Jordi Vivaldi

This talk aims to conceive the accommodative disposition of hospitality in terms of invention by working out the notion of common circumstance. Thinking of inventions in demiurgic terms through the universality of sacred and technical objects (Simondon), it will be argued that, when invoked in such an inventive set-up, the practice of hospitality might not gravitate so much around psychological notions such as care, fragility or prescription; it rather gains a more gravitational or even cosmic temperament involving all beings regardless of essences or properties. In its equatorial vocation, the notion of common circumstance articulates the roles of host and guest as multivalent poles whose modal difference ramifies the pair ‘habitat-inhabitant’ that habits cultivate through the labor of time. Dramatized by multiple bodies and fleshes across different axes or scales, both roles jointly accommodate in public terms the implex (Valéry) that lies in the circumstantial tenor of this equatoriality. By thinking of oblivion and sound as embodying the moments of contraction and expansion of an inventive breathing, the common circumstance will be conceived as facilitating the dynamics between the private grace internalized by habits and the public articulations emerging from their ‘sounding’ in codes and schemes.