Risky Cosmopolitanism: Intimacy and Autoimmunity in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist

ABSTRACT

For a novel consistently teetering on the brink of violence, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist begins in a surprisingly benign manner but ultimately offers a sustained interrogation of the possibilities and limits of hospitality in a time of terror. The novel is permeated by references to familiar forms of hospitality and their ultimate failure, yet this article focuses more specifically on the troubling implications The Reluctant Fundamentalist has for a philosophy of hospitality; that is, what appears as a failure of hospitality—the inevitable violence of the novel’s conclusion—is actually a provocative and sustained engagement with hospitality in its most pure and terrifying form. Using the figures offered to us by Immanuel Kant and Jacques Derrida, I argue that the novel theorizes a hospitality given even and especially when the face of the other is the irreducible face of death. It exemplifies what Gideon Baker conceptualizes as cosmopolitanism as hospitality—an ethics that opens to difference as Other whatever that other may bring in his infinitely unknowable state. Ultimately, The Reluctant Fundamentalist suggests that if absolute hospitality is an openness to whoever or whatever arrives, then included in that is a hospitality even to the one who comes to kill.

KEYWORDS:

• Hospitality
• fundamentalism
• violence
• autoimmunity
• terror

Notes

1. I use hospitality here to refer to the ethical philosophy espoused by Immanuel Kant and Jacques Derrida in particular. Broadly, I take hospitality to include both Kant’s notion of “the right of a strangers not to be treated as an enemy upon the arrival in another’s country” (15) and Derrida’s definition of hospitality as a principle that demands, “even creates the desire for, a welcome without reserve and without calculation, an exposure without limit to whoever arrives” (“Principle” 6).

2. There is, of course, precedent for this collapse of hospitality into violence. At the end of Homer’s The Odyssey, the scene of hospitality—structured around Odysseus’ homecoming—is overturned when the conventional objects of welcome (a footstool for guests to sit, a basket of meat) are deployed as weapons against the guests. See Steve Reece’s, The Stranger’s Welcome (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993) for a detailed account of hospitality in ancient Greece.

3. The most familiar philosophical understandings of the term are likely aligned with the definition provided by the Oxford English Dictionary, in which hospitality—hospitalité in French and, in Latin, hospitālitās—is described as “the act or practice of being hospitable; the reception and entertainment of guests, visitors, or strangers, with liberality and goodwill” (“Hospitality”). Hospitality itself is rooted in the Latin, hospes, which the linguist Emile Beneviste divides into the sub-roots of hostis and potis. Potis represents “the power exercised by the master of house,” while hostis “means the stranger who has equal rights before it means ‘enemy’” (Still 5). Curiously, the root hostis in Latin finds its equivalent pre-Germanic Gothic source in the word gasts. The meaning of gasts, however, is “guest,” whereas the Latin hostis translates as “enemy.” According to Beneviste, “to explain the connexion [sic] between ‘guest’ and ‘enemy’ it is usually supposed that both derived their meaning from ‘stranger’” (75).

4. As Derrida notes, the word “hospitality” has a “troubled and troubling origin, a word which carries its own contradiction incorporated into it, a Latin word which allows itself to be parasitized by its opposite, ‘hostility,’ the undesirable guest [hôte] which it harbors as the self-contradiction in its own body” (Derrida, “Hostipitality” 3). As this etymology reveals, the contradictions and complexity surrounding hospitality are not new, nor are they recently discovered. Not only is this “trouble” built into language—it is also referenced across time and culture and is reflected in the works by Immanuel Kant, Derrida, and others from whom we derive both our philosophical and political understanding of hospitality.

5. Both The Iliad and The Odyssey are heavily invested in figures of hospitality, in both conditional and more absolute forms. Travel and welcoming strangers into the home are common themes in Homer’s work, as are moments of violence and hostage-taking, hosts abusing their position, hostiles posing as guests, departures and homecomings, and doorways and thresholds. The notion of hospitality is raised almost immediately in The Odyssey when, in Book I, the goddess Athene arrives in Ithaca. Upon her arrival, Telemachus “thought it blame in his heart that a stranger should stand long at the gates” and so speaks “[h]ail, stranger, with us thou shalt be kindly entreated, and thereafter, when thou hast tasted meat, thou shalt tell us that whereof thou hast need’” (Homer 4–5). This scene is described by Steve Reece as a theoxeny—a case of a god appearing as a stranger who “comes to earth to test the hospitality of mortals” (10). Reaching beyond Homer, Louis Chevalier de Jaucourt, in his entry on “Hospitalitié” for Diderot’s Enclyclopédie, traces a genealogy of hospitality back further still, to the Abraham of Genesis, who “practiced noble beneficence towards foreigners” (“Hospitalitié”). de Jaucourt, in fact, describes various expression of hospitality practiced by a large number of cultures—Abrahamic being one, but also Jewish, Greek, Roman, Persian, and Middle Eastern societies (“Hospitalitié”).

6. Here, in his lengthy and mournful eulogy to Emmanuel Levinas, Derrida insists—following in Levinas’s footsteps with an attentiveness to the irreducible singularity of the Face—that the obligation to hospitality is an obligation that remains firm even in the literal face that is violence. The demand for hospitality issued by the face of the other—be it hostile enemy or benign friend—presupposes any violence that the other may bring.

7. See Richard Gray’s critique of 9/11 fiction as a “domestification” in After the Fall (2011) and Pankaj Mishra’s similar assessment of such fiction as “retreat” (“The End of Innocence”); Kristiaan Versluys (2009) also argues that much of 9/11 literature represents a fallback onto “mainstream” themes and thus does not adequately address a growing fascination with strangers and strangeness that is at the core of social and cultural life in the aftermath of terrorist attack.

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Lindsay Anne Balfour

Lindsay Anne Balfour is a visiting scholar at New York University and an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the September 11 Memorial and Museum. Her research examines the function of public art at the 9/11 Museum and its relationship to a philosophy of hospitality. Lindsay completed her doctorate in Cultural Studies at the University of British Columbia, where she was funded by the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada.