Routledge InternationalHandbook of Contemporary

Social and Political Theory

Edited by Gerard Delanty and Stephen P. Turner

I~~~o~&t!r:n~s~~upLONDON AND NEW YORK

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publicatiol'l DataRoutledge intemational handbook of contemporary social and political theolY /edited by Gerard Delancy and Stephen P. Turner.p. CI11.

1. Soci,1 scienccs- -Philosophy. 2. Sociology- -Philosophy. 3. Political science- -Philosophy.l. Delanry, Gerard. II. Tumer, Stephen P., 1951- Ill. Tille: [ntemational handbook ofcontemporacy social and political theory.I-I61.R686 2011300.1- -dc222010034061

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Hospitality, Rights, and Migrancy

Meyda Yegenoglu

Recent years have witnessed growing enthusiasm about the concept of hospitality in an attemptto understand the relation between immigrants, exiles, foreigners, refugees, and other displacedpopulations who are in transit and! or without a home and their hosts or the "new" socio-cultural and political "homes" they are situated in. The portrayal of these groups as guests entailsdiscussing the meaning of a series of other concepts and issues such as the host, what does towelcome and receive mean, subjectivity, ipseity, and interruption of the self, conditional andunconditional hospitality, hostility, home, ownership, and expropriation (or dispossession). Butmost important of all, these debates have highlighted the problematic and convoluted nature ofthe relation between the ethics and politics of hospitality. Three names stand out in any discussionof hospitality: Immanuel Kant, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. In discussing theirideas, I will particularly focus on the importance ofDerrida's recasting of our understanding of thenature of the relation between the ethics and politics of hospitality and the paradox, hiatus, oraporia this relation entails.

It is in Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1983) that Kant develops his ideas on theissue of hospitality. Perhaps it is important to mention at the outset that it is the Kantianunderstanding that has constituted the background of the moral and legal codes of hospitality inWestern civilization. Moreover, as Derrida notes, all the three monotheisms share the same, whathe calls, the Abrahamic understanding of hospitality.

As the philosopher of Enlightenment par excellence, Kant develops his ideas on hospitality inhis attempt to disentangle hospitality from its religious and moral bind, and come up with ideasthat can possibly mitigate potential hostilities between the nation-states in a modem and globalworld. So, Kant's notion of hospitality does not have a religious or other spiritual undercurrentthat has shaped the understanding of hospitality before him. The territorial expansion and theconsequent dissemination of people he witnessed in his age compelled him to ask, while notgiving up on the question of national sovereignty, the question of the foreigner in a particularway. How can a stranger who is in our land be responded to respectfully and handled in apeaceful way? One of the key issues that were at stake in cases where a foreigner was to beencountered for Kant was the maintenance of nationhood or national integrity and not to losepeace at the same time. The goal of responding to a stranger not with hostility but hospitality isfirst of all to maintain peace among the nations. Indeed, Kant's question, as the title of his essay

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indicates, is to preserve peace. Kant's concern with peace suggests that his starting point is theprimacy of a state of war:

The state of pedce among men living in close proximity is not the natural state (statusnatura/is); instead, the natural state is one of war, which does not just consist in open hos-tilities, but also in the cons[:mt and enduring threat of them. The state of peace musttherefore be established, for the suspension of hostilities does not provide the security ofpeace, and unless this security is pledged by one neighbor to another (which can happenonly in a state of lmifulness), the latter from whom such security has been requested, cantreat the fonner as an enemy.

(Kant 1983: 111)

So, Kant's question concerns the peaceful regulation of the relation between the nations thatlS engendered through the mobility of citizens into each other's tenitory without sacrificingpeace or reverting to war. Neither the nations should preclude the movement of people nor thevisitors should infringe upon the sovereignty of the host society. The respectful visitation of astranger therefore is something that needs to be regulated by a common law. The rationale forsuch a common measure is to regulate the relation of strangers when they visit each other'stenitory for lawlessness would result in hostility. In "The Third Definitive Article for PerpetualPeace," Kant suggests, "cosmopolitan light shall be limited to conditions of universal hospital-ity." Hence for Kant, hospitality is not an issue of philanthropy but an issue of right as it "meansthe right of an alien not to be treated as an enemy upon his anival in another's country. If it canbe done without destroying him, he can be turned away; but as long as he behaves peaceablyhe cannot be treated as an enemy" (118). Therefore, for Kant, visiting another nation's territoryshould be regulated by and grounded in maxims that have universal applicability and not left tothe benevolence of the host society in question. By removing hospitality fi'om the field of moralor religious responsibility or benevolence, and placing it in the field of rights, Kant recommendssituating the issue of hospitality under the command of legal and jUlidical regulation. Hospitality,for Kant, should be seen first and foremost as a right of visit.

