Haunting and Hospitality

In Infrapolitical Literature: Hispanism and the Border Alberto Moreiras touches upon the concept of haunting many times, especially in relation to thought, literature, and otherness.  Early in his discussion, haunting is briefly connected with hospitality: “Whatever arises is new, yet thought must welcome it.  Haunting is the condition of all hospitality, or hospitality is the condition of haunting” (185).  In this way, the otherness of the world is what visits, or perhaps intrudes upon, thought or consciousness.  Haunting shares a relationship with hospitality in that it is always both within and outside its host.  What haunts is always incorporated and yet othered, set apart.  Perhaps there is a fruitful connection to both Derek Attridge and Jacques Derrida in this discussion of hospitality.  In The Singularity of Literature, Attridge describes how the “dominant mode of mechanical reading can be modified or interrupted by a somewhat different relation to the work.  Not all works will have something to offer to a reader’s openness to alterity, of course, but when one does, mechanical and instrumental interpretation is complicated by what we may term readerly hospitality, a readiness to have one’s purposes reshaped by the work to which one is responding” (80).  Attridge’s conception of “readerly hospitality” is more specific than Moreiras in that it describes the hospitality of the reader, the host, to the otherness of fiction.  Moreiras seems to be applying this hospitality to encounters with otherness that exceed the literary and extend to the political, historical, infrapolitical, etc..  In Of Hospitality, Derrida writes that “absolute hospitality” is something that is “graciously offered beyond debt and economy, offered to the other, a hospitality invented for the singularity of the new arrival, of the unexpected visitor” (83).  This “absolute hospitality” that Derrida describes as being “invented” is also an important element of this puzzle—which not only informs Attridge’s notion of singularity in literature, but also speaks to Moreiras’s concept of hospitality and haunting.  If we are to believe that haunting is the condition of all hospitality and that hospitality is the condition of haunting, which Moreiras posits, then there must be some kind of inherent singularity, inventiveness, that is born of this relationship.  There also must exist a kind of graciousness or offering, which when applied to more political contexts may become increasingly problematic.