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The Principle of Hospitality

Jacques Derrida

To cite this article: Jacques Derrida (2005) The Principle of Hospitality , Parallax, 11:1, 6-9, DOI:
10.1080/1353464052000321056
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Published online: 05 Aug 2006.

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 parallax, 2005, vol. 11, no. 1, 6–9

The Principle of Hospitality

Jacques Derrida

An interview wih Dominique Dhombres for Le Monde, December 2, 1997. Translated

by Ashley Thompson.

Le Monde: In your last book, Of Hospitality, you oppose ‘the unconditional law of unlimited
hospitality’ and ‘the laws of hospitality, these rights and obligations always conditioned and
conditional’ What do you mean by this?

Jacques Derrida: It is between these two figures of hospitality that responsibilities

and decisions must in effect be taken. This is a formidable challenge because if
these two hospitalities do not contradict each other, they remain heterogeneous at
the very moment that they appeal to each other, in a disconcerting way. Doubtless, all
ethics of hospitality are not the same, but there is no culture or social bond without a
principle of hospitality. This principle demands, it even creates the desire for, a
welcome without reserve and without calculation, an exposure without limit to
whoever arrives [l’arrivant]. Yet a cultural or linguistic community, a family, a nation,
can not not suspend, at the least, even betray this principle of absolute hospitality: to
protect a ‘home’, without doubt, by guaranteeing property and what is ‘proper’ to
itself against the unlimited arrival of the other; but also to attempt to render the
welcome effective, determined, concrete, to put it into practice [le mettre en oeuvre].
Whence the ‘conditions’ which transform the gift into a contract, the opening
into a policed pact; whence the rights and the duties, the borders, passports
and doors, whence the immigration laws, since immigration must, it is said, be
‘controlled’.

It must be remembered that the stakes of ‘immigration’ do not in all rigour coincide
with those of hospitality which reach beyond the civic or properly political space.
In the texts you cite, I analyse something which is not a simple opposition between the
‘unconditional’ and the ‘conditional’. If the two meanings of hospitality remain
mutually irreducible, it is always in the name of pure and hyperbolic hospitality that
it is necessary, in order to render it as effective as possible, to invent the best
arrangements [dispositions], the least bad conditions, the most just legislation. This is
necessary to avoid the perverse effects of an unlimited hospitality whose risks I tried
to define. This is the double law of hospitality: to calculate the risks, yes, but
without closing the door on the incalculable, that is, on the future and the foreigner. It
defines the unstable site of strategy and decision. Of perfectibility as of progress. This
site is being searched for today, for example in debates on immigration.

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6 DOI: 10.1080/1353464052000321056
It is often forgotten that it is in the name of unconditional hospitality (which gives its
meaning to all welcoming of the foreigner) that we must try to determine the best
conditions, that is to say some particular legislative limits, and especially a
particular application of the laws. It is always forgotten, by definition, in the realm of
xenophobia; but it can also be forgotten in the name of a certain interpretation of
‘pragmatism’ and ‘realism’. For example when it is thought necessary to give electoral
guarantees [gages] to the forces of exclusion or occlusion. Dubious in its principles, this
tactic could well lose more than its soul: the anticipated benefit.

LM: In the same book, you ask this question: ‘Does hospitality consist in interrogating whoever
arrives?’, in the very first place by asking him his name, ‘or does hospitality rather begin by the
unquestioning welcome?’ Is the second attitude more in conformity with the principle of ‘unlimited
hospitality’ that you are evoking?

JD: There again, the decision is taken at the heart of what seems an absurdity,
what resembles the impossible itself (an antinomy, a tension between two equally
imperative laws but without opposition). Pure hospitality consists in welcoming
whoever arrives before imposing any conditions on him, before knowing and
asking anything at all, be it a name or an identity ‘paper’. But it supposes also that
one address him, singularly, that he be called therefore, and that he be understood to
have a proper name: ‘You, what is your name?’ Hospitality consists in doing
everything to address the other, to accord him, even to ask him his name, while
keeping this question from becoming a ‘condition’, a police inquisition, a blacklist or a
simple border control. This difference is at once subtle and fundamental, it is a
question which is asked on the threshold of the ‘home’ and at the threshold between
two inflections. An art and a poetics, but an entire politics depends on it, an entire
ethics is decided by it.

LM: You note, in the same text: ‘The foreigner is first of all foreign to the language of law in which are
formulated the right to hospitality, the right of asylum, its limits, its norms, its police. He must ask for
hospitality in a language which, by definition, is not his own.’ Could it be otherwise?

