Stranger (Gr. xénos)

Following the discussion of the foreigner as the “stranger-wanderer” (or immigrant), it would seem that the concept of the foreigner as the “stranger-guest” (xénos) would naturally be a hybrid of these two social relationships in contradistinction to the determination of the friend (phílos). However, nothing could be further from the truth, and there has been a confusion of the two terms over time; therefore, it is around the particular social form of the stranger-guest that we will need to return again to the rich analysis of Benveniste. Our earlier analysis of the Latin term perigrinus pertained to the stranger determined as a wanderer or immigrant, and we began by reflecting on the quantitative increase of such strangers as the result of globalization and the multiple encounters that occur today outside the earlier boundaries of the Roman Imperium. However, there is another kind of stranger that appears in Benveniste’s analysis of the fundamental Indo-European institutions and pertains to the stranger determined as the stranger-guest (xénos)—that is, at the very boundary of the stranger–guest and stranger–enemy distinction. It is this form, according to Benveniste, that explicitly belongs to the primitive institution of friendship (philótēs).

In one sense, the term phílos demarcates the social sphere of those members “who directly have a share in political rights” (co-partageant des drioits politiques), thus linking the interior of the family to the interior boundaries of the city. All who are found to dwell inside this boundary are linked together by a circle of friendship, which is strictly determined as a form of political dependency that takes its original condition from the family or natural community. However, prior to designating any sentimentality or affective meaning that often colors the concept of friendship today, the original significance establishes the direct relationship even topologically considered, between the house, the enclosure of the family, and the enclosure of the city where the citizen is found to dwell. As Benveniste argues, “These are the three progressive steps that lead directly from the group to the city.”1

From the ancient relationship of “friendship,” which Vedic śeva- denotes, to the better attested sense “group by matrimonial alliance,” which appears in Germanic heiwa- and, finally, to the concept of “co-partners in political rights,” which Latin cīvis expresses, there is a progression in three stages from the “closed group” to “the city.”2

According to this metaphoric progression across different steps, or thresholds, that belong to the polis, the minute the familial subject crosses the threshold of the home he or she may be outside the closed group of the family but still exists within the circle of the polis that determines his or her social identity as a citizen, which is then linked dialectically to his or her identity as a member of the family, as if allowing the subject to traverse from one formal identity to the next, thereby creating a visible and tangible boundary between inside and outside. At the same time, however, the very boundary between the home and the polis is effectively crossed through or canceled out so that these two social identities appear as simply a natural extension of the same civil right, implying a community of habitat and political rights. This constitutes an anomaly from which the abstract notion of “citizenship” is derived, which Benveniste argues is “peculiar” to the Latin vocabulary.3

At the same time, it goes without saying that there are also other social beings found to be present, occasionally, both in the home and in the streets of the city, but who do not share the same political right of hospitality. These are called the stranger-guests, or foreigners (xénoi). Given that their point of entry into the center of the city is not from the space of the home but from “outside” (again, “the stranger is one who arrives from outside”), they do not belong to the progressive determination of phílos but constitute an exception to this social form of identity and the sentiments normally associated with members of a closed group. The appearance of the stranger-guest also marks a transformed sentimentality, however, as Benveniste argues, one that is strictly determined by a restricted and special meaning of philótēs as the bond of obligation or exchange that occurs only artificially by means of a special pact or contract that is originally sealed by a “kiss” (phílēma), which originally had no affective meaning, being rather a pure symbol of recognition that belongs to the ritual of hospitality.4 As Benveniste recounts, a second symbol assumes the form of a broken ring, the two halves of which are exchanged between host and guest as a symbol of the pact of the relationship. The fact that both these symbols have evolved and now belong to the modern (Christian) institution of marriage gives us the precise sense of the distance, as well as a genealogical affiliation, between these two original forms of social obligation, or “hostage-taking.”5

At this point, however, Benveniste argues that the possessive form of the stranger–friend relationship indicates the obligatory comportment of the host to the guest and is not reducible to a simple linguistic possessive. As he writes:

We are arrested by the well-known fact that in Homer phílos has two senses: first of all the one of friend, phílos does not designate the value of friendship, but rather possession. . . . It is a mark of possession that expresses no amicable relation. Therefore, in its purely social signification, as in other Indo-European languages, “my friend” would bear no particular sentimental association, except the nomination of familial or juridical possession as in “my spouse,” or “my child.”6

