Dwelling and Hospitality: Heidegger and Hölderlin

Abstract In this article, I focus on Heidegger’s conception of hospitality in his first and final lectures on Hölderlin’s Germania (1934/5), Remembrance (1941/2), and The Ister (1942). I argue that the hospitality of the foreigner for Heidegger is the condition of possibility of dwelling understood as the happening of history. In the first section I analyze the notions of hospitality in Levinas and Derrida. The second section unpacks some of the senses of the earth in Heidegger as the site of man’s historical dwelling, whereas in the third section I focus on holy mourning as the disposition that reveals the earth as the uncanny ground of history. In the final section, I spell out Heidegger’s conception of hospitality, the greeting, and the foreign guest.