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HOSP 3 (2) pp. 151–168 Intellect Limited 2013

Hospitality & Society Volume 3 Number 2

© 2013 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/hosp.3.2.151_1

AndreAs OberprAntAcherUniversity of Innsbruck

breaking with the law of

hospitality? the emergence

of illegal aliens in europe vis-

à-vis derrida’s deconstruction

of the conditions of welcome

AbstrAct

In two seminars published under the title De l’hospitalité/Of Hospitality (J. Derrida [1997] 2000) and in other writings too, Jacques Derrida invites his readers to consider some differences between ‘conditional hospitality’, that is ‘the right to or pact of hospitality’ on the one hand and ‘the absolute or unconditional hospitality’ on the other. By emphasizing the incommensurability between the two in antinomic terms, Derrida has indeed questioned established practices of welcoming foreigners while insisting on a sense of hospitality that is not bound by and to its immediate legalisation. The following article will attempt to trace the limits of Derrida’s decon-struction of the conditions of welcome by arguing that for those estimated millions of people who are commonly dismissed as illegal aliens in liberal democratic states, such as in Europe, to ‘break with hospitality in the ordinary sense’ is not just a hyperbolic ethical imperative – it also feels like a bleak verdict. Otherwise said, what is the potential use value of Derrida’s thinking of a transgressive hospitality given the evidence that far too many are actually living in extremely inhospitable

KeywOrds

politics of hospitalityirregular migrationstate of exceptionpolitical aestheticsJacques DerridaGiorgio AgambenJacques RancièreMichel Agier

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1. In the United States, the situation is even more acute. As a report published by the Office of Immigration Statistics of the US Department of Homeland Security states, in January 2011 ‘an estimated 11.5 million unauthorized immigrants were living in the United States’ (Hoefer et al. 2011: 1). The same report further indicates that out of the almost 38 million people residing in the state of California about 7.5 per cent (that is 2.8 million people) have no legitimate residence status. According to Mike Davis and Justin Akers Chacón, it is precisely these (working) illegal aliens who ‘comprise the vast connective tissue that allows the American economy to function’ (Davis and Chacón 2006: 157).

situations in European liberal democratic states without being able to rely on a bare minimum of legal standards?

IntrOductIOn

According to the latest estimates for the European Union, provided by the EU-funded research project CLANDESTINO – Undocumented Migration: Counting the Uncountable (Anon. 2007–2009), there is plausible reason to assume that in 2008 between 1.8 and 3.3 million people without the required residence and working permits were living in the EU-15 countries. Even though the authors of this comprehensive study argue – along the lines of reports provided by individual member states of the European Union – that except for incidental increases there has either been a slight decline or a relative stability in the number of ‘undocumented migrants’ estimated for the EU-15, they speculate that ‘[i]f policies do not modify circumstances that lead to irregular migration in the first place, irregular migration will resume and numbers will grow soon to the prior levels or even beyond’ (Anon 2009: 7; cf. Triandafyilldou and Vogel 2010). The estimation that ‘uncountable’ people are living in European states without the right to do so may sound extreme when contrasted with the ideal of liberal democratic inclusion that is officially informing the major institutions of the European Union and its associated countries. And yet, it is highly significant for a critical examination of the rather inhospitable quality of the civic life in Europe, in the sense that it is paramount to discuss the (hardly visible) presence of a multi-tude of people who are commonly dismissed as illegal aliens in the wider context of the question who counts and who does not count as a subject of rights for liberal democratic states – and what it implies to be left out of the official count.1

The designation ‘illegal aliens’ itself is highly problematic: on the one hand due to the complexity of the phenomenon involving a variety of flows (demo-graphic flows; border-related flows; geographic flows) and, as a consequence of these multiple flows, a rather variegated combination of people that are living to different degrees and in different ways in conditions of illegality; and, on the other hand, due to the term’s implicit pejorative meaning. While main-taining the term illegal aliens as a figure of speech that is as much problematic as it is also paradigmatic for understanding contemporary situations of aban-donment, this article agrees – in analytic terms – with the definition proposed by the authors of the CLANDESTINO project, according to which

irregular or undocumented residents are defined as residents without any legal residence status in the country they are residing in, and those whose presence in the territory – if detected – may be subject to termination through an order to leave and/or an expulsion order because of their activities.

(Jandl and Vogel 2008: 7, original emphasis)

Or, to put it in slightly more political terms with Nicholas De Genova, the ‘deportability [of illegal aliens] perfectly and precisely marks the zone of indis-tinction between a condition that is (virtually) stateless and one that is posi-tively saturated with the state’ (2010: 46). In this sense, the figure of illegal aliens seems to be emerging at the limits of contemporary statehood.

In consideration of the incidence of estimated millions of people who are neither accepted as migrants nor recognized as refugees, but more often than

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2. In methodological terms, my article agrees with Agamben’s exposition of the ‘paradigmatic method’ ([2008] 2009: 25; 9–32) as a method that allows to recognize and to question transformations that are taking place in the field of power relations by addressing particular figures (and situations) that emerge on the side (Greek: παρά-δειγμα/para-deigma) of normalizing procedures or discourses. More specifically, I am interested in exploring the figure of illegal aliens as a paradigmatic figure that indicates problematic transformations of governing spaces of appearance and belonging.