And yet, if the possessive form of “my guest” would at some point become equivalent to “my spouse,” then this only occurs linguistically following the transposition of the original concept’s signification outside the ritual institution of hospitality, as a result of which its original social meaning is hopelessly lost. In other words, here Benveniste perceives that the reduction of phílos to a simple possessive (“my friend,” like “my spouse,” even extending to “myself” or “my kind”) could entail the loss of the original institutional and ritual determination of the social idea of friendship as the expression of behavior that is incumbent on a member of the community toward a xénos, a “stranger-guest.”7 That is to say, reduced to its linguistic and grammatical sense, its original social meaning becomes abstract. Like a coin worn from being passed from hand to hand, therefore, the archaic ritual conventions of the philótēs have been lost, perhaps irretrievably so. Thus, the most remarkable moment of Benveniste’s long and complex analysis of the meaning of the Greek phílos and the French ami occurs when he radically separates the simple grammatical sense of the possessive from any affective meaning ascribed to its adjective. In this sense phílos designates a possessive sense—“my friend”—and contains no affective or sentimental meaning at this point; moreover, as a possessive, phílos can only be expressed by the host to designate possession and a formal obligation associated with dependency or political alliance, such as in the common phrase “friend of Caesar,” or later, “friend of Christ.”

At this point, let us return to ask in what manner the Greek language dreams of a purely sentimental value of “friendship” (philótēs, philía). As with the Freudian dream-work, the friend assumes many other latent significations without any regard to their overt semantic content but become pure floating signifiers as in the dream-work itself. Therefore, in a quite dense and remarkably rich section of his own etymological analysis of phílos, Benveniste attempts to construct the chain of signifiers that belong to the concept in the manner of an original condensation of poetic metaphors that ultimately serve to displace its original signification. Furthermore, the association to the Freudian dream-work is not arbitrary or accidental, since at one point he determines the destination of the original concept’s signification as “repressed.” The condensation of signifiers include the following, all of which are derived from the text of Homer, which constitutes a privileged urtext for Benveniste. First, as I have already referred to above, phílos is associated with the act of kissing (phileîn) that originally serves as the symbol of mutual recognition that seals the pact between phíloi. Thus, according to Herodotus, when Persians greet one another in their travels, in place of exchanging words they kiss one another on the mouth according to a custom that continues to the present day; if there is a difference in social status or hierarchy between the two parties, the kiss is exchanged on the cheek.8 Once again, Benveniste qualifies this symbol to argue that it initially has no affective or sentimental meaning outside the highly ritualized and symbolic performance of recognition. (However, it is significant that the mouth is the part of the body that is chosen, signifying an act that can only be performed mutually and spontaneously by two separate beings, indicating its fundamental sense of reciprocity—since no one can kiss their own mouth—and thus the choice is logical in addition to being poetic.) Secondly, phílos acquires an additional affective value in being associated with the members of the home as the friend who enters the home is greeted in a manner comparable to the spouse with the exchange of gifts that belong to one’s own body or private and household economy (oikos).

Throughout his explication of the original social institution of the philótēs, Benveniste takes great pain to demonstrate that the origin of the affective nature of the sentiment that belongs to the meaning of the friend today is a figurative outgrowth of one of the earliest Indo-European institutions, that of hospitality between those who are nominated as “friends” (philótēs) and that would include both members of the family as well as citizens. In other words, the affective quality that currently belongs to the term, and which has belonged to it for several centuries, since it is present in Cicero as well, marks the transposition of the sentiment of the community into an affective term of the “friend” (ami). In other words, the affective meaning now belonging to the term in most contemporary languages indicates a purely metaphorical (i.e., impure) transposition of the social significance, one that obscures the obligatory and ritual meanings of the act of “hospitization,” here employing the neologism that Benveniste coins to refer to the specific social occasions and situations from which the nomination of the friend first appears as a living category, or what I have called, following Deleuze, a conceptual persona.

