The EROTIC and PRAGMATIC SENSES of HOSPITALITY Jean-Luc Nancy and Bernard Stiegler’s Conversation on Christianity, Politics, and the Ends of Philosophy

This article discusses three aspects of hospitality. The author first presents hospitality as a way to think the shared, responsive structure of existence. From this ontological sense of hospitality as originary response, the author presents two political inflections offered by Jean-Luc Nancy and Bernard Stiegler in their “Conversation about Christianity.” Nancy presents a hospitality animated by the experience of alterity—bound with a politics of risk; while Stiegler thinks from the basis of the prepared and preparing host—and offers a politics of care. This conversation presents a fundamental tension within the question of hospitality that not only separates Nancy’s and Stiegler’s thought but also charts a larger difference between a philosophical eros and theoretical pragmatics, an attunement to the infinite and the finite that can be traced back to a shared affirmative point of departure: an original yes to alterity, to sense.