Kant's reduction of the reception of the foreigner to an impersonal, formal, abstract, andindifferent form of relation has implications: it results in the reception of the foreigner, the guestin "our" land and this reception does not result in any form of relation between the host andthe guest. The stranger, turned into an object of abstract and impersonal law, is only offered atight. The hospitality offered is a conditional one, for it welcomes the other on the conditionthat he/she adjust to the chez soi, respects the order and rules of the home, nation, and culture,learns and speaks the language, and so on. Here the master remains the master, host remains theowner of the home, and the guest is an invited guest, that is, one who is expected not to alterthe rule and order of home but obey them.

As Tracy McNulty (2007) notes, the forn1 of encounter Kant envisions between the host andthe guest does not result in an immanent or accidental encounter that is neither foreseen norlegislated and, as such, eliminates "relationality" (65) and thereby privileges "ontology overethics, identity over relation" (66). She suggests that in Kant's understanding, hospitality doesnot designate a welcorning of the stranger but refers to a right of visit as Kant does not use theteml Gennan Castlichkeit (derived from the root word Cast) but uses the word Besuchrecht, des-ignating a right of visit (55). She further notes that this usage does not designate welcoming orreceiving. This is a vely impoltant observation and I will discuss the implications of this usagewhen I am discussing the notion of hospitality as ethics in Levinas's and Derrida's frameworksand its difference from the Kantian understanding.

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Let me bnefly discuss how hospitality is circumscribed in Kant's framework. Hospitality doesnot indicate any openness towards or preparedness for a relation with the other. As part of animpersonal rule and juridical regulation it indicates, an abstract right of the guest. Such anabstract and impersonal law and rule enables the one who is visiting to be treated according tothe legal and juridical mles that are signed among the sovereIgn nation-states. As such, a relationof hospitality is transformed into an abstract, legal, and juridical contract rather than beingtreated as an "immanent, accidental encounter which can be neither foreseen nor legislated"(McNulty 2007: 65).

Kant's idea on cosmopolitan right of citizens to visit each other's territory without beingtreated as an enemy is modeled on the givenness of the nation-state and its sovereignty. Hencewhat is of primary importance in the Kantian treatment of hospitality is the protection ofthe sovereignty of the nation-state whose sovereignty is not endangered to be dispossessed bythe visiting guests. Therefore, in Kant's understanding of hospitality, the sovereignty, posses-sions, and borders of the nation-states remain inviolable because the guest, upon enteringanother sovereign nation's territory, is ascribed only a right of visit, implying that this is a rightthat is granted on the basis of certain conditions. The fundamental condition here is that theborders and sovereignty of the nation have to be respected while one is visiting the other'stenitory either for commercial or touristic purposes. And the host nation's hospitable responseto this temporary visit is something to be transmitted as a legislatable universal right throughlaws such as laws of citizenship, laws of commerce, and laws of exchange. The laws thatregulate the nature and condition of the guest's visit to the sovereign nation-state's territory arebased not only on the premise and inviolability of borders but also on the presumption that theguests who are visiting are citizens of another sovereign national entity. Hence the firstconditionality to grant a right to visit is introduced by Kant: the visitor must be a citizen ofanother country. This implies that those who are classified as nomads, asylum seekers, or peoplewho are displaced for a variety of reasons cannot be granted hospitality or a right to visit for theyremain a potential menace to the integrity and sovereignty of the nation-state. Hence theconditionality of the right of hospitality is premised on the sacredness of the national borders.McNulty suggests that by situating hospitality within the field of rights and under the sign of amle or regulated mode of visitation, Kant's understanding removes hospitality from the status ofan obligation: "Kant's imperative involves the displacement or even the elimination of hospitahtyas such, in favor of what he calls an 'unsocial sociability,' an impersonal relation that dispenseswith the immediate - and therefore potentially uncomfortable or menacing - penetration of thestranger into the intimacy of the home" (McNulty 2007: xlvi-xlvii).

