Jacques Derrida on Hospitality 

Tuesday & Thursday
1:30-2:45 p.m., Spring 2019
Dr. Deborah Achtenberg 

Derrida in Lycée Ben-Aknoun school photo, Algiers

Levinas, his brothers, his sister (Raissa), and Raissa’s sister, Esther (copyrighted photo; use only with Hansel family permission)

“To define uprightness, Emmanuel Levinas says, in his Tractate Shabbath, that consciousness is the ‘urgency of a destination leading to the other person and not an eternal return to the self, an innocence without naiveté, an uprightness without stupidity, an absolute uprightness which is also absolute self-criticism, read in the eyes of the one who is the goal of my uprightness and whose look calls me into question.  It is a movement toward the other that does not come back to its point of origin the way diversion comes back, incapable as it is of transcendence–a movement beyond anxiety and stronger than death.  This uprightness [droiture] is called Temimut, the essence of Jacob.'”
Emmanuel Levinas, “Temptation of Temptation,” quoted in Jacques Derrida, “Adieu”

“This interruption of the self by itself, if such a thing is possible, can or must be taken up by thought:  this is ethical discourse–and it is also, as the limit of thematization, hospitality.  Is not hospitality an interruption of the self?” Jacques Derrida, “Word of Welcome” 

“the “principle of secularity is, despite appearances, intrinsic to Islam, and this has been true since its origins. And yet, the uniqueness of the third monotheistic religion resides in the fact that the different dimensions of life–religion and politics, the spiritual and the temporal, nature and culture, the public and private—if they must naturally be separated in order to avoid confusion and to prevent all totalitarianisms, must not be placed in opposition.  Their extreme separation can create a void, which reason cannot be counted on to fill,” Mustapha Chérif, in Islam and the West.

Mustapha Chérif

Louis Massignon (Paris, 1913)

“There I understood that he [Abraham] was the Father of all faiths, that he was the pilgrim, the gêr [the stranger, the hôte], the one who left his own, who made a pact of friendship with the foreign countries where he came as a pilgrim, that the Holy Land was not the monopoly of one race but the Land promised to all pilgrims like him,” Louis Massignon, in “Hostipitality,” in Acts of Religion

“there would be an antinomy, an insoluble antinomy, a non-dialectizable antinomy between, on the one hand, The law of unlimited hospitality (to give the new arrival all of one’s home and oneself, to give him or her one’s own, our own, without asking a name, or compensation, or the fulfillment of even the smallest condition), and on the other hand, the laws (in the plural), those rights and duties that are always conditioned and conditional….”  Jacques Derrida, “Step of Hospitality / No hospitality”

Anne Dufourmantelle “But let us return to the fear provoked by our incursion into an unknown place whose strangeness freezes us before we get used to it stage by stage.  Is the anguish provoked enough to keep us alive, in other words to prevent this process of growing accustomed?”  Anne Dufourmantelle, “Invitation”

“Hospitality–if there is any–must, would have to, open itself to an other that is not mine, my hôte [host/guest], my other, not even my neighbor or my brother,” Jacques Derrida, “Hostipitality,” in Acts of Religion