ABSTRACT
Is hospitality not a solicitation to its addressee, “Viens, all that I have, all that I am, is at your disposal?” Is hospitality, as Emmanuel Lévinas writes, “an incessant alienation of the ego … by the guest entrusted to it … being torn from oneself for another in giving to the other the bread from one’s mouth,” a one for the other that fissures the ego, hospitality that does not expect reciprocity and witholds nothing from the guest?1 Or is there, as Derrida observes, an ineliminable tension between an unconditional offer to another and the juridical, political, and economic conditions that actually constitute the offer and without which the extending of hospitality is meaningless? Does this tension inhere in Abraham’s proffering of bread and refreshment to the three strangers who arrive after God appears to him at Mamre (Genesis 18:4-5), an offer generally adduced as a paradigmatic instance of biblical hospitality?