The Kantian framework is not only based on an understanding that makes the nation'ssovereignty fundamental and inviolable, but also the individual host's sovereign identity remainsintact while the act of hospitality is offered to the stranger. The conditionality introduced byKant is based on the premise that the sovereignty of the subjectivity of the host remains intact andthat the host as subject should not be dispossessed or interrupted by opening itself to othemess.Here the conditional welcoming of the guest enables that the self-identity of the host does notbecome vulnerable through being exposed to a relation with the stranger. For this reason,Kant's conceptualization of hospitality can be read as laying the conditions of conditionalitywhile at the same time maintaining the means where the host does not relinquish its sovereignty.As Derrida notes, to welcome the other is to appropriate a place for oneself and then welcomethe other, indeed appropriate a place to be able to welcome the other (Den-ida 1997: 15-16).McNulty (2007) regards this Kantian privileging of ontology over ethics, identity over relationleading to the elimination of relationality and the unforeseen encounter with a strangeraltogether (66). It is with Levinas's view of hospitality and Derrida's particular reading of it that

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the issue of hospitality is freed from the constricting field of rights but transposed into the fieldof ethics.

Denida's reading of Levinas underscores that the Levinasian understanding of hospitalityopens it up to the field of ethics and constitutes a challenge to the Kantian account of hospitalityand its encapsulation into a matter of juridical legislation of the other nation's citizens right oftemporary sojourn and opens it up to the field of ethics. One of the key concems that motivateDerrida's reading of Levinas is the nature of the relation between the ethics and politics ofhospitality. I will address this toward the end of the essay.

While Kant statts with the condition of natural or originaty hostility or war, andregards peace as something to be restored through the cosmopolitical rules and laws that arrangethe relations between citizens and sovereign nation-states, Levinas, "starts out from a nonnaturalyet originary - or, better, preoriginary - peace rather than from a natural state of war, as Kantdoes" (de Vries 2001: 182). In Levinas, peace is not something that is institLlted as a result oflegal regulation or prevention of war. According to Derrida's reading, Levinas's ideas on hospi-tality revolve around what it means to welcome or receive the other. This explorationnecessarily leads us to the domain of ethics of hospitality, for hospitality as ethics sets in motiona relation with the other. In Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas (1997), Derrida suggests that thequestion of hospitality in Levinas needs to be understood as "the whole and principle ofethics" (Denida 1997: 50) or ethics as such or "ethicity itselj" (50). Therefore hospitality is neithera region of ethics, nor a question of political or juridical regulation. When we are in the domainlaid out by Levinas, we are dealing with the issue of hospitality that is not simply empirical orthematizable either. This is so because with Levinas, the issue of hospitality is carried onto thefield of responsibility. However this is not to say that what Levinas suggests about hospitalitydoes not have peltinence for understanding and engaging with one of the most burningissues of our times: that is, with displaced populations, exiles, refugees, and inunigrants. AsDerrida notes,

... Levinas oriented our gaze toward what is happening today, not only in Israel but inEurope and in France, in Africa, America, and Asia, since at least the time of the FirstW odd War and since what Hannah Arendt called The Decline oj the Nation State: everywherethat refugees of every kind, immigrants with or without citizenship, exiled or forced fromtheir homes, whether with or without papers ... call for a change in the socio- and geo-political space - a juridico-political mutation, though before this, assuming that this limitstill has any pertinence, an ethical conversion ... It is intensified, one might say, by thecrimes against hospitality endured by the guests (hotes) and hostages of our time, incarceratedor deported day after day, from concentration camp to detention camp, from border toborder, close to us or far away.

(Derrida 1997: 70-1)

If the issue of hospitality has great relevance for understanding issues that are triggered byprocesses of globalization, then it is important that we engage in the discussion of the nature ofthe relation that can be established between the ethics oj hospitality and a politics oj hospitality.Another way of engaging with this issue is to address the nature of the relation betweenconditional and unconditional hospitality and whether unconditional hospitality can be adoptedas an official policy by the nation-states and open their borders to unconditionally welcomestrangers without turning the issue of hospitality into a matter of legal and juridical regulationof the right of visit of strangers. Can we attribute unconditional hospitality the status of aregulative idea?

