Summary
Jacques Derrida’s term, as Stateless Citizenship (2013) takes it up in Chapter 3, for the hostile underpinnings of hospitality: the word hospitality “allows itself to be parasitized by its opposite, ‘hostility’, the undesirable guest … which it harbours as the self-contradiction in its own body” (Derrida 2000, 4, as quoted, Stateless Citizenship (2013), PDF p.129).
Details
- Hospitality in Derrida’s account is always already juridical and conditional: the host’s greeting is bestowed only on condition that the host “remains the patron, the master of the household” and maintains authority in his own home, so that hospitality is “a self-contradictory concept, an experience which can only self-destruct” in being put into practice (Derrida 2000, 4-5, as quoted, PDF p.127, p.130).
- Genuine hospitality, by contrast, would be unconditional — “a law without law” (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000, 83, as quoted, PDF p.130) — and would require the invited guest to become “the one who invites the one who invites”, the host’s host (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000, 125, as quoted, PDF p.132).
- Molavi’s application: the liberal-Zionist account of the Jewish state as a home into which the Palestinian-Arab citizen can be welcomed is an exercise of hostipitality, combining hospitality toward and hostility toward the Other at once; Palestinian-Arabs are welcomed only as a socio-politically inferior and legally unrecognized collective, and where the ‘Palestinian guest’ does not supply the reassurance of the host’s sovereignty, it is extracted through legally enforced obligations and limitations (PDF p.135-136).
- Its instrument is the category Israeli-Arab; its outcome, at Chapter 3’s close, is that Palestinian-Arabs in Israel “become stateless-citizens” — see Stateless Citizenship (PDF p.137-139).
Related pages
Stateless Citizenship (2013), Jacques Derrida, Israeli-Arab, Stateless Citizenship, Indigeneity