An exceptional state where there is no host/guest power structure

What renders 'ecological hospitality' impossible is not the human host's abandonment of his ownership and control […] but primarily the animal guest's complete indifference to the host. […]

No animal, indeed, has the concept of and respect for the hospitable human's property and protection. What underlies this animality is antiphusis, as aforementioned, with nature as dark, violent, rotten, hostile, which appears negative in the anthropocentric frame, but which fundamentally implies neutrality for the human. […]

In other words, pure hospitality that is always impossible when offered by the human to the animal might be possible when we rethink it the other way around. […]

Genuine hospitality is, then, that which can be only recognized, retroactively, by the visitor and not the inviter, in an exceptional state where there is actually no host/guest power structure. Derrida also suggests a 'hospitality of visitation rather than invitation', adding that the visit might actually be very dangerous, but 'a hospitality without risk, a hospitality backed by certain assurances, a hospitality protected by an immune system against the wholly other' could not be true hospitality. This true hospitality is again almost impossible to realize, whereas its significance may lie in that it serves as the conceptual idea of actual tolerance, if not perfect, still needed in reality […]. Yet we can go further than this conceptual justification of pure hospitality or gift on the human's side if we posit the visitor not as the host but as the guest of animal hospitality in a zone of indeterminacy between subject and object. Visitation would thus be viewed as an ethical adventure of abandoning one's subjectivity as a host, becoming a volunteer homo sacer who can be killed without being sacrificed in anti-nature, and finding oneself to be in an unprepared and unexpected hospitality without any symmetrical exchange or companionship with the other. Does this not suggest an ethics that is not responsible for the other as a vulnerable sufferer but responsive to the other as a pure gift? A truly ethical act might be to accept the other's being in itself as a gift to me in the realization that it is I who is vulnerable and thus virtually accepted by the very other, gifted its unintended hospitality.

Seung-Hoon Jeung, 'A Global Cinematic Zone of Animal and Technology' in Animals (Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Ltd, 2016) pp. 97-98

To explore a larger bio-polis

Ontological others of the human call for our attention in this regard, urging us to explore a larger bio-polis emerging between, and encompassing both, the human world that becomes ever more globally homogenized and its radically external-immanent environment, natural or technological. The question of how to face this environment requires complexly ethical rather than simply political attitudes, since biopolitics concerns not a new public sphere so much as the condition of any such polis.

Seung-Hoon Jeung, 'A Global Cinematic Zone of Animal and Technology' in Animals (Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Ltd, 2016) p. 96

Answering for a dwelling place

We had also recalled the fact, at one point, that the problem of hospitality was coextensive with the ethical problem. It is always about answering for a dwelling place, for one's identity, one's space, one's limits, for the ethos as abode, habitation, house, hearth, family, home. So we should now examine the situations where not only is hospitality coextensive with ethics itelf, but where it can seem that some people, as it has been said, place the law of hospitality above a "morality" or a certain "ethics."

Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality (Stanford University Press, 2000) pp. 149-151 

The dictates of conscience

'The forehead declares, "Reason sits firm and holds the reins, and she will not let the feelings burst away and hurry her to wild chasms. The passions may rage furiously, like true heathens, as they are; and the desires may imagine all sorts of vain things: but judgement shall still have the last word in every argument, and the casting vote in every decision. Strong wind, earthquake-shock, and fire may pass by: but I shall follow the guiding of that still small voice which interprets the dictates of conscience."

'Well said, forehead; your declaration shall be respected. I have formed my plans – right plans I deem them – and in them I have attended to the claims of conscience, the counsels of reason. I know how soon youth would fade and bloom perish, if, in the cup of bliss offered, but one drug of shame, or one flavour of remorse were detected; and I do not want sacrifice, sorrow, dissolution – such is not my taste. I wish to foster, not to blight – to earn gratitude, not to wring tears of blood – no, nor of brine: my harvest must be in smiles, in endearments, in sweet – The will do. I think I rave in a kind of exquisite delirium.

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Penguin Books, 1971) p. 230

Most of our vices are attempted short cuts to love

In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.

