Responsibility of movement: a character analysis of Ahmad’s quest in Khane-ye Dust Kojast as acts of infinite responsibility

This presentation departed from my ongoing work which considers posthuman subjectivity to redeem the experience of encounters from the mechanisms of modernity/coloniality but also postmodernity/ postcoloniality. Staying with the experience of an encounter, in this paper I would like to examine the aesthetics of infinite responsibility (Derrida 1978, 312)– that which occurs upon encountering a strange(r) phenomenon – and what acts resist the construction of the Other. Situated within the field of curatorial practice and its questions concerning the philosophies and methodologies in times of theoretical exhaustion (Braidotti 2013), I undertake a reading of Abbas Kiarostami’s 1987 film Khane-ye dust kojast (Where is the Friends House?), to illustrate the practice of quests as a metaphorical tool during the experience of encounters. With the film acting as a microcosm in the broader field of hospitality, I study the gestures performed by Ahmad’s character as “a crusade against this ‘herd’ morality and […] an arrival at ‘ethical questions’” (Gabriel and Wilson 2020, 197). As visible in the movie, through the tumultuous journey of Ahmad – within harsh societal, political, and ecological conditions – as he attempts to return his friend’s book to save him from expulsion, Ahmad’s quest showcases the primacy of the body and movement (against a landscape) as an aesthetic reconfiguration of the idea of the host and guest. Thereby reconceiving hospitality as a “spatial and affective relational practice” (Zembylas 2020, 38). Through this, I hope to unpack how attention to Ahmad’s movement through the landscape displays a different kind of consideration by overriding the disciplinary politics of Iran in the last quarter of the 20th century.