Hospitality, Volume I 9780226828022

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H o s p i t a l i t y, V o l u m e I

T h e Se m i na r s of Jacqu es Der r i da Edited by Geoffrey Bennington & Peggy Kamuf

Hospitality Volume I

Jacques Derrida Edited by Pascale-Anne Brault and Peggy Kamuf Translated by E. S. Burt

The University of Chicago Press ‡ C h i c a g o a n d L o n d o n

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2023 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2023 Printed in the United States of America 32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23

1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82801-5 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82802-2 (e-book) DOI: https://doi.org /10.7208/chicago/9780226828022.001.0001 Originally published in French as Hospitalité. Volume I. Séminaire (1995– 1996), © Éditions du Seuil, 2021. Session 4 was published in French as “Question d’étranger : venue de l’étranger” in De l’hospitalité by Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, © Calmann-Lévy, 1997, pp. 11– 69. Session 5 was published in French as “Pas d’hospitalité” in De l’hospitalité by Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, © Calmann-Lévy, 1997, pp. 71– 137. Stanford University Press publishes De l’hospitalité in English as Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, trans. Rachel Bowlby, © 2000 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. New translations of “Question d’étranger : venue de l’étranger” and “Pas d’hospitalité” by E. S. Burt included here with permission of Stanford University Press. Appendix I was published in French in Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort! © Éditions Galilée, 1997. © Facsimiles courtesy of Princeton University. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Derrida, Jacques, author. | Brault, Pascale-Anne, editor. | Kamuf, Peggy, 1947–, editor. | Burt, E. S., translator. | Derrida, Jacques. Works. Selections. English. 2009. Peggy Kamuf ; translated by E. S. Burt. Title: Hospitality / Jacques Derrida ; edited by Pascale-Anne Brault and Peggy Kamuf ; translated by E. S. Burt. Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2023– | Series: The seminars of Jacques Derrida | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023007540 | ISBN 9780226828015 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226828022 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Other (Philosophy) | Other minds (Theory of knowledge) Classification: LCC B2430.D482 E5 2023 | DDC 121/.2—dc23/eng/20230420 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023007540

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Foreword to the English Edition : vii General Introduction to the French Edition : ix Editors’ Note : xi Translator’s Note : xix

First Session : 1 Appendix 1 : 27 Second Session : 32 Third Session : 52 Fourth Session : 76 Appendix 2 : 101 Fifth Session : 102 Discussion Session : 128 Sixth Session : 153 Seventh Session : 178 Eighth Session : 205 Ninth Session : 224 Annex 1— Session of the Closed Seminar : 245 Annex 2— Session of the Closed Seminar : 260 Index of Proper Names : 265

For ewor d to the English Edition

When the decision was made to edit and publish Jacques Derrida’s teaching lectures, there was little question that they would and should be translated into English. From early in his career, in 1968, and annually thereafter until 2003, Derrida regularly taught at US universities. It was his custom to repeat for his American audience the lectures delivered to his students in France the same year. Teaching first at Johns Hopkins and then at Yale, he read the lectures in French as they had been written. But from 1987, when he began teaching at the University of California, Irvine, Derrida undertook to lecture in English, improvising on-the-spot translations of his lectures. Recognizing that the greater part of his audience outside of France depended on translation proved easier, however, than providing a satisfying ad libitum English version of his own elegant, complex, and idiomatic writing. In the circumstance, to his evident joy in teaching was often added a measure of suffering and regret for all that remained behind in the French original. It is to the memory of Derrida the teacher as well as to all his students past and still to come that we offer these English translations of “The Seminars of Jacques Derrida.” The volumes in this series are translations of the original French editions published by Éditions du Seuil, Paris, in the collection “Bibliothèque Derrida” under the direction of Katie Chenoweth. In each case they will follow shortly the publication of the corresponding French volume. The scope of the project, and the basic editorial principles followed in establishing the text, are outlined in the “General Introduction to the French Edition,” translated here. Editorial issues and decisions relating more specifically to this volume are addressed in an “Editor’s Note.” Editors’ footnotes and other editorial interventions are all translated without modification, except in the case of footnoted citations of quoted material, which refer to extant English translations of the source as necessary. Additional translators’ notes have been kept to a minimum. To facilitate scholarly reference, the page numbers of the French edition are printed in the margin on the line at which the new page begins.

v i i i ‡ For e wor d t o t h e E ng l i s h E di t ion

Translating Derrida is a notoriously difficult enterprise, and while the translator of each volume assumes full responsibility for the integrity of the translation, as series editors we have also reviewed the translations and sought to ensure a standard of accuracy and consistency across the volumes. Toward this end, in the first phase of work on the series, we have called upon the advice of other experienced translators of Derrida’s work into English and wish to thank them here: Pascale-Anne Brault, E. S. Burt, Katie Chenoweth, Kir Kuiken, Michael Naas, Elizabeth Rottenberg, and David Wills, as well as all the other participants in the Derrida Seminars Translation Project workshops. Geoffrey Bennington Peggy Kamuf M a rch 2 021

Gen er a l I n troduction to the Fr ench Edition

Between 1960 and 2003, Jacques Derrida wrote some fourteen thousand printed pages for the courses and seminars he gave in Paris, first at the Sorbonne (1960– 64), then at the École normale supérieure, rue d’Ulm (1964– 84), and then, for the last twenty years of his life, at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS, 1984– 2003). The series “The Seminars of Jacques Derrida,” in the collection “Bibliothèque Derrida,” will make available the seminars that Derrida gave at EHESS, six of which have already appeared.1 This corresponds to the period in Derrida’s teaching career when he had the freedom to choose the topics he was going to treat, most often over two or even three years, in seminars that were themselves organized into the following thematic series: “Philosophical Nationality and Nationalism” (1984– 88), “Politics of 1. Four volumes were published by Éditions Galilée (Paris): Séminaire La bête et le souverain. Volume I (2001–2002), ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud (2008) [The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. I, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009)]; Séminaire La bête et le souverain. Volume II (2002–2003), ed. M. Lisse, M.-L. Mallet, and G. Michaud (2010) [The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. II, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010)]; Séminaire La peine de mort. Volume I (1999–2000), ed. Geoffrey Bennington, Marc Crépon, and Thomas Dutoit (2012) [The Death Penalty, vol. I, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014)]; Séminaire La peine de mort. Volume II (2000–2001), ed. G. Bennington and M. Crépon (2015) [The Death Penalty, vol. II, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017)]. Two volumes have appeared at Éditions du Seuil in the collection “Bibliothèque Derrida”: Le Parjure et le Pardon. Volume I. Seminaire (1997–1998), ed. Ginette Michaud and Nicholas Cotton (2019) [Perjury and Pardon, vol. I, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022)], and Le Parjure et le Pardon. Volume II. Seminaire (1998–1999), ed. Ginette Michaud, Nicholas Cotton, and Rodrigo Therezo (2020) [Perjury and Pardon, vol. II, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023)]. La Vie la mort. Seminaire (1975– 1976), ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Peggy Kamuf [Life Death, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020)], was the first seminar to be published in the “Bibliothèque Derrida” collection.

x ‡ G e n e r a l I n t roduc t ion t o t h e F r e nc h E di t ion

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Friendship” (1988– 91) and “Questions of Responsibility” (1991– 2003), which focuses successively on the secret (1991– 93), testimony (1993– 95), hospitality (1995– 97), perjury and pardon (1997– 99), the death penalty (1999– 2001), and, finally, questions of sovereignty and animality under the title “The Beast and the Sovereign” (2001– 3). We will here follow the logic previously established for the final seminars of Jacques Derrida, namely, publishing in reverse chronological order all the seminars given at EHESS, all the while respecting the internal chronology of each thematic series. We have tried in our editorial work to remain as faithful as possible to the text as Jacques Derrida wrote it and we present it here with as few editorial interventions as possible. With very few exceptions (for example, improvised sessions), Derrida would prepare for each class session not notes but a continuous written text, sometimes punctuated by references to the texts he was quoting, didascalia (e.g., “comment”) indicating a time for improvisation, and marginal or interlineal annotations. When we have been able to locate tape recordings of the seminars, we have also indicated in footnotes the oral comments that Derrida added to his text in the course of a seminar session. It is likely that if Derrida had himself published his seminars during his lifetime he would have reworked them. This practice of reworking was in fact rather common with Derrida, who frequently drew from the vast wealth of material of his courses for lectures and texts he intended for publication. This explains the fact that we sometimes find a partial reworking or adaptation of a seminar in an already published work, highlighting even further the dynamic and coherence that characterized Derrida’s teaching, a laboratory where ideas were tested and then frequently developed elsewhere in a more or less modified form. That being said, most of the seminars that will appear in the “Bibliothèque Derrida” have not been previously published in any form: their publication can only greatly enrich the corpus of Derrida’s thought by making available one of its essential resources. Katie Chenoweth, Head of the Editorial Committee Geoffrey Bennington Pascale-Anne Brault Marc Crépon Peggy Kamuf Ginette Michaud Michael Naas Elizabeth Rottenberg Rodrigo Therezo David Wills

Editors’ Note

Jacques Derrida delivered this seminar at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris from November 1995 through June 1996. With this seminar and another from the following year on the same topic, he was continuing the series inaugurated in 1991 under the general title of “Questions of Responsibility.” Derrida also presented this seminar at the University of California, Irvine, in the spring of 1996 in an English version that he improvised for the occasion. The recapitulative description from the Annuaire de l’EHESS sketches out the broad lines of the questions to be studied over the year 1995– 1996: We have been pursuing a cycle of investigations on the contemporary stakes (philosophical, ethical, juridical or political) of the concept of responsibility. Having before privileged, as a guiding thread, the themes of the secret and witnessing, we now begin to elaborate a problematic of the foreigner. What does one call a foreigner? How is the foreigner welcomed? How is the foreigner turned away? What difference is there between an other and a foreigner? What is an invitation, a visit, a “visitation”? How does the notion of foreigner get inscribed in the language? What is its European history, to begin with its Greek or Latin history? How does it get distributed into the spaces of kinship, of ethnicity, of the City, of the state, of the nation? How to analyze today, in particular in France and in Europe, the pertinence and stakes of the opposition friend/enemy? Taking into account technological mutations (for example, in the structure and speed of “communication”), where are things today with borders, citizenship, ius soli and ius sanguinis, displaced and deported populations, immigration, exile or asylum, integration or assimilation (republican or democratic), xenophobia or racism, etc.? These questions have been treated either through crossed readings of the great classical texts (the Bible, for example, Sophocles and Plato— and especially the famous article by Kant on the “cosmopolitan right” to universal hospitality in Towards Perpetual Peace), and modern texts (Heidegger, for example,

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Benveniste on ipseity or on the relation hospes/hostis, Arendt on the decline of the nation-state, Camus’s “The Guest,” Klossowski’s Laws of Hospitality, etc.), or else with respect to current debates on the subject of immigration or the right to asylum in France and in Europe (Schengen agreements, etc.). This year’s preliminary reflection has been structured by the rigorous distinction (although a distinction without opposition) between two heterogeneous logics that always risk becoming corrupted themselves or perverting one another: that of a strict and conventional hospitality (always finite, conditional, and subordinated to the mastery of the “at home” or of ipseity) and the idea of a hospitality open unconditionally to the arrivant.1

11

Following a habit adopted near the start of his teaching career, Jacques Derrida wrote out almost entirely the text of the seminar sessions and then read and commented on them before his listeners. Derrida’s habit was to pursue this practice of weekly writing at the same time as numerous other publication projects or public presentations.2 Sometimes, however, and even relatively often, the several aspects of his intellectual activity overlaid one another, as was the case when Derrida would revise pages previously written for his seminar for a publication or a lecture, or would present in his seminar texts that had been written with a public lecture in mind, as was the case for the text that would 1. Jacques Derrida, “Questions de responsabilité (V. Hostilité/hospitalité),” in Annuaire de l’EHESS 1995– 1996 (Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 1996), 511– 12. 2. Derrida provides the following list of his contributions in the Annuaire de l’EHESS 1995– 1996: “Projects, lectures or seminars in North American universities (in particular, the University of Alabama [Tuscaloosa], New York University, Columbia, New School for Social Research, Cardozo Law School, Johns Hopkins, University of California, Irvine), South American universities (Buenos Aires, Santiago, São Paulo), European universities (Freiburgim-Breisgau, Bucharest, Craiova, Milan, Turin, Rome, London, Luton, Louvain-la-Neuve, Toulouse, Berlin, Frankfort-am-Oder, Athens) or African universities (Rabat).” The list of the year’s publications follows and includes: Résistances— de la psychanalyse (Paris: Galilée, 1996), 150 pp.; Apories (Paris: Galilée, 1996), 140 pp.; Lignées, in collaboration with Micaëla Henich (Bordeaux: William Blake & Co. 1996), 100 pp.; Témoignage et traduction (original edition in Greek) (Athens: Institut français d’Athènes, 1996), 120 pp.; “Foi et savoir. Les deux sources de la “religion” aux limites de la raison,” in La religion, under the direction of J. Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Paris: Les Éditions du Seuil, 1996), 85 pp.; “Adieu (à Emmanuel Lévinas),” in L’Arche, February 1996, 6 pp.; “‘Il courait mort’: Salut, salut; Notes pour un courrier aux Temps Modernes,” in Les Temps Modernes, March-April-May 1996, Paris, 50 pp.; “La norme et son suspens,” “La norme doit manquer” and “Vers une reconstruction juridique de l’’humain’ et autres contributions,” in Le génome et son double (Paris: Hermès, 1996), 12 pp.; “Préface” to En direct du couloir de la mort by Mumia Abu-Jamal (Paris: La Découverte, 1996), 6 pp.

E di t or s’ No t e ‡ x i i i

become Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort! 3 and which Derrida read almost in entirety during the session of March 20, 1996. We have reproduced our transcription of it as an annex (see annex I). Three more of the sessions— the first, fourth, and fifth— have already given rise to publications and translations.4 All of the other sessions are unpublished. Jacques Derrida gave his seminar on Wednesday afternoon, from 5:00– 7:00 p.m., in the amphitheater of the EHESS at number 105, Boulevard Raspail, in the sixth arrondissement of Paris. The seminar was open to all listeners, except once a month when, in principle, the closed seminar was reserved for students studying for the DEA5 and for other students involved in research. These sessions of the closed seminar— which in fact generally attracted scarcely fewer listeners than the open sessions— were devoted to discussion, often following upon several student presentations, and without any lecture being written in advance. Following the general rules adopted for this edition of Derrida’s seminars, these improvised discussion sessions are not included, with a few exceptions. We have just mentioned the exception made for the closed seminar of March 20th presented in annex I. The several pages of annex II are also drawn from a session of the closed seminar that took place on May 22, 1996. As for the third exception, the most important of the three, it consists in an entirely improvised discussion from January 31, 1996. A transcript of this session was archived with the typescript of the seminar. This circumstance, in itself exceptional, suggested to us that Derrida himself wanted to keep a record of what had been said during this session. 3. Jacques Derrida, Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort! (Paris: Galilée, 1997); On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley (London: Routledge, 2001). 4. For the first session (November 15, 1995), see “Hostipitalité,” in “Pera Peras Poros: Atelier interdisciplinaire avec et autour de Jacques Derrida,” ed. Ferda Keskin and Ӧnay Sӧzer, Cogito, no. 85, 1999, 17–44 (French) and 45– 71 (Turkish); see also in English, “Hostipitality,” trans. Forbes Morlock and Barry Stocker, in Angelaki 5, no. 3, 2000, 3– 18. The fourth session ( January 10, 1996) and the fifth session ( January 17, 1996) appeared under the respective titles “Question d’étranger: Venue de l’étranger” and “Pas d’hospitalité,” in J. Derrida and A. Dufourmantelle, De l’hospitalité: Anne Dufourmantelle invite Jacques Derrida à répondre (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1997), 11– 69 and 71– 137; “Foreigner Question: Coming from Abroad/from the Foreigner” and “Step of Hospitality/No Hospitality” in Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 3– 74 and 75– 155. 5. [Translator’s note:] The Diplôme d’études approfondies (DEA) was a diploma delivered to students five years after the baccalaureate, at the end of the first year toward the doctorate, during the period from 1964 to 2005. Roughly the equivalent of a master’s degree, it was replaced by that degree under the system inaugurated around 2005 that sought to standardize diplomas across Europe.

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13

Here more than ever, Jacques Derrida opens his seminar to topical questions, which touch on what he does not call “foreign policy but the policy on foreigners in France.”6 He will follow the evolution of this policy from the decree-law of May 2, 1938, on the policing of foreigners, to the nationality code defined from the ordinances of October 19, 1945, and of November 2, 1945, as well as the so-called “Pasqua laws” of 1986 (relative to the conditions of the entrance and residence of foreigners in France) and of 1993, but also, even more closely, to the bill for the so-called “Toubon law” of 1994; he is going to mention several texts calling for protest against this bill in session 9. Derrida will give the example of the action taken against it by “a number of us,”7 which consisted in defying the repressive order that seeks to ratify the “crime of hospitality,” in other words, the act of sheltering or aiding those foreigners in an “irregular” situation in France. From session 1 on, he invites his listeners to support the Groupe d’information et de soutien aux travailleurs immigrés (GISTI) (Group for the Information and Support of Immigrant Workers), whose work he will often cite.8 The organization’s journal, Plein droit, will moreover publish the public remarks Derrida improvised in December of 1996, during which he shares his revulsion at the expression “crime of hospitality.”9 This politico-philosophical reflection, then, faced with the regression of what Kant designates as a universal human right to hospitality, is not disassociated from militancy. About midway through his trajectory, Derrida emphasizes the “strangeness” of his two-speed approach: Perhaps you have already sensed or anticipated the strangeness of the approach I am attempting or to which I see myself constrained here by a sort of law. One could also describe this law as a mixture or crossing of languages or codes. On the one hand, I am drawing things toward a general and abstract formalization, sometimes by interrogating the most ancient history and literary or philosophical texts; on the other hand, starting from examples that are only examples among many other possible ones, I would like to open onto the field of present-day urgent situations, of political and more than political emergencies (for the political and the juridical, precisely, are at stake here), but urgent situations that are not only the actualizations of classical structures but are . . . what comes as if to deconstruct these classical structures by itself.10 6. See below, 11. 7. See below, 69. 8. See below, 11. 9. Jacques Derrida, “Quand j’ai entendu l’expression ‘délit d’hospitalité’ . . . ,” Plein Droit, no. 34, April 1997, 3– 8, rptd. in Marx en jeu, with Marc Guillaume and Jean-Pierre Vincent (Paris: Descartes & Cie, 1997), 73– 91. 10. See below, 121.

