Aff - Unconditional Hospitality UBI - Michigan 7 2023 BFHGR

Aff – Unconditional Hospitality BI – BFGHR
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1AC Materials
1AC
1AC---Unconditional Hospitality
The advantage is HOSPITALITY.
A while back, a passer-by came in, frozen stiff. Chilled, iced, stiff, immobile, exhausted-it is the snake stretched out on the snow one winter's day. It asked for nothing; it was hibernating perhaps. A villager walking by, on his own land (note this well), gathers up the snake, brings it inside, stretches it out by the fire, where it immediately begins to awaken. From the outside to the inside, from numbness to life , from sleep to anger, from indifference to hatred: from cold to hot. The passer-by asked for a haven, a bed and some food, soup, victuals-to sleep under the same roof. Asked for but did not negotiate; it is not a question of price: the satyr's hospitality is free. Thenceforth the risk is there, quite literally; one is at the other's mercy. On the contrary, in the villager's house, another country rat. As his action is meritorious-charity, my good sir-it is a question of rent. Rent, that is to say, a price for a space, a payment for territory. The one who is at home is my lessee: this double locative is a veritable hornet's nest where regulated hospitality passes many a time to hostility. Having come back from the cold into the warmth, the insect attacks: ingrate, says the villager, such is my pay! But he figures wrong. The serpent is not a lessee; he was not looking for a haven; he was answered without having called. He was given an uncalled-for opinion. Someone made himself the serpent's benefactor, savior, and father. You are sleeping quite peacefully, and when you wake you find yourself in debt. You live with no other need, and suddenly, someone claims to have saved your country, protected your class, your interests, your family, and your table. And you have to pay him for that, vote for him, and other such grimaces. Thus the serpent awakens obliged to another. Something to get angry about. But, moreover, the villager was taking a walk at home, then goes into his house, still at home. As far as he is concerned, he never changed territories, never crossed a border. For himself, he is at home. On the contrary, the serpent does change. It was undoubtedly in its nest and finds itself in a foreign land. More than having been given a spot, his own has been taken away. Another debt. Thus when the balance sheet is drawn up, the demanded payment is turned around. And the host is less a host than he thought. Less hospitable than he thought. Undoubtedly hostile, that's the thorny part, the hot spot. Who has to pay? The litigation is serious. Who is the host and who is the guest? Where is the gift and where is the debt? Who is hospitable, who is hostile, again the same�ord, the same thing: * No third to judge in this case. It is true that elsewhere the third opens the oyster and eats it, devours the weasel and the rabbit, which surely means that he judges, that is to say; he decides, that is to say, he slices [tranche] . Like the esquire trenchant. We are drowning in words and in language. Host is subject, object, friend �e!!�_m.y':"'Decide then. Yes, immediately:To decidds to cut. The vlllager thus takes up his hatchet. Notice: he does not judge, does not decide; he slices in three [tranche] . Trancher, a medieval word, from trz'nz'care, from the Vulgar Latin for "to cut in three. " Thus: he takes his hatchet , slices the animal in three, making three serpents from two blows, a trunk, a tail, and a head. Perrin Dandin slices the pilgrims' oyster correctly: crunches it and gives a shell to each. The arithmetic works out right: he takes the booty and sends the other two on their way, each with a worthless shell. Can this calculation be generalized? Which is the third part? Or who or what is the third, in this logic of the trenchant decision? Is the third excluded or not? Here we have a trio valent logic where we expected only a bivalent one. t The same at the head, the other at the tail, or being at the head and nonbeing at the tail, and this middle trunk that is both same and other, being and nonbeing, and so forth. I think, however, that it can be decided. Here, La Fontaine, fol. lowing Phaedrus or Aesop, writes from the peasant's point of view. Death to ingrates. At least we understand here that gratitude, in the hard logic of exchange, bears the risk of life or death. I have just written "'You can understand why the great hunter, face to face with the Eternal One, Saint Julian, becomes the Hospitaller. I shall speak of these curious hunts. t"All of you who say that hot and cold or any two such principles are All, what is it that you attribute to both of them when you say that both and each are? What are we to understand by this 'are'? Is this a third principle besides those two others, and shall we suppose that the All is three, and not two any longer?" (Plato , The Soph ist, 243D-E). 