Gerasimos Kakoliris

This chapter is about the decision of hospitality. For a decision to be a ‘true’ or ‘real’ decision, according to Derrida, it cannot be the result of who I am, or of my subjectivity, because in this case the decision is not capable of bringing about the arrival of the other, of what is different from what is expected of me anyway. For Derrida, the decision of hospitality must go beyond what is simply possible for the host, beyond what is desirable or possible for them, and as such the decision of hospitality can only be the decision of the other in the host. In this sense, ‘I make a decision’ as a host would mean that I ‘make’ a decision that is driven by the absolute other in me. This making of decisions is on the side of passivity and heteronomy rather than on the side of activity and autonomy of the subject. Accordingly, the decision of hospitality cannot be the result of knowledge or the enforcement or application of criteria, maxims, or values that not only access the arrival of the other based on the host’s values and reduce the other to what the host knows about them, but they also make the decision a mechanistic process. Even if, in many cases, we are practically forced to make calculations, we must remember that the other and our responsibility toward them can only take the form of that which renounces any calculation.

This chapter is concerned with Derrida’s reading of Levinas’ ‘third’ in Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. One of the main aims of this reading is to show the violence inherent in a face-to-face ethical encounter and the necessity of its ‘contamination’ by its other, namely, justice and politics, in order to mitigate this violence. The inevitable and at the same time necessary ‘betrayal’ or ‘perjury’ of the face-to-face ethical encounter by the presence of the third alongside the other makes it impossible to maintain ethics and justice or politics as two entirely separate spheres, as Levinas might have wished. The ethics of unconditional hospitality remains exposed to the same possibility of violence so that its contamination by politics and law becomes necessary.

This chapter presents Jacques Derrida’s reading of D. H. Lawrence’s poem ‘Snake.’ The question that guides the reading of this particular poem concerns the extent to which our ethical responsibilities as hosts extend to non-human animals. Derrida analyzes this poem under the weight of Levinas’ uncomfortable hesitation to grant animals a ‘face’ and thus make humans ethically responsible to them. In Derrida’s reading of the poem, hospitality ceases to be conditional on the other being human. In the unexpected encounter between the male narrator and a snake in the poem, hospitality blurs boundaries and allows the other to appear in non-anthropocentric terms and claim a place within human responsibility. If ‘hospitality’ means crossing boundaries, then it requires allowing the other of the human, the animal, to cross the boundary traditionally established between the two, but without first having to prove that the animal is ‘like the human,’ that is, without assimilating the otherness of the animal into the human. Hospitality renegotiates the question of crossing the boundaries between species.

This chapter explores a number of issues that arise from the possibility of transforming the ethics of hospitality, characterized by infinite responsibility and unconditionality, into concrete politics and law. While acknowledging ‘the necessity of a relation between ethics and politics, ethics and justice or law,’ Derrida is not satisfied with a politics of hospitality adorned with some ethical elements. Only if politics maintains a relationship of deduction with ethics as infinite and unconditional responsibility for the other can we hope that hospitality transcends the so-called pragmatic requirements of a specific context as well as the power of the sovereign state or host society. For Derrida, while such a ‘deduction’ is necessary, there remains—and must remain—a ‘hiatus’ or ‘silence’ between ethics and politics or law in terms of the forms their relationship must take each time. There is no prior specific answer, maxim or rule to the question ‘what ought I do’ in a particular case.

This chapter is concerned with the ‘unconditional ethics of hospitality,’ which refers to what hospitality requires of us to do in relation to the coming other, namely, its unconditional provision for all, both humans and non-humans, living and dead. For Derrida, hospitality belongs to the order of an ‘ethicity and an ethical justice’ (H II 29/HS II 58) that cannot be reduced to law and politics. However, the application of such an ethics without its contamination by politics or law could have disastrous consequences. In this sense, the unconditional ethics of hospitality could lead to morally reprehensible acts. For Derrida, then, it is not just a matter of formulating and prescribing an ethics of hospitality but also of demonstrating the aporias to which such an ethics is subject. However, while he relates the provision of hospitality to justice, Derrida does not explicitly speak of a responsibility of hospitality to the coming other. Thus, part of the chapter consists in relating hospitality to responsibility through his fragmentary references to this concept but also to Levinas’ work on responsibility.

