Abstracts

Dror Pimentel (Bio)

Hospitality in the Age of Econo-rithm

In this talk, I will further corroborate the underlying argument of my book Aes-ethics: Of Hospitality in Art: That the notion of hospitality — as forged by Levinas and Derrida — is the most important and pressing philosophical notion of our time. This is so, since a line can be drawn in these days between two distinct modes of discourse: On the one side stand techno-science, capitalism and neoliberalism; on the other, phenomenology, psychoanalysis and marxism.

At the heart of this division lies the question of radical alterity — whether one calls it being, donation, the other, god, or, in the language of the book, the rav — which resists all forms of assimilation and reduction into any economy whatsoever.

The first mode of discourse denies the existence of such radical alterity, while obsessively seeking to negate it by its assimilation into various economies. Most notably today, this situation is embodied in what I call Econo-rithm: A digital economy of algorithms — manifested in search engines, AI, and related technologies — that aims to ultimately dominate life through its total algorization. The second mode of discourse affirms the existence of radical alterity and, in doing so, takes up the ethical task of offering it a proper site of hospitality — in which it could dwell without being reduced, assimilated, or economized.