Thresholds and Refuges: Hospitality as a Challenge
Résumé
The aim of this book is to examine the practices and the representations of hospitality, the generous and open-hearted welcomes, the open doors; but also the hostile reactions, the hermetic thresholds and the brutality that may ensue. The following chapters question the complex entanglements between hospitality and hostility and try to look beyond the binary opposition between welcoming and rejecting, in order to suggest new dynamics for the future. In an attempt to disentangle oppositions between brutal rejection and naïve openness, this book aims at proposing not only conceptual analyses, but above all ethical attitudes and possible actions. It is about ways of being in the world which concern human beings’ relations with one another, as well as with the world around them, the foreign other, but also the non-human world, the animal and vegetal world of the living, the mineral world and the sky and stars beyond our planet.