E di t or s’ No t e ‡ x v

It is not only to urgent political situations in France that Jacques Derrida remains attentive. The conflicts then raging in Bosnia and Chechnya are also on the agenda for reflection. In the seventh and eighth sessions, Derrida retains from these tragic events the figure of the enclave in particular as what draws a singular structure of the other’s expulsion inside the inside, split in itself and in its at-home. Similarly, he asks about new developments in the domains of technology and science: email, the cell phone, or else “xenografts,” all the “technoscientific possibilities threatening the interiority of the at-home,”11 and thus the experience of hospitality. Derrida leans here on contemporary revelations in the press concerning phone taps discovered in Germany, as well as on examples of email tapped in the United States, “so many radical de-localizations that call for another experience of the relation to the other.”12 Although it is strongly anchored in numerous topical questions that punctuated the academic year of 1995– 1996, this seminar remains astonishingly relevant; the stakes that it raises have not stopped increasing over the past twentyfive years. Several words on the title are necessary. In the description Derrida provided for the two years of the seminar in the Annuaire de l’EHESS, he refers to it each time by two names, separated by a slash, as follows: “Hospitality/Hostility.” By contrast, at the head of the typescripts for each session, he writes the portmanteau word “Hostipitalité.” During the first year of the seminar, the neologism is used only twice, in the seventh session. It occurs more frequently during the second year (seven times), which is far from eclipsing his incessant recourse throughout the two years to the common noun “hospitality.” The fact that he had chosen not to register this invented and inventive title with the EHESS suggests to us that Derrida hesitated to retain it as a general title. And the fact that he agreed to include two sessions of the first year of the seminar in the work published with Anne Dufourmantelle under the title De l’hospitalité13 makes us think that he wished to place the emphasis on that term. For all these reasons, we have believed it desirable to entitle the two seminars simply: “Hospitality.” The present edition was established from electronic files of the original typescript of the seminar, preserved in the collection Jacques Derrida of the Critical Theory Archive in Langson Library at the University of California, Irvine.14 We have also consulted the collection Jacques Derrida at the Institut mémoires 11. See below, 93. 12. See below, 60. 13. Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, De l’hospitalité; Of Hospitality. 14. The typescript of the seminar is stored, along with other linked items (photocopies, newspaper articles, tracts) in Box 119, files 8– 14, in the Jacques Derrida archive.

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15

16

de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC).15 With the exception of the first session, which Derrida has clearly revised for a lecture given in English16 and which bears numerous manuscript additions added especially to the first page, the typescript presents very few revisions or handwritten additions. However, upon listening to the recordings made during the reading of his text before an audience, one finds that Derrida habitually and often added remarks, precisions, or commentaries pertinent to his point. Of these oral additions, we have retained in footnotes only the most significant, and have not sought to represent in writing all that was said orally. On the other hand, and so as to restore something of the rhythm of his teaching language, we have left numerous interpolations that Derrida made in reading citations in the principal text. It happened that he would type these citations into his text in full, in which case he sometimes inserted written comments in brackets. But most often, he noted only which passage he wanted to read in his typescript and then improvised his comments as he read. For this circumstance, we have adopted the convention of indicating these oral additions between square brackets inside angle brackets, as follows: , thus making use of angle brackets to signal an editorial intervention. As for the two facsimiles reproduced in the “appendixes,” they come from the typescripts of the first and fourth sessions. The peculiar handwriting of these pages, which is barely legible, follows these sessions to affix something like the signature of one who will not have ceased watching over this work. We would like to express our gratitude to all those who have helped us over the course of this long labor. Our thanks go first to Katie Chenoweth, head of the Editorial Committee, who graciously responded to our requests for information on works from Derrida’s personal library, which is housed in Princeton University’s Firestone Library, and to Brianna Cregle, the assistant for the special collections in that library. The considerable help provided by Geoffrey Bennington, Ginette Michaud, Michael Naas, and Elizabeth Rottenberg, as well as that of the whole editorial team of the Derrida seminars, is greatly appreciated. Brieuc Gérard, doctoral student at the University of Southern California, was extremely helpful in deciphering the pages in the manuscript. We also thank E. S. Burt, the American translator of these pages, for her painstaking reading. Thanks are owed to the personnel of IMEC and of the Derrida Archives at the University of California, especially Audra Eagle Yun and Derek Quezada, for 15. The typescript of the seminar is stored in two boxes: 219 DRR 235.1 and 219 DRR 235.2. 16. In all likelihood, this lecture was delivered at Johns Hopkins University in the United States.

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the indispensable aid they provided to our research. For the tapes of the sessions of this first year, we are grateful to Yuji Nishiyama, professor at the Metropolitan University of Tokyo and translator of Derrida seminars into Japanese, who arranged the electronic transfer of the majority of the sessions taped by Makoto Asari, past professor at the University Bordeaux-Montaigne. This invaluable contribution allowed us to enrich the seminar in numerous ways. Thanks go also to Fatima Zenati for transcribing the discussion session of January 31, 1996, to David Farrell Krell for his verification of the German, and to DePaul University for its aid. Above all, we would like to salute and thank Pierre Alferi and Jean Derrida for the support that they gave this project from the beginning. We want to dedicate this volume to the memory of Marguerite Derrida. Pascale-Anne Brault and Peggy Kamuf

T r a n s l a t o r’s N o t e

In his seminars and published texts, Derrida often comments on the translations and the translatability of terms he is using. Rarely, however, is translation linked to the problematic explored so explicitly as in Hospitality I. . . . We will speak again often of translation and hospitality: basically, it is the same problem . . . . . . and, we noted a little while ago that translation too is a phenomenon or enigmatic experience of hospitality, if not the condition of every hospitality in general . . . . . . and the question of translation is always the question of hospitality . . .1

This near synonymy presents a challenge to the translator, for it states that it is not enough to translate a text about hospitality; one must also engage in a performance of hospitality in translating. Now, for Derrida hospitality is above all aporia: . . . a non-dialectizable antinomy between The Law of hospitality as unconditional law of unconditional hospitality (give the whole of one’s at-home and one’s self to the arrivant, give to them one’s proper, our proper, without asking their name, or for any return, or to fulfill the least condition), an antinomy then between The unconditional law of unconditional hospitality and the laws of hospitality, the always conditioned and conditional rights and duties of hospitality, such as they are defined by the Greco-Latin tradition . . . .2

We are commanded by conditional laws to limit our hospitality, to offer it only to those whose names we know, who offer it in return or otherwise fulfill certain conditions— and yet a hospitality so conditioned is not hospitality at all but, as the quid pro quo evoked in the passage suggests, verges on barter or 1. See below, 3, 8, 18. 2. See below, 103.

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exchange. What Derrida calls The Law of hospitality commands hospitality unconditionally— yet a hospitality so open risks tipping over into its opposite, into a careless lack of solicitude for the guest who ought to be welcomed in their singularity, or into an anxiety about the purity of the home place so opened that tends toward violent immune responses and xenophobic paranoia. This antinomic situation of two conflicting laws, says Derrida, is the impossible situation one must negotiate for hospitality to be possible. It is also, by inference, the impossible situation to be negotiated in translation. In translating, one is receiving a text in another language into one’s own, and in so doing, imposing the laws of one’s language onto that text. The (master of the house) imposes translation into his own language upon the (foreigner), and that is the first violence. The question of hospitality starts there: must we ask the foreigner to understand us, to speak our language, in all the meanings of the term, in all its possible extensions, before and in order to be able to welcome them into our home? If they already spoke our language, with all that that implies, if we already shared everything that is shared with a language, would the foreigner still be a foreigner, and could one speak of asylum or hospitality with respect to them?3

To translate is to do more than betray, then; it is to violate and subjugate. Here, our English rules of syntax, our unspoken rules of connotation and language register, of politeness, etc. must be imposed on a French text. How is that a welcome, a reception that respects the other’s alterity, and not an appropriation? But if, on the contrary, the translator lifts all conditions, lets the rules of French flow over into the translation, floods the page with quaint Gallicisms, follows the rules of French adverbial placement or seeks to contort English to display every idiosyncrasy in a writer’s idiom, what English speaker would not reject in disgust the language salad so produced? Such are the horns of the translator’s dilemma. Derrida’s comment about aporia as both barrier to and condition for hospitality lies behind the solution he proposes for hospitality, here couched in terms of politeness: To be polite, in particular in the experience of hospitality, one must know the rules and transgress them each time in a certain way and not in another, by inventing other rules for it, absolutely singular ones, but in the spirit of the inherited rules, in the spirit at once inherited and reinvented in a new way.4

Transposed into the arena of translation, this comment lays down a challenge: to translate, to honor the guest one wants to welcome, one must, in the spirit of 3. See below, 80. 4. See below, 156.

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the inherited rules of one’s language, reinvent the inherited rules in a new way, one that is transformative with respect to the possibilities of one’s own language. Frequent readers of Derrida know that he very often comments on untranslatable terms seminal to the problematic explored. That is particularly the case in this seminar. In an important side comment in session 8, he tells us that what is untranslatable is, very precisely, the economy of the original: To put things very simply: when one says, “This is untranslatable,” and explains why it is untranslatable, well, one does it by translating. It is obvious that a discourse on the untranslatable dismantles untranslatability; it is a pragmatic contradiction, as they say in Germany, a performative contradiction: that is, I prove the contrary of what I want to prove by showing that such and such a word is untranslatable because I must translate it. One cannot translate “Unheimliche” because “Unheimliche” means at the same time “familiar and not familiar.” There, I translated it. However, I needed two words in place of one, or three words. What is untranslatable is economy, it is the word, it is not the link of meaning with the German language; it is the economy in one word of two apparently contradictory meanings.5

Three classic methods of dealing with such untranslatables have been adopted here, with a view of disrupting as little as possible the economy of the original. A short glossary of the “untranslatable” terms that affect the whole of the seminar is provided below. Following the usage of earlier translations of Derrida’s seminars, wherever the meaning of an untranslatable term is especially problematic, the italicized French term will be provided in parentheses in the text. Where the term affects only a single section, a translator’s note has been provided in the relevant spot. A comment is in order on the translating of a gendered language like French into modern English usage in this seminar. In Derrida’s analysis, it is consistent with the androcentric traditions of conditional hospitality that “host,” as welcoming proprietor and powerful master of the house, be gendered male and hospitality limited to that offered humans. In cases where Derrida is describing this traditional phallologocentric setup with its reliance on sovereignty, it would be misleading to adopt the current academic usage, which recommends the third-person “she” or “they” for cases without a specific referent. Yet, in a seminar where limiting hospitality to one group or another and even to humans alone is in question in the name of unconditional hospitality, Derrida will often underscore that such determinations must be open to transformation, either by directly questioning them or by reminding that hosts and especially guests are not limited to a single sex or species. In keeping with the unlimited character of the foreigner arrivant, where the hospitality described is neither specific 5. See below, 221n44.

x x i i ‡ T r a ns l at or’s No t e

nor specifically traditional, I have adopted the pronoun “they” preferentially to translate the French il. Short Glossary chez. For reasons discussed by Derrida at length,6 the translation of this term central to hospitality causes difficulties. Chez is a preposition indicating directionality or location, and chez moi is most often translated as referring to the place where hospitality is offered: “at, to, or in my house, my place.” Chez may also be extended to refer to a family or community as the “place” indicated, or even to the interiority of the self, the innermost being. It is also one manner of referring to a work, for instance, chez Kant, “in Kant’s work.” The form employing the third-person indeterminate pronoun, chez soi, will be translated as “at home”; where a determinate personal pronoun is involved (e.g., chez moi), the English formulation, “at my house, at my place,” will generally be preferred to the less idiomatic “at my home.” le droit. It is a recurrent dilemma whether to translate the noun droit as right or law (in the sense of ensemble of laws, legislative system, foundation of positive law). Kant’s treatise on Perpetual Peace, the text providing a springboard for Derrida’s reflection and heavily present throughout the first year of the hospitality seminar, makes use of the German term Recht, ordinarily translated by “right.” For that reason, and to avoid confusion with Derrida’s frequent use of the term loi (law), that translation has been generally followed. étranger. This term, which can be a noun or an adjective, is related to the term étrange, “strange.” The cognate for the noun form in English is “stranger,” as the outsider to any inside, but it can also be translated by the more pointedly political terms “foreign” and “foreigner.” In the third session, Derrida— taking into account what he calls the “semantic richness of the word étranger”— limits, at least provisionally and by way of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, the acceptation of the term to “every other human being who does not belong to a social body that goes by the name nation or state.”7 The term “foreigner” therefore seems the better equivalent to choose in English. The French term also appears in another expression relevant for the seminar, à l’étranger, meaning “abroad, in foreign parts.” hôte. In French, hôte means both host and guest. In the early part of the seminar, Derrida generally makes clear which of the two is meant, often by using the English terms. Later, after he discusses the open possibility of a substitu6. See 153–54 and 176–77. 7. See below, 53.

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tion of one for the other, it will not always be evident which English term is to be preferred. Where the case is ambiguous, the French term is provided in parentheses. même. In the second session, Derrida explores this term at some length. The problem it presents the translator derives partly from the fact that it may be an adjective, a pronoun, or an adverb, and partly from the fact that, through its meaning of ipseity, it enters into numerous idiomatic expressions. No single equivalent can be found for it and the task has not been attempted here. It may be translated according to context as “same” (la même chose, “the same thing,” tout de même, “all the same”); as “itself ” (la chose même, “the thing itself ”); as “even” (même la chose, “even the thing”); as “right next to, right on” (à même la chose, “right on the thing”); or as “to be able or qualified to” (elle est à même de faire cette chose, “she is able, qualified to do this thing”). Where deemed advisable, the term has been provided in French in parentheses, but it is too common a term for that to have been everywhere possible. pas. Pas is famously both the noun for “step” and a negative adverb meaning “not, no.” This ambiguity is foregrounded in the title of the fifth session, Pas d’hospitalité. The title can be translated as “No Hospitality,” announcing a discussion of the impossibility of hospitality, and also as “Step of Hospitality,” announcing instead a discussion of a coming hospitality, a progress in hospitality. The double translation “No Hospitality/Step of Hospitality” adopted here (following Rachel Bowlby’s translation in Of Hospitality,8 while reversing the order of the terms) is the awkward solution that seemed necessary for a pre-comprehension of the aporia that Derrida will lay out in that session. Beyond the thanks owed earlier translators of parts of this seminar, I want to give particular thanks to several individuals— Pascale-Anne Brault, Peggy Kamuf, Michael Naas, Kevin Newmark, Elizabeth Rottenberg, Janie Vanpée, Andrzej Warminski— who generously helped me find solutions to difficulties, as well as to all the members of the Derrida Seminar Translation Project, whose careful review of a late draft was invaluable in bringing polish to the translation. All responsibility for error and awkwardness is mine, but I am happy to own that any successes very likely derive from the suggestions of these friends and fellow translators. E. S. Burt 8. Derrida, Of Hospitality, 75.

