrants held by the current Trump administration today, which has established a policy of separating families at our borders and putting the children of those families in detention cages, has produced something like a “double bind,” leaving us to choose between two irreconcileable though irreducible visions of the country, predicated on seemingly opposing values of accepting hospitality and rejecting hostility. I would like to suggest that this vicious double bind might be productively analyzed and understood using It is precisely this double bind at the core of the American national identity that I would like to explore in this article using Derrida’s concept of messianic hospitality might shed some light on the hostility that is so pervasive in American politics today I. What I want to discuss with you today is how Derrida’s concept of messianic hospitality might shed some light on the hostility that is so pervasive in American politics today. As we know, Derrida has been interested in the messianic for some time. The concept comes up in his 1982 discussion of Joyce’s Ulysses and again more recently in Specters of Marx in which he offers a scathing critique of Fukuyama’s The End of History and a rereading of Marx more generally. Taking on capitalist, neoliberal, and Marxist orthodoxy in this work, Derrida addresses the messianism informing Marx’s projection theory, his ontology, and his teleology in order to expose a messianic quality inherent in concepts like democracy, hospitality, justice and emancipation. But what mystifies the many critics of Derrida’s Marx book the most is his insistence on interpreting messianism as a textual praxis of “performative interpretation, ” according to which a given host text offers hospitality to its messianic readers who arrive offering interpretations that transform the host text in question. In the eyes of Derrida’s more strident critics, this textualist model of messianism developed in the context of a so-called “return to Marx” appears to reduce urgent matters of economics, politics and social justice to mere exercises in textual hermeneutics. After first looking at a couple of seminars from 1996 and 1997 in which Derrida develops this textualist or hermeneutic model of messianic hospitality as if in response to these earlier critics, I want to examine the relationship between a certain messianism at work in American history and a pervasive inhospitality (or outright hostility) in American culture today toward longstanding democratic institutions, values and government domestically and to its neighbors, allies, and trade partners abroad, a hostility that has been attributed to anxieties attending processes of globalization from the consolidation of global markets to the mass migrations of displaced peoples and refugees. My working hypothesis in thinking this through is that the religious messianism informing the American national identity as a promised land continues to produce, first, effects of messianic suspension of law (katargesis) that conditions our permanent state of exception or lawlessness according to Agamben and, second, a domestication of fulfilled messianic presence (pleroma) that effectively forecloses the possibility of hospitality toward future messianic others to come. II. In an analysis of hospitality that extends across a range of lectures, seminars, articles, and books, Derrida reveals some of hospitality’s more striking features. It’s culture itself. It’s a moral imperative, a paradoxical law, a collision of laws, an undialectizable antinomy between laws that are at once incompatible and inseparable. It is philosophically incomprehensible, and it is ultimately messianic. What strikes me now upon reading back through his seminars from 1996 and 1997 is the way his effort to articulate his messianic model of hospitality – proceeding as it does from Greek tragedy to Abrahamic encounters in the book of Genesis – recalls and even recapitulates Kierkegaard’s effort in Fear and Trembling to recuperate a notion of faith from its assimilation within Hegel’s concept of the ethical. Both Kierkegaard and Derrida begin by taking issue with Hegel’s dialectical model of Greek tragedy in order to recover topics that exceed the reach of philosophical comprehension, that derive from the Hebrew tradition, and that center on the figure of Abraham. For Hegel, Greek tragedy represents an early aesthetic form of dialectic in which conflicts are reconciled. Hence, Antigone’s tragic destruction mediates the reconciliation of the conflict between the public law of the polis and the private law of blood relations (Creon’s prohibition against administering burial rights to Polynices and Antigone’s decision to do so anyway). And Socrates’ tragic destruction mediates the reconciliation of the conflict between the exteriority of the traditional oracular culture and the interiority of consciousness or mind, a philosophically important moment that Hegel associates with the historical birth of subjective interiority. Hegel, Lectures of the History of Philosophy, I: Greek Philosophy to Plato (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1995), 425. In a 1996 seminar included in Of Hospitality, Derrida approaches the topic of hospitality in a manner that seems meant to recall Hegel’s interpretation of tragedy. After situating his discussion of hospitality in the context of a series of Greek tragedies and focusing on tragic figures like Oedipus, Antigone and of course Socrates, he then defines hospitality as a “conflict” or “collision between two laws, at the frontier between two regimes of law” (77): the general law or principle of “unlimited hospitality,” on the one hand, and the always plural laws, rights, and duties regulating the experience of hospitality at borders and border crossings on the other. Yet, unlike Hegel, for whom tragedy mediates a dialectical reconciliation of antagonistic forces or laws, Derrida invokes tragedy as constitutively non-dialectical. The conflict between two regimes of law that constitutes the “paradoxical law” of hospitality exists as “an insoluble antinomy, a non-dialectizable antinomy” (77). Just