JD: Yes, because it is perhaps the first violence which the foreigner undergoes: to have
to claim his rights in a language he does not speak. Suspending this violence is nearly
impossible, an interminable task at any rate. Another reason to work urgently to
transform things. An immense and dreadful task of translation imposes itself here, a
task which is not simply pedagogical, ‘linguistic’, domestic and national (training the
foreigner in the national language and culture, for example in the tradition of lay or
republican law). It implies a transformation of law, of the languages of law. Obscure
and painful as it is, this progress is taking place. It touches upon the history and the
most fundamental axioms of international law.

LM: You recall the abolition by Vichy of the Crémieux decree of 1870 which accorded French
citizenship to Algerian Jews. You lived this strange experience, in your youth, to be thus without
nationality. How do you see this period retrospectively?

JD: Too much to say, here again. Instead of what I recall, from the depths of my
memory, here is only what I would like to recall, today: the Algeria of that era now
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 resembles, after the fact, an experimental laboratory – where the historian can
scientifically, objectively isolate what was a purely French responsibility in the
persecution of the Jews, this responsibility which we asked Mitterand to recognize,
as Chirac has since done thankfully. Because there was never a single German in
Algeria. Everything depended on the application, by the French, only by them, of the
two Statutes on Jews. In the civil service, in schools and universities, in the procedures
of expropriation, this application was at times more brutal than in France itself. A
piece of evidence to be added to the dossiers of the trials and repentances now
underway.

LM: Michel Rocard declared, a few years ago now, that ‘France could not receive all the misery of the
world.’ What does this statement inspire in you? What do you think of the way in which the Jospin
government is presently working to partially regularise clandestine immigrants?

JD: I seem to recall that Michel Rocard retracted this unfortunate sentence.
Because either it is a truism (who ever thought that France, or any other country, has
ever been able to ‘receive all the misery of the world’? who ever asked for that?), or it
is a rhetorical quip aimed at producing restrictive effects and at justifying
withdrawal, protection, reaction (‘since we can not receive all the misery’, the line
goes, ‘you should never reproach us for not doing it enough or even for not doing it
at all’). That is doubtless the (economical, economistic and confused) effect that
some wanted to exploit and that Michel Rocard, like many others, regretted. As for
current policy on immigration, if I must speak of it quickly, it worries those who
fought for the sans-papiers1 (and who shelter them when necessary, as I also am doing
today), those whom certain promises had filled with hope. We can regret at least
two things:

1. That the ‘Pasqua-Debré’ laws were not abolished rather than touched up. Besides
the fact that symbolic value was attached to them (which is not nothing), we again have
a double choice: either the essential core of the old laws is retained, and one should not
claim the contrary; or it is essentially modified, and one should not seek to seduce or
appease a right-wing or far right-wing electoral opposition by simply sticking on the
‘Pasqua-Debré’ label. This opposition will, in any case, reap the profits of this retreat
and will not let itself be disarmed. We need, here, political courage, a change in
direction, fidelity to promises, civic pedagogy. (It should be recalled, for example, that
the contingent of immigrants has been neither increasing nor threatening – quite to the
contrary – for decades.)

2. With the limits officially in force, the promised procedures for regularisation
seem slow and minimalist, in a gloomy, tense and irritated atmosphere. Whence the
concern of those who, without ever asking for the pure and simple opening of
the borders, have argued for a different policy, and have done it on the basis of
research and statistics (using work tested by experts and qualified associations,
who have worked in the field for years) in a ‘responsible’ manner – and not
‘irresponsibly’ as dared to say, I believe, one of these ministers who are constantly
calculating their slips and sound-bites [petites phrases] today, more or less well, and it is
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always a bad sign. The decisive limit, that from which a policy is judged, passes
between ‘pragmatism’, even ‘realism’ (which are indispensable for an efficient strategy)
and their dubious double, opportunism.

Notes

1 2
Le Monde, December 2, 1997. Interview by Sans papiers literally means ‘(people) without
Dominique Dhombres. Translated by Ashley (identity) papers’, which might be roughly translated
Thompson. as ‘illegal aliens’.

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) was Professor of Philosophy at the Ecole Normale

Supérieure and at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His major
publications inclule Of Grammatology (Johns Hopkins University Press; Reprint Edition,
1998), Writing and Difference (University of Chicago Press, 2002), Speech and Phenomena
(Northwestern University Press, 1973), Dissemination (University of Chicago Press;
Reprint Edition, 2001), Glas (University of Nebraska Press; Reprint Edition, 1990),
Specters of Marx (Routledge, 1994), Of Hospitality (Stanford University Press, 2000) and
Politics of Friendship (Verso, 1997).

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