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Derrida's interpretation of Levinas's ideas particularly attends to this question. If the horizonopened up by Levinas compels us to rethink of hospitality different from the conditionalityintroduced by the Kantian understanding of hospitality as an issue of rights, obligations andduties, then what are the key components involved in rethinking ethics as hospitality? ForDerrida, as an ethics, hospitdlity is infinite and unconditional. But if hospitality as ethics impliesunconditionality and irreducibility to politics or legal regulation, how would it operate ina practical politics? Could an ethics of hospitality bring on and lay down the foundations of aparticular politics or a law? If Derrida suggests that the burning issues of our times call fora transformation of the socio-geo-political space and therefore an ethical traniformation (as theabove quotation illustrates) in dealing with the problems involved in immigration and all sortsof issues that stem from the transit and mobility of people, then how do we think of therelation between this ethical transformation and politics? Another way of asking this question iswhether unconditional hospitality can be treated as a decree and command to fOlTIlUlate apolitical program,

Derrida's answer is that it is not possible to deduce a politics from the ethics of hospitality.Rather, he thinks the relation between the two with the aid of a number of concepts such asaporia, hiatus, lacuna, gap (Derrida 1997: 20), or constitutive impossibility. The series of concepts areall devised to warn us to be wary of translating absolute hospitality into a determinate politics ordeducing from it an inunediately political and juridical regulation and thereby turninghospitality into an issue of granting rights, Rather, by insisting on the hiatus or lacuna betweenthe ethics and a determinate politics of hospitality, Derrida wants to underline the irreducibleheterogeneity between the two (Raffoul 1998: 280):

Let us assume, concesso non dato, that there is no assured passage, following the order of afoundation, according to a hierarchy of founding and founded, of principal originarity andderivation, between an ethics or a first philosophy of hospitality, on the one hand, and alaw or politics of hospitality on the other. Let us assume that one cannot deduce fromLevinas's ethical discourse on hospitality a law and politics, some particular law or politicsin some determined situation today, whether close to lIS or far away,

(Derrida 1997: 20)

However, this does not mean that there is no relation between the two, Hospitality asethics demands or calls for a politics of a certain kind. But this relation is not one of the ethicallaying the conditions or pinning down the nature of politics, Denida insists on the non-deducibility of the latter [rom the fanner to underline the necessity of a nonloundationalrelation between the two, In suggesting that there is a hiatus or the aporetic relation between thetwo, he does not mean their non-relationality but insists on the necessity of leaving theirrelation to one of non-detennination and thus leaving the interval open so as to situatepolitical decision to be determined. The lacuna between the two does not indicate absoluteabsence of rules.

How, then are we to interpret this impossibility of founding, of deducing or deriving?Does this impossibility signal a failing? Perhaps we should say the contrary. Perhaps wewould, in truth, be put to another kind of test by the apparent negativity of this lacuna, bythis hiatus between ethics,., on the one hand, and, on the other, law or politics. If there isno lack here, would not such a hiatus in effect require us to think law and politics other-wise? Would it not in fact open - like a hiatus - both the mouth and the possibility ofanother speech, of a decision and a responsibility, as we say, taken, without the assurance of

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Hospitality, Rights, and Migrancy

an ontological foundation? .. , Beyond this appearance or convenience, a return to theconditions of responsibility and of the decision would impose itself, between ethics, lawand politics

(Demda 1997: 20-1)

The hiatus or aporia neither indicates a non-relation between the two nor lack of mles. It isprecisely when a hiatus remains between the ethical and the political, or when the relationbet'vveen the two is left undetemuned that political action and decision can take place andresponsibility can be exercised. The hiatus, gap, or lacuna thus indicates the irreducible het-erogeneity between the two (Raffoul 1998: 280). As Derrida notes "without the hiatus, whichis not the absence of mles, but the necessity of a leap at the moment of ethical, political, orjuridical decision, we could simply unfold knowledge into a program or course of action.Nothing could make us more irresponsible; nothing could be more totalitarian" (Derrrida 1997:117). Derrida's intervention is to invite us to think ethics and politics otherwise than the oneimplied in the Kantian tradition of hospitality where legal and juridical regulation of rights andthe universality of law are equated with issues of morality and justice.

