Using Derrida’s notion of hospitality from Of Hospitality, I argue in this lecture that Husserl’s phenomenology has always attempted to write its descriptions of objects, world, and other people in as welcoming a way as possible. Phenomenology welcomes and stands in solidarity, in other words, with what remains on the margins. Using the famous text concerning “The Principle of All Principles” from his first book of the Ideas, as well as sections from Formal and Transcendental Logic, Cartesian Meditations, and The Crisis of the European Sciences, I will show more specifically how the manner and motion of givenness is to draw us toward the margins of experience. Our objects, our world, an the other people who lead us toward them from within–these all are meaningful dis-placements toward and from the margin. Phenomenological explication, for Husserl, becomes then a kind of “absolute beginning” and a continuation of givenness as it founds the non-primordial dichotomies of inner and outer, immanent and transcendent.
After having determined to what extent phenomenology is primordial, hospitable and aims at the margins, I will turn to texts from the Books of Deuteronomy, Ruth and Esther, as well as the Gospels of Luke and John to show how phenomenology demands a privileging of the discourse of the stranger and the act of welcoming. Phenomenology demands, in other words, that we fashion our political and religious lives in a hospitable way toward the stranger as an echo of the very motion of experience.