Risk and Extortion XXII: Kenosis as Practicing Place the Hard Way

Having established how social identities are primarily enacted by a rhetoric of belonging-to, we have stumbled upon a core concept: place. Identifications take place, they are practices of emplacement. More often than not, these practices are aligned with categorizations that are derived form technologies and institutions deployed to manage and govern the Estate, i.e. this is the work of the Establishment. The Establishment sanctifies and legitimates the territorialisation of the Estate and divides between those who belong-to and those who own. This is obvious in the case of nationhood, nationalism and national identities, but it also applies to, for example, relations of production as well as family and kinship structures. 

I have already argued that Identity and Property are deeply intertwined and this becomes very clear when considering the practicing of place. If you think from the starting point of having properties  and possessions that identify you,  you are already engaged in a rhetoric of belonging-to. Your starting point is that of having something to lose. In the case of nationalism, this threat of loss (“risk”) is very often framed by the analogy of the home (in English property often immediately connotes real estate). A loss of nationhood is like homelessness. For Jews in the Third Reich and for Palestinians since 1948, this is literally the case, but for most of us, it remains more a threat than an actual reality. 

On this basis, the first trope associated with practicing place is that of home-making, but with a specific antagonistic twist: securing a home, defending a home, asserting ownership over property. This is an existential logic tied to the way in which sociality presupposes territoriality. However, territoriality is not the only form of practicing place. If we consider the same trope – the home – in relation to form of practicing place, i.e. home-making, than completely different connotations may appear, not  those of belonging and ownership, not those of territoriality and self-preservation, but those of hospitality: of welcoming and being welcomed,  of receiving and being-received.

Whereas most “moral” and “ethical” discourses of home-making emphasize duties and obligations related to providing hospitality, which more often than not are considered to be associated with “female responsibilities”, very little attention has been paid to the issue of being a good guest. This is because conceptualizing the home as property, privileges the perspective of ownership and belonging-to, rather than that of being welcomed and being cared-for. It is as if our mind-set is organized on the basis of always-already being “at home” rather than say, displaced. This, obviously, perfectly resonates with the colonial mind-set: when place has been taken, it is only so, because it had no previous owner (a land without people for a people without land). 

If we conceptualize sociality from the perspective of receiving hospitality, then the entire rhetoric of ownership and belonging-to becomes unsettling and even alienating. By taking the starting point as that of receiving hospitality, then instead of starting with a notion of property and ownership, we understand sociality as emerging from debt. Although this is not quite the same as that which Marcel Mauss may have had in mind when he referred to the gift as a total social fact, it does resonate rather well with Derrida’s reflections on “given time”. A kenotic form of sociality starts from the perspective of being indebted; i.e. solidarity stems from the recognition, that a debt has already been incurred.

Debt is what is brought into being by a gift, but not when it is articulated as such. A gift that actively and openly acknowledges that it initiates a debt ceases to be a gift and becomes transactional. The debt has to remain hidden, implicit, unspoken, and can thus be forgotten easily. Therefore, kenosis emerges not from inculpation (an invocation of guilt, as with the psychoanalytic concept of neurosis) but from anamnesis. Kenosis is not a form of worship through holocaust, the sacrifice of a scapegoat, but a retracing and remapping of the taking place of hospitality: the gift of life – and of a life worth living – is out of the abundance of hospitality: the debt does not have to be repaid, it merely has to be respected, acknowledged and attended to. That is what the Maori notion of hau – the spirit of the gift – means. Instead of annihilating the hau, by a repayment of debt, hau has to become part of the one receiving it; enrich her or his life, increase her or his sociability.

This is practicing place the hard way. There is no uninhabited land that can be claimed and territorialized. The land we live on is sacred because it grants us hospitality. A life worth living is a life that recognizes the primacy of hospitality. We are all part of a web of life because hospitality has been given to us. What kenosis now asks us to do, is to act in solidarity, by recognizing that a debt has already been incurred: by recognizing the hau within us not as a property but as a gift.

Kenosis is not easy because it no longer invokes self-preservation as the bottom line. Does this mean that we should surrender everything to the Putins, Trumps and Netanyahus of this world? Of course not. A life worth living is incompatible with kakistocracy. Hence, if we honour our debt to the web of life, we have a duty to stop the kakistocratic entropy. Self-preservation, however, is no longer the legitimation of whatever it takes to make this happen. Instead, we need to reconfigure a politics of immunization through healing, which may include a removal of tumors, chemotherapy, radiation therapy etcetera. However, the ends do not justify the means. Just like good oncological practice always embodies a holistic perspective on the patient’s health, wo must we engage with the removal of kakistocracy in such a way, that the web of life is strengthened, by harmonizing a greater number of interests. This is a more difficult mode of practicing place than that of territorialisation. It takes courage to be humble and to accept what has been given as debt. It is easier to deny that anything has been given, or that what had been given was merely a repayment. Kenosis is harder for the colonizer than for the colonized. This is perhaps why identity thinking invites adopting the role of the victimized as the starting point. This is why identity thinking and slave morality are often identical. Kenosis cannot start with victimhood; it starts from debt and gratitude.