Fir st Session

November 15, 19951

More than once, unfortunately, in sadness, I have dedicated the first session of a seminar to the memory of a friend; today I take leave with you of another friend, the great philosopher Gilles Deleuze. All that he thought, wrote, and did counted a great deal for me over decades. Some of you may perhaps remember that we read him together, right here, as we circled around the secret of “Bartleby the Scrivener,” of Melville and the “I would prefer not to,” in the same seminar on the secret, where we were also reading, at the same time, that other friend, Louis Marin.2 1. For the publication drawn from this session, see “Editor’s Note,” xiiin4. This first page of the first session bears numerous handwritten annotations. Some concern talks in French and English that were taken from this session. Featured there in particular is an English introductory sentence: “No doubt, I must have chosen this theme, hospitality, as a way of expressing gratitude to my hosts (colleagues, friends and students), to this university to which I have been generously invited during the last thirty years.” The reference to the last thirty years suggests that the university referred to is Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where Jacques Derrida gave his first public conference in the United States in 1966. See Jacques Derrida, “La structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines,” in L’Écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 409– 28; trans. Alan Bass, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Social Sciences,” in Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 278– 94. 2. See the first session of the seminar “Répondre— du secret” (unpublished, 1991– 92, EHESS, Paris); “Responding to/Answering for the Secret,” trans. Kevin Newmark, Yale French Studies, no. 125– 26 (2014): 7– 29. The session treats “Bartleby, ou la formule,” [postface by Gilles Deleuze to “Bartleby the Scrivener” in Herman Melville, Bartleby: Les Îles enchantées, trans. Michèle Causse (Paris: Flammarion, 1989); republished in Critique et clinique (Paris: Éd. de Minuit, 1993), 89– 114]. In the same session of this seminar on the secret, Derrida also referred to an essay by the philosopher and art historian Louis Marin, “Logiques du secret,” Traverses, nos. 30– 31 (1986): 60– 69. Gilles Deleuze died on November 4, 1995, and Louis Marin on October 29, 1992. For the texts Derrida wrote on the occasions of the death of these two friends, among many others, see J. Derrida, Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Paris: Galilée, 2003); trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas as The Work of Mourning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

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Even before beginning,3 I will read, reread with you, by way of an epigraph, a long and famous passage from Kant. I will read it without commenting on it today. Almost without comment. But in each of its words, it will keep watch over the whole of this seminar, over all the questions of hospitality, the historical questions, at the same time ageless, archaic, modern, current, or to come, that are magnetized by the simple word “hospitality,” the questions historical, ethical, juridical, political, economic, etc. Doubtless we will never stop interrogating this text of Kant, directly or not, implicitly or not, in its language or translations. As you have no doubt already guessed, I am referring, in Toward Perpetual Peace, to the famous Third Definitive Article of a Perpetual Peace (Dritter Definitivartikel zum ewigen Frieden), whose title is “Das Weltbürgerrecht soll auf Bedingungen der allgemeinen Hospitalität eingeschränkt sein”: “Cosmopolitan right shall be limited to conditions of universal hospitality.”4 Two terms are underlined by Kant in this title: “cosmopolitan right” (Weltbürgerrecht), right of world citizens: we are then indeed in the space of right and not of morals and politics or something else, but of a right determined in its relation to citizenship, that is to say, to the state, to the subject of the state, be it a world state; so it is a matter of international right— and we will again have much to say of international right here this year, as you might suspect. The other word underlined is “hospitality” (der allgemeinen Hospitalität, of universal hospitality). It is a matter, then, of defining the conditions of cosmopolitical right, a right whose terms would be established by a treaty among states, by a sort of UN Charter before the fact, and one of those conditions would be what Kant calls “universal hospitality,” die allgemeine Hospitalität. I quote this title in German to emphasize clearly that the word for “hospitality” is a Latin word (Hospitalität, a word of Latin origin, of a troubling and troubled origin, a word that bears something like its own contradiction incorporated into it, a Latin word that lets itself be parasitized by its opposite, “hostility,” the undesirable guest that it shelters as a self-contradiction in its own body, and that we will have to talk about again at length). Right from the first sentence of the article that I will now read, Kant will find for this Latin word, Hospitalität, a German equivalent, Wirtbarkeit (blackboard) (which he will place in parentheses as an equivalent of Hospitalität). Unfortunately, this German equivalent in parentheses is going to disappear from 3. Handwritten above the first line of this paragraph: “Do we know what hospitality is? What we call by this name?” 4. Immanuel Kant, Zum ewigen Frieden, ein philosophischer Entwurf (Leipzig: Philipp Reclam, 1954), 56; Toward Perpetual Peace, in Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 328.

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the French translation, recently published by Flammarion, to which I am referring.5 It will not only disappear, which would already be regrettable, but it will be replaced, which seems incredible, and truly unjustifiable even to the point of absurdity, by the Latin equivalent for Hospitalität, namely, hospitalitas; it is true that Kant, elsewhere, often makes use of a Latin word in parentheses, especially when it is a matter of right, but he does so there to recall the Latin equivalent or ancestor of the German word; whereas here he does the contrary: he makes use in German of a word of Latin descent, Hospitalität, and in parentheses he adds not hospitalitas, but the idiomatic German word, which makes the choice of the French translators, namely, the addition in parentheses of hospitalitas after Hospitalität, an oddity a little zany or comical, as if one wanted to correct Kant by returning him to his good habits, and to do so by suppressing a German word that asks to remain German by a word that is neither German nor French. (We will speak again often of translation and hospitality: basically, it is the same problem.) So Wirtbarkeit is the equivalent recalled by Kant. I’ll return to it in a minute. Kant writes: “Here, as in the preceding articles, it is not a question of philanthropy but of right (Es ist hier . . . nicht von Philanthropie, sondern vom Recht die Rede.)”6 (By specifying that it is a matter here of right and not philanthropy, Kant does not want to indicate, of course, that this right must be misanthropic, or even an-anthropic, it is a human right, this right to hospitality— and for us this already announces a serious question, the question of the anthropological dimension of hospitality or the right to hospitality: what is there to say, and can one speak about a hospitality to what is nonhuman, to the divine, for instance, to what is animal, vegetal? Does one owe hospitality, and is that the right word when it is a matter of welcoming— or of being welcomed by— the other or the foreigner, as god, animal, plant, to make use of these three conventional categories? We will constantly come back toward the horizon of these questions; I close this parenthesis). By underlining that it is a matter of right and not of philanthropy, then, Kant does not mean that the right to hospitality is a-human or inhuman but that it does not arise, qua right, from the love of humanity as a sentimental motive. Universal hospitality arises from an obligation, from a right and a duty regulated by law; elsewhere, in the Doctrine of the Elements of Ethics that concludes his Doctrine of Virtue,7 5. [Translator’s note:] The reference is to Immanuel Kant, Vers la paix perpétuelle, in Vers la paix perpétuelle, Que signifie s’orienter dans la pensée?, Qu’est-ce que les lumières?, et autres textes, trans. Jean-François Poirier and Françoise Proust (Paris: Flammarion, 1991), 93. 6. Ibid. (Derrida emphasizes “right.”) 7. Immanuel Kant, Die Metaphysik der Sitten, Zweiter Teil, Metaphysische Anfangsgründe des Tugendlehre, in Kants Werke, t. VI (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1968), ¶26 and ¶46–47,

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Kant distinguishes the philanthropist from what he calls “a friend of humanity” (and allow me to refer those who might be interested in this distinction to what I say about it in The Politics of Friendship, in the passage devoted to the “black swan,”8 288ff.). But let me return to this first sentence and to the German word that accompanies “Hospitalität” between parentheses: “Here, as in the preceding articles, it is not a question of philanthropy but of right, so that hospitality (hospitableness) (Wirtbarkeit) means the right of a foreigner (bedeutet das Recht eines Fremdlings) not to be treated with hostility because he has arrived on the land of another (seiner Ankunft auf den Boden eines andern wegen von diesem nicht feindselig behandelt zu werden).”9 Already, as you see, hospitality is opposed to what is nothing other than opposition itself, that is, hostility (Feindseligkeit). The welcomed guest is a foreigner treated as friend or ally, as opposed to the foreigner other treated as an enemy (friend-enemy, hospitality-hostility). The pair hospitality-hostility, about which we have not finished speaking, is in place, but let us leave it there for the moment. Before pursuing my simple reading or citation, I would like to underline the German word (Wirtbarkeit), added by Kant in parentheses, as the equivalent of the Latin Hospitalität. Wirt then (in the feminine, Wirtin), is at once the master and the host, the host10 who receives the Gast, the Gastgeber, the proprietor of a hotel, of a restaurant. Wirtlich, like Gastlich, signifies “hospitable,” “welcoming.” Wirtshaus is the café, cabaret, inn, the place that provides shelter. And Wirt rules over the whole lexicon of Wirtschaft, that is, of economy, so of oikonomia, the law of the house. The Wirt, the Gast, here is equally the one who, in the role of hôte (host and not guest11), receives, welcomes, offers hospitality in his hotel, and, first of all and for good reason, the one who is the master of the household, the boss, the master at home.12 Basically, even before setting out, we could stop our seminar here, with the formalizing of a law of hospitality that violently imprints a contradiction on the very concept of hospitality by setting limits on it, by determining it: hospitality, that’s good, we need it, it’s a right, a duty, an obligation, a law, it is the welpp. 147– 51; The Metaphysics of Morals in Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), ¶26, 569– 70, and ¶46–47, 584– 88. 8. See J. Derrida, Politiques de l’amitié, suivi de L’Oreille de Heidegger (Paris: Galilée, 1994), 288ff; trans. George Collins, The Politics of Friendship (London: Verso, 1997), 257ff. 9. Immanuel Kant, Zum ewigen . . . , 56; Toward Perpetual Peace, 328– 29. 10. [Translator’s note:] Host is in English in the text. 11. [Translator’s note:] Host and guest in English in the text. 12. The words chez soi (at home) are circled in the typescript and a caret of insertion, followed by “guests visitors,” appears in the margin.

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coming of the foreigner other as a friend, but on condition that the host,13 the Wirt, the one who receives or shelters or offers asylum, remain the proprietor, the master of the house, on condition that he guard the authority of the self at-home [l’autorité du soi chez-soi], that he guard himself and guard and watch over what concerns him (qu’il se garde et garde et regarde ce qui le regarde), and that he thus affirm the law of hospitality as the law of the house, oikonomia, law of his house, law of place (house, hotel, hospital, hospice, family, city, nation, language, etc.), the law of identity that delimits the very place of the hospitality offered and keeps authority over it, keeps the truth of authority, remains the place of safe-keeping [lieu de la garde], that is to say, of truth; and hence, limits the gift offered and makes of this limitation, that is, of the being-oneself at home, the condition of the gift and of hospitality. That is the principle both of the constitution and implosion of the concept of hospitality, whose effects, following my hypothesis, we will never cease to verify. This implosion, or if you prefer, this self-deconstruction having already taken place, we could, as I was saying, stop the seminar here. Hospitality is in itself a contradictory concept and experience, one that cannot but self-destruct or protect itself from itself, auto-immunize itself in a way, that is, deconstruct itself on its own—precisely [ justement]— rightly [ justement), by exercising itself. But so as not to stop this seminar here before even beginning, I am going to act as if we had as yet said nothing and we are going to continue for some time still, as if nothing had taken place, for weeks, months, or years. So, still by way of an epigraph, but this time without stopping, I am going to continue the reading of this text of Kant almost to the end. We could pause on every word, but as it is an epigraph, I won’t do so, I will keep on going. We will have a hundred chances to return to it later. (Read here Kant, Third Definitive article . . . , 93– 97.) Here, as in the preceding articles, it is not a question of philanthropy but of right, so that hospitality (hospitalitas) (Wirtbarkeit) means the right of a foreigner not to be treated with hostility (feindselig) because he has arrived on the land of another. The other can turn him away, if this can be done without destroying him, but as long as he behaves peaceably where he is, he cannot be treated with hostility. What he can claim is not the right to reside (Gastrecht) (for that a special beneficent pact would be required, making him a member of the household [Hausgenossen] for a certain time), but the right to visit (Besuchsrecht); this right, to present oneself for society, belongs to all human beings by virtue of the right of possession in common of the earth’s surface (vermöge des Rechts aus gemeinschaftlichen Besitzes des Oberfläche der Erde) on which, 13. [Translator’s note:] Host in English in the text.

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as a sphere, they cannot disperse infinitely but must finally put up with being near one another; but originally no one had more right than another to be on a place on the earth. Uninhabitable parts of the earth’s surface, seas and deserts, divide this community, but in such a way that ships or camels (ships of the desert) make it possible to approach one another over these regions belonging to no one (herrenlosen Gegenden), and to make use of the right to the earth’s surface, which belongs to the human race in common, for possible commerce. The inhospitableness of the inhabitants of sea coasts (for example, on the Barbary coast) in robbing ships in adjacent seas or enslaving stranded seafarers, or that of the inhabitants of deserts (the Arab Bedouins) in regarding approach to nomadic tribes as a right to plunder them, is therefore contrary to natural right (ist also dem Naturrecht zuwider); but this right to hospitality (welches Hospitalitätsrecht aber)— that is, the authorization of a foreign newcomer (der fremden Ankömmlinge)— does not extend beyond the conditions which make it possible to seek to commerce with the old inhabitants. In this way, distant parts of the world can enter peaceably into relations with one another, which can eventually become publicly lawful and so finally bring the human race ever closer to a cosmopolitan constitution . If one compares with this the inhospitable behavior (das inhospitale Betragen) of civilized, especially commercial, states in our part of the world, the injustice (die Ungerechtigkeit) they show in visiting foreign lands and peoples (die sie in dem Besuche fremder Länder und Völker) (which with them is tantamount to conquering them) goes to lengths that horrify [Erschrecken, so, condemnation of violent colonization]. When America, the negro countries, the Spice Islands, the Cape, and so forth, were discovered, they were, to them, countries belonging to no one, since they counted the inhabitants as nothing. In the East Indies (Hindustan), they brought in foreign soldiers under the pretext of merely proposing to set up trading posts, but with them, oppression of the inhabitants, incitement of the various Indian states to widespread wars, famine, rebellions, treachery, and the whole litany of troubles that oppress the human race. China and Japan (Nipon), which had given such guests (Gästen) a try, have therefore wisely placed restrictions on them, the former allowing them access but not entry, the latter even allowing access to only a single European people, the Dutch, but excluding them, like prisoners, from community with the natives. The worst of this (or, considered from the standpoint of a moral judge, the best) is that the commercial states do not even profit from this violence; that all these trading companies are on the verge of collapse; that the Sugar Islands, that place of the cruelest and most calculated slavery, yield no true profit but serve only a mediate and indeed not very laudable purpose, namely, training

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sailors for warships, and so, in turn, carrying on wars in Europe, and this for powers that make much ado of their piety and, while they drink wrongfulness in like water, want to be known as the elect in orthodoxy. Since the (narrower or wider) community of the nations of the earth has now gone so far that a violation of right on one place of the world is felt in all , the idea of a cosmopolitan right is no fantastic and exaggerated way of representing right; it is, instead, a necessary supplement to the unwritten code of the right of a state and the right of nations necessary for the sake of any public rights of human beings and so for perpetual peace ; only under this condition can we flatter ourselves that we are constantly approaching perpetual peace .14

Now we begin, or we pretend to open the door of the seminar. We are on the threshold. Nous ne savons pas ce que c’est que l’hospitalité. We do not know what hospitality is.15 Not yet. Not yet, but will we ever know? Is this a question of knowledge and a question of time? There it is then, in any case, the phrase that I address to you, just as I have already addressed it to you, and that I now place in quotation marks: “We do not know what hospitality is.” This is a phrase I address to you in French, in my language, at home [chez moi], so as to begin and as if to wish you welcome into this seminar where I take the floor first, in my language, which seems to assume that I am here at home, master of my home, that I receive you, invite, accept, or welcome you, allow you to come and pass the threshold, while saying to you “welcome.”16 I repeat— listen well, receive well— what I am going to say to you once again. (Repeat all that precedes.) Already, as you have heard, I have used, have been further using up, the most used-up words in the code of hospitality, whose lexicon is made up of the words 14. Kant, Zum ewigen . . . , 56– 60; Towards perpetual . . . , 328– 31). [Translator’s note:] Translation modified. 15. In the typescript above this sentence, handwritten, there appears: “I asked in beginning: do we know what hospitality is. Now I am venturing a response.” 16. [Translator’s note:] In English in the text. During the session, Derrida translates, adding: “bienvenue.”

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“to invite,” “welcome,” “receive,” “accept,” receive “at home” when one is “master at home,” and from the threshold of the house, to be the first to speak in one’s own language as master at home and to wish “welcome,” to give the floor to the other on condition that they not interrupt you for long, not in another language, not too often, etc. Given this, to address, as a host to a guest,17 the first sentence with which I began, “We do not know what hospitality is,” seems to contradict, in a selfcontradiction, a performative contradiction, all that I have just recalled, namely, that we understand all these words very well, and that they belong to the everyday lexicon or common semantics of hospitality, of any pre-understanding of what “hospitality” is and means, namely, to “welcome,” “accept,” “invite,” “receive,” “wish someone welcome into one’s home,” where at home one is the master of the house, or the master of the city, or the master of the nation, the language, or the master of the state— places from which one wishes the other welcome (but what is a “welcome”?) and grants a sort of right of asylum in authorizing the other to cross a threshold that is a threshold, a threshold determinable because self-identical and indivisible, one whose line is traced (the door of a house, a human house, family or house of god, temple or hôtel-dieu,18 hospice, hospital or hospitable hotel, border of a city or a country, or of a language, etc.). We assume we fully understand these usual words in the French language— where I am as if at home— and in all that it translates (and we noted a little while ago that translation too is a phenomenon or enigmatic experience of hospitality, if not the condition of every hospitality in general). And nonetheless, even while we understand one another fairly well, I suppose, on the meaning or pre-understanding of this whole vocabulary of hospitality and of what are called the laws “of hospitality,” I have dared to begin by saying to you, as if in a manner of “welcome”: “We do not know what hospitality is.” It is a performative contradiction, apparently, to wish someone welcome while admitting that one does not know what “welcome” means, and that perhaps none are perfectly welcome; a performative contradiction as unusual and disconcerting as an apostrophe of the kind “O my friends, there is no friend,”19 an apostrophe to whose meaning and consequences this contradiction is doubtless not completely foreign, always supposing that we know what 17. [Translator’s note:] A host to a guest is in English in the text. 18. [Translator’s note:] In the medieval period, a hôtel-dieu, literally, a hostel of God, was the name for any institutional shelter that housed the poor and sick. 19. See Derrida, Seminar “Politiques de l’amitié” (unpublished, 1988– 89, EHESS, Paris) and Politiques de l’amitié; Politics of Friendship.

