Response and Responsibility in a Postclassical World

The term “reception” has been repeatedly criticized for assuming a too-passive relationship to the texts and artifacts transmitted from classical antiquity. The term “response” allocates more agency to the reader, but one might worry that it allocates too much. Yet response opens, too, onto the idea of responsibility, and with it the notion of reception as a particular kind of embedded act, one in which historical actors but also present-day scholars, are implicated in a relationship to the past and the present that entails forms of responsibility.

Several of Plato’s texts reflect on hospitality, and at least three of his dialogues (Sophist, Statesman, Laws) feature a xenos. But how does the trial and defence of Socrates raise the question of hospitality? In order to sketch out an answer, I would like to consider two influential thinkers who have written about hospitality in relation to the Apology. One of these is Gandhi, who responds to Socrates while he is trying to work out the rights of foreigners in South Africa; the other is Derrida, who responds to Socrates in his seminars on hospitality.

Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (TTP), published in 1670, offers classicists a model of engaged philology that is both troubling and worth emulating. An astonishing document, TTP sits uncomfortably at the cross-roads of secular Enlightenment, Biblical criticism, classical philology, and republican and democratic political theory. A heretical work, TTP outraged Spinoza’s Jewish and Christian contemporaries alike.