The Conditions of Hospitality: Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics on the Threshold of the Possible

The Art and Poetics of Translation as Hospitality

Derrida’s notion of hospitality, and the aesthetics of hospitality, serve as a starting point for this essay which focuses on hospitality and translation in the context of contemporary migration and the migrant/national relationship: the relationship between the arrivant and the host. Juridicial issues, and the contradistinction between ethical and legal demands - the irreconcilability between conditional and unconditional hospitality - are addressed. Hospitality as art, as poetics, is explored, and the idea of the translator as host developed, Derrida’s reflections on cosmopolitanism and hospitality serving to represent the translator as s/he who oscillates between unconditionally surrendering himself/herself to the (hospitality of the) other’s language, and complying to the conditions posed by his/her native language and culture. The translator is seen as being in the in-between space between his/her own language and the arrivant’s language, in an intercultural transnational (transitional/relational) space which is not exactly identifiable with his/her own native parameters. With translation therefore, new forms of communities, relations, architectures enter the host’s (i.e. the translator’s) world. Yet translation as hospitality is understood to be an unconditional kind of hospitality; it is a task that can never be fulfilled. Still, the translator can move constantly from his/her own, familiar native language and the guest’s dislocated one, thus offering a pattern for new diverse laws of hospitality.