Open AccessHOSPITALITY, RESPONSIBILITY, AND COMMUNITY: A POLITICAL PHENOMENOLOGICAL READING OF ANTIGONE
Author(s) -
Nicolai Krejberg Knudsen
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
revista de antropología y filosofía de lo sagrado/revista de antropología y filosofía de lo sagrado
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2603-6053
pISSN - 2530-1233
DOI - 10.24310/raphisa.2019.v3i2.4994
Subject(s) - hospitality , reading (process) , politics , epistemology , sociology , relation (database) , psychology , philosophy , psychoanalysis , tourism , political science , law , computer science , linguistics , database
In Derrida’s reflection on hospitality, the figures of Oedipus and Antigone play a decisive role. Derrida describes Oedipus as being anomos, an outlaw, since he transgresses the established nomos. According to Derrida, both Oedipus and Antigone are involved an unsolvable tension between conditional and unconditional hospitality. A closer look at Sophocles’ Antigone, however, fits poorly with this understanding of the relation between hospitality and the nomos. Arguing against Derrida, I propose a phenomenological reading of Antigone’s actions as an attempt to disclose her suffering with the community. In this way, she demands hospitality not for herself nor for her infinitely removed father but for the world disclosure that she embodies. Within this phenomenological framework, hospitality is not caught in an aporia between the general and the singular, the conditional and the unconditional; rather, it constitutes a site of dispute between conflicting configurations of the shared world.