Phenomenologies of the Stranger: Between Hostility and Hospitality

7. The Time of Hospitality—Again

7 The Time of Hospitality—Again K A L PA N A R A H I TA S E S H A D R I Hostage, host, guest, ghost, holy ghost, and Geist . . . —Jacques Derrida How does someone dreaming, wondering about half-forgotten stories in dead languages, (something about a boy who seeks hospitality from Death only to find that Death is not at home and awaits him . . .) find a door, at least a narrow passage to slip into the discursive space of the modern university where the thought of hospitality and the stranger is carried on in the language of expertise? After several tries, she might boldly settle for an interruption, a sheaf of observations: It appears that any attempt to think hospitality in relation to the stranger, is inescapably to situate it at the limit of the unknown—the ultimate border of death. In other words, there seems to be some indiscernible and subtle relation between the thought of hospitality toward an absolute stranger, and the syntagm ‘‘awaiting death.’’ What is more, this relation seems to inform any scene of hospitality—be the other family, friend, or foreigner. And is it not the case that this resolutely unspoken relation is already at some level understood and attested to in the daily words that encircle parting, taking leave, departure, sending off—à-dieu? To wonder about this relation is to recognize that no contemporary thinker (other than perhaps Levinas) has worried about this relation with more tenacity and nuance than Jacques Derrida, who nevertheless puts the term ‘‘hospitality’’ in play in such varied contexts that it refuses to be 126 gathered into a single proposition. However, if the dreamer-wonderer were to pursue this relation between death and hospitality, it is to Derrida ’s Apories that she must turn, a text that when read alongside Of Hospitality and Adieu à Emmanuel Levinas yields insights—sometimes ‘‘formidable’’ ones.1 But first, before plunging headlong into the impossible topic that is called ‘‘death’’ and the ethics that are also the essence of ‘hospitality,’ let us hear what Derrida says when he is issued a direct invitation to respond to the word ‘‘hospitality.’’ Priority of Affirmation In Of Hospitality, Derrida begins by situating the question of hospitality in relation to the absolute anonymous other who washes up on the shore bereft of the cosmopolitical rights that distinguish the legitimate foreigner . The latter xenos is not an anonymous other, rather he or she is one with whom a pact xenia is made thereby alluding to ‘‘an objective morality . . . [that] presupposes the social and familial status of the contracting parties, that it is possible for them to be called by their names, to have names, to be subjects in law . . .’’2 The absolute other, on the other hand, ‘‘cannot have a name or a family name.’’3 In other words, this figure would be in an oblique nonrelation to the laws of the land—as one to whom they would not apply.4 Thus, it is with this unspeakable figure before him, facing him that Derrida raises the question of what it means to speak of an ethics of hospitality. He writes: [T]he absolute or unconditional hospitality I would like to offer him or her presupposes a break with hospitality, with the right to or pact of hospitality. . . . The law of hospitality, the express law that governs the general concept of hospitality, appears as a paradoxical law, pervertible or perverting. It seems to dictate that absolute hospitality should break with the law of hospitality as right or duty, with the ‘‘pact’’ of hospitality. To put it in different terms, 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 . . . or even their names. The law of absolute hospitality commands a break with hospitality by right, with law or justice as rights.5 In the second seminar, entitled ‘‘Pas d’hospitalité,’’ Derrida refers to the ethical imperative toward the absolute other as mandated by what he now The Time of Hospitality—Again 127 terms as ‘‘the law of absolute, unconditional, hyperbolic hospitality.’’6 And this inexorable law, Derrida suggests, can even command that we...