Limital Hospitality

Jordi Vivaldi; 30.07.2021

“Inmundo”, “inmundicia”; from the Latin term “inmunditia”: without purity or order.

The etymology of the Spanish translation of the term “filth” suggests a singular association: it

connects physical uncleanness, dirtiness and noisomeness to inmunditia, the deprivation of

the Roman mundus, that is, the lack of the universal systematics composing the Greek

kosmos. To be filthy would mean thus to be void of the kosmetikhe1 (cosmetics) that

vertebrate the universe; it would announce the categorical exodus and exile from the gloria

mundi, the ontological de-foundation of certain manners of being whose confusing

miscegenation would irreversibly mark them as “worldless” or “poor of world”.2

In its amalgamation of human and natural histories, the Anthropocene has brought us a new

situation. The acknowledgement of multispecies forms of togetherness has intertwined the

mundus and the immundus; oncomouses, robotic rays, chatbots or synthetic landscapes

appear as filthy fleshes whose bastardy enfeeble their worldness not by increasing its distance

in relation to the order of a purified mundus, but by plurifying the latter: they propel

probabilistic ontologies of habitation3 that are premised on an abundance of local

complicities, viscous coherences irreducible to the systematics of one single warehouse.

By advocating for a promiscuous overlap of habitational patterns, this scenario questions the

notion of home. Constructed of literal and metaphorical walls, the home has conventionally

1
The greek term kosmetikhe should be read here as a tekhne of providing order and beauty.
2
M. Heidegger. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, World, Solitude, Finitude, London, Bloomington, 1995, p. 177.
3
Stacy Alaimo. Exposed, London, University of Minnesota Press, 2017, p. 38.
made sense as an architectural apparatus by erecting boundaries between order and chaos,

civitas and barbarie, safeness and peril. Mundus and immundus. However, in light of the

“differing togetherness” animating the Anthropocene, the question of the home becomes the

question of hospitality, the greek xenia. Hospitality; a form of pact, a contract4. Care and

reciprocity towards the foreign, the unknown, the xenos, but also an obligation extending to

the family, to the generation, to the genealogy. What does it mean to be hospitable in a planet

shared with radically different ontologies of habitation? How to let them come, to let them

arrive? How can they take place in our place? In brief, how to give them, to give us, spaces of

inhabitation that are hospitable enough to live well?

We will frame this question with regard to the notion of limit. If inhabitation implies the

production of spaces within spaces5, and if there is no hospitality without finitude6, the

presence of limits capable of holding fleshes together-in-its-difference7 is pivotal. However,

such operativity is not well captured, it seems to me, by reducing the limit to an Euclidean

border line: regardless of the latter’s porosity, this approach would presuppose homogeneity

in the subdivision of space8. Thus, in addition -and not necessarily in opposition- to Plato’s

limit as contour -where does something end?-, we will also conjure up the Stoics’ limit as

power -how far the action of something goes?- and Eugenio Trias’ limit as territory -what

spaces might be opened within the limit itself?-. The careful interplay among these limited,

limitrophe and liminal limits, particularly present both in the Roman temple and in the

Roman Limes, will be central in this essay: in conversation with various artistic,

technological and political spatial expressions, they will reveal limital forms of hospitality

particularly sensible and sensitive to their arrivants, whichever their form might be.
4
M. Serres, The Natural Contract, Michigan, The University of Michigan Press, 1995, p.15.
5
A. Schmarsow, “The Essence of Architectural Creation”, in Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics,
1873-1893, London, Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1993, p. 288-289.
6
J. Derrida, Of Hospitality, California: Stanford University Press, 2000, p. 55.
7
R.Braidotti, Post-human Knowledge, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019, p. 52.
8
H.Lefebre, The Production of Space, Cambridge, Editions Anthropos, 1991, p. 98.