This chapter discusses in detail the two forms that hospitality can take according to Derrida, namely, that which is offered without conditions or terms, which he calls ‘unconditional,’ and that which is offered to the guest ‘conditionally.’ The first form of hospitality he associates with the absolute ethical or ‘hyper-ethical’ law of hospitality and the second with the laws of hospitality. The law of hospitality demands unlimited and unconditional ‘openness’ to the coming other. In this sense, hospitality excludes dependence on any conditions and requires no invitation on the part of the host: the guest comes uninvited, while the host remains fully receptive to the stranger. Of course, complete ‘openness’ to anything external would probably amount to insanity. Whether consciously or unconsciously, we always choose those whom we allow to enter our home. Thus, Derrida argues for a ‘transaction’ or ‘negotiation’ between absolute, unconditional hospitality and the establishment of conditions that limit hospitality but at the same time protect it from the possibility of violence.

This chapter aims to demonstrate the paradoxical or ‘aporetic’ nature of moral responsibility through Derrida’s reading of the biblical story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac in The Gift of Death. One cannot be ethically responsible to one or more particular others without simultaneously becoming ‘irresponsible’ to another other or more others. To fulfill my absolute responsibility to the singular other, I must sacrifice another or many other singularities or a general ethics. I can respond to the call of the other only by sacrificing the call of all others, by neglecting my responsibility to all others. For example, every time I open my door or rush to help a particular other, I am sacrificing all others who also need my hospitality or help. I will never be able to justify this sacrifice. In this sense, ethical responsibility paradoxically contains at its core its opposite, namely, a non-ethical element that cannot be shaken off. It is impossible for ethics to harmoniously combine responsibility toward the singular other with universal responsibility in order to escape this ethically painful paradox or ‘aporia.’ Ethics cannot be constituted as such, that is, as untainted and unadulterated by its opposite; on the contrary, it constantly carries its opposite within it as a constant trial, which for Derrida is the very condition of the possibility of a decision and of the responsibility that results from such a decision.

This chapter explores the relationship between unconditional hospitality and Kantian regulative ideas of reason and highlights Derrida’s reservations about identifying unconditional hospitality with them. To illustrate the similarities and differences between the two, the chapter offers a detailed explanation of Kantian regulative ideas of reason. Despite their similarities, however, the law of unconditional hospitality is not merely a regulative idea, for its purpose is not limited to improving existing laws of hospitality or to being merely a guideline or roadmap to guide hospitality in practice. The law of unconditional hospitality responds to the ethical requirement to be just and responsible to the coming other. As such, it cannot be postponed indefinitely, but requires the provision of hospitality to the other, here and now.

This chapter deals with the event of hospitality. Derrida defines the event as a radical break with a previous state of things. An event of hospitality should not merely unfold, activate, or accomplice what is already possible; the event of hospitality should consist in the arrival of the impossible. Only as such can the event of hospitality bring about the arrival of the heterogeneous, the ‘absolutely other.’ If hospitality is offered only to those to whom it is possible to offer hospitality, then there is no event of hospitality. Since it is impossible, the event of hospitality cannot be predicted, scheduled, or pre-planned. But it also cannot be announced, shown, or described. The event is always unique; it is an exception and therefore escapes any calculation, that is, it does not fall under the generality of any particular knowledge, analysis, or judgment. The event of hospitality also goes beyond the ‘I can’ and beyond the specific conventions required by what John L. Austin called ‘performative’ or ‘performative linguistic enunciations’ in his theory of speech acts.

