Emmanuel Levinas on hospitality: Ethical and Political aspects

The current refugee crisis poses the crucial question of hospitality [or hos(ti)pitality in Derridean terms] as the complex ethico-political question of welcoming the stranger in a globalized world. For Emmanuel Levinas, hospitality means ethical and by extension political responsibility for the absolute Other. Without doubt, this is the quintessence of the Levinasian ethical and political thought. It is noteworthy that this sui generis metaphysical ethics does not concern conventional moralism orcharity either in the case of personal ethics or in the case of political ethics. In both cases, it chiefly concerns the foundation of world as a refugium, i.e. a threshold of unconditional justice. In a nutshell, this article try in the final analysis to indicate the critical fact, according to Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical argumentation, that a public policy on refugee question should mainly be determined by the ethics of hospitality in the sense of the pure welcoming of the absolute Other. Undoubtedly, this form of ethico-political justice is worthy of the name.