Staging the Nation: Hospitable Performances in Kant's Anthropology

Exploring recent developments in theories of hospitality and nationality, this essay considers how Immanuel Kant's Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (a text published in 1798 and composed of “popular” lectures delivered to the “general public” from 1772–1796) uses the figure of an “Asiatic Turk” as a placeholder for what I call the proleptic and self-divided character of Kant's “Germany.” As an intervention into a late eighteenth-century public (or “popular”) culture, the Anthropology, I argue, may be too early to proclaim explicitly the question of a German nationalism; but there is this sense in the Anthropology that the addressee of the text, the Prussian reading and lecture- attending public, is being called upon to lead the nations toward the Universal Hospitality of Kant's cosmopolitan ideal.