as Kierkegaard argues against the Hegelian dialectic in order to extricate a concept of faith from its subsumption within philosophical ethics, Derrida argues against the dialectic to extricate a principle of unconditional hospitality from its subsumption within the instituted laws that regulate our experience of hospitality. What is gained in both cases is something radically exterior to philosophical rationality, unknown and unknowable as Derrida will go on to insist repeatedly in his 1997 seminars. Indeed, if Hegel reads ancient tragedy as mediating the historical emergence of philosophical interiority, Derrida returns to ancient tragedy in order to recover precisely exteriority itself – the exteriority that is sublated in Hegel’s model and that is constitutive for Derrida’s understanding of hospitality. The significance of this move can best be understood in relation to the messianic version of hospitality that Derrida will go on to develop. Having thus isolated an absolute principle of unconditional hospitality (from Hegel, from the empirical experience of hospitality, and from philosophical comprehension more generally) Derrida turns to the figure Abraham in Genesis whose visitation by Yahweh constitutes a kind of primal scene of messianic hospitality. The focus on the story of Abraham in Genesis is unusual since it is not strictly speaking a canonical text of Jewish messianism. What interests Derrida, who relies heavily on the work of Louis Massignon in his discussion, is the way the encounter with Yahweh, who arrives to announce to Abraham that he is to become the father of a new religion, both overwhelms and more importantly transforms Abraham, which is signaled in part by the change of name (Abram to Abraham) and the institution of Abraham as the father of a multitude of nations (H 372) – the “universal paternity of Abraham at the origin of the three religions” of the book (373). In his encounter with the absolute other, Abraham demonstrates an unconditional hospitality that does not result in the assimilation or appropriation of the other, but rather allows the host, Abraham, to be expropriated by the other and into the alterity of the other. This absolute hospitality becomes paradigmatic for the kind of hospitality that Judaism demonstrates in its subsequent encounters with the other “religions of the book,” Christianity first and then Islam, which emerge as the discursive effects of messianic encounters with an unconditionally hospitable host text, the Hebrew Bible, which is thus expropriated, dislocated, transformed, and renewed in each encounter. This, then, is the religious source of messianic hospitality that Derrida defines as a praxis of “performative interpretation” that has the capacity to generate endless new discursive formations, from theologies, philosophies, and politics, to modern national identities. III. While the specific messianic encounter with the Hebrew tradition that produces Christianity begins with the messianic appearance of Jesus Christ himself, the messianic method of performative interpretation is evident, for instance, in Paul’s typological reading of the Hebrew Bible as a series of promises that are both suspended and fulfilled by the later Christian Bible. Hence, Moses leading his people from Egypt into the wilderness toward the promised land of milk and honey is read as the promise of Jesus Christ leading humanity out of sin and into the promised land of god’s kingdom, an interpretation that becomes foundational for early Puritan settlers in North America who would go on to interpret their mission in the new world messianically as an “errand into the wilderness” and their progress as “a spiritual act of salvation.” Aaron Mauro, “Prophetic Literary Authority and the American Messianic Consciousness,” Mosaic 44.3 (September 2011), 68. For the early settlers, “Messianism was not merely a belief, but the founding metaphor of a nation,” a constitutive element of a new national identity, predicated not only on a understanding of America as both wilderness and promised land, but on a perpetual recycling of this performative interpretation that would go on to inform later doctrines like westward expansion, manifest destiny, and American exceptionalism. Ibid. Indeed, Cornell West has argued that such messianism informs the emergence of American pragmatism “less [as] a philosophical tradition putting forward solutions to perennial problems in the Western philosophical conversation initiated by Plato and more [as] a continuous cultural commentary or set of interpretations that attempt to explain America to itself at a particular historical moment.” Cornell West, The American Evasion of Philosophy (Madison: The U of Wisconsin P, 1989), 5. Quoted in Mauro, “Prophetic Literary Authority,” 68. The broad appeal of such messianic self-interpretation is reflected, for instance, in Sacvan Bercovich’s astonishment, as a Canadian immigrant, at a “country that, despite its arbitrary territorial limits, could read its destiny in its landscape, and a population that, despite its bewildering mixture of race and creed, could believe in something called an American mission, and could invest a patent fiction with all the emotional, spiritual, and intellectual appeal of a religious quest …. Here was the anarchist Thoreau condemning his backsliding neighbors by reference to the Westward errand; here, the solitary singer Walt Whitman, claiming to be the American Way; here, the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, descendant of slaves, denouncing segregation as a violation of the American dream; here an endless debate about national identity, full of rage and faith, Jeffersonians claiming that they, and not the Priggish heirs of Calvin, really represented the errand, conservative politicians hunting out socialists as conspirators against the dream, left-wing polemics proving that capitalism was a betrayal of the country’s sacred origins.” Sacvan Bercovich, The American Jeremiad (Madison: The U of Wisconsin P, 1978), 11. The implicit hospitality toward the other within America’s messianic national identity has thus made it enormously attractive to a range of interpreters, and thus also rendered it vulnerable to hostile readers whose performative interpretations arrogate the position of messianic alterity and foreclose its emancipatory potential. It seems to me that Derrida identifies an example of this kind of hostile messianism in Fukuyama’s The End of History from 1992. In this book, Fukuyama argues that the collapse of the Soviet Union signaled the end of history and the global triumph of “liberal democracy” and “free market” capitalism, a position predicated on a specific American reception of Alexandre Kojève’s reading of Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit that entered the American academy by way of Leo Strauss. Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 32, 74, 15. In his response to Fukuyama in Specters of Marx, Derrida exposes what he calls the “tiresome anachronism” of Fukuyama’s late recycling of Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel; the moral repugnance of Fukuyama’s failure to allow the empirical reality of unabating suffering around the world to disrupt the “ideal finality” of his “absolute orientation”; and the implicitly Christian perspective from which Fukuyama excludes what he calls “the Islamic world” from entering into the “‘general consensus’ that, he says, seems to be taking shape around ‘liberal democracy.’” Ibid., 15, 57, 60. But more to the point, Derrida identifies a religious messianism in Fukuyama’s “gospel” of liberal democracy and free market economics whose neoliberal messiah suspends the march of time “at the end of history” upon his arrival in the fullness of his presence, effectively foreclosing the possibility of new messianic arrivals in the future. By countering Fukuyama’s messianism with what he calls a “messianic without messianism,” Derrida seeks to liberate “a universal structure of experience” (namely, the welcoming relationship to the future arrival of the other and the other’s performative transformation of the host) from its religious source in which the fulfillment of the messianic promise (the arrival of the messiah in the fullness of his divine being or pleroma) is effected by a radical suspension of time and law (katargesis). Understanding the difference between what Derrida calls the “messianic without messianism” and the religious messianism informing not only Fukuyama’s argument, but America’s national identity more generally is more crucial than ever considering the precariousness of American democracy today and the future of American politics more generally. As Giorgio Agamben has argued in his reading of Paul’s Letters to the Romans, the logic of religious messianism (simultaneously suspending and fulfilling the law) provides an early model for the Hegelian dialectic and indeed for the legal concept of the “state of exception” or emergency that allows a sovereign state authority to suspend its own laws and operate from a position of lawless messianic exteriority – from a position that Donald Pease, for instance, has called “the internal externality of the exception.” Hardt and Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000), 186-90. Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005), 99-104. Donald Pease, The New American Exceptionalism (Minneapolis: The U of Minnesota P, 2009), 24. Following Carl Schmitt, Agamben conceives of the messianic state of exception as a paradigm of government itself and considers the United States in particular as having operated under a state of exception or emergency almost uninterruptedly since at least the Civil War, always grounding this sovereign power – for Constitutional reasons – in emergencies linked to war or matters of national security. Giorgio Agamben, The State of Exception (Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 2005), 21. It is surely no coincidence that our current president, who recently declared a state of national emergency in order to secure funds to seal off our southern border from incoming immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, is repeatedly hailed as the messiah by Evangelical leaders and rank-and-file members of his Christian base. In contrast, then, to the institutionalized lawlessness that goes by the messianic name of American exceptionalism but more closely resembles fascism, Derrida proposes his more democratic concept of the messianic without messianism. Liberated from the metaphysics of presence and the eschatological finality inherent in the Christian messianism informing America’s national identity, Derrida’s messianic is surely – as Agamben has observed about deconstruction itself – a “thwarted messianism, a suspension of the messianic.” Agamben, The Time that Remains, 103. In a manner that is tellingly reminiscent of his effort to recuperate the antinomy between the laws of hospitality against a more traditionally dialectical reading of tragedy, Derrida works here to open an analogously undialectizeable space between messianic hospitality toward the other and the foreclosure of such hospitality that attends the arrival of messianic other. Recent political theorists like Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt have suggested that America’s global hegemony has resulted in a world without exteriority, a suggestion that has prompted other scholars like Peter Pál Pelbart, for instance, to question whether the concept of the outside remains “capable of grounding our resistances to the intolerable” and how we might begin to “rethink the very concept of the outside.” Peter Pál Pelbart, “The Thought of the Outside, The Outside of Thought,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 5.2 (August 2000), 202. Derrida’s concept of messianic hospitality, I would suggest in closing, represents a serious effort, if not to rethink the concept of the outside precisely, at least to safeguard its emancipatory promise. It is also a means by which America can retain the messianic metaphor informing its national identity while continuing to be transformed and renewed in the performative interpretations of its perpetually arriving others. Reynolds – Messianic Hospitality in America 2