John Steinbeck, East of Eden (Penguin Books, 2000) p. 505

Alla är maktlösa inför någon

Människor är inte så små som man tror. Och inte så stora. Felet med att ha makten som bedömningsgrund och inte handlingarna är att nästan alla friskriver sig då, var och en hittar sin maktlöshet när de behöver den. För alla är maktlösa inför någon, och något. Alla har ett skikt av maktlöshet i sig, i sin upplevelse av sig själva i tillvaron, som de då använder. Och därför ser världen ut som den gör. Alla har en glipa i sin makt, även när de vet att de har makt och ansvar, som de kan utnyttja för att förstå varför de måste handla som de gör. Moralen börjar hos individen. Man måste kräva den av alla. De som har makt föddes maktlösa och denna känsla är den som består i dem hela livet, särskilt i de stunder då de handlar fel. Då minns de att de blev mobbade på skolgården och slagen av pappa och inser att allt är någon annans fel även nu.

Lena Andersson, Egenmäktigt Förfarande (Natur & Kultur, 2013) p. 173

Evil spreads as necessarily as disease

There is no sort of wrong deed of which a man can bar the punishment alone; you can't isolate yourself and say that the evil which is in you shall not spread. Men's lives are as thoroughly blended with each other as the air they breathe: evil spreads as necessarily as disease.

George Eliot, Adam Bede (Penguin Popular Classics, 1994) p. 403

Consequences are unpitying

"A man can never do anything at variance with his own nature. He carries within him the germ of his most exceptional action; and if we wise people make eminent fools of ourselves on any particular occasion, we must endure the legitimate conclusion that we carry a few grains of folly to our ounce of wisdom."
"Well, but one may be betrayed into doing things by a combination of circumstances, which one might never have done otherwise."
"Why, yes, a man can't very well steal a bank-note unless the bank-note lies within convenient reach; but he won't make us think him an honest man because he begins to howl at the bank-note for falling his way."
"But surely you don't think a man who struggles against a temptation into which he falls at last as bad as the man who never struggles at all?"
"No, certainly; I pity him in proportion to his struggles, for they foreshadow the inward suffering which is the worst form of Nemesis. Consequences are unpitying. Our deeds carry their terrible consequences, quite apart from any fluctuations that went before – consequences that are hardly ever confined to ourselves. And it is best to fix our minds on that certainty, instead of considering what may be the elements of excuse for us."

George Eliot, Adam Bede (Penguin Popular Classics, 1994) p. 171

It is by doing just acts that the just man is produced

Actions, then, are called just and temperate when they are such as the just or the temperate man would do; but it is not the man who does these that is just and temperate, but the man who also does them as just and temperate men do them. It is well said, then, that it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the temperate man; without doing these no one would have even a prospect of becoming good.

But most people do not do these, but take refuge in theory and think they are being philosophers and will become good in this way, behaving somewhat like patients who listen attentively to their doctors, but do none of the things they are ordered to do. As the latter will not be made well in body by such a course of treatment, the former will not be made well in soul by such a course of philosophy.

Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2009) p. 28

Virtue comes as a result of teaching or habit

Virtue, then, being of two kinds, intellectual and moral, intellectual virtue in the main owes both its birth and its growth to teaching (for which reason it requires experience and time), while moral virtue comes about as a result of habit, whence also its name (ethike) is on that is formed by a slight variation from the word ethos (habit). From this it is also plain that none of the moral virtues arises in us by nature; for nothing that exists by nature can form a habit contrary to its nature. For instance the stone which by nature moves downwards cannot be habituated to move upwards, not even if one tries to train it by throwing it up ten thousand times; nor can fire be habituated to move downwards, not can anything else that by nature behaves in one way be trained to behave in another. Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit.

Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2009) p. 23

Colour is syncopation

Everything aspires either to the black or to the white. Colour is syncopation.

Samuel Beckett, Eleutheria (Faber and Faber, 1996) p. 113

All people of broad, strong sense have an instinctive repugnance to the men of maxims

The great problem of the shifting relation between passion and duty is clear to no man who is capable of apprehending it: the question, whether the moment has come in which a man has fallen below the possibility of a renunciation that will carry any efficacy, and must accept the sway of a passion against which he had struggled as a trespass, is one for which we have no master key that will fit all cases. The casuists have become a by-word of reproach; but their perverted spirit of minute discrimination was the shadow of a truth to which eyes and hearts are too often fatally sealed: the truth, that moral judgements must remain false and hollow, unless they are checked and enlightened by a perpetual reference to the special circumstances that mark the individual lot.