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“foreign” [étranger] means— and there once again is concentrated the whole question of hospitality. So, I owe you, as my guests, an explanation. This little phrase: “we do not know what hospitality is,” which implicates us, which has already implicated you high-handedly, in advance, in a “we,” and which speaks French, can have several acceptations. At least three and doubtless more than four. Before beginning to unfold them, note in passing that the French term acception,20 from accipere or acceptio, and which in French means the sense that is given to a word (and which many make the tempting mistake of confusing with the French acceptation), this term “acception” also belongs precisely to the discourse of hospitality; it is lodged at the heart of the discourse of hospitality. Acceptation, in Latin, is, like acceptance, the act of receiving, the welcome accorded, the manner in which is received (and here you sense already that this whole seminar on hospitality will be a seminar on what “receive” might mean, as a postscript to Plato’s Timaeus, in which khōra,21 place, is that which receives [endekhomai, endekhomenon], the receptacle [dekhomenon, which can signify also “it is acceptable, permitted, possible”]); in Latin, acceptio is the act of receiving, the reception, the welcome (“reception” and “admission” [accueil] are also the words that you often read at the entrance of hotels and hospitals, of what were once also called hospices, places of public hospitality). The “acceptor” is the one who receives, gives welcome, reserves, as we also say, a welcome or who approves, accepts the other and what the other says or does. When I said that I speak here, at home, my language of French, that also means that I am more welcoming to Latin, to the Latinate languages, than to others, and you see how violently I am behaving as master of my home, at the very moment of welcoming. Accepto, the frequentative of accipio (that is, of the verb that counts the most here, accipio, which means “to take,” capere, or “comprehend” so as to bring to oneself, “to receive,” to welcome), signifies “to have the habit of receiving.” Accepto: I am in the habit of receiving, of making welcome, and, in that respect, from that point of view, it is almost synonymous with recipio, which means both “to take in return,” again, and “to receive,” “to welcome,” “to accept,” the re- of recipio sometimes having the meaning of return and repeti20. [Translator’s note:] The French term “acception” corresponds to the English term, “acceptation,” whereas the French term “acceptation” corresponds to the English term, “acceptance.” 21. See Jacques Derrida, Khôra, Paris: Galilée, 1993, 61ff; “Khōra,” in On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit, trans. Ian McLeod (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 95ff. The reference to Plato is to the Timaeus, 48eff.

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tion, anew of the “new” in renew (du nouveau de “de nouveau,” à nouveau), and sometimes— where the re- is erased from receive in the sense of welcome— of accepting, be it for the first time. You can already see that, besides the idea of necessary repetition and thus of law, iterability and the law of iterability at the heart of any law of hospitality, we have there, with the semantics of acceptation and acceptance, of reception, the double postulate of giving and taking (capere), of giving and of taking into oneself and one’s home, not for a single time but by expressing one’s readiness to repeat, to renew, to continue from the first time on. “Yes, yes, welcome, welcome everyone.”22 Hospitality, at home, gives and takes “home” more than once. It gives, offers, extends, but what it gives, offers, extends is a welcome that comprehends and summons or lets come to one’s home, bending the foreigner other to the interior law of the host (host,23 Wirt, etc.) who has a tendency to begin by dictating the law of his language and his own acceptation of the meaning of words, which is to say also his own concepts. The acceptation of words is also the concept, the Begriff, the manner in which one seizes or comprehends, takes, apprehends the meaning of a word in giving it a meaning. I was saying then that the sentence I had addressed to you, namely, “We do not know what hospitality is,” can have several acceptations. At least three and doubtless more than four. 1. The first acceptation would depend on the stress placed on the word “know”: we do not know, we do not know what hospitality is. This nonknowledge is not necessarily a deficiency, infirmity, lack. Its apparent negativity, this grammatical negativity (the non-knowledge), would not signify ignorance but would signal or recall only that hospitality is not a concept that lends itself to objective knowledge. Certainly, there is a concept of hospitality, of meaning of this word hospitality, and we have some pre-comprehension of it. Otherwise, we could not speak of it, assuming that we speak of it knowing what it means to speak. But on the one hand, what we pre-understand in this way, as we shall verify, is recalcitrant to a self-identity or a consistent and stabilizable, objective, conceptual determination. On the other hand, that of which this concept is the concept is not, is not a being (un étant), is not something which, as a being, thing, or object, could belong to knowledge. Hospitality, if there is any, is an “experience,” in the most enigmatic sense of this term, that not only— beyond the thing, object, present being— calls for the act and intention, but is also an intentional experience that carries itself, beyond knowl22. During the session, Derrida adds: “Yes, yes, today and tomorrow, now and in a little while, stay, make yourself at home.” 23. [Translator’s note:] In English in the text.

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edge, toward the other as absolute foreigner, as unknown, where I know that I know nothing about him. (We will return shortly or later to the distinction, so difficult and so necessary, between these two concepts that are nonetheless indissociable, the other and the foreigner, a distinction nonetheless indispensable if one wants to delineate any specific feature of hospitality.) Thus, doubtless it is necessary to know all that one can know of hospitality, and there is so much to be known; certainly, it is necessary to carry this knowledge to the highest and fullest consciousness possible; but it is also necessary to know that hospitality is given, and that it gives itself to being thought beyond knowledge. (Let me say in passing and within parentheses, on the matter of knowledge, I am not going to indicate any preliminary bibliography to you, I almost never do; it would be an enormous one in this case, but I bring to your attention right away— besides, as always, the Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society by Benveniste, book I, chapter 7, on hospitality, which I will be talking about in a minute, and then his article “Semantic Problems of Reconstruction,” in his Problems of General Linguistics— a book published after the death of my friend Henri Joly, Études platoniciennes: Question des Étrangers [Vrin, 1992]; and then a recently published special issue of the journal Plein Droit, which is the journal of the GISTI [Group for the Information and Support of Immigrant Workers], number 29– 30, from November 1995, devoted to— it’s the title of the issue— “50 Years of Legislation on Foreigners.” Found there, concerning the French example of course, but calling for fascinating comparative analyses, are a large number of articles and a wealth of legal documents and reflections on the condition of the foreigner in France, on immigration, the right to asylum, the right of residence, the nationality code, the motives for and limits to the welcome afforded foreigners in this country, in brief, not foreign policy but the policy on foreigners in France and its relative continuity over more than fifty years, before and since the famous Order of November 2, 1945,24 and the nationality code defined by the Order of October 19, 1945,25 [possibly read several extracts, pp. 33– 35].26 I do not know if this journal is easily found 24. See “Ordonnance, no. 45-2658 du 2 novembre 1945 relative aux conditions d’entrée et de séjour en France”; https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/loda/id/JORFTEXT000000699737. 25. The Ordonnance no. 45-2447 of October 19, 1945, concerned the code of French nationality. Consisting of 164 articles, the Order was set in place by the Provisional Government of the French Republic whose counsel president was Charles de Gaulle. 26. During the session, Derrida adds: “I was going to quote— I am not going to read extracts, it would take too long— the ninth article, ‘Foreigners sojourning in France are classified, according to the length of their sojourn, as temporary foreign residents, ordinary foreign residents, and foreign residents with special privileges, etc., etc.’ All this is very interesting. ‘Diverse dispositions . . .’ I am reading at random, but I invite you to read all these

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for sale, but it is distributed by “Diffusion Populaire,” 21b rue Voltaire, Paris, eleventh arrondissement, and you can subscribe by writing to the journal Plein Droit, 30 rue des Petites Écuries, Paris, 75010, CCP 30 132 02 V [180 francs for four issues]. Do that; it will help you; it will help them too; they need it; they do good work.) 2. The second acceptation of this apparently negative sentence, “We do not know what hospitality is,”27 could seem wrapped up in the first. If we do not know what hospitality is, that is because it is not, it is not a present being. This intentional act, this address or this invitation, this experience that calls and addresses itself to the other as foreign to say “welcome,” is not, in several senses of not-being, I do not say of nothingness. First, it is not because it often is proclaimed (but this will be one of our major problems) as a law, duty or right, obligation, thus, as an ought-to-be rather than a being or existent (28and without even referring to Kant’s text with which we opened this session, a juridical text that defines the foreigner’s right, thus, reciprocally, the duty or obligation of hospitality on the part of the host29 who is master of the house, who is who he is at home, and without invoking too all the texts that can be inscribed under the title “The laws of hospitality”— in particular that of Klossowski in Roberte ce soir, a text to which we will of course return and which indeed analyzes an internal and essential contradiction of hospitality, a contradiction that can already be anticipated, beginning with that sort of preface or protocol entitled “Difficulties” in which the temporal contradiction of hospitality is such that the experience cannot last; it can only pre-form itself in the imminence of what is “on the verge of happening” and can last only an instant, an instant exactly because a contradiction cannot last without becoming dialectical (Kierkegaarddocuments, which are essential today if one wants to understand anything about the policies of this country, and in general: ‘The foreigner undergoing naturalization, whose name contains sounds difficult to pronounce, by the same decree that confers naturalization on him, may upon request in future be authorized, together with his minor children, to bear his patronymic under a Gallicized form. The modification can only concern spelling, and excludes any change of name, which remains subject to the procedure specified in the law of the 11th Germinal, year I.’” 27. During the session, Derrida adds: “I wanted to quote to you, pardon me, in the same order of ideas, you are no doubt attentive to this today, the trials now going on, notably in Brittany, under the rubric of ‘Crime of Hospitality.’ They concern Bretons who sheltered Basques, I do not want to enter here into the content of the trial, it is spoken about every where, on television in particular, but what is interesting is that it is called ‘Crime of Hospitality.’” On this trial, see below, 69, and Jacques Derrida, “Quand j’ai entendu l’expression ‘délit d’hospitalité ’. . . .” Also see “Editor’s Note” above, xivn9. 28. The parenthesis is not closed in the text. [Translator’s note:] The sentence that opens it is not complete. 29. [Translator’s note:] In English in the text.

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ian paradox) and one cannot, says the text, “at once take and not take.” I read these “Difficulties” very quickly, underlining this temporal contradiction and the prefatory or protocollary place of these “Difficulties” in relation to the text or code called “The Laws of Hospitality.” (Read and comment on “Difficulties,” in Roberte ce soir, pp. 10– 11.) When my Uncle Octave took my Aunt Roberte in his arms, one must not suppose that he was alone in taking her. An invited guest would enter while Roberte, entirely given over to my uncle’s presence, was not expecting him, and while she was in fear lest the guest arrive— for with irresistible resolution Roberte was awaiting the arrival of some guest— the guest would already be looming up behind her as my uncle made his entry, just in time to surprise my aunt’s satisfied fright at being surprised by the guest. But in my uncle’s mind it was over in an instant, and once again my uncle would be on the point of taking my aunt in his arms. It was over in an instant . . . for, after all, one cannot at the same time take and not take, be there and not be there, enter when one is already inside. My Uncle Octave would have been asking too much had he wished to prolong the instant of the opened door; he was already doing exceedingly well in getting the guest to appear at the door, and the instant after, to loom up behind Roberte so that he, Octave, might be able to feel that he himself was the guest when, borrowing from the guest his door-opening gesture, coming in from the outside, he could behold them from there with the impression it was he, Octave, who was taking my aunt by surprise. Nothing could give a better idea of my uncle’s mentality than these hand-written pages he had framed under glass and then hung on the wall of the room reserved for visitors, just above the bed, a spray of wildflowers fading over the old-fashioned frame: The Laws of Hospitality30

The laws of hospitality properly speaking will be marked by this contradiction inscribed in the essence of the hostess— for of course the interest, one of the interests of Klossowski’s book is to have treated the problem of hospitality while rendering the sharpest and most painful, but also most ecstatic account of sexual difference in a couple and in the relation of a couple to a third (to the terstis31 who is here both witness and invitee),— a contradiction, of course, inscribed in the essence of the hostess, which Klossowski analyzes, as he often does, in the theologico-scholastic language of essence and existence, and which must lead, according to a necessity that we will often put to the test, to a rever30. Pierre Klossowski, Roberte ce soir (Paris: Minuit, 1953), 10– 11; Roberte ce soir in Roberte Ce Soir and The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes: Two Novels by Pierre Klossowski, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Marion Boyars, 1989), 11– 12. [Translator’s note:] Translation modified. 31. See Jacques Derrida, Seminar “Le témoignage” (unpublished, 1993– 94, EHESS, Paris) and Seminar “Secret témoignage” (unpublished, 1994– 95, EHESS, Paris).

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sal according to which the master of the house, the master at home, the host32 will be able to fulfill his mission of host, thus, of hospitality, only by being invited by the other into his own home, welcomed by the one he welcomes, by receiving the hospitality that he gives. I will settle for reading just two passages from the “Laws of Hospitality,” pending a return to them later, one of which describes the contradiction in the essence of the hostess, the other of which, in conclusion, tells of the final reversal of the roles of host and guest [de l’hôte et de l’hôte], of the inviting host [hôte] as host33 (master at home) and the invited guest [hôte] as guest,34 of the inviting and the invited, of the becominginvited, if you like, of the one inviting. The inviter becomes as it were the hostage of the invitee, his guest, the hostage of the one he receives and who keeps him at home. It will be necessary, it would be necessary for us in this seminar to undertake a lengthy study of the hostage, the logic, economy, politics of the hostage. The French word otage, for whose ordinary meaning the Littré contests any derivation from ostage, which itself derives from hoste, oste, and which in certain thirteenth-century texts could signify what we today call a hostage; according to Littré, otage would come from the contraction hostaticum from obsidaticum, from obsudatus, which means “pledge,” from obses, obsiditis, “hostage, hostage of war” (uncontestable), from obsidere, “occupy, possess, indeed besiege, obsess”; The Robert35 makes less fuss about deriving otage from hostage, which means “lodging, residence,” a place where guests are lodged, hostages having been first lodged at the sovereign’s residence, precisely as pledges, guarantees, sureties for the enemy. I have not researched the etymology more seriously, but it is incontestable that obses means “hostage of war” in Latin; incidentally, the two etymologies ally easily with one another: in both cases, the hostage is the pledge of an occupation; the hostage is the pledge for the other, held in place and place-holding. It will be necessary to pursue this terrifying and implacable strategy of the hostage, as much in the direction of a modernity and a techno-political specificity to hostage-taking (which today is not what it was only a few decades ago), as in the direction (the inverse, so to speak) of what Levinas calls the hostage when he says that the exercise of ethical responsibility begins where I am and must be the hostage of the other, passively delivered over to the other before 32. [Translator’s note:] Host in English in the original. 33. [Translator’s note:] Host in English in the original. 34. [Translator’s note:] Guest in English in the original. 35. [Translator’s note:] Dictionnaire de la langue française, by É. Littré, 4 vols. plus supplement (Paris: Hachette, 1863). Le Grand Robert de la langue française, 6 vols., Paul Robert and Alain Rey (Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1953).

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belonging to myself (the theme of obsession, obsidionality,36 persecution also, which incidentally plays an essential role indissociable from that of the hostage in the discourse of Levinas about responsibility before the other; that discourse supposes that I am, in a non-negative meaning of the term, originarily, qua self, myself, insofar as I say “here I am,” a subjected, substitutable subject, the hostage of another It is through the condition of being hostage that there can be pity, compassion, pardon, and proximity in the world,” [says Levinas in “Substitution”37]; or again, and here the word “ipseity” will be of the utmost importance to us: “The ipseity in the passivity without arche characteristic of identity, is a hostage. The word ‘I’ answers for everything and for everyone”38 (“Substitution,” p. 500, in Revue Philosophique de Louvain, August 1968, reprinted in Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence, pp. 142–45, where the sentence “The word ‘I’ would answer for everything and for everyone” becomes “The word I means here I am, answering for everything and for everyone.”39 Two pages earlier we find the resonant phrase that it would obviously be necessary to analyze in context and along the logic of what Levinas here calls substitution, the subject as the subject of substitution, hence the phrase: “A subject is a hostage,” p. 142]).40 And then there is Sygne de Coûfontaine from Claudel’s Hostage, which we ought to read together, as we ought to read “The Exchange.”41 (Read Roberte ce soir p. 11 H, then pp. 13– 15 HI.42) 36. [Translator’s note:] This substantive is rare in French, although its adjectival form, obsidional, “relative to what concerns the siege of a town,” is not. Through its more particular meaning of “feeling of being besieged,” in various expressions the term has the pathological meaning of “persecution complex,” “siege mentality.” The English neologism “obsidionality” coined by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas in translating Derrida’s Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999) keeps the etymological relation to “obsession” (57 and 84) and seems preferable for this reason. 37. Emmanuel Levinas, Autrement qu’être, ou au-delà de l’essence (Amsterdam: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978); Otherwise Than Being; or, Beyond Essence, trans. Alfonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University, 1998), 117. 38. During the session, Derrida clarifies: “So, ‘I’ is hostage. I can say ‘I’ to the extent that I am a hostage. To say ‘I’ is to present oneself as hostage, responding for everyone and everything, guarantee, pledge for everyone and everything: ‘Here I am.’” 39. Levinas, Autrement, 150; Otherwise, 114. 40. Levinas, 142; 112. 41. Paul Claudel’s play, The Hostage, written 1908– 10, was published in 1911; the play The Exchange, whose first version goes back to 1894, appeared in a second version in 1951. 42. “H” and “H1” designate passages to be cited in the margins of the photocopy of the Klossowski text that accompanies the typescript. Derrida often used this manner of identifying passages to be read during sessions; no further mention of it will be made in the text.