For hospitality to be hospitable and capable of welcoming the other, it needs to be extendedwithout the imposition of any condition to a guest who is unexpected or unanticipated. It isprecisely by not envisaging the nature of the guest - that is, without asking any question,including his/her name, identity, language, where he/she is comjng from etc. - that a welcomecan be offered to the one who visits. According to Derrida, for hospitality to be a hospitablewelcome, it should be a hospitality of visitation not of invitation. In that sense, hospitalityneeds to be extended without being conditioned. For this reason it needs to be extended toanybody and everybody without even asking the name of the visitor. However, on theother hand hospitality needs to be a singular act as well. As Naas (2003) suggests, "hospitalityrequires that the guest be welcomed as a somebody, not as a serialized nobody" (159).

There are a number of other issues and stakes that are closely connected with the uncondi-tional welcoming or hospitality as ethicity as such. One such issue pertains to home, ownership,and proprietorship and the other concerns subjectivity, ipseity, and sovereignty. No doubt theyare intenelated, Taking Levinas's ideas on responsibility and welcoming as his guide, Derridaoffers a radical reconsideration of these issues. A brief sketch of these themes will also reveal theradical difference between the Kantian understanding of conditional hospitality and the ethicalhospitality suggested in the writings ofDerrida. In the last section, I will discuss the implicationsof these two approaches on hospitality in terms of the relation between citizens and foreigners,strangers, or immigrants.

In Denida's understanding, absolute or unconditional hospitality can exist only as uncon-strained and hence entails a restructuring of the relationship between the host or the master ofthe house and the guest, the hostis or the foreigner. Such a restructuring implies a deconstmc-tion of the at-homeness of the host, because an unconditional welcoming opens the home to asharing with the new visitor and freely shares it. This requires that the ownership and control ofthe house be relinquished and that the home becomes hospitable to its owner. In Derrida'sunderstanding this would turn the host (owner) a host received in his "own" home, a guestwho is also welcomed or a an owner turned into a tenant. This would imply that the home isnot owned or is owned only in a very particular form. Derrida puts it as follows: " .... at least itis owned, in a very singular sense of this word, only in so far as it is already hospitable to itsowner. The head of the household, the master of the house, is already a received hote, already aguest in his own home" (Derrida 1997: 42-3). Utilizing the ambiguity of the French term hOte,which designates both the host and guest, Denida wants to refer to the fact that, when there is

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Meyda Yegenoglu

unconditional hospitable welcoming, then there is no at-homeness from which the subject isable to receive, whereas with conditional hospitality, the guest is welcomed but still the own-ership of the home is retained. Oppming to this kind of understanding of hospitality, Derridawams us against the risk or danger of a usurpation of a position of power by the conditionalwelcoming of the other: "to dare to say welcome is perhaps to insinuate that one is :It homehere, that one knows what it means to be at home, and that at home one received, invites, oroffers hospitality, thus appropriating for oneself a place to welcome (acceuellir) the other, or worse,welcoming the other in order to appropriate for oneself a place and then speak the language ofhospitality" (Drrida 1997: 15-16).

Emphasizing the importance of the Levinasian conception of hospitality and its differencefrom the conditional one, Derrida underlines how the structure of unconditional or absolutehospitality not only involves a peculiar reversal of the meaning of the host (becoming a guest inhis home and being welcomed by whom he welcomes), but it also implies a radical transforma-tion of the ownership and possession of the home. For this reason, absolute hospitality cannotbe dissociated from issues of propriety and possession. On the basis of this peculiar reversal,Derrida identifies what he calls the "implacable law of hospitality". "[T]he hote who received(the host), the one who welcomes the invited or received hOte (the guest), the welcoming hOtewho considers himself the owner of the place, is in truth a hOte recived in his own home. Hereceives the hospitality that he offers in his own home; he receives itfrorn his own home - which,in the end, does not belong to him. The hote as host is a guest" (Derrida 1997: 41).

When the distinction between host and guest breaks down, the position of master ofthe house is dismantled and through this unconditionality the issue of possession of the homebecomes limited only to a legal ownership, but making hospitality more open, absolute, orgenerous. The inhabitant dwelling in this way, inhabits the land "as a refuge or of an exile, aguest and not a proplietor" (Derrida 1997: 37). For this reason, absolute hospitality precedesproperty (Derrida 1997: 45)

