Lettera internazionale 118 (2014) Writing in Lettera internazionale (Italy), Rachid Boutayeb attempts to help the politics of hospitality out of the Procustean bed by tirelessly consulting Derrida, for whom hospitality is not so much conceived as one field of ethics but as ethics itself, and Levinas, whose philosophical oeuvre could be read as a single, immense treaty on hospitality. However, Boutayeb dissociates himself from the Derridean dichotomy of conditional and unconditional hospitality and, instead, introduces dialogic hospitality into the discourse: The dialogue represents not only a casual attribute of the subject, but its identity, the knot of a critical solidarity – a dialogic hospitality that says yes (an unconditional yes) to the foreignness of the other, without even remotely wishing to assimilate the other, but which nonetheless says yes to the form of foreignness that is open to allowing itself to be respected without trying to belong to itself, to claim ownership. (I dont belong to myself, Gabriel Marcel would say). Hospitality is the gift of the encounter. Indeed, Boutayeb concludes by emphasizing the encounter with and not an inclusion of the other: a self-contained political culture is simply not an option. Women in the streets: Baraccopoli, slums, vincedades, favelas are the result of inescapable undercurrents in the megacities writes Rita El Khayat in an article focussing on the violence that women have to face in their everyday lives. However, this violence is not only the consequence of poverty. The act of trying to hide female bodies and the male control of urban territories in Arab-Islamic cities can also be seen as a form of violence against women: The female body was seen as a disturbing factor in public spaces and services. As if womens bodies were too visible, too obscene and could create disorder and discord. This opinion, conludes El Khayat, still prevails today.
Posted on: Sat, 03 May 2014 20:07:05 +0000