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The master of this house, having no more pressing concern than to shed the warmth of his joy upon whoever, at evening, comes to dine at his table and to rest under his roof from a day’s wearying travel, waits anxiously upon the threshold of his house for the stranger he will see appear like a liberator upon the horizon. And catching a first glimpse of him in the distance, though he be still far off, the master will hasten to call out to him, “Come in quickly, for I fear my happiness.” This is why the master will be grateful in advance to anybody who, rather than considering hospitality as an accident in the souls of he and she who offer it, shall take it as the very essence of the host and hostess, the stranger himself coming as a third party to partake of this essence in his guest’s capacity. For with the stranger he welcomes, the master of the house seeks a no longer accidental, but an essential relationship. . . . Now it seems that the essence of the hostess, such as the host visualizes it, would in this sense be undetermined and contradictory. For either the essence of the hostess is constituted by her fidelity to the host, and in this case she eludes him the more he wishes to know her in the opposite state of betrayal, for she would be unable to betray him in order to be faithful to him; or else the essence of the hostess is really constituted by infidelity and then the host would cease to have any part in the essence of the hostess who would be susceptible of belonging, accidentally, as mistress of the house, to some one or other of the guests . The notion of mistress of the house reposes upon an existential basis; she is a hostess only upon an existential basis. This essence is therefore limited by its actualization in her existence as mistress of the house. And here the sole function of betrayal, we see, is to lift this limit. If the essence of the hostess lies in fidelity to the host, this allows the host to cause the hostess, essential in the existing mistress of the house, to manifest herself before the eyes of the guest; for the host can play host only at the risk of losing, since he counts on her for the strict application of the rules of hospitality and since she cannot escape her essence, consisting in fidelity to the host, for fear that in the arms of the inactual guest come here to actualize her qua hostess, the mistress of the household exist only traitorously.43

If we do not know what hospitality is, it is then because this thing that is not some thing is not the object of a knowledge, nor is it in the mode of beingpresent, but is at least in the mode of the law of the ought-to-be or obligation, of a law of hospitality whose imperative seems, in addition, contradictory or paradoxical. 3. But there is yet a third acceptation, or third inflection, a third stress of the same sentence. This third stress seems also to have a relation to time and to an essential a-chrony or anachrony, indeed even to the paradoxical instant we have 43. Klossowski, Roberte ce soir, 12– 14; Roberte Ce Soir, 12– 13. [Translator’s note:] Translation modified.

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just been discussing; but in truth it is a matter of another experience, another dimension of time and space. “We do not know what hospitality is” would imply “we do not yet know what hospitality is,” in a sense of “not yet” that remains to be thought: “not yet” not because we will know better tomorrow in the future, in the future present, but “not yet” for two other types of reasons: A. On the one hand, the system of right— of national or international right, the political system that determines the obligations and limits of hospitality, the system of European right of which Kant’s text read at the beginning gives us at least an idea, the regulative Idea, and a very exalted idea— this system of right and the concept of the political, or even of the cosmopolitical that his text inscribes and prescribes, has a history, even if only the history of the concept of history, teleology, and the regulative Idea that it implements. This history and this history of history call up questions and delimitations (about which we will speak again, of course) that authorize one to think that the determination and the experience of hospitality maintain a future beyond this history and this thinking of history— and that we therefore do not yet know what hospitality is beyond this European right, this universally European right.44 B. And above all, on the other hand, the “not yet” can define the very dimension of what, always from the future to come, comes from hospitality, is called hospitality, and remains called for by hospitality. What we call hospitality maintains an essential relation to the opening of what is called to come [à venir]. When we say that “we do not yet know what hospitality is,” we imply also that we do not yet know who or what is going to come, any more than what is called “hospitality,” or what is called for45 [s’appelle] in hospitality, namely, that hospitality, first off, is called for [ça s’appelle], even if that call is not embodied in human language.46 To call the other, call one another, invite, invite one another, summon one another or let come and come well, to greet, to greet one 44. During the session, Derrida clarifies: “In the sense that it is this right inscribed in international institutions, which are today governed by a European logic, and by a European concept of the state, and by a European concept of hospitality.” In the margins of this paragraph appears a handwritten note: “limits of cosmopolitanism.” 45. [Translator’s note]: Appeler means “to call” in all the English senses of the term, and has the further legal sense, “to appeal.” S’appeler, with its pronoun se, can imply reciprocity among speakers who call one another. Along with this idea of reciprocity comes that of “calling for, summoning up” as here, “ce qui s’appelle dans l’hospitalité, what is called for in hospitality.” The pronoun se may also be reflexive, however: “Je m’appelle” means, literally, “I call myself,” or, more idiomatically, “my name is.” 46. During the session, Derrida adds: “Nor in a language that might be, to make use of traditional categories, divine or animal; once, stupidly, or let us say, massively, once hospitality is determined as a human thing, once it is forbidden to speak of hospitality with respect

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another in sign of welcome, these are so many experiences that come from the future, that come from seeing come or from letting come without seeing come, no less than from the “not” [pas] or the “step” [pas], so from the “not yet/again a step” [“du pas encore”] the past “not yet/again a step” of the no/step that passes over the threshold [du “pas encore” passé du pas qui passe le seuil].47 That which is called hospitality and which we do not as yet know— that is what calls. And although “to call” [s’appeler] is an untranslatable French grammatical form (and the question of translation is always the question of hospitality), although “to call” [s’appeler]— that is its untranslatable privilege in the French idiom— can be reflexive or non-reflexive (on the one hand, I can call myself [ je m’appelle] such and such, he or she calls himself or herself [il ou elle s’appelle] by this name; on the other hand, we call one another, masculine or feminine [on s’appelle l’un l’autre, l’une l’autre]), although all this is very French then, I would refer here nonetheless to a famous text of Heidegger, Was heisst Denken? (1951– 52, trans. Granel, Qu’appelle-t-on penser? [Presses Universitaires de France, 1959]). In this text, Heidegger says at least two things of the highest importance for us and that I pick out, then, too quickly. You will broaden and complete this reading for yourselves. On the one hand, in the opening pages, which I leave you to read, he insists at length that “Most thought-provoking is that we are still not thinking— ‘not even yet,’ [the most disquieting, the most serious, the strangest or the most dubious, das Bedenklichste, is that we are not yet thinking: Das Bedenklichste ist, daß wir noch nicht denken; immer noch nicht48 . . . , still not yet.]” And further on, after having noticed that “Das Bedenklichste in unserer bedenkliche Zeit ist, daß wir noch nicht denken (the strangest and most disquieting thing in our strange and disquieting time is that we are still not thinking),” he determines the noun “das Bedenkliche” as “was uns zu denken gibt,” what gives us to think, which no doubt justifies Granel’s somewhat contrived choice to translate consistently to God, the animal or plants, one can already say that there is something about hospitality that one is not yet thinking.” 47. [Translator’s note]: As noted in the “Translator’s Preface,” pas is both the noun for “step” and a negative adverb meaning “not, no.” Encore can mean “again” or “yet, still.” Hence, “un pas encore” can be translated either as “a not-yet, a deferral” or as “again a step, another step.” 48. Martin Heidegger, Was heißt Denken? (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1971), 2, in Gesamtausgabe 8, ed. Paola-Ludivika Coriando (Frankfurt-am-Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2002), 6; What Is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper, 1968), 4. During the session, Derrida translates again: “Das Bedenklichste, that is to say, the most disquieting, most serious, most bizarre, gravest, the most suspect, what Granel translates by ‘what gives the most to think,’ the most troubling.”

F i r s t S e s s ion ‡ 19

das Bedenkliche as “ce qui donne à penser” (what is given to be thought); das Bedenklichiste, what is given the most to be thought. But what I would especially like to recall from this book, once again unfortunately too quickly, is precisely what is in play with the “to call/to be called” [s’appeler], the “heißen,” which means “to mean,” doubtless, to be called, to call (was heißt Denken?: what is called thinking? What does thinking mean? For das heißt means “that means, that is to say”; but heißen also, or first of all, means to call, invite, name: jenen willkommen heißen is to wish someone welcome, address a word of welcome to someone. And when he analyzes the four meanings of the expression was heißt Denken? [I refer you to this, it’s on p. 127 of the French translation, at the beginning of the “Second Part,” the summer semester course of 1952, p. 79 of the original], he notes in the fourth place that it also means “What is it that calls us to thinking? Was ist es, das uns heißt, uns gleichsam befiehlt, zu denken? Was ist es, das uns in das Denken ruft? What is it that calls us, to thinking, toward the thinking of thought, by giving us the command,49 the call to answer present, here I am?”)50 There is no simple play on words here, as Heidegger emphasizes, and I invite you to read all these pages (I too have attempted to do it, elsewhere),51 in particular, to read what, in these pages, brings this call or this invitation of Heißen back to the promise (Verheißung), to the alliance and the yes of acqui49. During the session, Derrida adds: “I have insisted on the fact that the tension or the perversion of the invitation seems to me at the heart of this logic. When one invites someone, the very gesture of hospitality— ‘come, I beg of you’— presupposes two contradictory gestures: it presupposes freedom left to the other; ‘I invite you,’ that means, ‘you are not obliged to come,’ otherwise, it is not an invitation, it is an order or an imprisonment: I invite you, but because it is an invitation, you are free not to come. But at the same time, at the moment that I invite you, I do not say: ‘If you don’t come, I couldn’t care less’ [Laughter]; I say to you: ‘I would prefer that you come, you are free, but I would prefer that you come,’ and so symbolic pressure is beginning to be exerted. Thus, the injunction, without destroying the freedom of the other, nonetheless exerts a hold, and that is the paradox: a true invitation leaves the other free without leaving them free. Once again, what would an invitation be that would leave the other entirely free, that would say to the other: ‘Are you coming? Come, if you like; if you don’t come, then you don’t come.’ It is not exactly what we call an invitation. This paradox of the invitation is obviously at the heart of hospitality.” 50. Heidegger, Was heißt Denken?, 79; What Is Called Thinking?, 114. 51. See Jacques Derrida, “La main de Heidegger (Geschlecht II),” in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre, vol. 2 (Paris: Galilée, 2003), 41– 50; “Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand,” trans. John P. Leavey Jr., in Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida, ed. John Sallis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 161– 96; rptd. in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. 2, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 27– 62.

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escence before the question (Zusage, ein Zugesagtes), to what is promised (ein Versprochenes). But, as I have just returned from Freiburg im Breisgau where, for the first time as a visitor, a few days ago,52 I crossed the threshold of Heidegger’s mountain hut, I have chosen to quote another passage from Was heißt Denken? which at the same time names Freiburg im Breisgau, as this city Freiburg where the course was given is called, alludes to a certain hut in the mountains, and says something essential about the call and hospitality. Here then is what Heidegger says at the end of the Course, in the summing up called the Summary and Transition, from the first to the second hour (pp. 228– 29, in the French translation, which I will now read while indicating here or there the German words): (Read Was heißt Denken? Fr. tr. p. 228 H, German, p. 151 passim).

42

The ambiguity of the question (Die Mehrdeutigkeit der Frage) “What is called thinking?” lies in the ambiguity of the questioning verb “to call” (heißen). Our town is called Freiburg im Breisgau. It has this name. (Die hiesige Stadt heißt Freiburg im Breisgau. Sie hat diesen Namen). The frequent idiom “das heißt” (that means) signifies: what we have just said is meant in reality in this or that way, is to be understood this way or that. Instead of “das heißt,” we also use the idiom “das will sagen” (that is to say). On a day of changeable weather, someone might leave a mountain cabin, alone, to climb a peak (Jemand verläßt bei unsicherem Wetter und gar noch allein eine Berghütte zu einer Gipfelbesteigung). He soon loses his way in a fog that has suddenly descended. He has no notion of what is meant (es heißt) by mountaineering. He does not know any of the things it calls for, all the things that must be taken into account and mastered. A voice bids to us to have hope (Eine Stimme heißt uns hoffen). It beckons us toward hope, invites us (Sie winkt uns das Hoffen zu, lädt dazu ein), commands us to hope (befiehlt uns der Hoffnung an), directs us to hope . Our town is called Freiburg im Breisgau. It is so named because that is what it has been called (Die hiesige Stadt heißt Freiburg i. Br. Sie wird so genannt, weil sie so geheißen worden). This means: the town has been called to assume this name (sie wurde in diesen Namen gerufen). Henceforth it holds itself at the call of this name to which it has been commended. To call is not originally to name, but the other way around: naming is a kind of calling, in the original sense of demanding and commending (Heißen ist nicht ursprünglich nennen, sondern umgekehrt; das Nennen ist eine Art von Heißen im ursprünglichen Sinne des Herbeiverlangens und Anbefehlens). We also use the word “Geheiß” ’ for calling 52. During the session, Derrida adds: “with Heidegger’s son, before meeting his grandson, his great-grandson.”

F i r s t S e s s ion ‡ 21

out to someone we enjoin to come. It is not that the “Geheiß ” has its being in the name; rather every name is a kind of “Geheiß.” Every “Geheiß ” implies an approach, and thus, of course, the possibility of giving a name. We might call (heißen) a guest welcome (Wir heißen einen Gäst willkommen). This does not mean that we attach to him the name “Well Come,” but that we call him to come in and complete his arrival as a welcome friend (als vertrauten Ankömmling). In that way, the welcome-call of the invitation to come in is nonetheless also an act of naming, a calling (ein Benennen, ein Anrufen) which makes the newcomer what we call a guest whom we are glad to see. “Heißen”— in Gothic “haitan”— is “calling”; but calling is something different than merely making a sound.53

After which Heidegger insists on the classic distinction, to his eyes necessary, to my eyes a little more problematic, between noise, cry, and call (Schall und Schrei und Ruf ), but let’s leave that aside for the moment.54 4. Finally, the fourth possible acceptation of my initial address (“We do not know what hospitality is”) would place us at a critical crossroads of semantic (or if you prefer etymologico-institutional) filiations and at an aporetic crossroads, that is to say, a crossroads or a sort of double postulate, double contradictory movement, double constraint or double bind55 (I prefer “double bind” because this English expression preserves the link (lien) to linking and thus to obligation, to ligament, to being bound [liance]). It can seem paradoxical that the experience of hospitality encounters aporia, where people mainly think that the host offers the guest passage over the threshold or border so as to welcome him at home. Is aporia not, as its name indicates, the non-road, the barred way, the non-passage? Well, my hypothesis or thesis in this seminar would be that this necessary aporia is not negative, and that, without repeatedly undergoing this paralysis within contradiction, the responsibility of a hospitality, hospitality tout court— where we do not yet know and will never know what it is— would have no chance of coming about, coming, making or letting well-come [d’advenir, de venir, de faire ou laisser bienvenir]. But this will later become more thinkable for us, if not clearer and more familiar. For the time being, so far as the critical crossroads of semantics or of etymology and institutions is concerned, I pass very quickly and without any transition from the welcome to Benveniste. Welcome to the one here welcome, Bienvenue to Benveniste. As always, in what is a Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society, 53. Heidegger, Was heißt Denken ?, 150– 51; What Is Called, 123– 24. [Translator’s note:] Translation modified. 54. In the margins of the typescript a handwritten notation appears: “pick up here again on Wednesday.” 55. [Translator’s note]: In English in the original.

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Benveniste starts from an institution, that is to say, from what he calls a “wellestablished social phenomenon”; and it is starting from that “well-established social phenomenon,” as he says, that he is going to study a lexicon, what he calls a “group of words,” that pertains to it. The name of the social fact here is then hospitality (title of this seventh chapter of Book I, Economy). The “basic term” then is the Latin hospes, which term, Benveniste recalls, is divided in two, into two distinct elements, he says, which “finally link up”: hosti-pet-s (blackboard ). Pet- alternates with pot-, which means “master,” so that hospes would signify, notes Benveniste, “guest-master.” As he rightly finds this “a rather peculiar designation” (those are his words), he proposes to study the two terms potis and hostis separately, and to analyze their “etymological connections.”56 Hostis will entail that strange passage between enemy and guest we will often speak about. But let us begin with potis, which gathers together the semantics of power, mastery, or despotic sovereignty. Before returning for my own purposes to this notion of mastery we have already talked about at length, let us follow Benveniste a moment while he explicates *potis, in its proper meaning, its “literal sense” [en propre] as he says. He goes back to Sanskrit where two significations, “master” and “husband,” are subject to two different inflections from the same stem. This is a phenomenon proper to the evolution of Sanskrit: one inflection means “master,” the other “husband.” When Klossowski describes the laws of hospitality in terms of the master of this house, the master of the premises considered as family, and as master of the wife, the husband of that wife who becomes as it were the stakes and the essence of hospitality, he is indeed within the domestic or oikonomic logic (law of the house, the domestic lineage, the family) that seems to command this Indo-European history of hospitality. From Sanskrit, Benveniste moves on to the Greek posís, a poetic term for husband, spouse (it also means, although Benveniste does not so note, fiancé, lover, and, in Euripides, secret husband; and in Latin, it yields potens, potentis, the master, sovereign, potentate). Benveniste specifies that posis is “distanced” from “despotès,” which signifies, according to Benveniste, only power, mastery or capability without domestic reference to the “master of the house” (a remark that greatly surprises me, I must say, although my competence is very limited, because elsewhere I do find references to Aeschylus noting that “despotès” means master of the house, and to Plato’s Laws or Statesman where “despotès” means master of the house, a synonym of oikonomos; the steward [économe] is the one who lays down the 56. Émile Benveniste, Le Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, vol. 1: Économie, parenté, société (Paris: Minuit, 1969), 88; trans. Elizabeth Palmer, The Dictionary of IndoEuropean Concepts and Society (Chicago: Hau Books, 2016), 62.

