Letting Madness In: Toward Hospitality without Incarceration

Abstract

In a setting suffused in madness, two people experiment with topologies of hospitality excluded from Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle’s Of Hospitality. The sanity of the host and author, Richard Ingram, is called into question by the nature of the dwelling in which he lives and writes a residence for people who have been excluded from the realm of reason. Following Bataille, Blanchot, and Foucault, the host and his guest ask what it means to pursue a form of “communication” characterized by what Nietzsche termed “self-overcoming.” This form of communication is precisely the kind rendered impossible in the dialogue between Derrida and Dufourmantelle in Of Hospitality.