6th Seamus Heaney Lecture

Professor Richard Kearney, holder of the John B Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston College, delivered the sixth lecture in the current Seamus Heaney Lecture Series entitled:  “The Poetics of the Strange: Hospitality of the Stranger”.  The lecture explored the concept of hostis in the Greek and Abrahamic traditions by analysing how many wisdom traditions are founded on a wager between the stranger as enemy or guest.  Looking at a series of texts, verses where this wager between primary hospitality and hostility is staged, it examined some of the critical implications of this existential decision for our contemporary culture and society.

Professor Kearney began his talk by referring to the 1492 incident between the Butlers, Earls of Ormond, and the Fitzgeralds, Earls of Kildare, when a dispute was resolved by one of the latter taking a risk by offering his arm through a hole in bolted door.  The need to ‘chance your arm’ when it comes to meeting the other, became a leitmotif of the lecture as the speaker set out two compelling models of hospitality.  The first followed from Jacques Derrida’s reading of the word hostis, whereby we cannot speak about hospitality without speaking about hostility.  The second followed from Paul Ricoeur’s reading of the same term which, unlike Derrida’s account, allows for the possibility of discernment between the stranger as enemy, and stranger as friend.  According to Professor Kearney, in the Greek tradition examples of the ambiguous nature of hostis abound.  It is implied by the attributes of the god Zeus who was ‘a protector of strangers’, and in a slightly different vein, it is evident in the story of the Trojan horse – the welcoming of which has destructive consequences.  Professor Kearney further elaborated this ambiguous dimension of the other as it appears in the Hebrew, the Christian and the Islamic traditions. The lecture was accompanied by a series of stunning images taken from the traditions in question.  One quite dazzling example was Bottichelli’s The Annunciation (below) which, the speaker suggested, alludes to the fragile and vulnerable space that emerges between the terror that accompanies the appearance of the angel to Mary, and the grace that invites her to be open to the radical otherness of the stranger.  As Professor Kearney pointed out the Christian wager is here illustrated in the way Mary ‘dares to imagine the impossible as possible’.

The influence of our dominant historical religious tradition was highlighted as a vibrant resource for interpreting contemporary Ireland. The presentation defended an interdisciplinary and intercultural approach to difference and identity, one that did not dismiss the genuine challenges of welcoming the stranger, but nonetheless articulated how a leap of imagination through the discernment of the stranger in each encounter is made possible. It is this imaginative act that characterises the poetics of the stranger, an act that, Professor Kearney suggested, challenges each of us today with an uncertain but potentially fruitful wager.

 

 

 

 

Last Updated: Thursday March 05 2009