Wonder and Generosity by La Caze Marguerite

Author:La Caze, Marguerite. [Caze]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438446776
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2013-06-09T16:00:00+00:00

The Condition of Universal Hospitality

Derrida addresses the specific questions of cosmopolitanism, hospitality and refugees in a series of interconnected essays and interviews. His piece “On Cosmopolitanism” is a speech on the concept of cosmopolitan rights for asylum seekers, refugees, and immigrants. Derrida's reworking of Kant's cosmopolitanism involves a questioning of Kant's reliance on the idea of nation-states, a proposal for “refuge cities” in Europe, and a shift of hospitality to the ethical and political planes in addition to the juridical one, as one might expect.7 He says we should distinguish between “the foreigner in general, the immigrant, the exiled, the deported, the stateless or the displaced person” (2001a, 4). While Derrida uses the concept of hospitality to apply to all these different groups, he is most interested in the difficulties of asylum seekers.

In this essay and his more detailed work Of Hospitality, Derrida considers the history of the concept of hospitality, which he sees as involving three traditions: the Hebraic tradition of cities of refuge described in the Bible, the medieval tradition of the laws of hospitality, and the cosmopolitan tradition the Enlightenment inherited from Stoicism, particularly from Cicero, and Pauline Christianity.8 While there are conceptual connections between these traditions, his primary focus is Kant's formulation of the law of hospitality and the limitations Kant places on it.

As I noted in the previous chapter, Derrida finds in the concept of hospitality a distinction between unconditional and conditional hospitality. Unconditional hospitality requires that anyone be welcome regardless of whether they identify themselves and their origins. While Derrida does not use this language, this kind of hospitality involves wonder, a nonjudgmental acceptance of the difference of the other, who can surprise us in so many ways. Conditional hospitality is the hospitality determined and regulated by the state and its legal apparatus. This kind of hospitality might be thought to be linked to generosity and respect for the other, but that would inappropriately simplify matters, as regulated hospitality can also be lacking in a generous recognition of what the safe citizen or resident shares with those fleeing persecution. What is needed, rather, is a sense of how both wonder and generosity can contribute to a fuller hospitality. For Derrida, these two forms of hospitality correspond to a distinction between the Law of hospitality, or justice, and the laws of hospitality. The Law is the absolutely unconditional ideal of law, like the personified law in Plato's Crito, whereas the laws are the particular laws that are put into place in particular contexts (Plato 1999, 43a–54e).

Parallel to his discussion of the impossibility of the gift (1992) and forgiveness (2001a), as I detail in later chapters, in Of Hospitality, Derrida explores an antimony in hospitality. He argues that the Law of absolute, unconditional hospitality demands that we transgress all the laws of hospitality and the laws of hospitality transgress the Law of hospitality (2000, 75). However, Derrida also says that the Law of hospitality requires the laws, and that it would not be unconditional if it did not have to become effective, concrete.

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