24 The Parasite from the other point of view, that of the serpent. Which of the two is the ingrate, I ask you? Who among you allows himself to be displaced, carried from his home territory, permits himself to be the passive object of another's whim, that of the first passer-by? Who would thank, moreover, the one who decides for you? That would be the same as giving recognition to professional politicians. To those who see and consider others as if they were rocks, cold stones. To those who force others to be only objects, which can then be carried. To those who are astonished when the passive object suddenly wakes up and lashes out in anger. The one who did not lash out against his benefactors, saviors, and fathers would be forgetting all his duties, as would he who did not pass from cold passivity to the heat of battle. Ready to die. Sliced in three. I was saying that it could be decided. Look for a third before reaching for the hatchet. Strike but listen first. Let's try the ingrates, says the snake in the bag. My life is in your hands, the snake says to the man ; cut me up but be aware that you are the ingrate. We'll go to the cow; let her be the judge. She says: I give my milk and my children to man and he has never given me anything but death. The steer, a new third party who will judge, says that he works and is beaten in return and that his life is ended with a sacrifice on the altar of the gods. All of them give to man, then, who never gives anything in return. But let us descend to the level of the tree. It gives shelter, decoration, flowers, fruits, and shade. And in return for its wages or more accurately for its rent-for it shelters and produces a territory-it is felled. The tree judges ' man to be an ingrate. Man milks the cow, makes the steer work, makes a roof from the tree; they have all decided who the parasite is. It is man. Everything is born for him, animals and beings. In the moral, La Fontaine is euhermerist, sociologist, or politician enough to please his reader. The great and powerful, he says, act this way. Yes, of course, but the others? The farmer of the cow, the carpenter of the roof, and the priest who kills the steer are not great people. History says so without symbols, without translations or displacements. But history hides the fact that man is the universal parasite, that everything and everyone around him is a hospitable space. Plants and animals are always his hosts; man is always necessarily their guest. Always taking, never giving. He bends the logic of exchange and of giving in his favor when he is dealing with nature as a whole. When he is dealing with his kind, he continues to do so; he wants to be the parasite of man as well. And his kind want to be so too. Hence rivalry. Hence the sudden, explosive perception of animal humanity, hence the world of animals of the fables. If my kind were cattle, calves, pigs, and poultry, I could quietly maintain with them the same relations I have with nature. Such is the peaceful dream of my contemporaries, descendants, and ancestors. Always talking, never giving, staying in a good position in irreversible logic. The louse is a man for the wolf. M,hor!, move aroun��!!J..�tamQ���.:. The Lion's Share The Simple Arrow You remember the relation of order and of him who plays to the hilt in the position of the king. * The one who occupies this site receives everything and gives nothing in exchange. This defines a space where a wild den is at the extreme limit. If I were a fox, I would tell you why: I would see how to get in but not how to get out. All flows are oriented to the aforementioned position, and none come from it. All the footprints point toward the lion's den, but none come away. A rigorous diagram of a space structured by the relation of order, bearing a maximized point. Oddly enough, here, it is the spot of power, of absolute power, that of the lion, the king's place. But it is also a trap, an open maw. He who is well-placed has the right to eat the others. It is always a question of a meal, of visitors, and of guests. What does the lion give in exchange for his good? Nothing? Not entirely. An edict, a document, a passport, words and writing. He pays for his meal in well-turned, well-written phrases. And thus he is in the position of a parasite, a universal parasite. One day we will have to understand why the strongest is the parasite� that is to say, the weakest�why the one whose only function is to eat is the one who commands. And speaks. We have just found the place of politics. Why? Invert the described space and you will see the king grown old. He does not receive visits and game but is kicked, bitten, butted. He is excluded and sacrificed. He dies twice from the donkey's kick. The maximized point suddenly is minimized. The host/guest is universal, eater of all and eaten by all. *"Le J eu du loup," in Hermes I V. La distribution, pp. 89-104. 26 Logics 27 The rats, the country- and the city-dweller, have shown us that the system of parasites in stepladder formation is not very different ( from an ordinary system. Who will ever know if parasitism is an obstacle to its proper functioning or if it is its very dynamics? Daily, general patterns of behavior depend on the answer to this question. If we eliminate these tie-ups, would a system still remain? Is the system a set of constraints on our attempts at optimization, or do these latter, quite simply, produce the system itself? The question is asked globally here. In the case of the lion, it is asked locally. The space is full of relations of order. All lines go in one direction, none in the other. They literally go to one opening: the gaping maw of the universal parasite. Or to a common misery: the broken back of the universal victim. Questions: is the king victim or parasite, is the parasite king or victim? It is l the same question, not asked of the whole network, but at a local division, a single point of the system, undoubtedly at its extremum. It is the same question as that of the host/guest. But here we already have an idea (a rare one) of what might be a point of decision: the den where the game is eaten ravenously and where, one day, someone else risks being cut up. The space is strewn with simple arrows, pointing in only one direction.