Given that absolute hospitality implies a radical dispossession of the home, it also impliesloss of sovereignty. The loss of sovereignty pertains not only to the land that one inhabits butalso concerns the very concept of subjectivity. Defining the subject as that very welcome or asopenness to the other, Derrida's reading of Levinas has radical implications for a reconsiderationof the concept of subject that is not understood as self-identity or ipseity. The welcome offeredto the other entails the subordination or putting the sovereignty of the subject into question.The intentional attention to the other involves an interruption of the self as other. Theresponsibility to the other, the subject's being a host, is about putting the subject's being inquestion. In Derrida's reading of Levinasian hospitality, ethics precedes ontology, relationalityprecedes being and identity. For this reason, for Derrida (1997), the host is a hostage when itsbeing is put into question. As he puts it, the subject "not the being of the questioner or of thequestioned, but the being-in-guestion, where, so to speak, it finds itself under accusation [mis encause], where it passively finds itself and finds itself contested interpellated, implicated, persecuted,under accusation" (56). It is this "other way of inhabiting, of welcoming or of beingwelcomed" that puts the subjectivity of the host into question: "the host [hOte] is a hostageinsofar as he is a subject put into question, obsessed (and thus besieged), persecuted in thevery place where he takes place, where as emigrant, exile, stranger, a guest [hOte] from the verybeginning, he finds himself elected to or taken up by a residence [elu a domicile] before himselfelecting or taking one up [elire domicile]" (56). Thus, unconditional hospitality not only involvesthe interruption of a full possession of a place called home and reversal of the owner becominga tenant in his/her "own" place, but also entails the freedom of the self from auto-affinnation.This means that the subject is no longer sovereign. Instead, it is placed as guest and host at

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the same time, because its being is welcomed as guest. So, the subject, in being responsiblefor the other, IS "heteronomous - subject to another - rather than autonomous" (Bankovsky200S; 161). The welcoming that is offered to the quest entails that the self is interrupted aslpseity, authority, mastety, and indissoluble sovereignty contradict with absolute hospitality. Inrelinquishing sovereignty, the host gives up possession of his subjectivity and is no longerin possession of himseJf. Therefore, in offering absolute hospitality, "the host who welcomes theother and offers hospitality does so also as a subject displaced from his/her own subjectivity, asubject other than and no longer in possession of her/himself' (Carroll 2006: 825). As Inoted above, the radical dispossession that the implacable law of hospitality implies is notonly pertinent for the dispossession of the ownership of home, but also has bearing on theway in which subjectivity is defined. As Raffoul notes, defining the subject as welcome ofthe other

does not mean that the subject would have, among other attributes, the ability to welcomethe other. More importantly, this means that the subject, as such, is a welcome and hos-pitality of the other, before any self-posited identity .. ,. The welcome of the other definesthe subject. As such the subject is that very welcome, that very openness to the other. Itsidentity is thus fractured and opened by the irruption or invasion of the other. The firstrevolution brought about by the thought of hospitality, then, concems the concept ofsubjectivity. The subject is no longer a self-identity, an ego, a consciousness, even anintentional consciousness. The subject is an openness to the other.

(Raffoul 1998: 277)

This interruption of the subject cannot be brought out by a decree or law, but is produced inthe intentional attention to the other. This implies the subordination or subjection of thesubjectum and hence enables the birth of a subject with freedom: the subject being put intoquestion by the responsibility offered to the other.

Conclusion

If the Kantian conceptualization of hospitahty, by limiting it with an issue of rights and legalregulations, does not involve any interruption of sovereignty, entails 110 risk, no accidentalencounter, or unforeseen relation to Otherness, then it means that the other's alterity is notwelcomed. When hospitality is turned into a regulated reception, then home, nation-state, orthe sovereign subject is not opened to otherness because the relation with the other occurs onlyas a result of an invitation not of visitation.

However, following Derrida, to insist on the irreducibility of unconditional hospitality into adetermined political program or juridical and legal regulation, does not mean that the conceptof hospitality and the questions of ethics are not inextricably linked. On the contrary, ithas great ramifications for thinking the socio-political manifestations of otherness and henceissues that are related to immigrants, asylum seekers, strangers, and other displaced people andinvites us to bring and translate issues of hospitality to these concerns. Without this translation,as Hent de Vries (2001) suggests, the issue of hospitality would remain "an empty dream" (184).But this does not mean that hospitality can be reduced to its concrete and particular instances orissues of laws and juridical regulations. The Levinasian/Derridean understanding of hospitalityinvites us to question our given ideas and politics on issues of immigration, nation-state,citizenship, and rights. Being hospitable to the idea of unconditional or absolute hospitalityinvites us to be more hospitable to the intelTIlptions of our given ideas on sovereignity and

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open ourselves to different understandings of politics that is beyond the familial nation-state'sjuridical regulative models and the confines a decree or a political program.