not abandoned as illegal aliens in situations of destitution, a series of concerns ranging from the categorical guarantee of basic human rights to strict law enforcement measures have thus gained in importance for contemporary polit-ical and social theory. Out of these diverse concerns that are typically linked to perceptions of people considered to be illegal aliens either as victims (of exces-sive state coercion or violence) or, alternatively, as vile perpetrators (of crimes against state integrity), the issue of hospitality is of particular value for it allows to address and understand these people other than as victims or perpetrators, that is as possibly unexpected, but in most cases enduring guests aspiring to become fellow cosmopolites. Such an appraisal, in turn, commands a careful re-examination and -visitation of hospitality itself since the legal scope of this notion has usually been determined by state policies, which historically have proven to be extremely violent against subjects deemed undesirables and in recent years have rejected vast sums of people in precarious conditions of ille-gality (see, e.g., Mezzadra and Neilson 2008). It is crucial to realize, however, that it is not just states that are implicated in the creation and management of a heterogeneous population of illegal aliens, but also actors that are usually acting in concert with liberal democratic states, so that two major elements of the rule-of-law, that is jurisdiction and accountability, are effectively diffused in a rather viscous and all-too-often treacherous frontier regime. Apart from the contemporary commodification of the various efforts to regulate people’s mobility, which involves private companies like European Homecare that ‘takes care’ of asylum seekers in Germany, new agencies have recently estab-lished in Europe that are also challenging the modern distinction between state actors and non-state actors. Frontex – an agency of the European Union that was formed in 2004 by Council Regulation 2007/2004 and that understands itself as a ‘key player in the implementation of the concept of EU Integrated Border Management’ (Laitinen 2007: 128) – is perhaps the most extreme case in point, since it repeatedly showed how the merging of different European states’ border police units into hybrid operations serves as a tactic to practically become immune against public accountability.

With regard to these general tendencies, my article is concerned with the emergence of illegal aliens in European liberal democratic states in particular. I consider this emergence to be a paradigmatic phenomenon2 occurring at the periphery of public attention that puts into question not only that exclusive ‘space of appearance’ (Arendt [1958] 1998: 198) administered by the modern state and its various domains, but also Jacques Derrida’s efforts to decon-struct hospitality as a de-limiting institution. Commencing with a discussion of the literature that was recently produced in political and social theory to make sense of the situation of people who are considered to be illegal aliens and whose lives are compromised in a ‘real zone of indistinction’ (Agamben [1995] 1998: 4), I will subsequently argue that Derrida’s writings on hospital-ity are promising to the extent that they are marking relevant ruptures in the ‘antinomy of hospitality’ (Derrida [1997] 2000: 79) without remaining obliged to a limited welcome to foreigners. However, Derrida’s deconstruction of the conditions of welcome appears also dubious when confronted with the emergence of illegal aliens for which ‘a break with hospitality in the ordinary sense’ (Derrida [1997] 2000: 25) is not something extra-ordinary, as Derrida seems to suggest in hyperbolic ethical terms, but rather the very expression of their most ordinary situation in liberal democratic states, that is: having to live one’s life as if the laws of hospitality were suspended. And as contemporary efforts to bring this situation onstage, be it Björn Bicker’s theatre play illegal.

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3. Expressionsofthisambiguitymaybeidentifiedintheworksofsomeofthemostbrilliantcontributorstomodernpoliticalthoughtwhotriedtodefinetheconstitutionandlimitsofstatehoodbydiscussingthecomplexrelationshipbetweenthestate’sinsideandoutsidewithregardtothestatusofitsinhabitants:ThomasHobbes(see[1650]1999:124–25),forinstance,distinguishedthe(illegitimate)multitudo/multitudefromthe(legitimate)populus/people,andImmanuelKant(see[1795]1983:118)discernedtheGastrecht,therightofforeignerstoresideinothercountries(asanunreasonableclaim),fromtheBesuchsrecht,therightofforeignerstotemporarilyvisitothercountries(asacosmopolitanentitlement).

wir sind viele. wir sind da/‘illegal. we are many. we are here’ (2009, my transla-tion) or Luc Boltanski’s cantata Les limbes/‘The Limbo’ ([2006] 2011, my trans-lation), are indeed attesting, this suspension is all but accidental. It is quite likely an effect of those administrative procedures that are currently making sure that the lives of people deemed undesirables are rendered uncertain (and thus vulnerable) by discarding them from the political scene as illegitimate.

Given the mounting evidence that illegal aliens are not simply adjusting to these tendencies, but actively confronting such administrative procedures with their unruly passions for a coming democracy, it is mandatory, though, to welcome with their arrival the arrival of another politics too. For the recent history of uprisings in Europe, beginning with the occupation of the Saint-Ambroise church in Paris (1996) by the Sans-Papiers movement via the protests of the Sin Papeles throughout major Spanish cities (2001) up to the Marche Europeenne des Sans Papiers et Migrant.e.s. (2012) and the actual Refugee Tent Action (2012–), is clearly signalling that people who cannot count on the right to remain present are very much capable of staging political dissent. In this sense then, my article will attempt to highlight the implicit limits of Derrida’s understanding of ‘ethics as hospitality’ (Derrida [1997] 1999: 19, original emphasis) by recommending a more pronounced political approach to the situation of those who are already between us citizens without constituting a legitimate democratic part.

The emergence of illegal aliens in conTemporary poliTical and social Theory

If it is pertinent to assume that modern philosophy is inextricably bound to the rise of the (nation-)state, to its formation and transformation, though in highly ambiguous terms,3 it is also plausible to argue that this arrangement between philosophical reason and the politics of the state has been irrevo-cably shaken by the terror exercised in the name of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. Especially Nazi-Germany demonstrated with brutal violence how the ‘inscription of life’ (Agamben [1995] 1998: 175) into the territorial state in the form of a privileging citizenship is precarious to the extent that it may be revoked and dissolved under specific circumstances, thus pushing former citizens – henceforth declared ‘stateless’ or even ‘displaced persons’ – in extremely treacherous situations of destitution.

A first and still echoing document of this shock is Hannah Arendt’s essay ‘We Refugees’ (1943), in which the author claims, after she had been declared a stateless person herself by the Nazi regime and seeking refuge in the United States, that

[…] [t]hose few refugees who [unlike the adapting parvenus, Andreas Oberprantacher] insist upon telling the truth, even to the point of ‘inde-cency,’ get in exchange for their unpopularity one priceless advantage: history is no longer a closed book to them and politics is no longer the privilege of Gentiles.

(Arendt 1943: 77)

In this sense, it is Arendt who marks the postmodern beginning of a series of debates in political theory regarding the status, needs and chances of people whose very presence has become outlawed. The vivacity of these debates, which Arendt has opened or stimulated in a variety of her writings that are gravitating around the dangers of worldlessness due to displacement, the

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4. The links between the campaign for a Global War on Terrorism and the active production of a population of illegal aliens becomes evident when considering for example that section 412 of the USA Patriot Act of 2001 (as well as the PATRIOT Sunsets Extension Act of 2011) permits indefinite detention of non-citizens in general and of illegal aliens in particular (see Anon. 2001).

