(No) Return: Between Levinas’s and Glissant’s Critiques of Rootedness

This paper is about the ambivalence of land relations, specifically what way of taking root enables rather than forecloses an ethical relation to the land and other people, including strangers. Turning to Levinas and Glissant’s critiques of rootedness, and specifically rootedness in territory or soil, I examine their respective accounts of origins and creation. In Levinas, I pay special attention to the tension that arises between Levinas’s account of a home without roots or land, separate from the elements, and his own account of the concrete conditions for hospitality, including shelter, food, and clothes. In Glissant, I focus on the difference between land and territory, and the different roles of the sacred, ritual, and literature in either case. I propose to read Levinas through this distinction, to resolve part of the tension surrounding hospitality: rootedness in territory excludes the other; rootedness in the land—in an aesthetic and cultural sense, not just a material and economic one—is a condition of possibility for hospitality.