Summary
The philosopher whose inquiry into the aporia of hospitality — in Of Hospitality and related texts cited as Derrida 2000, Derrida 2005 and Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000 — supplies Chapter 3 of Stateless Citizenship (2013) with its frame of Hostipitality (Stateless Citizenship (2013), PDF p.127-133).
Details
- Working from Kant’s account of hospitality in Toward a Perpetual Peace, Derrida shows hospitality to be a right of resort conditional on the visitor’s acceptance of the host’s code of conduct, and the host’s mastery to be requisite to its practice: “We do not know what hospitality is” (Derrida 2000, 3-4, as quoted, PDF p.128-130).
- The door figure: “for there to be hospitality, there must be a door. But if there is a door, there is no longer hospitality” (Derrida 2000, 14, as quoted, PDF p.130).
- The host becomes almost the hostage of the one invited — “the hostage of the one he receives, the one who keeps him at home” — and genuine hospitality would require the guest to become the host’s host (Derrida 2000, 9; Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000, 125, as quoted, PDF p.131-132; the fuller quotation is split across the PDF p.131-132 page break in the text copy).
- His unconditional injunction: “Let us say yes to who or what turns up, before any determination, before any anticipation, before any identification” (Derrida 2000, 77, as quoted, PDF p.132).