Abstract

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.