5. While totalitarian regimes were usually ready to directly deprive minorities and political opponents of their citizenship, European liberal democratic states seem rather keen to create situations of insecurity, in which people that are depreciated as undesirable subjects tend to behave – at their own peril, so to say – as if they had no citizenship and thus become extremely vulnerable.

6. Rawls outspoken disinterest to discuss the contingency of borders is a major characteristic of his (not surprisingly conservative) theory of international relations and law (see, in particular, Rawls [1999] 2000: 38–39).

importance of the unconditional ‘right to have rights’ (Arendt [1951] 1979: 296) and the unpredictable chances of creating a public space by risking oneself and speaking up, has gained momentum over the past few decades. Paradoxically, the securitization of population flows in the post-Cold War era, which was progressively intensified (and de-territorialized) from the moment when it was linked to the campaign for a Global War on Terrorism,4 has not only produced a sum of connate abject subjects such as the detainees of Camp Delta (cf. Butler 2004) or – as I would like to argue – illegal aliens, but also a renewed sensibility for articulating dissent against these tendencies to restrict or criminalize the mobility of those who are deemed undesirables in liberal democratic terms. In fact, various political thinkers have all, from one direc-tion or another, converged on the conclusion that liberal democratic states are involved in dramatic changes that need to be problematized in economic as well as in political terms, since they are producing large quantities of people who are forced to live in extremely precarious situations. If it is true that ‘democracy is gradually evolving into consumerist post-democracy’, as Slavoj Žižek ([2008] 2009: 325) maintains, it is equally important to concede with Zygmunt Bauman (2004: 5) that the contemporary consumerism produces its own type of ‘wasted humans (the “excessive” and “redundant,” that is the population of those who either could not or were not wished to be recognized or allowed to stay)’. In other words, not just totalitarian regimes, but liberal democratic states too are quite capable of abandoning people in situations of de facto statelessness.5

Considering the rich diversity of Arendt’s theses, it is hardly surprising that contemporary readers of her work have stressed alternative aspects when discussing actual situations of ‘people forced to live outside the common world’ (Arendt [1951] 1979: 302). Among the most prominent of her inter-preters, Giorgio Agamben ([1995] 1998) is advocating a Foucauldian, that is a biopolitical re-evaluation of Arendt’s writings on totalitarianism while conceiving the current situation of statelessness as a novel disposition and the present refugee as a figure that ‘throws into crisis the original fiction of sover-eignty’ (Agamben 1995). Along these lines, Agamben has repeatedly stressed Arendt’s critical awareness of anomic situations and exposed mechanisms of government that are at present generating and compromising politically unqualified, in short: bare life, such as that of aliens rendered illegal. Whereas Agamben seems to be mainly interested in Arendt as a critic of the ‘decadence of the political realm in modern societies’ (Agamben [1995] 1998: 3–4), Seyla Benhabib is rather concerned with recalling Arendt’s ‘resounding plea for the acknowledgment of the right of every human being to “belong to some community”’ (Benhabib 2004: 51; see also 2001; 2006; 2011) by confronting it with positions of gender studies and defending it against restrictive concep-tions of citizenship like that of John Rawls.6 Doing so, Benhabib illustrates how Arendt was not just addressing, but also actively contesting anomic situations by calling for a politics that makes ‘[h]uman distinctness’ (Arendt [1958] 1998: 176) possible. Another effort of reconsidering Arendt’s writings against the background of contemporary risks of destitution and opportuni-ties of agency for illegal aliens is that of Judith Butler. While her anthology of essays Precarious Life (J. Butler, 2004) may be said to share some of the convic-tions regarding the state of exception dear to Agamben (see [2003] 2005), her subsequent discussion with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Butler and Spivak 2007) of street demonstrations enacted by illegal aliens in the Los Angeles area in the year 2006 focuses on questions concerning the capacity for political

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7. Various elements of Butler’s political appraisal of the body can also be found in her conversations with Athena Athanasiou that were published under the title Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (see Butler and Athanasiou 2013).

change of those who are left out of the liberal democratic count. One of her most recent essays (Butler 2011) is also dedicated to a radical appraisal of agency while transcending Arendt’s preference for (political) speech towards bodies in alliance and criticizing Agamben’s notion of bare life. In this article, Butler cautions against the risk posed by theoretical discourses that remain indebted to an (elitist) ‘internal point of view of the Greek Polis on what poli-tics should be’ (Butler 2011) and that are thus practically incapable of appreci-ating all those forms of political agency enacted by people who are seemingly outside of the established order. By arguing:

[…] that one reason the sphere of the political cannot be defined by the classic conception of the Polis, is that we are then deprived of having and using a language for those forms of agency and resist-ance that focus on the politics of exclusion itself or, indeed, against those regimes of power that maintain the stateless and disenfran-chised in conditions of destitution. Few matters could be more politi-cally consequential.

(Butler 2011)7

Butler makes indeed clear that theoretical discourses are politically co-re-sponsible, in the sense that it makes a difference how they are respond-ing to conditions of destitution: if they are effectively de-limiting politics and welcoming unprecedented subjects or if they are eventually reproduc-ing discriminating settings by insisting on the limited equation of a Polis-politics.