However, let us also recall at this point Deleuze’s assertion that the Greek notion of the “friend” is too complicated and remote, even already from its later Platonic sources, to designate any “living category” in its contemporary sense. Benveniste’s own argument seems to confirm this claim; although, the same conclusion is arrived at by a different method of etymological investigation. He concludes:

All this wealth of concepts was smothered and lost to view once phílos was reduced to a vague notion of friendship or wrongly interpreted as a possessive adjective. . . . As to the etymology of phílos, it is now clear that nothing that has been proposed on this subject holds good any longer.9

Here, as elsewhere in the argument concerning other Greek terms that have lost their original semantic and social meaning through the process of translation into the Roman imperial Latin, the implicit aim of Benveniste’s entire analysis is that the common and even “banal” meaning of friendship that finds its usage in most contemporary Indo-European languages finds its origin precisely in the Greek language and, specifically, that even the Platonic transformation of the concept radically departed from its Homeric sources. (Hence Benveniste’s statement, “It is high time we learned again how to read Homer.”10) Nevertheless, it would not be accurate to say that Plato was entirely responsible for this metaphorical transformation of the social notion into a simple affective term but rather that it is “the Greek language itself that dreams of according this term an exclusively sentimental value that cannot be derived from its initial social notions.”11 What is remarkable here is the statement that the Greek language is capable of dreaming in sentimental terms and that this “dream” may have infected and contaminated the original social notion of the friend, and by extension, the specific form of dependency and obligation that originally defines the friend as a social entity. As he goes on to defend his privilege of the Homeric usage, Benveniste argues the following:

In order to understand this complex history, it is important to recall that in Homer the entire vocabulary of moral terms is impregnated with non-individual and purely relational values. What we take as a psychological, affective, and moral terminology, in reality, only indicates the relations of the individual with the members of the group; and the direct connection between certain of these moral terms is appropriately clarified by their initial significations. Thus, there is a constant and direct link in Homer between phílos and the concept of aidṓs, a very interesting term that will have to be explored.12

As an experiment (and to follow Benveniste’s argument), at this point let us perform a radical bracketing of any affective or sentimental sense in defining the concept of the friend, similar to the phenomenological method. Why? First of all, this emotion is a dream that is originally invented by the poetics of the Greek language and not from the concrete social and ritual significations from which the term is derived, as in the case of many other Greek concepts; therefore, it must be radically extirpated in order to arrive at its primitive social notion. In this regard, even many of the contemporary philosophical analyses of hospitality, such as those by Derrida and Levinas, remain far too metaphorical in their translation of the original conceptual personae of the Greek stranger-guest and even the concept of hospitality itself. Even while each philosopher attempts to recover an earlier and even archaic institution of xénia, the “stranger–guest” relation that belongs to the institution of hospitality, as if to revive a primitive signification as the philosophical basis for erecting a moral and ethical sensibility toward “the other,” both philosophers also attest to the implicit failure of this project, which is primarily owed to two later deformations of the terms themselves in their subsequent translations into Latin and French: first, by a Roman and juridical translation of the alter huic; and second, by a scholastic and essentially pseudo-Platonic concept of autrui. For example, if I have not employed this term in this study, preferring the more concrete conceptual personae instead, this is because I find the concept of autrui still too metaphorical, along with being poetically overdetermined by the sentiments of a pseudo-Christian “piety,” to recover some of the original social significations that, according to Benveniste, belonged to the relationship between the host and the stranger-guest. It is also for this reason that throughout this study—but especially in this chapter—I have included the Greek and Latin terms in brackets, along with their diacritical characters, as if to identify “false friends” and restore their identity as “foreign words.”

However, at this point we must ask: what would be the archaic basis for the hospitization of the stranger-guest in the first place, which is not simply an ethical sense of duty or obligation in the Kantian sense? “It is necessary,” Benveniste writes, “in order to fully understand the situation, to represent the xénos, of a ‘guest,’ who is visiting another country where, as a stranger, he is deprived of all rights, of any protection, as well as any means of existing on his own.”13 It is only in such a limit-situation, however, that the full meaning of the obligation of hospitality appears, according to which the “stranger-guest” is bound to the same observance of community already enjoyed by the natural citizen but by means of a special pact that is premised on the sign of recognition of absolute dependency on the host. As Benveniste writes:

He finds no other guarantee of protection, therefore, than the one that is accorded to him in the relationship of friendship (philótēs). It is from such an extreme situation that the bond of friendship finds a more restricted and special determination, but as also with the meaning of phílos that emerges progressively from the family, both senses originate from a state of absolute dependency (and possession), which then is transposed onto other emotional qualities. What are the emotional qualities? Regard, pity, comfort, respect for the misfortunate; also, honor, loyalty, collective goodwill (charitas), and finally “modesty” and “despair.”14

“Regard, pity, comfort, respect for the misfortunate”—first of all, these are the ethical prescriptions of superiors toward those who are inferior in rank and status; likewise, “honor, loyalty, and collective goodwill” are the affective terms that define the superior’s ethical response and responsibility. However, “modesty” and “despair” are the extreme opposites that stand at the absolute limits of all community, since the exhibition of despair cannot be tolerated and must be treated with the virtues of modesty and charity (e.g., to feed the hungry, to clothe the poor). Therefore, these extreme states invoke the community’s emotions that define the obligatory behavior toward the host—that is, the ritual observance of hospitality in response to the call for respect, or reverence (aidṓs).

