Abstracts

Lukas Graf (Bio) and Noga Lilli Gerzon (Bio)

Dangerous encounters and daring to slay: Learning with Artemisia Gentileschi

The 2024 edition of the Venice Biennial famously claimed that we are “foreigners everywhere”. In a Levinasian sense, this is true: According to his idea of ethics, acknowledging one’s foreignness is the very foundation of any relationship between self and Other and hence enables mutual hospitality. However, this notion goes missing in the curatorial statement of the Biennial. Rather than understanding foreignness as a foundational principle of all sociality, the statement was instead turned into a “call to action” which didactically forces readers into acknowledging that they are “always truly, and deep down inside, a foreigner.” (Adriano Pedrosa, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, 2024) It hence does not allow for a continuous and relational coming-into-being, but rather aims “to foresee the expected outcome of an investigated process”, which Irit Rogoff claims to be “completely alien to the very notion of what ‘education’ is about.” (Irit Rogoff, Academy as Potentiality, 2007)

An event of true hospitality must hence be one that is unforeseeable – and potentially dangerous. As Derrida suggests, it is not based upon an invitation, but rather the result of an arrival. (Cf. Jacques Derrida, Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides, 2001) In order to understand what “foreigners everywhere” could mean if it were not reduced to a moral stance, we suggest taking a closer look at the 1620 Artemisia Gentileschi painting Jael and Sisera. The painting can be seen as the last of three works depicting mythological murderous females in the domestic sphere. Although one might expect the image of female hospitality to be suggestive and/or caring for, Jael and Sisera does not depict any nudity or food. In it, Sisera, who had been defeated by the Israelites, seeks refuge in Jael’s tent. Since he is a hostis (both a guest and an enemy), this encounter is tête-à-tête, but not vis-à-vis. While she initially provides him shelter, feeds him milk and lets him rest, Jael eventually kills Sisera with the peg of her tent, which in this case is the real site of hospitality.

This dangerous outcome allows for a queer reading of Levinas and Derrida. We suggest seeing the tent not as a home, but as the physical body – or face? – of Jael. Sisera’s arrival means inflicting violence on Jael, while she also uses her very body for retaliation. Through Sisera, Jael undergoes a transition: Her vulnerable open tent turns into a phallic peg that eventually kills Sisera. Moreover, she is not depicted nude, but rather naked. Compared with other famous depictions of this defining moment, she is often depicted either (partly) nude or faceless. Reading this image alongside Gentileschi’s biography, which has also been shaped by male violence and sexual abuse, calls for both an aesthetic as well as ethical reading of what hospitality in the context of art and its housing institutions means: namely “turning [them] into a space of learning in the real sense rather than in one of information transfer, aesthetic satisfaction or cultural edification” (Irit Rogoff, Academy as Potentiality, 2007).