Vulnerability, (In)hospitable Politics and Ethical Encounters in The Visitor (2007)

Abstract

This chapter addresses the notion of vulnerability in The Visitor (McCarthy 2007) by exposing how asymmetries of power concretize through undocumented immigrants’ experiences in the US. Upon arrival, illegal immigrants confront a power dynamics where they are denied to legal forms of employment or housing, thus becoming especially vulnerable and at risk of exclusion. In the film, vulnerability emerges as a complex concept related to bordering processes, power structures, and inhospitable policies that unveil the ontological fragility of the marginalized, as well as an existential dimension linked to agency, self-development, and relationality. Drawing on Butler’s (2012) concepts of cohabitation and unwilled adjacency, the chapter analyzes how ethics and politics are interrelated in the film to provide a more nuanced understanding of human interdependence as a precondition to respond ethically to people’s suffering. Further aims are to explore the ways in which the violence and precarity involved in bordering processes are depicted as well as how the concept of vulnerability is reworked by interrogating the ethics of (in)hospitality in order to overcome our illusions of self-sufficiency and envision the possibility of a shared and committed life.