The Xeno-Monde: Worlds of Strangers

The Xeno-Monde: Worlds of Strangers emerges as a response and challenge to the history of “being” in philosophy. The discourse of “being” and “being” in a world is an ancient one, to which Martin Heidegger returns in his early lectures and writings. Indeed, existential philosophy, if it has foundations at all, emerges as a way of thinking about beings as existents in a world. When beings are in a world they encounter other beings. They confront each other first as strangers but become daughters, friends, enemies, or lovers. The question of natality, of being born into worlds, might be the central philosophical question, rather than that of death. In cultural history the stranger emerges as a central discourse—in fiction, in religion, in the moving image.

Martyn Hudson’s book challenges and reworks the Xeno-Monde—the world of strangers—by arguing for lucidity towards otherworldly beings traveling beyond human time and human space. Strangers are not just born as humans but enter into this world from other-wheres and go to other worlds. These out-of-world and out-of-time beings are often cosmic entities, meta-humans or meta-persons, deities and angels. Hudson examines the strangers from beyond our world and challenges and counterposes out-of-worldly being to the “being-in-the-world” of Heidegger, using the work of Friedrich Nietzsche to think through these meta-human forces. A particular focus for Hudson is the Bacchae by Euripides, wherein an otherworldly stranger, Dionysus, arrives from the east into the city of Thebes, demands recognition, causes a riot, and invites us all to kick off our shoes. Hudson explicates the significance of this for ideas of barbary, Europe, and divine time and space encountering the human world and bursting into mythos at the birth of human history and historical writing.

Ultimately, The Xeno-Monde is about strangers, philosophers, and gods in alien worlds. It is about exile and manifestation and attempts to elucidate a set of stories about travellers between worlds with beings that are in or from outside worlds, or inside the walls of a palace in the winter of an ice age of an alien world. It confronts Heidegger’s notion of being-in-the-world with beings from without and by thinking through the questions that the Bacchae confronts at the beginning of the human world, we can try and elucidate its endings, its ruination, and thereby give modernity a close, or a caesura.