Queer Hospitality in Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno"

Questions about hospitality (or hostipitality) and about queerness emerge as often implied though rarely articulated bedfellows in both Jacques Derrida's late work and Herman Melville's fiction.¹ This essay addresses this surprising alignment of these two writers, arguing that Derrida, specifically in Of Hospitality, and Melville, in "Benito Cereno," elliptically trope queer desire as both enabling and threatening the possibility of hospitality.

While Derrida's reading of perverse exchanges between hosts and guests provides, I will suggest, a valuable model for examining the erotically fraught relationships between Melville's captains and slaves, "Benito Cereno" complicates the terms by which readers might frame such exchanges. Reading, Melville's tale implies, is a queerly hospitable act, a taking up and extending of hospitality that calls into being a desire for, and to be, the other. Negotiating uneasy slides between narratorial and authorial voices that position the text within and outside networks of desire, readers of Derrida's meditations and Melville's short fiction are called on to recognize their dysfunctional roles—the guest as host, the host as guest.

Queer desire might be said to trace Jacques Derrida's articulation of a politics of hospitality, driving its imaginings of an exchange between self and other even as that exchange erases its erotic potential. This queer trace emerges, first, in Derrida's delineation of the perverse interdependence of conditional and unconditional hospitality in a series of five seminars delivered in Paris in 1996. For Derrida, the term "hospitality" takes the form of

a non-dialectizable antinomy between, on the one hand, The law of unlimited hospitality (to give the new arrival all of one's home and oneself, to give him or her one's own, our own, without asking a name or compensation, or the fulfillment of even the smallest condition), and on the other hand, the laws (in the plural), those rights and duties that are always conditioned and conditional . . . by all of law and all philosophy of law . . . across the family, civil society, and the State.²

These "antagonistic terms," the "two regimes of law," as Derrida goes on to argue are, nevertheless, interdependent and inseparable. While the law of hospitality is "outside the law," it "requires" (79) the laws in order to mark out the possibilities of its coming into effect and, at the same time, the laws depend upon a concept of unconditional hospitality, of the law, in order to define themselves as hospitable.

Derrida frames this antinomial relation between the law and the laws, on more than one occasion, through a rhetoric of perversion: "the law . . . needs the laws, which, however, deny it, or at any rate threaten it, sometimes corrupt or pervert it. And must always be able to do this. For this pervertibility is essential, irreducible, necessary too" (79). Derrida's returns to the pervertible and perverting trajectories of the laws of hospitality underscore the instabilities of this "conjugal model, paternal and phallogocentric" (149), this imagining of hospitable home-space as familial, self-contained, private, heterosexual. Indeed, Derrida queerly partners the home and the state as participants in the breakdown of their own principles of inviolability. The "right" to hospitality, "whether private or familial, can only be exercised and guaranteed by the mediation of a public right or State right" so that the sanctity, the hospitality of the "private domain" can only be gained through the State "controlling it and trying to penetrate it to be sure of it" (55).

Yet for all Derrida's vested interest in exposing the perverse manifestations of a phallogocentric model of the home and of the host (hôte), his staging of hospitality remains, as a number of feminist critics have pointed out, strangely limited by the very terms it would seek to expose. Indeed, drawing as it does so closely on Emmanuel Levinas's account of ethics as a radical opening of the self to the Other in all their otherness, Derrida's relocation of this scene to the threshold of a masculinized home-space strangely forgets the feminine casting of the host in Levinas's model. Penelope Deutscher notes how...