As discussed earlier in relation to the foreigner (perigrinus), Derrida has written extensively on precisely this “restricted and special” usage of the term philótēs to address both a complete state of dependency and an absolute obligation to hospitality (Benveniste’s hospitization, or Levinas’s “hostage situation”), a responsibility that in a certain sense he has also shown to be a reversal of the superiority embodied by the original institution of the host (as despot, or master), but this might be an arbitrary determination of the real social relationships that have evolved out of this early institution. Just as the friend indicates the sentiment of community that flows out to all of the natural members who already have a share (partager) in the political rights of the group (through kinship or inheritance), the affection of friendship directed by the host toward the stranger-guest indicates the emotional qualities that define the special bond of the philótēs. As one result, the history of this original institution of friendship toward the stranger-guest is remarked by all the failures of this circle of the closed group to complete itself and become absolute—that is, to encompass all the living relationships that belong to the polis.

And yet, it should not go unobserved that what is even more remarkable is the very existence of this special pact or social institution pertaining to the right of the stranger-guest in the first place. This special pact becomes the precedent of the stranger’s universal right of hospitality that Kant would later on define as the basis for international law: the “special pacts” or positive customs that are accorded to strangers who travel outside the limits of their own territory, which bind the prospective hosts to certain obligations and duties—first of all, that the stranger not initially be treated as an enemy as long as “he conducts himself peacefully in the place where he happens to be.”15 And yet, the question I have already raised is, what could be the foundation of this so-called universal right of hospitality, which can be called neither universal nor a right in the strictest sense, nor even a duty or obligation in the moral sense, which is dependent upon culture and religion? In this respect, the natural origin of this right presents us with the same mystery as the “Rights of Man,” except in this case, we discover the right of hospitality pertains only to a special case of immunity that is restricted to the social being of strangers. In what way can this right be called universal—unless, that is, all people are strangers by nature? Therefore, are there not also strangers who also appear in the very center of the closed group? For example, let us imagine the situation that Benveniste defined above: at the very center of the city (if not in the very home) appears the existence of a social being who is deprived of all political rights, all protection, and thus any means of existence, which is to say, in a state of absolute dependency on an original host. Here we discover in the appearance of this being—including the suddenness and the unexpected nature of his or her appearance—a natural corollary to the infant who appears inside the home at the center of the circle of the family. Thus, perhaps the infant is the first and most primitive figure of the stranger-guest, the first appearance of a being who is deprived of all political rights, in a primitive state of absolute dependency, whose very claim to protection or “immunity” is only a surrogate of the host’s respect and reverence for this “particular stranger” who appears at the very center of the closed group but whose identity also originates from positive law, custom, and culture.

Following this association of the stranger-guest relation that is also internal to the group, let us recall again the affective and emotional qualities of reverence and respect that belong to the situation involving hospitization in response to the obligation of aidṓs. Again, these subjective attitudes first appear from the perspective of a superior host in response to a state of dependency and function as the motives for the overt actions of ritual obligation of friendship, or hospitality. Moreover, as Benveniste shows, it is in the inner sphere of the family that the emotional qualities of reverence, or respect, begin to exclusively define the position of the oikodespótēs (the head of the family), also for whom the power of aidṓs is solely reserved, especially “pity” for those who are completely dependent on his sovereignty. To this subjective quality we find other emotions that belong naturally to the members of the household group and that constitute a state of mutual dependency and obligation between master and host, such as regard, comfort, honor, loyalty, goodwill (charitas), and, finally, “modesty” and “despair.” The sexual re-lation in particular is reserved for the feelings of modesty and restraint, particularly toward women and children; honor, loyalty, and collective goodwill appear to generally characterize all the subjective relations between members of the household; and, finally, the extreme sentiments of “pity” and “despair” do not seem to be tolerated and demand immediate hospitization by the oikodespótēs. The question of how these emotional qualities first appear to naturally determine the relationships of this group is perhaps unanswerable, but what is more important is that these subjective comportments begin to objectively define the special nature of the social relationships that one finds there.