F i r s t S e s s ion ‡ 23

law in the oikos, the house or the family, the master of the family being also the master of slaves. Here, we are in the passage between the family and the state.) Benveniste then recalls that the Greek despoès and its Sanskrit equivalent dam patih enter into the formation of ancient expressions related to social units of varying extension, the master of the house, dam patih, the master of the clan, vis patih, the master of the lineage or family line, jas patih.57 I’ll let you follow out for yourselves all the variants that he cites in Iranian, Lithuanian, Hittite, etc. He does not cite, but might have done so, the word hospodar, prince, lord, which has passed into French and was even used by Voltaire, as well as hospodarat (office or dignity of the hospodar), a word of Slavic origin (hospodin in Bohemian, gospodar in Russian, gospoda in Polish, whence gospodarz, hotelkeeper, master of the house, host, innkeeper, etc.). Let us leave Benveniste and these semantico-institutional filiations for a moment in order to emphasize in a very general and structural way a paradoxical trait, namely, that the host, the one who offers hospitality, must be master at his house, he (in the masculine, first of all) must be assured of sovereignty over the space and the goods that he offers or opens to the other as stranger or foreigner. This seems to be both the law of laws of hospitality and what appears to us as common sense in our culture. It does not seem that I am able to open or offer hospitality, no matter how generous, and even for it to be generous, without also implying: this belongs to me, I am at home, be welcome at my house, without implying, then: “make yourself at home” but on condition that you observe the rules of hospitality, that is to say, respect the being at home of my home, the being oneself of what I am. Do we need to give examples? (Develop on the “open seminar” or family, or country [right to asylum, etc.] from the perspective of interruption, language, disorder, respect for the laws in force, etc.)58 There, within the law of hospitality, an axiom of self-limitation or selfcontradiction can be found whose consequences and corollaries we have not finished exploring. As reaffirmation of mastery and of being oneself at home, hospitality limits itself already from the threshold on its own threshold (dès le seuil sur le seuil d’elle-même), it remains always on the threshold of itself, it commands the threshold— and to that very extent it forbids in a certain way 57. Benveniste, Vocabulaire 88; Dictionary 62. 58. During the session, Derrida comments: “There is no point in giving examples, I have already given many even during this seminar, this open seminar: ‘Come in, make yourselves at home, but let me speak. Interrupt me, but not too often,’ etc. ‘Speak to me in a language that I understand.’ That goes as well for a country (right of asylum, etc.), it is always necessary to respect the laws in force, to practice your religion but as a citizen, etc.”

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crossing the threshold whose crossing it seems to permit. Hospitality becomes the threshold. That is why we do not know what it is, and cannot know. The minute we know it, we no longer know it, what it is properly, what is its identity threshold.59 In saying that, namely that hospitality in a certain way always does the contrary of what it claims to do and comes to a standstill on its very threshold, the threshold that it re-marks and constitutes, on itself in short, on both its phenomenon and its essence, I am not claiming to say that hospitality is this double bind60 or this aporetic contradiction, and thus that where it is, there is none. No, I am saying that this apparent aporetic paralysis on the threshold “is” (I place quotation marks around “is” or I cross it out, if you prefer) what must be crossed, this “is” “is” in order that, beyond hospitality, hospitality may come about. Hospitality can take place only beyond hospitality, only by deciding, while letting come, to cross over that hospitality that lets itself get paralyzed on the threshold that it is. It is necessary to let come beyond hospitality, if that is possible. It is in that sense perhaps that “we do not know (not yet, but always not yet)” what hospitality is, and that it awaits its chance and stretches toward its chance beyond what it is, namely, the paralysis on the threshold that it is. In this sense, it is always to come, but from a to-come that does not present itself and will never present itself as such, as present. To think hospitality on the basis of the future, on the basis of this future that will not present itself, or will present itself only where it will not be awaited as present or presentable, is to think it on the basis of death no less than of birth. All these propositions that I am accumulating a little quickly before finishing today will be clarified later, I hope, especially, with regard to death rather than birth, on the subject of a possible distinction between the place of birth— which will have always undergirded the definition of the foreigner in our tradition (the foreigner as the non-native, the non-indigenous, we will speak about this often)— and the place of death. “Dying elsewhere” or “dying at home.” And together we will perhaps read a passage from Montaigne on this topic, about dying while traveling, in a text where, after having listed what he calls the “forms of dying,” and especially dying away from one’s home, he asks the question of what he calls with a sublime term, but perhaps only sublime, the co-dying [commourans] (blackboard ), those who die together, at the same time, as if that were possible, if not in the same place. He does not speak, and for good reason, of Romeo and Juliet, who 59. During the session, Derrida adds: “Thus, absolute hospitality has to renounce absolute hospitality so as to become absolute hospitality, has to renounce being at home.” 60. [Translator’s note:] In English in the original.

F i r s t S e s s ion ‡ 25

illustrate in this respect an irreducible, absolute mishap [contretemps],61 but he asks himself, I am quoting here: “Might we not even make death luxurious like Antony and Cleopatra, those fellows in death [commourans]?” (Montaigne’s Essais, III, IX, p. 1102).62 But this will be for later. Next time (much later, then), while pursuing a little further this analysis of the critical crossroads of semantic filiations (or, if you prefer, etymologicalinstitutional filiations) and the aporetic crossroads— that is to say, at a crossroads where a sort of double bifurcation, double postulation, double contradictory movement, double constraint or double bind63 at the same time paralyzes and broaches hospitality, extends it over itself in tendering it to the other, deprives it of, and favors it with its chance— we shall see how power (the despotic sovereignty and virile mastery of the master of the house) is nothing other than ipseity itself, the sameness of the oneself, to say nothing of the subject, which is a stabilizing and despotic bid to raise the stakes of ipseity, of self-being or the Selbst. The question of hospitality is also the question of ipseity (Benveniste will also help us, in his way, to confirm it on the basis of the language, the utpote and what he calls the “mysterious -pse of ipse,” p. 90); we will pause on a particular sentence of Benveniste and its context, a sentence at once luminous and philosophically somewhat naive, in its form of puzzlement and surprise. Benveniste writes then, but we will come back to this (p. 90). While it is difficult to see how a word meaning “the master” could become so weakened in force as to signify “himself,” it is easy to understand how an adjective denoting the identity of a person, signifying “himself,” could acquire the proper meaning of master.64 [Ben61. See Jacques Derrida, “L’aphorisme à contretemps,” Psyché, vol. 2, 131–44; “Aphorism countertime,” trans. Nicholas Royle, in Psyche, vol. 2, 127–42. 62. Michel de Montaigne, “De la vanité,” in Essais, Livre III, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. A. Thibaudet and M. Rat (Paris: Gallimard, 1962). 962; “On Vanity,” in The Essays of Montaigne, trans. M. A. Screech (London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1991), 1113. [Translator’s note:] A propos of commourans, Hazlitt refers to Plutarch’s Synapotanoumenes, that is, “bands of those who would die together,” explaining that such bands were “formed by Antony and Cleopatra after the battle of Actium.” “Of Vanity,” Bk 3, Essays of Montaigne, ed. W. Carew Hazlitt, trans. Charles Cotton (New York: A. L. Burt Co., 1892), 471. 63. [Translator’s note:] In English in the original. 64. Benveniste, Vocabulaire, 90; Dictionary, 64. [Translator’s note:] Translation modified.

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veniste very much likes “proper meaning,” and he uses this expression casually on every page— I have already and often remarked on this— as if the request for a proper meaning were not exactly the same as the request for the proper, for what is the very same as it is, for the self, for essence itself, the word “same” [même], ipseity never becoming entirely separate from the properness and the self-identity of whatever or whoever it may be.]

Then we will attempt a difficult, subtle but necessary distinction between the other and the foreigner; and we will venture into what is both the implication and the consequence of this double bind, this impossibility as condition of possibility, namely, the troubling analogy, in their common origin, between hostis as guest and hostis as enemy, between hospitality and hostility.

A ppen di x 1

The remainder of the last page of the typescript along with an added page were filled by Derrida with manuscript notes that seemed to sketch out notions or questions to be pursued. We have attempted to decipher them, not always successfully. These pages are reproduced in facsimile, followed by a transcription translated into English.

A ppe n di x 1 ‡ 29

Transcription of Facsimile 1 at home = self (casa) alienation What is place as host (the self ) Confidence of the guest1 . . . ≠ transaction the gift obligates . . . priceless X the fact: the other is already at our home x “as at home” to be obliged to → to want to ↓ to be obliged to beyond obligation x question alienation foreigner whoever ↓ the damned one (has nothing) slave of hunger . . . thus x generosity

“along the example of our proprietor” =expropriation of the at-home: (condition of hospitality) asymmetry

1. [Translator’s note:] In English in the text, followed by French de l’hôte.

A ppe n di x 1 ‡ 31

I think I must come back to it again next year to take another look x City of Asylum = unconditional laws 1). cosmopolitan manifesto < compare? > Marx?

2.

law and Law (or right) \ city of asylum (unconditional)

3. responsibilities are not any longer [+] national? What is the function of a cosmopolitan ideal today? going worldwide despite reservations about Kant . . . (state . . .) 5. democracy to come = ready to come < declare? > relation to cosmopolitanism

(promise without the state if without: equality/ singularity beyond perfectibility

6. < judgment? road?> Sami Naïr : < promise? > < ? > of knowledge

law : nomos, nomads, sharing we are all nomads (Hebrew 3 indigeneities

Arab)

I am not the master of my house I am a guest (hôte) at my home Schmitt: the enemy is our question es gibt Feindschaft . . .

Secon d Session

December 13, 1995

56

All the same: I realized, upon rereading my notes, that today we are going to turn around the expression “all the same” [tout de même] whether we utter it or not, “tout de même” with that odd inflection also found in English, I believe, in “all the same”1 and that also signifies opposition, objection, whereas at the beginning, in a French a little old-fashioned, “tout de même” means “equally, all things being equal, simply, all the same,”2 before usage began to mark it with the oppositional connotation, objection, even exclamation (“all the same! nonetheless! however, although, still and all . . . , despite everything”), refutation or objecting argument within equivalence itself, within “all things otherwise being equal”: opposition— virtual or explicit— at the very heart of identity or equality, of sameness. In the past, I used to give titles to each session of these seminars. I have lost the taste for that, but if I still had that taste, I would entitle this one: “All the same.” If only in order to attract your attention to this all the same extraordinary expression. I say “all the same extraordinary” also to emphasize that in French “all the same!”— even when the expression marks objection, opposition even— does so in an exclamation stemming from admiring astonishment, from the question, from the thaumazein that opens toward the question and toward thought, opens thought to the incomprehensible, provokes it to think the unthinkable or inadmissible, the extraordinary (all the same!), and forces a door, steps over a limit: all the same! This clamor of the exclamation reserved in the very heart of the same, this is what will call us or invite us to think today. “All the same!” but on the subject of the “same,” even of the very self-same same [du même même]. All the same, we had resolved on more than one thing several weeks ago,3 in the figure of the crossroads or threshold, of the threshold become crossroads. We had 1. [Translator’s note:] “All the same” is in English in the text. 2. [Translator’s note:] “All the same” is in English in the text. 3. See above, first session.

S e con d S e s s ion ‡ 33

resolved to pursue a little further this analysis of what I had dubbed the critical crossroads of semantic filiations (or, if you prefer, etymologico-institutional filiations) and the aporetic crossroads, that is to say, a crossroads that is also like an infinite threshold, the place of a waiting or a differance both finite and infinite, where a sort of double bifurcation, double postulation, double contradictory movement, double constraint or double bind at the same time paralyzes and broaches hospitality, tetanizes it, extends it over itself in tendering it to the other, deprives it of, and favors it with, its chance. We had resolved to pursue this analysis a bit, from threshold to threshold, from crossroads to crossroads, to try to comprehend, if comprehending were here possible, how “power,” a word more troubling, more enigmatic and more indeterminate than ever (here under the apparently well-known, recognizable form of the despotic sovereignty and virile mastery of the master of this house [maître de céans]), how power, then, is nothing other than ipseity itself, the sameness of the self-same, to say nothing of the subject, which is a stabilizing and despotic bid to raise the stakes of ipseity, of self-being or of Selbst as subjectivity. So, here is a first threshold, on the threshold of the threshold that is the place of hospitality. The question of hospitality is then also the question of ipseity, and it proclaims itself such; Benveniste, too, in his way, will help us to confirm it from language, the utpote and what he calls the “mysterious -pse of ipse”4 (p. 90); we will pause, we had begun to do so at least in quoting it, on one sentence of Benveniste and its context, a sentence both luminous and somewhat naive philosophically speaking, I had said, in its form of question and in the surprise it manifests. It is as if the linguist, entirely astonished, were saying or implying: “all the same!”— “isn’t that extraordinary?” Benveniste writes, then, I cite again but we will return to this (p. 90): “While it is difficult to see how a word meaning ‘the master’ could become so weakened in force as to signify ‘himself,’ it is easy to understand how an adjective denoting the identity of a person, signifying ‘himself,’ could acquire the proper meaning of master.” (Benveniste likes “proper meaning” a lot, and he uses this expression casually on every page— I have already and often remarked upon it— as if the request for proper meaning were not the same [la même] precisely as the request for the proper, for oneself [soi-même], for that which is the very thing that it is, for oneself [soi-même], for essence itself [même], the word “same” [même] and ipseity never being separable from propriety and the self-identity of whatever and whoever it may be.) And then we had to attempt, I had announced this— and it will be the second pre-liminary threshold, as it were, the second protocol to a prolegomenon— a difficult, subtle but necessary distinction between the other and the foreigner (I don’t know if I will get there yet today); and finally, we will venture— third 4. Benveniste, Vocabulaire, 90; Dictionary, 64.

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preceding or preparatory stage, third threshold or third door opening onto a door— into what is at the same time the implication or consequence of this double bind, this impossibility as condition of possibility, namely, the troubling analogy, in their common origin, between hostis as guest and hostis as enemy, between hospitality and hostility.

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The first step toward the threshold concerns, then, the strange link, in its etymological-institutional figure, between hospitality offered, the mastery of power, and ipseity itself, being oneself, identity itself as identity to oneself [l’ipséité même, l’être soi-même, l’identité même comme identité à soi-même]. It is the little word “même” [same] that should capture our whole attention here. Benveniste does not speak about it in the article he devotes to hospitality and to which we are going to return. But you sense in advance that in all its meanings and all its functions, this little word “même” carries everything; it introduces and summons up everything, as adjective, as pronoun, or as adverb (blackboard); as adjective, that says first of all the identical, the like, the equal, or the proper (as in “I always say the same thing” [identity], “of the same value” [equality], “She is goodness itself [proper: properly so called])”; as indefinite pronoun: the same one or ones (as in “it is always the same ones who invite,” for example, or “it comes down to the same,” “same difference” [c’est du pareil au même]); and finally as adverb, marking an increase, an amplification that goes beyond the limits (even, even if, even so, and I am thinking of the example from Voltaire as given by the Robert dictionary: “Instructive for foreigners, and even [même] for those of my country”; and these two other examples that I find in the Littré dictionary: from Voltaire again, in Olympia, Act III, 3. “I’ll from this temple, from your very arms, / Even [même] from the unpitying gods bear off my wife”5: “même” in the neuter singular; it is indeed an adverb: I will oppose myself even to the gods, if they do not grant my wish, even to the gods, I will go even so far as to defy them, I will go even so far as to transgress their law if they do not grant my wish.) Listen also to this sentence from Rousseau in the Emile, so as to mark the hyperbolic raising of the stakes: “Other women, even beasts, will be able to give him the milk that she refuses him. There is no substitute for maternal solicitude.”6 (Repeat twice or blackboard). This example had escaped me when I was 5. Voltaire, Olympie: Tragédie en cinq actes, 3.3.835– 36; Olympia, in The Works of Voltaire, vol. 8, The Dramatic Works, Part 1, trans. William Fleming (Paris and New York: E. R Du Mont, 1901), 137. 6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile; ou, de l’éducation, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 4, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 257; Emile; or, on Education, in the Collected Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. Roger D. Master and Christopher

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taking an interest in the supplement in Rousseau some thirty years ago,7 and it seems to mean that one can replace everything of the mother [chez la mère], that other women and even beasts could replace everything of the mother, including the milk, including the breast, except what Rousseau calls “maternal solicitude,” maternal solicitude which then becomes and signifies in that way properly maternity properly so called, the essence of maternity, which is neither the breast nor anything of the body, nothing of what other women, even beasts, could supply. Which also means, if we wanted to linger on it, but it is not here our focus, that maternity properly so called, maternity itself, the essence of maternity as human maternity, where it cannot be replaced or supplemented, either by the breast of another woman or by the milk of an animal, proper and properly so called human maternity, is the experience of irreplaceable solicitude, the irreplaceable, the unsubstitutable as solicitude, worry, concern, cura, care,8 Sorge. What is irreplaceable is maternal solicitude, solicitude as maternity, and maternity as irreplaceability— so speaks the one who knew enough to call Madame de Warens, a woman who precisely was not what one usually calls one’s mother or birth mother, “Mama”; and he does so— he tells us that the mother is the irreplaceable, the non-supplementable— in a statement that can seem both archaic and phantasmatic, but also very modern, obliging us to rethink what is the proper of maternity, if there is such a thing, at the moment when, far beyond all experience of wetnurses and substitute mothers, we see getting deployed today the familiar prosthetic structures about which we spoke a lot last year,9 surrogate mothers,10 “wombs rented or bought,” as I believe is said in Italian, unless it is in Spanish— and each language has its own expression by which to call this maternal prosthesis. Far from simply disappearing into the play of metonymic or prosthetic substitutions that Rousseau seems to wax indignant about or protest against, maternity— as determined on the basis of this maternal solicitude— is exactly what remains foreign and inaccessible to all this prostheticity, to all this replacement: everything can be replaced— gestation, fecundation, the breast, nourishment, milk— all these replaceable parts of maternity can be replaced, but it is the irreplaceable as solicitude that one will call Kelly, trans. Allan Bloom (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, for Dartmouth College, 2010), 170. 7. See Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), esp. 207– 26; Of Grammatology, revised trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), esp. 153– 58; in fact, this example is cited at some length, 158ff. 8. [Translator’s note:] In English in the original. 9. See Jacques Derrida, Seminar “Le témoignage” (unpublished, 1993– 94, EHESS, Paris), first session. 10. [Translator’s note]: In English in the original.

