User:Aitantv/Derrida, J (2000) Of Hospitality

Derrida, J & A, Dufourmantelle (2000) Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond. Stanford University Press, Stanford.

Hospitality is viewed as a question of what arrives at the borders, in the initial surprise contact with an other, a stranger, a foreigner.

"That is where the question of hospitality begins: must we ask the foreigner to understand us, to speak our language, in all the senses of this term, in all its possible extensions, before being able and so as to be able to welcome him into our country? If he was already speaking our language with all that that implies, if we already shared everything that is shared with a language, would the foreigner still be a foreigner and could we speak of asylum or hospitality in regard to hom?" (Derrida 2000, pp.15-17)
"absolute hospitality requires that I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner...but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other, and that I give place to them, that I let them come, that I let them arrive, and take place in the place I offer them, without asking of them either reciprocity (entering into a pact) or even their names. The law of absolute hospitality commands a break fwith hospitality by right, with law or justice as rights. Just hospitality breaks with hospitality by right" (Derrida 2000, p.25)
"Does one give hospitality to a subject? to an identifiable subject? to a legal subject? Or is hospitality rendered, is it given to the other before the are identified, even before they are...a subject, a legal subject and subject nameable by their family name, etc.?" (Derrida 2000, p.30)
"Nowadays a reflection on hospitality presupposed, among other things, the possibility of a rigorous delimitation of thresholds or frontiers: between the familial and the non-familial, between the foreigner and the non-foreign, the citizen and the non-citizen, but first of all between the private and the public" (Derrida 2000, pp. 48-49)
"I want to be master at home..., to be able to receive whomever I like there. Anyone who encroaches on my "at home," on my ipseity, on my power of hospitality, on my sovereigty as host, I start to regard as an undesirable foreigner, and virtually as an enemy. This other becomesa hostile subject, and I risk becoming their hostage." (Derrida 2000, p.53-55)

parasitism - guest

"Let's say "parasite"because what this directs us to open up is indeed the general problematic of relationships between parasitism and hospitality. How can we distiguish between a guest and a parasite? In principle, the difference is straitforward, but for that you need a law; hospitality, reception, the welcome offered have to be submitted to a basic and limiting jurisdiction. Not all new arrivals are received as guests if they don't have the benefit of the right to hospitality or the right to asylum, etc. Without this right, a new arrival can only be introduced "in my home," in the host's "at home," as a parasite, a guest who is wrong, illegitimate, clandestine, liable to explusion or arrest." (Derrida 2000, p.59-61)

unconditional hospitality

"It is as though hosptiality were the impossible: as though the law of hospitality defined this very impossibility, as if it were only possible to transgress it, as though the law of absolute, unconditional, hyperbolical hospitality, as though the categorical imperative of hospitality commanded that we transgress all the laws (in the plural) of hospitality, namely, the conditions, the norms, the rights and the duties that are imposed omn hots and hostesses, on the men or women who give a welcome as we as the men and women who receive it." (Derrida 2000, pp. 75-77)

+ an antimony between the law of unlimited hospitality and the laws (Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian)

The law of unconditional hospitality, if it is said to be a law, a "law without law" for "if it practice hospitality out of duty, this hospitality of paying up is no longer an absolute hospitality" (Derrida 2000, p.83)

language

Language as belonging but also exappropriation "What is called the "mother" tongue is already "the other's language." If we are saying here that language is the native land, namely, what exiles, foreigners, all the wandering Jews in the world, carry away on the soles of their shoes, it is not to evoke a monstrous body, an impossible body, a body whose mouth and tongue would drag the feet along, and even drag about under the feet." (Derrida 2000, p.89) It's at once belonging but an emobodied reminder of the other's exappropriation, the dislocation, the illusion of property. The mother tongue maintains are alienability as a forgeigner *think of how Bibi never fully acculturated and Dad didn't speak to us in Pharsi. The languaged is carried away with us from our ancestral home "carrying it away, as we say, with each step, on the soles of our shoes. But always while being separated from oneself like this, while never being quits with that which, leaving oneself, by the same step never stops qutting its place of origin." (Derrida 2000, pp.91-93)

host as hostage

Of Oedipus, the foreigner in a foreign land, and his demand to be buried secretly by Theseus without a tomb, "The host thus becomes a retained gostage, a detained addressee, responsible for and victim of the gift that Oedipus, a bit like Christ, makes of his dying person or his dwelling-demanding, his dwelling-dying: this is my body, keep it in memory of me." (Derrida 2000, p.107)
Antigone, Oedpius'daughter, weeps about this unlocalized death, that Oedipus has no tomb she can visit and mourn. Without a tomb she cannot mourn. "She weeps at being deprived of a normal mourning. She weeps for her mounring, if that is possible." (Derrida 2000, p.111)
hidden is his death Oedipus become an even more foreign foreigner. "What this death is, is the becoming-foreign of the foreigner, the absolute of his becoming-foreign." (Derrida 2000, p.113)
"Antigone ask something clear: that he see her at last, her, at this very moment, and see her weep. More specifically: she commands him to see her tears, The invisibility, the placelessness, the illocality of an "of no fixed address"for death, everything that removes her father's body from phenomenal exteriority: that is what is being wept for without being seen by the eyes. " (Derrida 2000, p.115)

"The Laws of Hospitality" a charter - the foreigner as saviour, liberator,

"It is as if the stranger or foreigner held the keys. This is always the situation of the foreigner, in politics too, that of coming as a legislator to lay down the law and liberate the people or the nation or the house, into the home that lets him enter after having appealed to him. It's as is...the stranger could save the master and liberate the power of his host" (Derrida 2000, p.123)
"So it is indeed the one who invites, the inviting host, who becomes the hostage - and who really always has been. And the guest, the invited hostage, becomes the one who invites the one who invites, the master of the host. The guest becomes the host's host." (Derrida 2000, p.125)

Lot and his Daughters

In Genesis, Lot puts he laws of hospitality above all. The men of Sodom demand to see Lot's guests who he is putting up. They want to see the guests in order to "penetrate" them. "In order to protect the guests he is putting up at any price as family head and all powerful father, he offers the men of Sodom his two virgin daughters. This scene follows straight after the appearance of God and his three messengers to Abraham, who offers them hospitality, at the oaks of Mamre...it is the great founding scene of Abrahamesque hospitality" (Derrida 2000, p.151-53)
a sort of extreme hierarchy of the guests and the hostages
Again "in the famous scene on Mount Ephraim in Judges". "After having welcomed a pilgrim on a journey, with his entourage, near Beit Lehem, their host recives a visit from the Benei Balia'a; who ask to "penetrate"("in the sexual sense,"the translator specifices) the pilgrim". (Derrida 2000, p.154) The master of the house implores them not to abuse this man, and instead offers the each memebr of the gang a concubine. "The guest, the "master"of the woman, "picked up his knife, took hold of the concubine, and limb by limb cut her into twelve peices; then he sent her all through the land of Israel." (Derrida 2000, p.155)
"Are we the heirs of this tradition of hospitality? Up to what point? Where should we place the invariant, if it is one, across this logic and these narratives? They testify without end in our memory. (Derrida 2000, p.155)
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