Cosmetics of Hospitality: the Limited, the Liminal and the Limitrophe

ATTP - TU Wien

Summer Semester 2022

Semester hours: X

Credits: 5.0

Type: SE Seminar Bachelor

Format: Hybrid

Language: English

Tutor: Jordi Vivaldi

Learning outcomes

After successful completion of the course, students are able to:

(In terms of Content)

- Gain knowledge regarding the particular themes of the course,

- Understand and articulate the various contexts that will be discussed in class,

(In terms of Arguments)

- Develop a research topic which is connected to the contents of the course, while
being explored and expressed in an academic manner,

(In terms of Method)

- Read across various disciplines, engage abstractly with texts and collectively discuss
them,
- Differentiate between academic and journalistic sources and forms of writing,
- Cultivate methodological skills to write in a manner adequate to academic research
(principles of library and internet research, correct handling of quotation and
bibliography, primary forms of argumentation).
Contents

- Brief

Hospitality; a form of pact, a contract, a play of hide and seek. Care and generosity towards

the figure of the unknown, the foreign, the xenos, but also a political commitment, a form of

openness to and by an-other involving as well the community, the generation, the genealogy.

A collective -if not cosmological- endeavor that today, in light of the Anthropocene’s

miscegenations, demands to trespass the human circumscription characteristic of the Greek

xenia in order to conceive hospitality as a commitment of human and non-human affiliation:

What does it mean to be hospitable on a planet shared with zoe/geo/techno modes of

inhabitation? How to let them come, to let them arrive? How can they take their place in our

place? In brief, how to give them, to give ourselves, spaces of inhabitation that are

hospitable enough to live together well?

Architecture, philosophy, mythology, art and science will nurture this seminar’s fascination

with these questions by offering us tools to ramify and recreate the notion of limit. If

inhabitation implies the production of spaces within spaces, the presence of limits holding

flesh together-in-their-difference seems pivotal. The differential sameness and

autoreferential difference of those limits will be connected to hospitality by expanding their

usual architectural role of enclosure in order to foliate into three codifications: the

limit-contour (Where does something end?); the limit-action (How far does the power of

something go?), and the limit-milieu (What territories might be opened within the limit itself?).

The numerous turns, overlaps, collisions, angles, jumps and intertwinings operating between

these codes of limitation, liminality and limitrophy will orchestrate the cosmetics of hospitality

proposed in this Seminar: articulations of spatial techniques (techne) seeking to collect

everything that can be considered (cosmos) while producing new variations and unknown

resonances regarding pleasurable forms of cohabitation.

- Readings

1. Stacy Alaimo, Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman

Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

[With special attention to Part 1 “Posthuman Pleasures”]

2. Gilles Deleuze, On Spinoza, Transcription of his lectures in Vincennes from

2.12.1980 to 24.3.1981.

[With special attention to the session on 17.02.1981]

3. Vinciane Despret, “The Body We Care For: Figures for

Anthropo-zoo-genesis”, Body and Society, no. 10.3, 2014.

[With special attention to the section “New Distributions: Lorenz and the
Becoming Jackdaw’]

4. Rick Dolphijn, The Philosophy of Matter, London: Bloomsbury Academic,

2021.

[With special attention to Part 2 “This is not the Earth!”]

5. Joseph Rykwert, The Idea of a Town: The Anthropology of Urban Form in

Rome, Italy and the Ancient World, London, Faber and Faber, 2011.

[With special attention to Chapter 3 “Guardians of Centre, Guardians of

Boundaries”]

6. Emanuele Coccia, Filosofia della Casa: Lo spazio domestico e la felicità.

Milano, Giulio Einaudi Editore, 2021.

[With special attention to the chapters “Introduzione. La casa oltre la città”,

“Traslochi” and “Cucine”.]
Teaching methods

The seminar is structured around the topic of Cosmetics of Hospitality and its relation to the
notion of limit. From this base, each student will cultivate and deploy their specific line of
thought, which will be accommodated through three different resources:

- In class group conversations

- Week to week writing exercises
- Two audiovisual documents developing the concept of Cosmetics of Hospitality that
should be seen outside class time.
- Optional meetings outside class time to prepare the essay of 8 - 12 pages that each
student is submitting at the end of the course.

Examination modalities

The evaluation considers the participation in class and the delivery of a paper of 8 - 12
pages according to the following criteria:

- Active participation and engagement in the seminar discussions.

- Capacity to engage with the concepts and contents of the course in an inventive
manner.
- Continued participation in the exercises and in the elaboration of the compendium
- Capacity to identify a topic study, a specific angle for such study, to develop
arguments and an adequate method.
- Capacity to distinguish academic research from critic and journalistic prose.
- Sophistication of the research topic and capacity to articulate it, in the written paper
- Academic formatting of the research paper and general attention to the presentation
(written and oral).

Additional information

Figures

- An Alchemical Transmutation
- A Tuning of Voices
- A Triangular Permutation
- A Matryoshka Working in Cycles
- A Geyser Erupting an Spatio-Temporal Regime
- A Motionless Journey
- A Play of Hide and Seek
- …
Schedule (1st month)

- Week 1

In-Class Activity:
Introduction to Cosmetics of Hospitality and presentation of the various “Figures”.

Week Exercise:
According to each “Figure”, each student should select and narratively order three
short quotations from the Bibliography. Then, each student should write a short essay
of 500 words connecting the three quotations with each student’s “Figure”.

- Week 2

In-Class Activity:
Close Reading of the selected quotations by the students.

Week Exercise:
According to each “Figure”, each student should select 1 paragraph from the texts of
the bibliography and replace 5 - 8 key words/expressions. Then, each student should
write a short comparative essay between the original and reformulated text,
underlining, with respect to the student’s figure, the intentional vector underpinning
these transformations.

- Week 3

In-Class Activity:
Close Reading of the original and reformulated texts.

Week Exercise:
According to each “Figure”, each student should choose 3 images to present their
“Board-Game” (Field of action). Then, each student should write a short text of 500
words connecting the 3 images of the “Board-Game” to three quotations of the basic
bibliography in light of each student’s “Figure”.

- Week 4

In-Class Activity:
Discussion on the selected images of the “Board-Game” and their associated
quotations with respect to each “Figure”.

Week Exercise:
Each student should choose one text that is part of the basic bibliography and one
text that is not part of the basic bibliography. Then, each student should write a short
essay of 500 words connecting both texts in light of the “Figure” that each student is
developing.
Previous knowledge

No previous knowledge is required.