Abstract
At a time of unprecedented migration and social displacement, following a century ravaged by war and hegemonic shift, the question of hospitality presents itself with unparalleled urgency. Taking his cue from Immanuel Kant’s cosmopolitics, Jacques Derrida addressed this question by deliberating on the nature of the political obligation to the other person. Invoking the work of Emmanuel Levinas, this demand is first of all ethical, and unconditional. But Derrida was also acutely aware of the residual violence of the hospitable gesture, which always takes place in a scene of power. The resultant aporias at the heart of hospitality provoked debate between the two authors at the 2007 Critical Legal Conference, and this paper seeks to elucidate and elaborate on this encounter. At stake are the matters of the potential political forms of hospitality, whether it should always been striven for and, ultimately, how one can conceptually reconcile its ethics with its violence.
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Notes
For an introductory exposition of Heidegger’s argument see Heidegger, Martin. 1993. ‘Being and Time: Introduction’. In Basic Writings: Revised and Expanded Edition, ed. David Farrell Krell, pp. 37–87. London: Routledge.
For instance, see the following passage of Adriaan Peperzak’s: ‘The Other … does not fit into my consciousness; it breaks through my circular or elliptic horizon, thus revealing his/her transcendence. As transcendent, the Other responds to the desire that opens my interiority to an absolute exteriority. The Other is, thus, the epiphany of a transcendent otherness or absoluteness’ (Peperzak 1997, p. 32). However, insofar that Levinas believes that the provocation of the other is embedded in the heart of the human subject, he is able to say that the human subject is structured as ‘the other in the same’ (Levinas 1998, p. 25). What is revealed by this is the manner in which Levinas’ philosophy could be considered transimmanent in a manner somewhat different to that found in Nancy’s work, separated from the latter by his fierce critique of Heidegger. Such a question goes beyond the scope of this article, however.
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Leung, G., Stone, M. Otherwise than Hospitality: A Disputation on the Relation of Ethics to Law and Politics. Law Critique 20, 193–206 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-009-9046-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-009-9046-1