Derrida notes that the relation between conditional and unconditional hospitality is hetero-geneous. Even though one cannot deduce a political program from uncodltional hospitality andeven though unconditional hospitality cannot be reduced to a legal fom1Ulation that theconditional hospitality implies, the lvvo arc nevertheless indissociable. That is, one cannotdeduce from unconditionality that nations, cultures, or governments open theif houses uncon-ditionally to strangers and aspire to make unconditional hospitality their official policy. This isbecause, like justice, unconditional hospitality is impossible. But this impossibility does not meanthat a politics if hospitality is impossible. Like the relation between law and justice, where justiceenables one to deconstruct law, unconditional hospitality enables one to deconstruct conditionalhospitality. Certainly the improvement of laws of immigration and other legal regulations isnecessary but it is insufficient to assure unconditional hospitality: it is futile to expect theseregulations to guarantee unconditional hospitality, because unconditional hospitality is not thename of a political program correcting global injustices and/or an injuction that can lead to abetter management of the nature of the relation with immigrants and strangers. Despitethis impossibility, for Derrida, one has to constantly aspire for unconditionality as it is throughthis aspiration that the condition of possibility of the prefection and improvement of conditionalhospitality is possible. Yet, the realm of action and practical regulation always remainsheterogeneous to theory. To quote Derrida:

It's impossible as a rule, I cannot regularly organise unconditional hospitality, and that'swhy, as a rule, I have a bad conscience, I cannot have a good conscience because I knowthat I lock my door, and that a number of people who would like to share my house, myapartment, my nation, my money, my land and so on so f01th. I say as I rule, but itmay happen, pure forgiveness may happen, just as an act of forgiveness, some forgivenessmay happen, pure forgiveness may happen. I cannot make a deternunate, a detemuningjudgment and say: 'this is pure forgiveness,' or 'this is pure hospitality,' as an act ofknowledge, there is no adequate act of detennining judgment. That's why the rcalm ofaction, of practical reason, is absolutely heterogeneous to theory and theoretical judgmentshere, but it may happen without even my knowing it, my being conscious of it, or myhaving rules for its establishment. Unconditional hospitality can't be an establishment, but itmay happen as a miracle .... in an instant, not lasting more than an instant, it may happen.This is the .... possible happening of something impossible which makes us think whathospitality, or forgiveness, or gift might be.

(Derrida 2001: 15-16)

If unconditional hospitality is distinct from this or that specific right and something thatcannot be guaranteed by law, it needs to be thought of in conjunction with Derrida's ideaabout democracy. For Derrida, democracy is the possible happening of something impossible,and needs to be thought as something to come (a venir). Speaking of democracy, Derrida (1991)states that "it is not something that is certain to happen tom01TOW. Not the democracy(national, international, state or trans-state) of the future, but a democracy that must have thestructure of a promise - and thus the memory of that which carries the future, the to-come, here andnow" (78). The "happening as a miracle" and "lasting more than an instant" implies the necessitythat the politics of hospitality has to be immanent to the present and require the transfom1ationof present conditions of conditional hospitality, yet it will never be capable of exhausting all thepossibilities of unconditional hospitality.

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Hospitality, Rights, and Migrancy

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bw", Philosophy Today, Summer, 49 (2): 156-70.Carroll, David (2006). "Remains of Algeria: Justice, Hospitality, Politics", MLN, 121: 808-27.Denida, J. (1991) The Other Heading: RiiflectioYlS on Today's Europe, trans. P.-A. Brault and M. B. Naas,

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trans. T. Humphrey, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, pp. 107-43.McNulty, T. (2007). The Hostess: Hospitality, Femininity, and the Expropriation oj Identity, Minnesota, MN:

University of Minnesota Press.Naas, M. (2003). Taking on the Tradition:Jacques Derrida and Legacies of De COl1struction, Stanford, CA, Stanford

University Press.Raffoul, F. (1998). "On Hospitality, Between Ethics and Politics", Research in Phenomenology, Fall: 274--83.de Vries, H. (2001). "Derrida and Ethics: Hospitable Thought", in T. Cohen (ed.) Jacques Derrida and the

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