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mother. Where there is solicitude as the irreplaceable, there is a mother;11 and this solicitude, which then has nothing natural about it in the sense of biological or genetic (since all that is genetic or biological about it, like milk or the breast, can be replaced), this solicitude, as maternal, as taking care in a disinterested fashion of the one who comes, the newcomer, the child who is the one in need of being welcomed, nourished, sheltered, the one who is, in principle, disarmed, infinitely vulnerable and in need, the absolute guest or arrivant, well, this solicitude, the mother, maternal solicitude is doubtless an absolute figure for hospitality, and especially if one defines it from its irreplaceability; for the duty of hospitality enjoins me to welcome in my place whomever as an arrivant, but first of all the arrivant to whom no other person in my place will give their place: it is necessary to offer one’s place (it is necessary for me to offer my place), where no one can offer a place in my place. It remains for us to reconcile this figure of hospitality as irreplaceable maternity with the figure of power and of the master or mistress of this house [maître de céans], the figure of which we have spoken and will soon again speak. How can the mother that Rousseau talks about (the irreplaceable, non-supplementable solicitude), how can this unique mother be a mistress? The problem, the luck or the misfortune, is that these two apparently contradictory figures are not incompatible, on the contrary; they supplement one another, as the very replaceability of the irreplaceable, the supplement of the unsupplementable— and as the power constituted on the basis of the irreplaceable, the power qua power to abuse the irreplaceable. How not to abuse irreplaceability, hence, one’s mortality? How to make oneself replaceable so as not to weigh on the other with the weight of one’s own singularity, hence, of one’s own death? How not to make oneself unique and unsubstitutable so as to avoid making the other suffer? How to exist for the other all the while retreating into substitution? Here is one of the forms of the question, as question of the “for the other” [ pour l’autre] in all the senses of this expression, one of the forms of the question by which an ethics might begin, an ethics in general, even an ethics of hospitality, supposing that this expression were not deeply redundant or tautological. For every ethics is probably an ethics of hospitality, if only to the extent that ethos (as modern Greek and Heidegger remind us), ethos signifies first of all residence, habitual place of sojourn, the manner of being as manner of inhabiting, so, the condition of hospitality; no sojourn, no residence (ethos), no halting place (Aufenthalt) is possible without the opening of hospitality; the laws of ethics are always the laws of hospitality; hospitality is not one ethical 11. During the session, Derrida adds: “The mother, the sole, the unique, the absolutely unique, and this uniqueness is not determined on the basis of birth, fecundation, gestation, or nutrition; uniqueness is determined otherwise, on the basis of solicitude.”

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question among others. To dwell a little longer with Rousseau and what he says of maternal solicitude, we would have to recall, I have done this elsewhere,12 that this fine word “solicitude,” which means worry, concern, care, before any other determinate signification (love, desire, interest, attachment, passion), this word “solicitude,” which Rousseau specifies here as maternal solicitude, insofar as it is not supplementable, insofar as it suffers no supplement, neither a supplement of substitution nor a supplement of addition, this fine word “solicitude” has an essential relation with totality, precisely. It comes from sollus, with two “l’s” (not from solus [blackboard ], the unique, the sole, or the irreplaceable with one “l”, but from sollus with two “l’s”, which means “all, the whole,” totus, and which, like salvus, no doubt comes from the Greek holos, which means “whole, entire,” and so, like salvus, “safe, healthy, entire, intact, unharmed, immune”; in Greek already, holos, which in everyday speech means “entire, whole,” can come to mean precisely “intact, safe, unharmed,” and thereby be associated with hugiēs, intact health, health as the intact, the whole, the integral, the safe and sound, immune, etc.). Solicitude, as sollicitudo, is, like sollicitus (from sollus and cieo), the being-solicited in the sense of the being-moved, set in motion, in citation (which means movement) in its entirety; to be sollicitus is to be constantly and totally, ceaselessly moved, agitated, restless, worried, anxious. “Sollicitum habere aliquem” is to make someone anxious, to worry someone (the expression is found in Cicero [Pro Sestio, 25], who elsewhere [Pro Murena, 88] says, and the example is interesting here, “the anxious mother dreads to see”: mater sollicita est, ne . . . conspiciat,13 the anxious mother takes care not to see, she is careful so as not to see, in view of not seeing, etc. We will find this care with seeing and not seeing, the “in view of not seeing,” in a certain Oedipus leaning on Antigone at the moment when he presents himself as a foreigner and addresses foreigners, at the threshold of the town, who address him as a foreigner. They all call one another “foreigner” [xenos]). If the adverb même can then mean amplification, a hyperbolical bidding up, it can also mean “precisely, exactly, properly: precisely here, exactly today,” or else “directly on” [à même], one of the French expressions that I know from experience is among the most difficult to translate and therefore among the most interesting, especially when it signifies that contact, in difference, between one body and another, a contact in an absolute proximity but without confusion, a contact that leaves without leaving a place for a foreign body: to sleep right on 12. See Jacques Derrida, Seminar “Répondre— du secret” (unpublished, 1991– 92, EHESS, Paris), fourth and fifth sessions. 13. The citations from Cicero come from the article “sollicitus” in Félix Gaffiot’s Dictionnaire illustré latin-français (Paris: Hachette, 1934).

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[à même] the ground, to drink directly from [à même] the neck of the bottle; one would speak thus of a contact lens that it is set right on [à même] the eye, of a tattoo that it is imprinted right on [à même] the skin; it is still the question of the support or the subject, the subjectile, the body directly onto which [à même] something foreign comes to be applied without penetrating, or to penetrate without penetrating, to penetrate while remaining on the surface or on the threshold, etc. Again a question of hospitality. With regard to the adverb, one must also count the expressions “as well as,” “all the same,” “able to” [“de même que,” “tout de même,” “à même de”], “à même de,” which means precisely “to be capable of, have the power to”— all expressions just as difficult to translate. “I am able [à même de] to do this or that,” means in French, “I can do,” I am capable of doing, or am empowered to do this or that, in a position to do this or that: it is commensurate with what I can do. All I will say about “power” and in particular about “social power,” the “power over the other” a few minutes from now, could be translated by “to be able to” [être à même de]. To be able, to have or possess a power, is “to be able to” [être à même de] or to be adjudged or declared “able to” [à même de]. Now this little word “même”— whose homonymy, so to speak, with “loves me” [m’aime], from “I love myself ” [ je m’aime] or “you love me” [tu m’aimes] makes its untranslatability even more vertiginous and henceforth unforgettable (each time that one says “same” [même] in French the two near homonyms resonate or sound together in an absolutely untranslatable fashion, which could be the last reason for remaining in this country or residing in this language: hear “last” as you wish in “the last reason for living in this country or in this language”)— this little word “same” [même] that Benveniste does not discuss, where does it come from?14 It is a word of Latin lineage, of course, which in Old French was spelled meisme (blackboard), with all sorts of proximate terms in Burgundian, Berrichon, or Provençal. They all come, like the Italian medesimo, from the Latin metipsissimus, the superlative of metipse, where we find again the ipse that has all the meanings of même we have just listed, including that of the adverb, “just, precisely, exactly.” Egomet ipse: myself, ipsemet: himself; ipsimet nobis: ourselves. The value of mastery (whether it is a matter of master or mistress) is moreover commonly admitted and widely known in the texts of Petronius, of Suetonius. We recognize then the ipse in the same, and with the ipse, this question of power that brings us back to Benveniste’s text right where we had left it, left it struggling with what Benveniste calls “the mysterious -pse of ipse,” which in fact 14. During the session, Derrida adds: “Benveniste does not speak of this, although he ought to be making it a theme precisely when he is speaking of ipse, hospes, and property, etc.”

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everything seems to bring back to words meaning what we call “power,” and power which we find at the heart of hospes, and, as you remember, of hosti-pet-s. Before taking a further step, I am going to clarify or emphasize what no doubt goes without saying, namely, that for me it is not a matter of diagnosing, even less of criticizing or denouncing in hospitality a power, a desire or ruse of power, be it only of the power to affirm oneself in one’s ipseity and what depends on that. There is doubtless and always and irreducibly such a notion of power, such a “will to power,” if you prefer, in every hospitality, but that does not mean that we already know and recognize something familiar and that we call power, a notion with whose help we would then try, afterward, in a second moment, to shed light on or analyze something less known, less clear and familiar, and that would here be our theme, namely hospitality. We are not going to shed light on hospitality by means of the will to power that is supposedly hiding in it. No, the notion of power is not clear for us, and above all, what is starting to take shape and what I want to emphasize, is that the concept of power is no less determined starting from hospitality than the reverse or the reciprocal. While every hospitality, every host as hospes presupposes some drive to power (Bemächtigungstrieb, that original drive about which Freud speaks with such discretion in Beyond. . . . , and that no one or almost no one has noticed, although it is irreducible to any other drive: death drive or sexual drive),15 while every hospitality, then, every host as hospes, presupposes some drive to power, conversely, it is very possible that power in itself might not be thinkable without something like the exercise and possibility of hospitality. To be powerful, have power, be master or mistress of one’s house, be at home, be oneself in one’s ipseity, be or have one’s own potential, is to be capable of hospitality. This begins even with hospitality: whoever is incapable of hospitality has to recognize their own lack of power (im-pouvoir). The two concepts, hospitality and power (power or possibility, potentiality, capacity, skill, faculty) would thus co-entail 15. See Sigmund Freud, Jenseits des Lustprinzips, Gesammelte Werke, 13 (London: Imago, 1952), 14. In the French translation, Samuel Jankélévitch translates Bemächtigungstrieb by penchant à la domination (“inclination to domination”); Au-delà du principe de plaisir, trad. fr. Samuel Jankélévitch, Essais de psychanalyse (Paris: Payot, 1927), 13. Jacques Derrida remarked on this word in La Carte postale, de Socrate à Freud et au-delà (Paris: Galilée, 1980), 346, 430, as also in the 1975– 76 seminar La Vie la mort, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Peggy Kamuf (Paris: Seuil, 2019), 359. Life Death, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 294. [Translator’s note:] James Strachey translates Bemächtigungstrieb as “instinct for mastery” in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18 (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 16.

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one another, they would both be at the same time subject and attribute of the other, the thing defined by and the thing defining the other, both of them determined and determining— all of which does not advance us much for the moment and gives us scarcely more than an equation between two terms with two unknowns. Unless these “two unknowns” were the condition, chance or threat, even risk, of an absolute— or absolved— hospitality. A return to Benveniste, then. After having recalled, as you may remember, that the Greek despotēs and the Sanskrit dam patih entered into the combining of terms that referred to a unit or social system whose reach could vary (house, clan, descendance: dam patih, master of the house; vis patih, master of the clan; jas patih, master of the lineage), Benveniste seems to perceive in this a clarity and an obscurity, something obvious and a problem. The obvious thing is what happens in Latin, where what Benveniste calls “an extensive etymological family” gathers around the word *potis.16 Note in passing that in speaking of “etymological family,” Benveniste is already introducing, pre-introducing from the outset, elementary structures of hospitality into language itself; there are etymological families; this is not incongruous, even if he does so here without pausing to consider, making use of a common trope (the family of words, the family of languages, for example the family or kinship of Indo-European languages, the genealogy or history of languages). But if one were to stop to consider at greater length than does Benveniste, one would have to take into account two phenomena or two irreducible dimensions. On the one hand, before even any kinship among languages, and so any hospitality of one house of language, one lineage to another, there is no hospitality without language, without one or more than one language. Even if I invite the other in silence, this silence is the mode of a possible speech, at least in the classical concept of hospitality and the address to the other.17 On the other hand, a language, like a family, can be (or not) hospitable to another language or another family of languages; and this hospitality is not limited to translation. I have tried to show elsewhere that, contrary to what all the linguists seem to think, there is no linguistic system, in any case, no linguistic system as possible completeness or self-identity, as possibility of a closure.18 By structure, and in what the linguists are no doubt right to call its system, its 16. Benveniste, Vocabulaire, 88; Dictionary, 63. [Translator’s note:] Translation modified. 17. During the session, Derrida adds: “No hospitality without language, no family without language.” 18. See Derrida, De la grammatologie, 46ff, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak, 32ff, and “Le Cercle linguistique de Genève,” in Marges: De la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972),

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systematicity, a language is open to incorporation, insemination or dissemination, fecundation, grafting, prosthesis, a grafting either natural or artificial in appearance, artificial insemination, etc.19 What is it like, this “etymological family” that is formed around potis? There is the noun hospes, there are the adjectives impos, compos, which mean: “who is not master (impos)”— so, impotent, without power— or “who is master (compos),” “who is master of himself (compos sui),” or “master of his spirit, compos animi, compos mentis.” Cicero, whom Benveniste does not cite here, asks in the Philippics, 2, 9: “Tu mentis compos?” Are you master of your mind? Do you have all your good sense?20 There is also the verb potere, and its perfect potui incorporated into the verb possum, posse, which then means “I can,” “power.” Possum (I can) is made from potis sum, just as potest comes from pote est. Up to this point, “there would be no problem,” says Benveniste, and “all this is clear.”21 Where do the problems come from then? All the problems come from what astonishes Benveniste, who seems to say, “all the same, it’s not believable,” namely that in the same area, the Indo-European area that interests him, at least three strange phenomena appear, in Lithuanian, in Iranian, and in Hittite, namely, forms that associate the signification of mastery with that of ipseity, of being oneself (l’être soi-même). In Lithuanian, the adjective pats signifies “himself ” and the noun pats signifies “master” in the compound ves-pats. In Iranian, the compound adjective xae-pathya signifies “one’s own” or “of oneself,” employed “without distinction of person,” “of me, you, him or her; what belongs properly.”22 In this expression, one then has “xae,” Iranian form of the reflexive pronoun *swe, ancient form *se, literally, “of oneself ” and -paithya derived from *potis. All these facts, Benveniste notes (p. 89), are well-known, but, he adds, “they deserve careful scrutiny because of the importance and singularity of the problem that they pose.”23 Here I think that we need to take an interest equally in the facts themselves, in the linguistico-institutional facts that Benveniste is putting forward as “wellknown” facts, and in Benveniste’s astonishment at what seems, to him, important, problematic, and singular, since he says that these facts “deserve careful 165– 84; “The Linguistic Circle of Geneva,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 137– 53. 19. During the session, Derrida comments: “Language is the place par excellence of artificial insemination.” 20. Cicero, cited in the article “Compos” in F. Gaffiot, Dictionnaire. 21. Benveniste, Vocabulaire, 89; Dictionary, 63. 22. Benveniste, 89; 63. [Translator’s note:] Translation modified. 23. Benveniste, 89; 63. [Translator’s note:] Translation modified.

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scrutiny because of the importance and singularity of the problem that they pose.” In truth, these facts can be raising a singular problem only to the extent that they appear as problematic, that they are “problematized” in a certain manner by the one to whom they appear as problematic. What we need to take an interest in, then, as much as in the so-called facts themselves, is Benveniste’s very problematization, the form and motivation for his astonishment— the form, the formulation, the formalization that he proposes for the aforesaid problems, and on that basis, the solution that prevails for him. We must ask in turn: Why is he astonished? What is so astonishing in that? Why is he inviting us to be astonished and to seek a solution there where he sees a problem and invites us to accompany him in his astonishment, his question? And if we follow him, why do we follow him? What does all that presuppose? I’ve already announced or stated his astonished question, which is first the following: “Under what conditions can a word signifying ‘master’ end up signifying identity?”24 The formulation of this question, like that of the astonishment that gives rise to it, can only come from one place, both linguistic and institutional (extralinguistic), a place in which the supposedly neutral metalanguage of the specialist is formed, where these two significations are not only dissociated but dissociated in such a manner that the derivation from mastery of identity (of self-identity; we should say rather, of ipseity) appears impossible, at any rate, improbable, or even shocking. The reading of the so-called linguistic facts is obviously arranged, interpreted, questioned from a situation, a linguistico-social, institutional, linguistico-historical, political, juridical site where that derivation is impossible, improbable, or shocking, even inadmissible, virtually blameworthy, from an ethical perspective in general, or a juridical or political one. Every sentence from Benveniste attests that this problematizing metalanguage is itself analyzable as the sign or symptom of the situation within which the specialist finds himself and of the situation that he assigns or presupposes on the side of his addressees, that is, of we who read him and can understand him only if we share what I will here call his point of view, namely, a place from which it is hard to see how a word signifying master can end up signifying self-identity. Benveniste and those who would follow him readily here, others or we ourselves, some among us or within us, live in a world, a culture, a language, a society in which identity, the self, ipseity, the sameness of the self, are not, at least ought not, should not depend on, be derived from mastery or from power.25 It is this 24. Benveniste, 89; 63. 25. During the session, Derrida clarifies: “One must be able to be oneself without that depending on power, either one’s own or that of another.”

