La tradizione giuridica dell'ospitalità come prospettiva umanista

Hospitality, in our juridical tradition, is not only one right out of many (the «right of hospitality»): it is a proper right insofar as it enters into an obligation when affirming a duty towards others. Its Law and its provisions predate positive legislation and rigorous law codes, and precede States and Nations; they come before established political rights of identity and organised communities, be they those of families, nations or states. We must therefore think of hospitality (and also the right of hospitality) as lying outside of the specialised domain of state law (outside the positive right of the state), as being distant from any constituted form of culture or identity, from any system of belonging to a community. We must regard the hospitality relationship as one that does not presume the objective inclusion of “Us”, that does not imply a collective future, and that does not acknowledge the abstract, separate, arbitrary and coercive nature of the laws of the state. It is not a case of establishing some community (be it ethnic, racial, political, national, international or supranational), because hospitality presumes a primary experience that predates any link or connection based on belonging, any commonality based on identity, any possession defined by people in common. At the same time, however, we must not forget that hospitality presumes, to an even greater extent, a primary relationship with the other that precedes the actual formation of the individual, or the consciousness of identity; in fact, it really involves an openness towards the other, an acceptance of the other, action on behalf of the other that precedes the actual determination of the inter-individual relationship. It does not involve the other as an identity (as an individual or ethnic, national or cultural entity), but as otherness (as an absolute, universal singularity); as a non-negotiable otherness , that cannot be attributed to differences (those involved in “regulated exchange”), but can be paradoxically placed within the ambit of a social relation based on reciprocal otherness, beyond any equivalence.

Il testo propone alcune riflessioni in ordine alla tradizione giuridica dell'ospitalità così come, a grandi linee, si è andata sviluppando nel corso della civiltà occidentale