Michel Serres 7, professor of philosophy at Clermont-Ferrand, “The Parasite”
Contemporary economics is a corrupting process. Attempting to tame uncertainty itself, it infiltrates as a rationality veiled in science which trends towards a self-interested neoliberalism that combines with a jingoistic sovereign state. This mixture shuts out the possibility of unconditional hospitality, making humanity the personification of competition. Ethics now constrained, the Other is left in a permanent state of hostility, the subject of death itself.
Edward Arrington 18, Professor of Accounting at Louisiana State University and former independent fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, “Eminent Otherness: Toward an Economy of Hospitality”, The Kyoto Manifesto for Global Economics, pp 359-365, eden
Humans have the capacity to transform the world for moral purpose. That is economics at its moral core; activity designed to enhance the material conditions indicative of the good life, to move from the actual given to the possibly better, and to do so with and for ourselves and with and for others. We work together or apart, we share the world as constructed by others, and we are responsible for far more than our own welfare simply because our economic products shape the lives of others, just as the products of others construct our own lives. To return to Kant, the “real force” of economic power is often ephemeral, difficult to locate, but always subject to the question of its relevance to others. This essay seeks to nudge our understanding of economic life closer to a hermeneutical horizon where hospitality and welcoming might provide the scope for understanding economic responsibility in a new ontological and moral key, a key in which the damage that we do might be lessened and the good we seek enhanced.
Modern economic thought, particularly after it turned its back on political economy and divorced itself from normative questions, shares with many other social science disciplines a preference for parsimony as it works to “tame” uncertainty and chance. We can glimpse with Stephen Toulmin how the ambiguity and uncertainty out of which we living breathing humans do in fact construct our lives and ourselves as historical beings in community with others is not so easily tamed, despite the epistemic and scientistic “virtues” that have turned our humanity away from the humanities, a turning we must remedy: We can reconcile the twin legacies of the exact sciences and the humanities only by a change of direction; and, for that, we must first see clearly how the agenda of “modern thought” over-reached itself. By now, it will be clear that we need to balance the hope of certainty and clarity in theory with the impossibility of avoiding uncertainty and ambiguity in practice. But the received view of Modernity rested not only on the Quest for Certainty and the equation of Rationality with a respect for formal logic: it also took over the rationalists’ belief that the modern, rational way of dealing with problems is to sweep away the inherited clutter from traditions, clean the slate, and start again from scratch (Toulmin 1990: 175).