Apart from these debates that in one way or another engage with some of the major propositions put forward by Arendt to address the plight of de facto stateless people as well as to explore the chances for a common life in public, a series of distinctively French approaches are also seminal for the emergence (and significance) of the figure of illegal aliens in contemporary political and social theory. Considering that the Sans-Papiers movement in France – which made its first public appearance in 1996 when the collec-tive Des papiers pour tous occupied the churches Saint-Ambroise and Saint Bernard de la Chapelle in Paris while protesting against the discriminating law Pasqua of 1986 and 1993 (as well as the future law Debré of 1997) – is the longest-standing and probably also the best known collective effort to voice the demands of illegal aliens in the European Union, it comes as no surprise that many French scholars of political and social theory have discussed these demands in their own work. What may be termed a distinc-tively ‘French’ tone in these discussions is the noticeable commitment to connect the struggles of the Sans-Papiers with the dynamics and egalitarian ideals of the French Revolution while focusing especially on actual opportu-nities for democratic change. It is possible, for instance, to refer the princi-pal interest of Alain Badiou’s political ontology of the event (see, especially, Badiou [1988] 2007) back to his advocacy for the cause of the Sans-Papiers. This advocacy that is informing his theory of subjectification since as early as in 1983, when the repression of a wild strike of undocumented work-ers from the Maghreb took place at the factory of Renault-Flints and, one year later, of Talbot-Poissy (see Badiou [1998] 2005: 49), is the result of his resolute acknowledgement that the French worker unions showed no politi-cal interest in including Sans-Papiers in their political struggle and that this discrimination corresponds, in mathematical terms, to ‘the signifier of the

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event […being] necessarily supernumerary to the site’, as Badiou (2007: 181) puts it. Against such discrimination and misconception of the political scene, the association Organisation Politique (1985–2007), co-founded by Badiou, issued the radical egalitarian prescription ‘“everyone who is here is from here” (tous le gens qui sont ici sont d’ici)’ (Hallward 2003: 233). Similarly, also Jacques Rancière expressed his reasons for an alternative count of the ‘part of those who have no part’ (Rancière [1995] 1999: 9) by proposing a theory of subjectification that dedicates special attention to ‘operations that displace forms of belonging’ (Rancière [2002] 2010: 90) and that is aware of the differences between politics on the one hand and what he terms ‘police’ or ‘policing’ on the other. And very much like Butler, Rancière too reacted quite critically to Agamben’s biopolitical analyses in an essay (Rancière 2004), where he argues that the ‘very difference between man and citizen […] is the opening of an interval for political subjectivization’ (Rancière 2004: 304). Étienne Balibar, in turn, has contributed to the discussion with a series of essays and books that appreciate and support the emergence of Sans-Papiers in France by first of all thanking them for ‘breathing life back into democ-racy’ (Balibar [1997] 2013; see also 1999). And with regard to their demands as a political movement that has gained momentum in liberal democratic states, he explicitly referred to Sans-Papiers as ‘active citizens’ (Balibar [2001] 2004: 46) while later coining the neologism égaliberté (cf. Balibar 2010) as an effort to strengthen the bond between equality and liberty.

In the context of these intersecting, but irreducible discussions, the follow-ing difficulty becomes tangible: how to acknowledge the agency of people who are forced to live in clandestine spaces, while at the same time taking the conditions of destitutions endorsed by liberal democratic states seriously and conceiving citizenship rights other than in a too narrow state-based sense? In other words, the various discussions regarding the situation of illegal aliens are usually turning into an undecidable controversy, the very moment when no effort is made (or seems possible) to translate between genealogical analy-ses of contemporary mechanisms of government (put forward by Agamben, but also by Bauman), appraisals of agency and forms of subjectification (as stressed by Butler, Badiou and Rancière) and novel discourses on the rights of others (advocated by Benhabib or Balibar).

One of the scholars who is making a comprehensive effort to combine genealogical analyses, basic rights discourses and thoughts on emerging poli-tics in his research is anthropologist Michel Agier (see, especially [2005] 2008; [2008] 2011; 2011b; 2012). In a variety of studies in which he is exploring current dynamics of ‘displacement’ while highlighting the routes ‘taken by people going from one institutional category to another – clandestine, asylum seeker, internal deportee, refugee or sans papiers – without ever being able to arrive at a place to stay and find recognition in a host city or society’ (Agier 2011a), Agier is indeed assessing the validity of theoretical terms by linking them to one another and by contrasting them with actual field work. In a recent paper presented at the conference Borders, Displacement and Creation: Questioning the Contemporary (University of Porto, 2011), he argued that to re-think the refugee as a subject capable of political dissent and action should be regarded as one of the three most important challenges for a de-centred (and, ultimately, de-colonized) anthropology. I would like to argue that this holds all the more true for the figure of illegal aliens given the actual state of hospitality in Europe and the current tendencies to either victimize or crimi-nalize such non-citizens.

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8. As Eyal Weizman is pointing out, actual space is increasingly imagined and administered as frontier, that is as ‘a space of “flow”. It is a military and political pattern of elastic and shifting geography, a zone of contact that cannot be represented by lines. […] If sovereign borders are linear and fixed, frontiers are deep, fragmented, and elastic’ (Weizman 2006: 84).

9. The book The Deportation Regime: Sovereignity, Space and the Freedom of Movement (cf. De Genova and Peutz 2010) collects critical essays that are all highlighting how contemporary procedures of violently displacing people by means of deportation are linking different regional and national settings – from the United States to Israel, and from Switzerland to Somalia.

the uncOndItIOnAl cOndItIOn Of hOspItAlIty: derrIdA’s InsIstence

As significant as the aforementioned discussions are for amplifying and disseminating the passions and voices of those involved in ‘border struggles’ (Mezzadra and Neilson 2012: 188), they do usually not address the follow-ing questions: to what extent does the critique of the current tendencies to produce (and manage) situations of de facto statelessness and the appraisal of the various struggles of illegal aliens also require that we have to break with hospitality in the ordinary sense and that I will eventually have to ‘open up my home […] 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’, as Derrida ([1997] 2002: 25, origi-nal emphasis) exposed in hyperbolic ethical terms? Would not an other hospi-tality, one that is not immediately restricted by national law, make it possible to welcome illegal aliens as fellow cosmopolites? In other words, does a deconstruction of the conditions of welcome have the potential to make the violence of the European frontier regime8 public and to create a democratic space of appearance that eventually exceeds state borders?

