Aesth-Ethics: Of Hospitality in Art

The question of hospitality is the most pressing question in contemporary thought: How can we host that which is utterly Other, that which resists all conceptualization, and thus disrupts the proper course of thought? In the current book, the discussion of hospitality is given a new conceptualization, and extended to the field of aesthetics: the event of hospitality does not occur in the face-to-face encounter with the other person, as Emmanual Levinas conceived of it, but rather in the encounter with the work of art itself. Writing about the event of hospitality--as it is eventuated in art--involves subverting the traditional precedence of theory over practice. This subversion is also evident in the indifference to traditional distinctions, such as those between poetry and visual art; modern art and classical art; international art and local art. Moreover, most of the artworks considered throughout are hybrid in character: they are suspended in the space between the visual and the verbal, whether they involve the verbal representation of a visual object (as in Rilke's poem "Archaic Torso of Apollo"), or a visual representation of a verbal object (as in Anselm Kiefer's work "Your Golden Hair Margarete"). The consideration of these and other works come together to give rise to a novel and original discourse on art that is termed "Aesth-ethics," and which is presented for the first time in this volume.