And if charity be not charitable

"Sometimes resentment would cross our faces, sometimes wildness would fill our eyes, but we were tame apes, and we dreamt not of the savannah, but of the books we would write in imitation of others."

Like Derrida, Habermas believes in cosmopolitanism but also notes its flaws: "the ontologization of the friend-foe relation suggests that attempts at a cosmopolitan juridification of the relations between the belligerent subjects of international law are fated to serve the masking of particular interests in universalistic disguise" (38).   Habermas sees cosmopolitanism as useful, but only if the concept involves rational communication and what he calls "mutual perspective-taking": "in the course of mutual perspective-taking there can develop a common horizon of background assumptions in which both sides accomplish an interpretation that is not ethnocentrically adopted or  converted but, rather, intersubjectively shared" (37).  Habermas's ideal vision, like Derrida's, invites readers to consider a world in which citizens share an equal opportunity to live how they wish to live, speak how  they wish to speak, feel how they wish to feel.  Although both share a somewhat utopian vision, it is Derrida who  hits upon a crucial critique of such a world.  He understands that equitable communication as Habermas describes it  would involve universal access to the same type of reason.  Derrida questions universal reason, but he also  considers the possibility of such reason necessary when addressing issues of international law,  global terrorism, and globalization in general.

This implicit debate between Habermas and Derrida is, in fact, most direct--and most lively--in their discussion of  the notions of tolerance and hospitality.  Habermas emphasizes the notion of tolerance, despite certain  limitations.  He understands that tolerance is problematic in that the concept "possesses [in] itself the kernel of  intolerance" (41).  This is so because tolerance involves setting boundaries that one allows others to cross.  In short, tolerance suggests that a stronger person or nation allows a weaker person or nation to act as he, she, or it pleases in relation to a certain limit.  Beyond that limit, tolerance devolves into intolerance.    Habermas counters this scenario by explaining how a constitutional democracy does not involve a single person or group tolerating another: "On the basis of the citizens' equal rights and reciprocal respect for each other, nobody possesses the privilege of setting the boundaries of tolerance from the viewpoint of their own preferences and value-orientations" (41).  Anticipating Derrida's critique of tolerance, Habermas notes, "straight deconstruction of the concept of tolerance falls into a trap, since the constitutional state contradicts precisely the premise from which the paternalistic sense of the traditional concept of 'tolerance' derives" (41).

Derrida picks up where Habermas leaves off, criticizing tolerance while endorsing his own notion of hospitality:   "Tolerance remains a scrutinized hospitality, always under surveillance, parsimonious and protective of its sovereignty" (128).  As Derrida suggests, tolerance does more to protect the hegemony of the person or state that tolerates than it does to achieve equality.  Opposed to this necessarily limited tolerance is Derrida's hospitality:  "Pure and unconditional hospitality, hospitality itself, opens or is in advance open to someone who is neither expected nor invited, to whomever arrives as an absolutely foreign visitor, as a new arrival, nonidentifiable and unforeseeable, in short, wholly other" (128-29).  Given this definition of hospitality, it  seems as if Derrida chooses to ignore the concept's applicability.  Not so.  As he writes, "an unconditional hospitality is, to be sure, practically impossible to live; one cannot in any case, and by definition, organize it" (129).  This is not to say that hospitality is impractical, even if it is "practically impossible to live"; rather, it may be that the realization of the concept lies in the ability or willingness of individuals, not nation-states, to embrace it.  Put another way, hospitality may be realized in practice by individuals even if it may be unrealistic at this historical moment for nation-states to do the same.  In this sense, hospitality at once resists unified organization by a nation-state as it encourages unified understanding among individuals who would accept it as a way of relating to others in the world.  (Chad Wickman)

Comments

[Alain]

Charles, this is a great passage. Toward the end it really points to one of the essential aporias of Derrida's thought - both the impossibility and necessity of hospitality. The author seems to acknowledge its practical difficulties but wants to emphasize how "it encourages unified understanding among individuals who would accept it as a way of relating to others in the world." This seems to ignore (or downplay) the true conflict of trying to embrace hospitality ethically while asserting its impossibility politically. Perhaps this is our situation but I suspect that there is more to it. The passage regarding the "Other others" from the Gift of Death may be a place to start.

