Radical Hospitality

Radical Hospitality addresses a timely and challenging subject for contemporary philosophy: the ethical responsibility of opening borders, psychic and physical, to the stranger. Kearney and Fitzpatrick show how radical hospitality happens by opening oneself in narrative exchange to someone or something other than ourselves—by crossing borders, whether literal or figurative. Against the fears, dogmas, and demands for certainty and security that push us toward hostility, we also desire to wager with the unknown, leap into the unanticipated, and celebrate the new, a desire this book seeks to recognize and cultivate. The book contends that hospitality means chancing one’s hand, one’s arm, one’s very self, thereby opening a vital space for new voices to be heard, shedding old skins, and welcoming new understandings.Radical Hospitality engages with urgent moral conversations concerning identity, nationality, immigration, commemoration, and justice, moving between theory and praxis and on to the formative life of the classroom. Building on key critical debates on the question of hospitality ranging from phenomenology, hermeneutics and deconstruction to neo-Kantian moral critique and Anglo-American virtue ethics, the book explores novel possibilities for an ethics of hospitality in our contemporary world of border anxiety, refugee crises, and ecological catastrophe.

In a time of increasing hostility and suspicion of the stranger, Radical Hospitality could not be more welcome. It is descriptively rich in historical examples and concrete phenomenologies of hospitality in all its embodiments. The book goes beyond mere description to grasp the ethics of hospitable interactions, giving nuance to the ambiguities of these interactions and showing their fragility as well as their necessity. Above all, Kearney and Fitzpatrick show how effective acts of hospitality at once recognize human fragility and vulnerability and yet provide the strength and inspiration to pursue peace.---Edward S. Casey, Stony Brook University, author of The World on Edge

Richard Kearney (Author) Richard Kearney is Charles Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston College and author and editor of more than forty books on contemporary philosophy and culture. He is founding editor of the Guestbook Project and has been engaged in developing a postnationalist philosophy of peace and empathy over several decades. His most relevant books on this subject include Strangers, Gods and Monsters (2001), Postnationalist Ireland (1998), Hosting the Stranger (2012), Phenomenologies of the Stranger (2010), Imagination Now (2019), and Touch: Recovering Our Most Vital Sense (2021).Melissa Fitzpatrick (Author) Melissa Fitzpatrick is an Assistant Professor of the Practice in Ethics for the Portico Program in Boston College’s Carroll School of Management and the Director of Pedagogy for Guestbook Project. Her research focuses on the intersection between contemporary virtue ethics and post-Kantian continental philosophy. She has also done integrated teaching, research, and community outreach in pre-college philosophy in the Mississippi Delta and on the Mexican–American border in El Paso, Texas.