Jacques Derrida has insisted in his later writings on a re-reading (and re-thinking) of hospitality that is capable of putting into question the limited modes of giving place to foreigners by recalling how all institutionalized prac-tices of hospitality involve a sense of hospitability that surpasses its contingent legal manifestation. By exposing the antinomy of hospitality in a series of writ-ings (e.g. Derrida [1997] 1999; [1997] 2001; [1994] 2005) and seminars (Derrida [1997] 2000), Derrida has evidenced how the actual conditions of hospitality – enshrined in discriminating laws that are regulating the official conduct with aliens, such as the notorious French Pasqua-Debré Laws (1986–1997) or the Italian Bossi-Fini Law (2002) for example – are tacitly obliged to the idea of an absolute and unconditional hospitality that pervades legal procedures while at the same time remaining heterogeneous to any particular standard. It is in the light of this differentiation ‘between an ethics of hospitality (an ethics as hospitality) and a law or a politics of hospitality’ (Derrida [1997] 1999: 19, original emphasis) that Derrida’s persuasive dictum that ‘[t]he law of absolute hospitality commands a break with hospitality by right, with law or justice as rights’ (Derrida [1997] 2000: 25) appears as promising, since it stands for a sensibility that is not simply reproducing the political imaginary administered by the modern state, but rather challenging this very administration.

Even so, Derrida’s writings on hospitality retain a disturbing ambiguity that has to do with the evidence that for those millions of illegal aliens who are already living between us citizens and who are all-too-often threatened with deportation9 or – what is probably more common – abandoned in situa-tions of destitution, the legal pact of hospitality as rights seems to have been suspended without this suspension coinciding with (or resulting in) any read-iness to welcome countless others. According to these tendencies, the figure of illegal aliens seems to be neither identical with the foreigner (or stranger) nor with the ‘absolute, unknown, anonymous other’ (Derrida [1997] 2000: 25) to which Derrida’s seminars repeatedly refer. Instead, it is exemplifying that between the (infinite) ethics of absolute hospitality and the (finite) laws of hospitality there is more than enough space for producing and managing abject subjects. Against the impression of the rather inhospitable conditions in which illegal aliens are forced to live in European liberal democratic states and

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10. Politics of Friendship was published about two years before Derrida’s seminars on hospitality took place and to a certain extent it prepared the ground for his subsequent deconstruction of the ‘paradoxical filiation of hostis’ (Derrida [1997] 2000: 21, original emphasis), a term that can be translated both as ‘guest’ and as ‘enemy’.

11. The making of the theatre play illegal (2009), which was first staged at the Munich Kammerspiele in 2008, involved a detailed research: the German author and playwright Bicker spent one and a half year with persons living as illegal aliens, he spoke with scholars, public officers and activists, and eventually he condensed the many interviews he had conducted and the material he had collected in three distinct, but nameless voices around which the entire theatre play revolves.

in consideration of the importance to appreciate the political agency of people who are dismissed at the margins of the world (cf. Agier [2005] 2008: 65), the next passages are thus an effort to trace the limits of Derrida’s deconstruction of the conditions of welcome without nevertheless giving up his insistence on a sense of hospitality that exceeds the rights guaranteed by the modern state.

In order to contextualize my further arguments that are critically engag-ing with Derrida’s ‘duplicity of ethical-political hospitality’ (Rosello 2001: 11), I shall first of all discuss to what extent the word ‘perhaps’ – which acts as a passe-partout in Derrida’s deconstruction (of hospitality) – is more than an expression of deconstructive practices. For all those who cannot count on the privileges of citizenship it is also expressing a modality of being that matches with the insecurity they have to endure. In the next section, I will illustrate this modality with reference to Bicker’s theatre play illegal (2009) and Boltanski’s cantata The Limbo ([2006] 2011). After that, I will focus on Derrida’s repeated efforts to expose the law of hospitality as a ‘paradoxical law’ (Derrida [1997] 2000: 25) while maintaining that his preference for an ethics as hospitality is problematic to the extent that it tends to arrest the capacity for political dissent of those who are already living in conditions as if the laws of hospital-ity were suspended. And finally I will address the question if the emergence of illegal aliens as a political subject which enacts democratic passions that are exceeding the space administered by the state, makes it necessary to part ways with Derrida’s deconstruction of hospitality.

‘perhAps’ As A mOdAlIty Of beIng

In one of the preliminary passages of Politiques de l’amitié/Politics of Friendship,10 Derrida emphasizes the importance of ‘marking a difference between “there is” [il y a in French] and “is” or “exists” – that is to say the words of pres-ence’ (Derrida [1994] 2005: 39), so as to question, if not to disturb any deter-mined (or determining) body of knowledge, of speech, but also of politics and of ethics. Instead of relying on the French peut-être, which is, in his words, ‘perhaps, with its two verbs (pouvoir and être), too rich’ (Derrida [1994] 2005: 39, original emphasis), Derrida raises the following question: ‘Would not the original possibility we are discussing efface itself better in the adverbs of other languages (vielleicht or perhaps, for example)?’ (Derrida [1994] 2005: 39, origi-nal emphasis).

Quite remarkably, it is the German adverb vielleicht/perhaps, repeatedly invoked and italicised by Derrida, not least while he is commemorating the anti-democratic impetus of Nietzsche, the philosopher of the dangerous viel-leicht (see Nietzsche [1886] 1997: 2), that emerges also in a different, but maybe indebted setting: in Bicker’s literary montage of voices entitled illegal (2009). In this theatre play11 that recollects and stages voices of people other-wise dismissed as illegal aliens or publicly insulted as bogus asylum seekers and as parents of anchor babies, a ‘Ukrainian’ who has no right to remain in Germany remembers a friend of his who went missing: Juri. As if he was aware of Derrida’s invocation, Bicker’s theatre play addresses the de facto stateless Juri also as a person with a predilection for prudent and preliminary wordings that efface original possibilities: ‘vielleicht sagt juri immer. vielleicht. das ist sein lieblingswort. auf deutsch’ (Bicker 2009: 12), ‘perhaps says juri always. perhaps. that’s his favourite word. in german’ (my translation).

