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.

• "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)
• "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)
• "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 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, but in the same frame
• "" (Derrida 2000, p.)
• "" (Derrida 2000, p.)
• "" (Derrida 2000, p.)
• "" (Derrida 2000, p.)
• "" (Derrida 2000, p.)