All people of broad, strong sense have an instinctive repugnance to the men of maxims; because such people early discern that the mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims, and that to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy. And the man of maxims is the popular representative of the minds that are guided in their moral judgement solely by general rules, thinking that these will lead them to justice by a ready-made patent method, without the trouble of exerting patience, discrimination, impartiality, without any care to assure themselves whether they have the insight that comes from a hardly-earned estimate of temptation, or from a life vivid and intense enough to have created a wide fellow-feeling with all that is human.

George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (Penguin Classics, 1985) pp. 627-628

Nothing is less innocent than laissez-faire

Nothing is less innocent, Bourdieu reminds us, than laissez-faire. Watching human misery with equanimity while placating the pangs of conscience with the ritual incantation of the TINA ('there is no alternative') creed, means complicity. Whoever willingly or by default partakes of the cover-up or, worse still, the denial of the human-made, non-inevitable, contingent and alterable nature of social order, notably of the kind of order responsible for unhappiness, is guilty of immorality – of refusing help to a person in danger.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2012) p. 215

'I call that the fanaticism of sympathy,' said Will, impetuously. 'You might say the same of landscape, of poetry, of all refinement. If you carried it out you ought to be miserable in your own goodness, and turn evil that you might have no advantage over others. The best piety is to enjoy – when you can. You are doing the most then to save the earth's character as an agreeable planet. And enjoyment radiates. It is of no use to try and take care of all the world; that is being taken care of when you feel delight – in art or in anything else. Would you turn all the youth of the world into a tragic chorus, wailing and moralizing over misery? I suspect that you have some false belief in the virtues of misery, and want to make your life a martyrdom.'

George Eliot, Middlemarch (Penguin Classics, 1994) pp. 219-220

But this impasse – it is only individuals that can be held ethically responsible for actions, and yet the cause of these abuses and errors is corporate, systemic – is not only a dissimulation: it precisely indicates what is lacking in capitalism. What agencies are capable of regulating and controlling impersonal structures? How is it possible to chastise a corporate structure? Yes, corporations can legally be treated as individuals – but the problem is that corporations, whilst certainly entities, are not like individual humans, and any analogy between punishing corporations and punishing individuals will therefore necessarily be poor. And it is not as if corporations are the deep-level agents behind everything; they are themselves constrained by/expressions of the ultimate cause-that-is-not-a-subject: Capital.

Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009) pp. 69-70

Instead of saying that everyone – i.e. every one – is responsible for climate change, we all have to do our bit, it would be better to say that no-one is, and that's the very problem. The cause of eco-catastrophe is an impersonal structure which, even though it is capable of producing all manner of effects, is precisely not a subject capable of exercising responsibility. The required subject – a collective subject – does not exist, yet the crisis, like all other global crises we're now facing, demands that it be constructed. Yet the appeal to ethical immediacy that has been in place in British political culture since at least 1985 – when the consensual sentimentality of Live Aid replaced the antagonism of the Miners Strike – permanently defers the emergence of such a subject.

Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009) p. 66

Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test. A man falling dead in a duel is not thought thereby to be proven in error as to his views. His very involvement in such a trial gives evidence of a new and broader view. The willingness of the principals to forgo further argument as the triviality which it in fact is and to petition directly the chambers of the historical absolute clearly indicates of how little moment are the opinions and of what great moment the divergences thereof. For the argument is indeed trivial, but not so the separate wills thereby made manifest. Man's vanity may well approach the infinite in capacity but his knowledge remains imperfect and howevermuch he comes to value his judgements ultimately he must submit them before a higher court.

Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (Picador, 2010) p. 263-264

All capitalists and financiers, as well as any homo economicus (meaning all of us), tend to become ordinary 'criminals' who collude to some extent in the economic banality of evil.

Serge Latouche, Farewell To Growth (Polity, 2009) p.19

Love is what gives consistency to an ethical subject, which allows it to persevere with a process of truth.
Love binds itself to justice on the basis of hope. The hope is that justice will be done and the subjective maxim is [...] Beckett's 'Continuez!' That is, continue in your conviction and love your neighbour as yourself. That is, we might define hope as political love.

Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding; Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (Verso, 2007) p. 44

Ethics cannot be based on any pre-given account of the subject, because the subject is not something that one is, but is rather something that one becomes. One can only speak of the subject in Badiou as a subject-in-becoming insofar as it shapes itself in relation to the demand apprehended in a situation.

Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding; Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (Verso, 2007) p. 44