One hardly gets to know anything personal about Juri’s actual life as the Ukranian voice speaks up in Bicker’s montage of voices, except that he

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12. Boltanski and Chiapello’s frequent use of the term ‘deconstruction’ (see, e.g., Boltanski and Chiapello [1999] 2005: 303) is linked to their general hypothesis that there is something like a tacit consent between an ‘artistic critique’ (Boltanski and Chiapello [1999] 2005: 38, original emphasis) and the renewed spirit of capitalism, which manifests itself as a problematic deconstruction.

13. A particularly severe example of legal indeterminacy in Europe is the case of the toleration status, which in Germany (and in other European states too) applies to all those who cannot be deported, but who nevertheless have no right to stay (cf. Lopez 2008).

had escaped from the Ukranian army to Germany, that he was arrested and deported, that he had succeeded in coming back, that he pretended to be an Austrian while sleeping with a women longing for his nonexistent Visa, that he was beaten up – by ‘South Americans’, as the Ukrainian voice claims –, that he messed up a crooked deal and that he eventually had to leave from Germany, this time for good – and that he likes the word ‘perhaps’, in German. For all that one gets to know as a spectator of the play or as a reader of the script, the modality of Juri’s life is a recurrent series of perhaps, a life ‘in’ and ‘as’ perhaps. It is an exemplary life, however, which in its fictionality recalls the lives of countless others more whose voices have not been assem-bled in Bicker’s theatre play. Living one’s life as if ‘the thesis of existence’, as Derrida puts it ([1994] 2005: 38–39), was ‘suspended’ – isn’t this formula in a certain sense the proverbial condensation of the situation of those whose lives are rendered extremely insecure and who are all-too-often referred to as illegal aliens?

Only recently, Luc Boltanski, the co-author of the widely acclaimed study Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme/The New Spirit of Capitalism (see L. Boltanski and È. Chiapello, [1999] 2005)12, published a cantata for several voices, in which he also suggests that ‘waiting, even if one does not desire anything, is today perhaps the heartcenter of our mode of living’ (Boltanski [2006] 2011: 60, my translation). And how many existences are indeed suspended these days, neither in a totalitarian hell nor in a liberal demo-cratic heaven, but rather in an adjacent zone of modernity’s premises and promises, that is to say in a para-modern limbo, which Agier understands in terms of a ‘“presentism” driven to excess’ (Agier [2008] 2011: 79) that frustrates the expectations of people who are confined in humanitarian camps without past or future. In this limbo we may also find the lives of people who are neither valued as migrants nor looked after as refugees, but who are nonetheless among us and who are generally condemned to wait, be it for a temporary residence or work permit, without the realistic prospect of eventually being admitted as citizens, but in the diffuse fear of being deported, a fear that can easily be capitalized as S. Mezzadra and B. Neilson (2008) are arguing.

In this sense then, Derrida’s passion for articulating a deconstruction of binary oppositions by habitually beginning with and returning to a ‘perhaps’ as an effort to suspend any identification and ‘to open on to the coming of what comes’ (Derrida [1994] 2005: 29) appears to somehow summarize the actual living condition of those who have already come without the right to remain present. Even though Derrida’s use of ‘perhaps’ is certainly not careless, for he announces repeatedly that it is not intended ‘to neutralize or inhibit, but to make possible all the determined and determining orders’ (Derrida [1994] 2005: 38), it appears nonetheless as coextensive with a situ-ation that suspends people’s presence by creating and governing cases of (legal) indeterminacy.13

the questIOnAble AntInOmy Of the lAw Of hOspItAlIty

Against the current tendencies of creating and managing situations of desti-tution in which illegal aliens are abandoned, I would thus like to pose the question, if Derrida’s exposition and deconstruction of hospitality’s antinomy involves an asymmetric preference that may turn out to be quite problem-atic? For it does seem as if Derrida remains obliged to a (hyperbolic) ethics as

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hospitality that augments – despite its benevolent terms – the risk of diffusing the various chances of practicing hospitality as politics.

In order to address this question, at least tentatively, it is important to first of all recall that according to Derrida there is a ‘difference of accent’ (Derrida [1997] 2000: 3) that matters when discussing questions, especially when discussing ‘the question of the foreigner [l’étranger]’ (Derrida [1997] 2000: 3). According to Derrida to say ‘the question of the foreigner’ is not the same as to say ‘the question of the foreigner’ (Derrida [1997] 2000: 3, original empha-sis). Before turning the question of the foreigner into a theme, before identi-fying it as the question, one should be aware that it is also a question of the foreigner, again in a double sense. It is as though a different accentuation of the foreigner’s question reveals, as Derrida remarks, that on the one hand ‘the foreigner were being-in-question, the very question of being-in-question, the question-being or being-in-question of the question’ (Derrida [1997] 2000: 3). And on the other hand such a difference of accent reveals that the foreigner could also be ‘the one who, putting the first question, puts me in question’ (Derrida [1997] 2000: 3).

But what hospitality is it that demands from the foreigner to speak out his or her name honestly and to disclose one’s self without reservation in front of courts, judges and experts that may legitimately concede or refuse entry? Derrida requires the participants of his seminars (and the readers of his manuscript) once more to be careful while highlighting yet another difference that introduces the crucial antinomy around which the entire seminar circu-lates. There is a major difference between a ‘conditional hospitality’ (Derrida [1997] 2000: 25), which can be understood as a ‘right to or pact of hospitality’ (Derrida [1997] 2000: 25) that regulates the conduct with the foreigner (and his family and community), and an ‘unconditional hospitality’ (Derrida [1997] 2000: 25), which concerns not the foreigner, but ‘the absolute other [… who] cannot have a name or a family name’ (Derrida [1997] 2000: 25). In other words, what is called hospitality is not just a particular set of norms, practices, expectations and so forth, simply put: an ethos. In the context of Derrida’s exposition it is also something other: a sense of hospitality that exceeds any particular legal or political standard in hyperbolic ethical terms. Or, as Derrida has put it at the funeral of his friend Levinas to whom the seminar is dedi-cated, there seems to be a ‘hiatus between ethics […], on the one hand, and, on the other, law or politics’ (Derrida [1997] 1999: 20), without the prospect of an ‘assured passage’ between one and the other. With these words note that Derrida does not intend to support the idea of a simple opposition between the unconditional law of (ethics as) hospitality and the conditional laws (or politics) of hospitality, as if the infinite and the finite or the law and the laws could be spelled out separately. Instead, he emphasizes how the uncondi-tional and the conditional are inextricably linked in the name of hospitality with no possibility for resolving this antinomy in one or the other direction. Hospitality can only become manifest to the extent that the unconditional law of hospitality limits itself.

