The stranger in the polis

Hospitality in Greek myth

John Manoussakis

pp. 274-284

in: Richard Kearney, Kascha Semonovitch (eds), Phenomenologies of the stranger, New York City, Fordham University Press, 2011

Abstract

By the gates of Thebes the stranger has no name. For to be given a name, or to give oneself a name, is to identify oneself as someone, and therefore as not a stranger anymore. Naming the stranger amounts to depriving him of his strangeness and appropriating him to the familiar, to ourselves. A stranger who can be named by this or that name is no longer strange. He is already within. Even before he enters my city or my home, he has entered my language: as Levinas says, “languageishospitality.”

Cited authors

Levinas Emmanuel