At the core of Toulmin’s critique stands Modernity’s agenda. That “received view” plays itself out in modern economics through a range of attributes of relevance to this essay. Among those attributes are (1) the effacement of the history of political economy, both in theory and in practice, in favor of an economics of the simple, the “scientific,” the “model,” and the “rational”; (2) an elevation of the self and its interests to the apex of values as each of us becomes a “moral monarch”; (3) a gloss over the difficulty of pursuing harmony, equilibrium, and peace; (4) a similar gloss over the particularities of the local and the contingent; and, (5) a preference for a morality of norms and rules grounded in subjective utility rather than a morality of intersubjective life, prudence and praxis. Alike with moral philosophy, there is a “thinness” about all of this that leaves out too much of living, breathing, experience; too much of “the world,” its moral richness and its complexity: This world has lots of good qualities. But one of its drawbacks is a tendency to narrowness on certain questions. And one of the most marked sites of this narrowness was in moral philosophy. The narrowness concerns more than just the range of doctrines considered, though it also consists of that. But, more fundamentally, it has restricted the range of questions that it seems sensible to ask. In the end, it restricted our understanding of what morality is. I have tried to sum this up by saying that Anglo-Saxon moral philosophy has tended to see morality as concerned with questions of what we ought to do and to occlude or exclude questions about what it is good to be or what it is good to love (Taylor 1996: 3).
That “tendency to narrowness” is just as true for contemporary economic thought as it is for moral philosophy. As Taylor notes, one casualty of such narrowness is the demise of inquiry into what it is good for us to be and good for us to love. Harmony and harmoniousness come to mind. But harmony has too often been romanticized and simplified within what some term “the metaphysics of presence,” an unfortunate thing since approaching the genuinely harmonious requires sticking with what John Caputo terms “the original difficulty of life,” a difficulty certainly strikingly obvious in contemporary economic life: The point is to make life difficult, not impossible – to face up to the difference and difficulty which enter into what we think and do and hope for, not to grind them to a halt. Indeed, it is the claim of radical hermeneutics that we get the best results by yielding to the difficulty in “reason,” “ethics,” and faith,” not by trying to cover it over. Once we stop trying to prop up our beliefs, practices, and institutions on the metaphysics of presence, once we give up the idea that they are endowed with some sort of facile transparency, we find that they are not washed away but liberated, albeit in a way that makes the guardians of Being and presence nervous.… Curiously enough, the metaphysical desire to make things safe and secure has become consummately dangerous (Caputo 1987: 7).
Under the cover of “science,” modern economics, particularly in the US and in its capitalistic garb, has not “faced up” to this difficulty. It sought a “positive” economics as it jettisoned questions of norms (except for those like efficiency and property rights that it is fond of). It divorced itself from its birth-mother political economy and reduced what it means to be a person to what Dierdre McCloskey terms that “great stick of a character,” homo economicus. It narrowed the Aristotelian scope of human rationality and indeed human nature to the pursuit of self-interests. It gave communication and political life over strictly to strategic rationality and strategic discourse, rendering human intersubjectivity an exercise in “how to win.” In this strategic world, intersubjectivity and ethics take only those forms which “benefit” the relevant parties in their “exchange” of increments to self-interest, with private property rights and liberty understood as the freedom to pursue subjective utility maximization as the key “moral” accoutrements to economics. To the extent it bothers with welfare economics at all, and in a post-Keynesian world it doesn’t bother much, it has relied upon welfare arguments adapted from Wilfredo Pareto (to whom Mussolini gave a medal as “the father of Fascist economics” and whom Karl Popper referred to as “the theoretician of totalitarianism”). This sort of economics seems rather indifferent to a world it helped create, a world ravaged by unbridled greed, indifferent at best and biased at worst to questions of economic justice, incapable of reconciling some putative economic “progress” through “growth” to the ever-expanding gap between the rich and the poor (see Piketty 2014), and, perhaps worst of all, at the brink of murdering that most gifted phenomenon of all, that tiny little sliver of cosmic “splendor” we call the Earth. The notion of economy has become consummately dangerous; a big part of the problem, not of the solution. We don’t even have the economic words to deal with this.
In this essay, I will not be bound to modern economic thought and will raise different sorts of issues and questions. I will adopt a phenomenological and hermeneutic perspective focused on ordinary life, the “to and fro” of our breath, our sustenance, our language, our sociality, and our self-understandings. With a casual rela

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