What is promising about Derrida’s deconstruction of the conditions of welcome is that according to his exposition of hospitality’s antinomy, the asymmetry that flexes hospitality (in the aforementioned double sense) makes it possible and even justifiable to interrupt and to disrupt the ‘force of ipse-ity’ (Derrida [1997] 2000: 149), which tends to identify hospitality exclusively with these specific laws as if there were no other possibilities of giving place to foreigners. In fact, as Derrida puts it,

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14. Especially the last seminars of Derrida, published under the title La bête et le souverain/The Beast and the Sovereign (Derrida [2008] 2009; [2010] 2011), reveal his difficult, if not contentious relationship to Agamben’s discussion of the state of exception (see, e.g., Derrida [2008] 2009: 92–96).

[…] the express law that governs the general concept of hospitality, […] 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 (provided with a family name, with the social status of being a foreigner, etc.), 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 (entering into a pact) or even their names. The law of absolute hospitality commands a break with hospitality by right, with law or justice as rights.

(Derrida [1997] 2000: 25, original emphasis)

In terms of Derrida’s cautious preference for a deconstructive practice that tends to associate unconditional hospitality with ‘the opening of ethics’ (Derrida [1997] 1999: 48) and conditional hospitality with the ‘political or juridical practice’ (Derrida [1997] 1999: 48) and that invokes the hyperbolic command of breaking with the law of hospitality as right or duty, it is hardly surprising that he also states – in his essay On Cosmopolitanism – that ‘ethics is hospitality; ethics is so thoroughly coextensive with the experience of hospi-tality’ (Derrida [1994] 2005: 17, original emphasis). Even though Derrida is not pleading for a unilateral ethical critique of the ‘juridico-political’ (Derrida [1997] 2000: 51), he is nevertheless spelling out his deconstruction of hospi-tality so that ‘intervening in the condition of hospitality’ (Derrida [1997] 2000: 149) begins with acknowledging that an ‘ethics beyond ethics’ (Derrida [1997] 1999: 4) is something other than the established order. Consequently, Derrida’s cautious preference is promising to the extent that it does not iden-tify itself with the political imaginary inherited from the modern (nation-)state, but rather it opens up to other possibilities of giving place.

Still, it is Derrida’s exposition of hospitality’s antinomy and his preference for an ethics as hospitality that makes his deconstruction of the conditions of welcome also quite disputable. Firstly, Derrida’s discussion of the law of hospi-tality as a ‘lawless law, nomos anomos’ (Derrida [1997] 2000: 79, original empha-sis), which is inextricably bound to (concrete) laws of hospitality, brings to the fore a situation that is ‘hospitable inasmuch as inhospitable’ (Derrida [1997] 2000: 81, original emphasis) or exclusive and inclusive. Doing so, it somehow paral-lels Agamben’s analysis of the state of exception as an ‘extreme form of relation by which something is included solely through its exclusion’ (Agamben [1995] 1998: 18). But at the same time Derrida seems to neglect (or even dismiss14) the historical possibility that hospitality’s irresolvable antinomy might at present correspond with a governmentality (cf. Foucault [2004] 2009: 108) that is actively interested in enforcing antinomic situations in which the lives of people rejected as illegal aliens are rendered insecure and as such made disposable. In other words, Derrida’s hyperbolic ethical imperative to break with hospitality in the ordinary sense appears to be strangely coextensive with the actual living condi-tions of people who are not just about to come, but who are already here with-out being welcome, inasmuch as he is not also posing the question, if there is a serious risk that laws of hospitality could be suspended out of a predominant interest and in the name of an unaccountable authority.

And second, Derrida deconstruction of the conditions of welcome seems not to consider if the foreigner has other capacities at disposal than the capac-ity of putting me in question. As much as Derrida is ready to ‘imagine the

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experience of cities of refuge’ (Derrida [1994] 2005: 23) as sites where ‘a new order of law and a democracy to come’ (Derrida [1994] 2005: 23) may be generated and even ‘put to the test (expérimentation)’ (Derrida [1994] 2005: 23), he appears to be rather reluctant to address foreigners as subjects that are capable of political dissent. But what if those ‘who have no right to be counted as speaking beings make themselves of some account’, as Rancière ([1995] 1999: 27) argues? Could not hospitality also be imagined and practised otherwise – possibly as politics?

pArtIng wAys with derrIdA

If it is true that the situation of people who are commonly dismissed as ille-gal aliens is not defined by a strict opposition of inclusion and exclusion, but rather by an ‘inclusive exclusion’ (Agamben [1995] 1998: 7) that suspends the laws of hospitality (in the plural) so as to facilitate the expansion of a plastic frontier regime (cf. Weizman 2010) that in Europe usually oscillates between the administrative procedures of (provisional) toleration and (consequent) deportation, the initial question needs to be re-proposed: what is the poten-tial use value of Derrida’s thinking of a transgressive hospitality vis-à-vis the emergence of illegal aliens?

