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In this text, I first criticize Derrida’s conception of “unconditioned” ethical hospitality. It is problematic because, by demanding to welcome the arrival of the newcomer as a “messianic” event and by guilting the one that welcomes him/her, Derrida operates a mere inversion of the xenophobic position. Contrary to what he asserts, being-here and being-at-home can be understood as the condition of the possibility of a hospitable reception. The Derridean conception of hospitality thus leads to an aporia, to an insurmountable antinomy. This is why I propose to return to Kant, to his political conception of hospitality which, by overcoming the reciprocal hostility between peoples, would make possible a pacified “cosmopolitical society.”

This paper questions the philosophical and the political imaginary that tends to situate the alterity of the other on the other side of a frontier, be it visible or invisible, real or imaginary. In support of the hypothesis of another that is not to be found in the vaguely distant horizon, the Husserlian concepts of association, pairing, and imaginary transposition are first considered in order to give an account of a troubling proximity of the other. This framework is complexified next with the help of psychoanalytic reflections on the status of unconscious phantasms in their relationship to history. The paper ends by opening a liminary space made of lacunae that allows us to encounter each other and to make sense of these encounters.

Since the Treatises of Westphalia in 1648, the notion of frontier (border) has been considered from an objectivist vision of the ecumene. Such a conception has resulted in the loss of the complexity that is the common basis of human interaction, given that identities are built around an illusion of substantiality that excludes the possibility of ontological continuum. Thus, identities have become inhospitable. By considering human interaction from the perspective of an a priori and non-monadic intersubjectivity, Merleau-Ponty’s ontology opens up the possibility of a more hospitable conception of border, where ego and alter ego become doubles, extending each other, the other-there, on the other side being the flesh of my flesh. Hospitality becomes thus an experience of the original character of the human community.

The aim of my article is to establish a concept of the border, as a particular schema of intersubjectivity, capable of welcoming others better than the conception of a world without borders could. The border is conceived in terms of power through the critique of the “principle of charity” (Quine, Davidson). This point must be understood in terms of the phenomenological paradox of transcendence (Lavigne). The border can thus be conceived by analogy with the phenomenological concept of intentionality, using the concept of phenomenological life as subjective power (Henry), which allows us to establish a coherent and legitimate concept of the border.

We will examine here a frontier: cruelty, which Jacques Derrida links to power and the sovereignty of ipseity, characterized by a tautological relationship with oneself—excluding the other. Such cruelty is structural and thus cannot be avoided by any contingent adjustment: it never ceases to materialise in renewed historical circumstances. So, what can we think, do, live, suffer? Derrida addresses this question to psychoanalysis and affirms an unconditional hospitality—given beyond self-sufficiency, and therefore beyond cruelty. Such hospitality is not a moral duty but a structural necessity.

This essay proposes a paradigm shift in the way humans relate to the earth as hosts and guests. It explores the possibility of a radical ecological hospitality following the phenomenological writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gaston Bachelard and the eco-feminist insights of Mary Robinson and Catherine Keller. Such an ecological conversion signals a shift from the Anthropocene of human domination of nature to a symbiocene of deep interdependency and vital entanglement between human and other-than-human life forms.

In this article, I argue that some of the unique features of Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy are helpful for providing some resources for considering the generalized use of the singular “they,” with some caveats. In particular, Levinas’s emphasis on the singularity of the Other and the thematizations necessary to make adjudications within politics can be mapped onto the first- and second-person forms on the one hand, and the third-person form on the other. The possibility of using a gender-neutral pronoun in the third-person form arises as a way of reducing unnecessary thematizations of the Other, at least in English.

Published in 2022, my book entitled Le désir du réel dans la philosophie Québécoise sought to establish the existence of similarities and differences between speculative realism and five Québec realist philosophers: Charles De Koninck, Thomas De Koninck, Jacques Lavigne, Charles Taylor, and Jean Grondin. Referring to certain ideas contained in my book, this text attempts to clarify, on the one hand, some of the hopes and expectations that I have had since its publication and, on the other hand, to present research on which I am currently working, research that developed out of Le désir du reel. While my hopes and expectations are linked to the importance accorded to Québécoise philosophy, my research centers on the relevance of using the Wittgensteinian concept of “family resemblances” when describing this philosophy, as well as on two of its constitutive characteristics: eclecticism and lived experience.

The Affection In Between argued that the Aristotelian concept of sunaisthesis, or sensing in common, revived through contemporary theories of intercorporeity and affect, ought to play a larger role in current ethical and political philosophy. But the historical neglect of this concept did not leave it intact. What effect did its long-standing marginalization and relegation to the private or intimate sphere have on sunaisthetic practices, and how might this impact any revival? This article charts opportunities and hazards for a contemporary deployment of sunaisthesis by drawing on the work of Ingeborg Bachmann. First, I connect Bachmann’s “moral impulse before all morality” to sunaisthesis as a sense-making activity at the limits of language. Next, I read her literary theory as charting attempts to traverse these limits and reawaken sunaisthetic experience. Finally, a close reading of a key passage from Malina illustrates the dangers of restricting sunaisthetic affect within strictly policed borders of intimacy.