According to Benveniste, what is most crucial to observe is that many of these same emotional qualities are transported outside the closed circle of the group in order to reappear in the institution of the philótēs, but again, only by means of a “special pact.” However, in the Roman and Christian worlds that follow, it is the area of religion (religio) that is gradually reserved for this “restricted and special pact,” as well as many of the subjective comportments between members of a natural community and a host of strangers. However, what is more significant is that it is also around this special pact that one finds the extreme expressions of pity and despair that now determine the state of absolute dependency of the creature before his God and, in response, a special kind of reverence and obligation that is particularly reserved for the relation between God, the “Host of hosts” (that is, the absolute oikodespótēs), and his own particular stranger-guests. Christianity, in its most primitive and archaic forms, is very much a religion that emerges out of this special pact and a sense of obligation to the stranger-guest; according to the Gospel of James, it is a religion of strangers, orphans, and widows, all of whom lay claim to the right of aidṓs in the name of a divine master, or host. In turn, Benveniste defines this form of absolute dependency that determines the Christian understanding of finitude as the obligation that defines a mortal creature who is literally “bound to the site” by his creator-God—that is, who becomes a “being towards death.”16 In other words, it is only according to a Christian sense of religio that death assumes the obligatory form of finitude, of the ens creatum. Consequently, the Christian owes God his or her very life to the Host; in fact, he is even a “slave to Christ,” according to Paul, marking a state of absolute dependency and obligation that surpasses all worldly obligations. As a result, the very content of the term religio undergoes a distinct and outward transformation, no longer designating a subjective form of inhibition or prohibition (that of “having scruples”) but instead an objective oath and institutional form of “having obligations” that is reserved for a heavenly Host, or in the name of those who are bound to the same site. Moreover, after the gradual secularization of this notion of aidṓs (respect, reverence), the more the human being becomes “free” to exist in his or her own circle of community, one claimed by right of citizenship or birth, the more that a state of absolute dependency is especially reserved or restricted only to the religious sphere of existence. In between these two spheres, however, the obligation of hospitality can become mitigated by other interests that juridically determine it—all the way to being vanquished completely from the sphere of the political under certain circumstances and with regard to certain strangers who do not belong to the closed circle of the polis.

To conclude these reflections concerning the evolution of the social and religious institutions pertaining to the relation between the host and the stranger-guest, let us return to the earlier assertion that there is no universal species of stranger; thus, every stranger is a “particular stranger” (i.e., determined by statute or positive law). With this observation Benveniste is raising the possibility that the original guest–host relationship (the archaic or Homeric institution of hospitality) can indeed undergo transformation of its content and, as a social institution, may even cease to exist historically through the gradual rewriting of the positive statutes and laws of a given society concerning its own “particular strangers.” Therefore, if every stranger is “a particular stranger,” then every appearance of the stranger is completely dependent on the positive statute or law that determines his or her “recognition.” The restricted and special obligations accorded to the behavioral comportment of obligatory hospitality are only the progressive and legal comportments of the same obligation, which has no natural basis, only a legal and juridical one. Here we can only briefly recall that the process of estrangement (or “depropriation”) that led to the genocide of European Jews under National Socialism gradually evolved from the juridical revision of positive laws that distinguished, primarily through marriage and racial membership, between those strangers who “come from the outside” and those who belong to the closed group and are thus “copartners in the political rights” of the closed group. In other words, the language and personae that originally belonged to the archaic institution of hospitality gradually disappear from the earth and are replaced by the modern political and juridical codes of responsibility enforced only by positive laws and today, especially in the area of international law, are where the “concrete encounters” between the stranger-guest and the stranger–host relationship are primarily located. However, as has been shown, first spoken as a natural language by the members of the family and then metaphorically transposed into the spheres of religion and civil society, the language of friendship has suffered from being both poetically overdetermined within each separate sphere throughout its migration into other linguistic families (as Benveniste suggests, in the manner of a dream-work) and as having acquired a new meaning that is shorn of all sentimentality and exists only in legal–juridical language to address the situation of those “particular strangers” who belong to the modern polis. Of course, this has resulted in a number of new “concrete situations” in which there may be a particular stranger invented by these new significations but no host, no obligation, and no possibility of aidṓs (regard, pity, mercy, sympathy in misfortune, etc.). It is this last concrete situation that also happens to address the particular stranger who is the deportee, as I discuss in the next chapter.