As various scholars have pointed out, there is a manifest risk that the ‘“ethical” trend is in fact the “state of exception”’ (Rancière 2004: 309), not necessarily in the sense of Agamben’s analysis of a ‘hidden matrix of the politics in which we are still living’ (Agamben [1995] 1998: 175), but rather as a ‘result of the erasure of the political in the couple of consensual policy and humanitar-ian police’ (Rancière 2004: 309). Along these lines, Agier ([2008] 2011: 199) is also contending that the ‘long and now converging histories of humanitarian-ism and camps’ have given rise to a (limitless) humanitarian government that tends to install and maintain zones in which sums of people who do not count in liberal democratic terms are confined and forced to live ‘under the discursive regime of “protection” […] or that of “control”’ (Agier [2008] 2011: 199). What is particular about this ethical trend is that it serves to neutralize the agency of those who are deemed undesirables and whose lives are compromised at the limits of public attention. In this sense, the questionable ethics of humanitarian-ism, which does not confine itself to particular circumstances, but which may command to suspend laws and to intervene (more often than not in the name of a hardly accountable higher authority), is creating real zones of indistinc-tion in which ‘new figures of the Inhuman’ (Rancière 2004: 297) are assembled. In Bicker’s montage of voices, it is precisely such a figure that is chanting the following swan song towards the end of the play:

[…] wir sind viele. wir bewegen uns. wir bewegen uns schnell. wir kommen aus ländern die es längst nicht mehr gibt. es gibt uns. es gibt uns jetzt. wir sind die neuen menschen. und ihr. ihr seid von gestern (Bicker 2009: 106), we are many. we are moving. we are moving fast. we are coming from countries that ceased to exist long ago. we exist. we exist now. we are the new humans. and you. you are from yesterday.

(my translation)

Considering that the contemporary ethical trend produces and manages politically unqualified life, it is important to remain aware that such zones of indistinction are not located outside of liberal democratic states, but that

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15. Themanyidentification,detentionanddeportationcentersthathavebeencreatedinthepastdecadeinorbyEuropeanliberaldemocraticstatesareprobablythebestexemplificationofthistrend(see,especially,Andrijasevic2010).

16. AsRoselloconfirms,

‘thesains-papiers affair’inthe1990ssucceededtodisplace‘thedebatetowardnewsymbolicground[…].Whentelevisioncamerasandnewspaperscoveredtheirstruggle,thesans-papierscreatedaspaceofsociological,legal,andphilosophicaldebateintheveryheartoftheFrenchcapital:theyaskedquestionsabouttherelationshipbetweenthecityandthenation,betweentherefugeeandthelaw,betweenrightsandequity’.(Rosello2001:5)

they can be found wherever spaces of belonging are governed under provi-sions that are effectively diffusing political dissent. And this is also the case in Europe.15

Albeit Derrida’s deconstruction of the conditions of welcome is not taking place in the name of an absolute ethics that is irresponsible, it nevertheless appears to remain obliged to a rather limited understanding of politics. And precisely this limit makes Derrida’s deconstruction of hospitality so vulner-able to a benevolent and politically questionable appropriation that might support the aforementioned ethical trend. In other words, Derrida is abso-lutely careful when exposing the law of hospitality as a law that is ‘in danger of remaining a pious and irresponsible desire, without form and without potency, and of even being perverted at any moment’ (Derrida [1994] 2005: 23) as long as it does not ‘answer to the new injunctions of unprecedented historical situations’ (Derrida [1997] 2000: 149), but he appears to be less careful when discussing politics as a de-limiting litigious practice. Strictly speaking, Derrida’s understanding of politics seems to border on that what Rancière has termed ‘the police’ or ‘policing’: ‘a rule governing [… the bodies’] appearing, a configuration of occupations and the properties of the spaces where these occupations are distributed’ (Rancière [1995] 1999: 29, original emphasis). According to this limited understanding of politics as policing that seems to be at work in Derrida’s deconstruction of the condi-tions of welcome after all, it is certainly consistent when he aligns the politics of the state with the contemporary apparition of a ‘border police, but also of a police without borders’ (Derrida [1994] 2005: 14), without at the same time stressing the political capacity of those who are currently subjected to discriminating procedures.

Given the situation of illegal aliens who are governed in European liberal democratic states as if they did not count as subjects of rights, Derrida’s deconstruction of the conditions of welcome is promising for it demands us to put into question the space of appearance and belonging administered by the modern (nation-)state. Considering that such illegal aliens have repeatedly been staging their dissent by:

[…] placing in common a wrong that is nothing more than this very confrontation, the contradiction of two worlds in a single world: the world where they are and the world where they are not, the world where there is something ‘between’ them and those who do not acknowledge them as speaking beings who count and the world where there is nothing.

(Rancière [1995] 1999: 27)

It is at least as imperative, however, to realize that an other hospitality that subverts the host/guest asymmetry is already in the creation. Throughout Europe illegal aliens are visibly and consistently demonstrating that they are not only capable of questioning us, but also of expressing democratic passions by generating unprecedented spaces of appearance and belonging that are, in fact, interrupting the current suspension of the laws of hospitality and chal-lenging the limbo to which administrative procedures are usually confining them. Or, as the activists involved in the current Refugee Protest Camp Vienna (2012–) are putting it in plain and at the same time daring terms: ‘If you [authorities] don’t want to meet our demands, then please delete our finger-prints from your data bases and let us move on. We are entitled to our future’ (Anon. 2013).16 And so it may indeed make sense to supplement Derrida’s

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deconstruction of the conditions of welcome that tends to prefer ethics as hospitality with an equally promising hospitality as politics – a politics that is not at all ‘exceptional’. It already takes place when people who have no right to remain present come together to give space to a new between.

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SuggeSted CitationOberprantacher, A. (2013), ‘Breaking with the law of hospitality? The emergence of illegal aliens in Europe vis-à-vis Derrida’s deconstruction of the conditions of welcome’, Hospitality & Society 3: 2, pp. 151–168, doi: 10.1386/hosp.3.2.151_1

Contributor detailS

Andreas Oberprantacher is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Core Faculty Member of the UNESCO Chair for Peace Studies at the University of Innsbruck. He is also Senior Lecturer at universities in Thailand, India and Taiwan and the acting Secretary General of the Austrian Society for Philosophy (OEGP). His main research areas include Political Theory and Aesthetics, Social and Cultural Philosophy as well as Media Theory. Currently, he is working on the research project Risking Public Life: The ‘Illegal Alien’ as Political Subject.

Contact: Department of Philosophy, University of Innsbruck, Innrain 52d, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria.E-mail: andreas.oberprantacher@uibk.ac.at

Andreas Oberprantacher has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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