The book systematically presents Derrida’s views on hospitality, as reflected in his texts and lectures from 1995 until his death in October 2004. Derrida’s engagement with hospitality is perhaps the most important and extensive philosophical attempt to respond critically to the growing hostility of many governments worldwide towards specific categories of foreigners, such as refugees and immigrants. Particular emphasis is placed on the ‘aporetic’ nature of hospitality that Derrida describes: namely, that, on the one hand, the provision of hospitality brings us face to face with the hyper-ethical ‘law’ of ‘unconditional hospitality,’ which requires the unconditional reception of the other, i.e. the provision of hospitality to the foreigner without conditions, restrictions or expecting anything in return. On the other hand, the provision of hospitality forces us to face the ‘conditional’ laws of hospitality, which, while establishing a right to and a duty of hospitality, simultaneously restrict hospitality by setting conditions for the arrival and stay of the foreigner. The book also analyses the ‘decision’ and the ‘event’ of hospitality, as well as the unresolved ‘aporia’ at the heart of the ethics of hospitality (or of ethics in general), an aporia or contradiction related to the fact that we cannot be hospitable towards a singularity without ‘sacrificing’ some other singularities. Attention is paid to Derrida’s attempt to open the provision of hospitality beyond humans, that is, to other living beings. Derrida’s views on hospitality are examined in the book in the light of the philosophical thought of Emmanuel Levinas, Immanuel Kant and René Schérer.

My text focuses on Derrida’s ethics of hospitality. For Derrida, the logic of the concept of hospitality is governed by an absolute antinomy or aporia. On the one hand, there is the law of unlimited hospitality that ordains the unconditional reception of the stranger. On the other, there are the conditional laws of hospitality, which relate to the unconditional law through the imposition of terms and conditions upon it. For Derrida, the responsible political action and decision consists of the need to continuously negotiate between these two heterogeneous requirements. One of the problems I trace in Derrida’s aforementioned position is that it resorts to the use of terms such as “pure”, “real”, “genuine” or “absolute”, in order to describe unconditional hospitality and to differentiate it from conditional hospitality. Yet, such terms have been placed into question by deconstruction itself. Moreover, the disjunctive distinction that Derrida installs, at an initial level, between “unconditional” and “conditional” hospitality contradicts the work which he had undertaken during the 1960s and the 1970s of deconstructing basic conceptual hierarchical binary oppositions that govern Western metaphysical thought. Against the rather problematic guiding concept of “unconditional” hospitality, I counter-propose a continuous, incessant effort of limiting violence towards the arriving stranger. My argument draws from the particularly insightful remarks of Derrida regarding the violence that inescapably resides in every act of hospitality as a result of the host’s exercise of sovereignty over his/her home.

Jacques Derrida’s engagement with Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the second part of Of Grammatology constitutes the most systematic, extensive example of deconstructive reading. Nevertheless, the problem of whether Derrida reproduces Rousseau’s basic claims adequately has remained a peripheral concern. This has meant that this may constitute a misreading and the consequences that this would have for the deconstructive operation itself have not adequately examined. Hence, this enquiry into Derrida’s reading of Rousseau centers upon the extent to which Derrida distorts Rousseau’s text in order to be able to confirm deconstruction’s radical theoretical positions.

The aim of my paper is to focus upon those aspects of Derrida's relation to language and textual interpretation that have not been adequately dealt with by either proponents of deconstruction, who take Derrida to have effected a total revolution in the way in which we must read texts, or those critics who view deconstruction as having subverted all possible criteria for a valid interpretation leading, thus, to an anarchical textual ‘freeplay’. This inadequate approach by both proponents and critics is the result of a failure to consider Derrida's deconstructive approach as enacting a process of ‘double reading.’ This ‘double reading’ commences with an initial stage or level which seeks to reconstruct a text's authorial intention or its vouloir dire. This initial level then prepares the text, through the identification of authorial or textual intention, for the second stage or level. At this second stage or level, which is the passage to deconstructive reading per se, the blind spots and aporias of the text are set forth. Through this focus upon the process of deconstructive reading as ‘doubling reading,’ it becomes evident that deconstruction is not as revolutionary as proponents or critics have assumed. For, Derrida's initial reading, or the ‘doubling’ of a text's authorial or textual intention is firmly set within a traditional interpretative form