Sociologies (Mar 2018)
Pourquoi l’hospitalité ?
Abstract
How can one understand the recent rise of the concept of hospitality in a series of political debates, but also in theoretical questions, such as the urban one? To try to answer this question, the concept of hospitality is first recontextualized within the semantic universe - the one where it meets the concepts of vulnerability, care ... - within which it becomes the main concern, perhaps taking on meanings further to its original connotations. Within this process, the moral understanding of hospitality starts to take precedence over its political and legal meanings, whilst making incursions into political debates, particularly those about vulnerable populations (the homeless, refugees ...). The text then seeks to grasp the antinomies which run through the concept, the double bind in which its different accentuations move, the moral accentuations calling for legal and political concretizations that cannot honor them, but also the unconditionality of its moral accentuations which may be in conflict with the conditions imposed by coexistence and cohabitation in the long term.
