Derrida and Hospitality: Theory and Practice (review)

The studies presented here locate Derrida's reflections on hospitality firmly in the context of contemporary distinctions between economic migration, asylum seeking, and growing numbers of refugees of all kinds. That context is filled out on the one side by an inflected consideration of post-colonial studies, starting with Ulysses and Abraham, and on the other by invoking a tourism, which destroys what it seeks to visit. The latter is a useful device for locating the otherwise difficult concept of the autoimmune. The crossover between disciplines provides a challenge to both writer and reader, which Still deftly negotiates. The less obvious strand in Still's contextualization is that of sexual difference. She underlines that it should not be odd to make space for Irigaray and Cixous alongside Kant and Levinas. This allows Still, in her fourth chapter, to give a wonderful reading of the interaction between Derrida and Cixous. Still shows how Irigaray is perhaps the surprise addition to that grouping, and she makes a good case for considering Irigaray's notion of sexuate difference: the female not as other of a taken-for-granted sameness, which is masculine, but of each as differing from the other. She intimates, but does not make focal, the degree to which this puts in question a whole series of silent exclusions in the series of pairings from Aristotle and Plato and Hegel and Kant to Levinas and Lévi-Strauss. Still's presumption, shared with Irigaray, that there is something odd about a canon with no women in it is distinctly refreshing. It complicates the supposedly indiscernible grammar of the host, who is a guest, and makes all the more vivid the astonishing logic of surrendering the daughter and the wife for rape by the male householder, rather than surrendering the male, anointed guest to the besieging male horde. She boldly invokes Susan Brownmiller's Against our Will: Men, Women and Rape (1975) 'for the thesis that both the practice and the threat of rape are integral to the functioning of patriarchy, providing the need for "protection" and the possibility of punishment' (pp. 45-46, n. 27). The use of the terms 'theory and practice' in the subtitle of Still's text is of potential concern in light of the old radical feminist slogan 'patriarchy is the theory and rape is the practice'. But the studies within are more sophisticated with respect to this eminently deconstructible distinction, already put in question by Althusser, for whom theory itself was a practice with real effects. Still amply demonstrates that reading is a practice inflected by theoretical commitments that may be challenged, hence her challenge to the brotherhood of deconstructive hospitality: Kant, Levinas, Derrida. This argument could have been developed in relation to a gap between questioning, in the opening sections of Politics of Friendship (1994), of the masculinist slogan 'liberty, equality, fraternity' and its reinstallation in the text, by virtue of the masculinity of friendship/discipleship. However, Still quietly subverts Derrida's inability to do more than announce a need to adjust the balance. These studies would also lend themselves to expansion in terms of a hospitality with respect to the religion of the other. This is a mark of the inner cohesion and flexibility of the principles informing the enquiry and its presentation. In her non-concluding conclusion Still states: 'In this book there have been two related, interpenetrating approaches, empirical and textual, to the intersection of hospitality and sexual difference' (p. 263). That, for me, already makes four — empirical, textual, conceptual, political — and the enquiry is all the stronger for it.