Thanks for posting this.

[Name]

Lars does sound like he's about 50 going on 500. As for the recent post by Dan Green on The Valve, doesn't anyone have anything *new* to say?

[Matt]

I think (in addition to n+1 of course!) that these folks are trying:

http://www.littlegirlonline.com/

And you have to admit that the speech Dan quotes, I assume it's this:

http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2005-10-05-valjataga-en.htm

says a lot of things that need to be said, especially re: public intellectuals. The problem is where one goes with it, as always (that is, how it markets itself, or risks marketing itself as fodder for the so-called 'war on Theory' – itself a front for the war on anything phenomeno-philo and especially non-Anglo). Etc.

Or so it seems to me anyway.

[Matt]

Not that such "critique" of markets (is this marketing what is "new?") will ever be a substitute for good, wondering and accessible (and not just genre soapboxing or crotchety) criticism of course.

[Amie]

I'd like to cite some passages from JD "on" hospitality, but before doing so it is perhaps worth noting that citing already has something to do with hospitality, and with a violence that is involved, for while citing can be a sign of respect for the other, the other's words, it also inevitably involves a tearing, grafting, sewing of the other's words (body and soul?) on one's own. It is perhaps worth noting that beyond where Derrida "thematizes' hospitality, all his texts are a very singular practice of citing, give themselves to be read as scenes of hospitality in all it's justice and violence. Texts which thereby offer a hospitality that is quite distinct from the kind of pratice in academia, the media and the web which proceeds as if it has already totally assimilated the other, as if the foreign could be ingested (digested?) without remainder. I trust examples of the latter are not necessary, they are everywhere.

"I have often been accused of writing things that are unnecessarily difficult that could be simplified, and I have even been accused of doing it on purpose. I'd say that this accusation is just and unjust at the same time. It is unjust because I really do try to be clear; it's not that I amuse myself multiplying obstacles to understanding; I can even be pedagogical - often too pedagogical, perhaps. But I have to admit that there is a demand in my writing for this excess even with respect to what I myself can understand of what I say - the demand that a sort of opening, play, intermination be left, signifing hospitality for what is to come [l'avenir]: 'One does not know what it means yet, one will have to start again, to return, to go on.' And if there were time, it could be shown precisely how each text enacts a kind of opening - as the Bible puts it - of the place left vacant for who is to come [pour qui va venir], for the arrivant - maybe Elijah, maybe anyone at all. There has to be the possibility of someone's still arriving; there has to be an arrivant (...)." — Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, p. 31

"Since there is no hospitality without finitude, sovereignty can only be exercised by filtering, choosing, and thus by excluding and doing violence. Injustice, a certain injustice begins right away, from the very threshold of the right to hospitality." — Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, p. 55

"Hospitality is culture itself and not simply one ethic amongst others. Insofar as it has to do with the ethos, that is, the residence, one's at-home, the familiar place of dwelling, as much as the manner of being there, the manner in which we relate to ourselves and to others, to others as our own or as foreigners, ethics is hospitality; ethics is entirely coextensive with the experience of hospitality, whichever way one expands or limits that." — Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, p. 16-17

(quotes courtesy of the wonderful http://www.lichtensteiger.de/diary.html )

[Anonymous]

http://spurious.typepad.com/spurious/2005/10/they_hate_us.html

[Chris]

Can anyone provide the book title and copyright year from which this quote comes?: "Pure and unconditional hospitality, hospitality itself, opens or is in advance open to someone who is neither expected nor invited, to whomever arrives as an absolutely foreign visitor, as a new arrival, nonidentifiable and unforeseeable, in short, wholly other" (128-29).