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ethics (both as ethos, way of inhabiting and as moral, juridical or political prescription) that commands Benveniste’s astonishment (his “all the same!”), and ours, if and when we follow him, understand him: self-identity, ipseity, the capacity to say “me,” myself, etc., ought not to depend on power and especially not on power as social power. This presupposition is rather naive, of course, as there would be many ways to show. It is not a question here of accusing or exonerating Benveniste, but of acknowledging, to the extent possible, trajectories of problematization, programs of problematization. (26For example— and I say this within parentheses, too quickly, to indicate paths that I do not believe I have to follow out here, for reasons of this seminar’s economy and strategy— it is not necessary to change worlds and cultures to introduce variations and pose the problem otherwise than Benveniste does within our own ethos, I mean to say within our own Western, hence IndoEuropean, culture or tradition, where something like philosophy plays a role at once determined and determining and where for a long time this philosophy has held as thinkable and conceptualizable what astonishes Benveniste so greatly. Without this series being at all limited and this list limiting, I will cite just a few proper names and a few schemas, argumentative schemas, in the direction in which— contrary to what Benveniste tends to think and what motivates his astonishment— it has been deemed possible [I indeed say possible, the possible saying also power, the possibility of doing, saying, causing to believe, and making acceptable, rendering credible or legitimate], it has been deemed possible to link self-identity to power and even to derive ipseity from power, the “I” from the “I can,” or existence as mine [ jemeinig] from the possible, if you will. The first examples or proper names could just as easily lead us back toward all the theories of the faculties, that is, the powers [Vermögen] that underlie all transcendental philosophy, in its broadest tradition, starting from the Cartesian cogito and the Kantian I think— which explicitly links possibility to faculty as power, and sometimes in its juridical form— and the Husserlian cogito, which, while putting into question Kant’s transcendental psychologism as theory of the faculties, nonetheless supposes a power, an “I can”: for example, I can bracket the existence of the world through phenomenological reduction, I can suspend all life and all existence in the free conversion of the gaze that is the transcendental epochē— extraordinary power of freedom that seems subtle and ethereal, even speculative, but that leads back, by way of this power, to the recapture of a pure transcendental ego, a pure self, as and starting from this power stronger than the very existence of the world and stronger than 26. The parenthetical remark opened here will be closed on p. 46.

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life, than the psychē itself [develop: above life27]. Another tradition might be that of Maine de Biran, who deduces inner sense, the relation to the self, from an “I can.” In another manner, the Dasein, which forms the theme of Heidegger’s existential analytic and which, beyond egological forms of subjectivity, is called always, each time, nonetheless jemeinig, mine, is explicitly described as “possibilization,” “being-able-to-be” [Seinkönnen]; all of Eigentlichkeit is linked to being-able-to-be and even to being-able-to-be in its totality or being-ableto-be toward death. Being, as being-there, is an original “being-able-to-be.” Sein und Zeit can be read as a book on possibility as possibilization and as a displacement of the classical concepts of possibility and of force or power [Kraft, Macht, Können, Möglichkeit, etc.]. If I save the reference to Hegel for the non-chronological end of this nonrestrictive series of indications, it is for a reason that I am going to try to explain, always just as schematically and while remaining with our principle or program. If any philosopher has tried to link the possibility of ipseity, in the form of self-consciousness, of the possibility of saying “myself,” to the affirmation of a power and a mastery, it is certainly the Hegel of the Phenomenology of the Spirit and of what is known as the master-slave dialectic of recognition. Without entering into the analysis of this complex process, one can retain at least this feature of it: through the mediation of the recognition by the slave and the work of the slave [in the triangle master-slave, thingness of the thing], mastery assures self-consciousness; and even if the master, and thus the power of domination [of Herrschaft] [Benveniste will soon place the word dominus into the chain that interests us at this moment, the master, the lord, the dominating sovereign, the proprietor of the domain], depends on the work of the slave and at a certain moment makes of the master the slave of the slave, nonetheless selfconsciousness passes through the moment of mastery or domination, that is to say, through the power of risking death by rising above life, something of which the master is by definition capable, since it is this power that is his mastery, that ensures him mastery. To be able to say “me” is to have power over the other in having the power to raise oneself above one’s life, risk one’s life [while keeping it, of course, you know that that is the whole problem, the comic aspect raised by Bataille28] in order to be able to enjoy the possibility of affirming oneself as 27. During the session, Derrida comments: “Access to the transcendental ego in Husserl is gained by means of a phenomenological reduction that suspends even down to the ego’s psychical life, which is only the parallel of transcendental life, and thus above life, the power to raise oneself above life. We could multiply these examples, afterward.” 28. On this laughter of Bataille, see Jacques Derrida, “De l’économie restreinte à l’économie Générale: Un hégélianisme sans réserve,” L’Écriture et la différence, esp. 376– 80; “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, esp. 255– 59.

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oneself and of being recognized, legitimated as such. Once again, without entering into these both classic and formidable texts, I’ll retain from them only what links the idea of power and domination to the possibility of being oneself, being self-consciousness recognized by the other. And if I do that here, it is less to refer to Hegel himself than to reconstitute the outlines of a French configuration. The work of Benveniste, in particular on the gift, is inscribed within the tradition of Mauss: that is the case with the piece that immediately precedes the one on hospitality and is devoted to “giving, taking, and receiving,” as it is the case with the Problems in General Linguistics, where the essay on “Gift and Exchange in the Indo-European Vocabulary” begins with a reference and an homage to Mauss.29 Still more clearly, Benveniste explicitly remembers Mauss’s analyses later in this essay of ours on hospitality, when he relates hospes to hostis, the guest [hôte] to the enemy [we will get to this]. He writes [p. 94: (Cite Benveniste, pp. 93– 94, H.)]

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How does hostis itself fit in with this? This emerges from the definition of Festus already cited: “quod erant pari iure cum populo Romano.” This defines the relation of hostis and hostire: “the hostes had the same rights as the Romans.” A hostis is not a stranger in general. In contrast to the peregrinus, who lived outside the boundaries of the territory, hostis is “the stranger in so far as he is recognized as enjoying equal rights to those of the Roman citizens.” This recognition of rights implies a certain relation of reciprocity and supposes an agreement or compact. Not all non-Romans are called hostis. A bond of equality and reciprocity is established between this particular stranger and the citizens of Rome, a fact which may lead to a precise notion of hospitality. From this point of view hostis will signify “he who stands in a compensatory relationship” and this is precisely the foundation of the institution of hospitality. This type of relationship between individuals or groups cannot fail to invoke the notion of potlatch, so well described and interpreted by Marcel Mauss in his monograph on “le Don, forme primitive de l’échange,” Année sociologique, 1924.30

All these considerations are inscribed in a tradition where, alongside Mauss, we also find— although Benveniste himself does not refer to it— the work of Kojève on Hegel,31 that is to say, a set of preoccupations, motifs, themes, interpretations, interests that profoundly marked a certain French scene, right 29. Émile Benveniste, “Don et échange dans le vocabulaire indo-européen,” in Problèmes de linguistique générale, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 315– 26; “Gift and Exchange in the Indo-European Vocabulary,” in Problems in General Linguistics, vol. 1, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971), 271– 81. 30. Benveniste, Vocabulaire, 93– 94; Dictionary, 67. 31. See Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1947, reedited, 1971); Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols Jr. (New York: Basic Books, 1969).

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before or right after the war. I will cite just the names of Bataille, Sartre, and Lacan, all three of whom were affected, in a different way to be sure, but in a way I believe determining, by these problematics in which the Hegelian dialectic, the question of sovereignty and domination intersect one another, through the experience of the gift and hospitality— in short, the intersecting tradition of the works of Mauss and Kojève [for these two themes of gift and hospitality are hard to separate, as you easily imagine]. Here I close this parenthetical remark, both too long and too short, and return to the question of problematizing that I was raising just before.) To be astonished that a word signifying “master” ends up signifying “identity,” one must therefore have settled into the assumption according to which this derivation is abnormal, and not only abnormal but against the norms, inadmissible, one might even say implicitly blameworthy from an ethical point of view (I insist on “implicitly,” for Benveniste claims to be neutral and not to indulge, as a specialist, in any moral evaluation. But I think that his astonishment and hence the problem that he sets for himself and for which he says he must seek a solution [we will see which solution] presupposes such an evaluation.) The ethos of the ethical would seem to condemn the very thing that renders it possible, namely, the possibility of saying oneself, and then the possibility of becoming “host,” the possibility of being responsible, as power, as mastery, and above all the possibility of deriving responsibility, the power of being oneself, from power itself, from mastery. Why speak here of evaluation? Because the answer or solution proposed is rather strange, interesting in the values, differences, or oppositions in values that it implements. Let us not forget that we are reading an essay on hospitality and that at stake is the host (hospes) as someone who at the same time affirms and confirms his power, his dominance, and either because of this dominance or by deriving this dominance from his power, sets itself up as itself, as ipse, oneself, the self-same. The host is the same, the host as other is the same as himself. To be host is to be capable of being as being-oneself, being the same as oneself in the relation to oneself: all the same, all things being equal besides, and all the same if something entirely other takes place (arrive) . . . What one ends by noticing, what in any case, after having read and reread these pages, I ended by noticing, coming to a halt before a thing so troubling, is that the differences of value or the oppositions in value that Benveniste implements to find the solution to this problem are also differences or oppositions, inversions of force, intensity, or power. They are expressed by two words, two little words that I signal and underline in advance, before coming back to them while clarifying all this in a moment. These two words are “weakened” and “amplified.” As we shall see, they refer to the same phenomenon. What could

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not be weakened in one sense, can be amplified in another sense. “Weakened” appears in this sentence: While it is difficult to see how a word meaning “the master” could become so weakened in force as to signify “himself,” it is easy to understand how an adjective denoting the identity of a person, signifying “himself,” could acquire the proper meaning of master.32

In this sentence, which we will soon come across again and reread at the end of the session, everything matters, every difference or opposition: weakenacquire, noun-adjective, proper meaning (of the noun) and meaning indicated only by the adjective. The grammatical opposition between subject and adjective (or predicate) will also be aligned with the opposition between the (nongrammatical) subject of mastery and whatever is coupled, attributed, or subjected to it. As for the expression “amplified,” it appears in the following sentence, where you will see confirmed this dimension of the host (hospes) as subject “master” and husband or paterfamilias or despot: For an adjective meaning “himself ” to become amplified into the meaning “master” there is one necessary condition: there must be a closed circle of persons subordinated to a central personage who assumes the personality and complete identity of the group to such an extent that he is its summation: in his own person he is its incarnation.33

Here again all the words count (“closed” and “complete”: “closed circle,” “complete identity”), personage/personality, assume/summation, etc. We will come back to this. How did Benveniste reach this point? Let’s start again from his question. He has just said: “These facts are well known, but they deserve careful scrutiny because of the singularity of the problem which they pose.” And now here is the problem: “Under what conditions can a word denoting ‘master’ end up by signifying identity?”34 In quoting this sentence just now, I did not pick up on the word conditions. (“Under what conditions . . . ,” etc.) This word “conditions,” which will shortly be clarified, already lets us think that these conditions (as they say, social or historical conditions, contextual conditions in general) will not be intralinguistic or etymological or even intra-semantic, conceptual, but rather exterior, as it were, to the properly discursive or lexical process. And this will be verified, as if this great linguist or historian of semantics but also au32. Benveniste, Vocabulaire, 90; Dictionary, 64. [Translator’s note:] Translation modified. 33. Benveniste, 64. [Translator’s note:] Translation modified. 34. Benveniste, 63.

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thor of the Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society took the socioinstitutional causes, the social conditions to be isolatable, as well as in the last instance determining of the processes, filiations, or lexical or semantic genealogies that he analyses. 75

In this, there would be a sociologism operating in the work of the linguist, as if he had the impression of grasping a genuine cause, of reaching a genuine causality worthy of the name when he is able to invoke, outside of language, social or politico-institutional processes separable from— and essentially anterior to— semantico-linguistic processes. Let us look into this: after having recalled what is clear and “well known” in Lithuanian and Iranian, after having signaled a sort of significant exception, namely Hittite, which, while it does not have a form corresponding to *potis, adjective or substantive signifying master, husband, head of a social unit, house, clan or tribe, nonetheless possesses an enclitic particle, pet, -pit that signifies “precisely himself,” Benveniste gives a rather remarkable example of this, since the same word, the demonstrative that signifies only “same, that very one,” “that one precisely,” the little demonstrative -pit also has the meaning of potis (in Lithuanian or in Iranian), although no word with this meaning exists in Hittite. These verses say, I quote only the translation: If a slave flees and if he goes to an enemy country, the one who brings him back, that very one (apāš-pit) who takes him.35

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So, here we would have an example in which the word (demonstrative) for “same” (même) would be applied to someone whose role or action is marked to a great degree by the exercise of power: power of the master over the slave, military power to go into the enemy’s home to lay hands on the slave, territorial power to go to the other’s home and return, bringing the slave back to one’s own home. It is all there. The Lithuanian particle pat means “precisely, exactly,” like the Hittite -pet or -pit; and this allows Benveniste to recall, correcting or fine-tuning things, that the Latin utpote can be compared to them to the extent that utpote does not signify, as it is most often translated, “as is possible” (with the pote of pote est) but “precisely inasmuch,” with pote marking identity. Utpote identifies “emphatically” (I emphasize Benveniste’s term, this allusion to force and intensity) the action with its author, the predicate with the one who assumes it, hence with the subject (in all the senses of the word): 35. Benveniste, 63.

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that very one insofar as, in his capacity, as such. (What is more, I note in a parenthetical remark that I would like to extend at length, this “insofar as oneself precisely, precisely inasmuch” is coextensive with all the uses of “as such,” of same [même] and proper [propre], of properly said, of the proper meaning that constitutes the very nerve center of philosophical, eidetic, phenomenological, and scientific discourse, and especially of Benveniste’s meta-discourse, Benveniste whose taste for what he calls the “proper meaning” I have so often emphasized— namely the meaning as such of something precisely as such, the very meaning of the very thing.) It is, in fact, what is emphasized starting with Benveniste’s next sentence. Indeed, in a sort of raising of the stakes of the proper itself, Benveniste writes: “Accordingly, what was considered as an isolated use becomes an important indication and reveals [the word is a strong one: reveals, as truth, the unveiling of truth] to us the proper signification of potis.” And, it is just after, in another sentence in which the expression “proper meaning” is repeated, that he introduces this strange evaluation that tells of the “weakening” of the sense of “master,” sense reduced, weakened, hence attenuated, extenuated in the meaning of “himself.” In other words, it is more difficult to understand the extenuation in one direction than the reinforcement in the other: Accordingly, what was considered as an isolated use becomes an important indication and reveals to us the proper signification of potis. While it is difficult to see how a word meaning “the master” could become so weakened in force as to signify “himself,” it is easy to understand how an adjective denoting the identity of a person, signifying ‘himself,’ could acquire the proper meaning of master.36

What does Benveniste do then so as to gain access to what seems to him more intelligible, namely, the passage from “himself,” from ipse to “despotēs,” if you prefer, from ipse to dominus, to “master,” a passage that he conceives as an amplification, augmentation, intensification, in short, a growth, rather than the passage from “master” to “himself,” which he interprets (I would say bluntly that he interprets it “naively”) as an extenuating wasting away, a weakening? Well, to gain access to what seems to him more intelligible, more explanatory, he inverts the order and places the institution and social power, or even violence (mastery), before the sameness of the same, as its cause, but a cause that, whether initial or final, nonetheless produces an effect that, in the semantic order, comes after, as an amplification, reinforcement, growth or augmentation of the signification “itself ” (même). 36. Derrida’s emphasis. [Translator’s note:] Translation modified.

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At this point, and to conclude today, I had better read and comment on a passage, p. 90 and following.37 (Read and comment on M, pp. 90– 92).

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While it is difficult to see how a word meaning “the master” could become so weakened in force as to signify “himself,” it is easy to understand how an adjective denoting the identity of a person, signifying “himself,” could acquire the proper meaning of master. This process, which illustrates the formation of an institutional concept , can be corroborated elsewhere: several languages have come to designate “the master” by a term meaning “himself.” In spoken Latin, in Plautus, ipsissimus indicates the “master (mistress), the patron,” the (personage) himself, the only one who is important. In Russian, in peasant speech, sam “himself ” refers to the “lord.” Among a restricted but important community, the Pythagoreans, autòs éphā (αὐτὸς ἔφα) “he himself has said it,” with autòs referred to the “master” par excellence, Pythagoras, was used to specify a dictum as authentic. In Danish, han sjølv “er selbst” has the same meaning. For an adjective meaning “himself ” to become amplified into the meaning “master” there is one necessary condition: there must be a closed circle of persons subordinated to a central personage who assumes the personality and complete identity of the group to such an extent that he is its summation: in his own person he is its incarnation. This is exactly the development we find in the compound *dem-pot(i)- “master of the house.” The role of the person so named is not to give orders but to assume a representation which gives him authority over the family as a whole with which he is identified A verb derived from *poti-, like Skt. pátyate, Lat. potior “to have power over something, have something at one’s disposal,” already marks the appearance of a sense of “to be able to.” With this may be compared the Latin verb possidēre, “possess” , stemming from *pot-sedēre, which describes the “possessor” as somebody who is established on something. The same figurative expression has passed into the German word besitzen. Again, in Latin we have the adjective compos “he who is master, who has command of himself.” The notion of “power” (theoretical) is thus constituted, and it receives its verbal form from the predicative expression pote est, contracted to potest, which gives rise to the conjugation possum, potest “I am capable, I can.” It is worthwhile pausing for a moment to consider a peculiar fact: as against Skt. dam pati and Gr. despótēs, Latin has formed from the same root an equivalent expression, but by a different procedure: this is dominus, a secondary derivative which belongs to a series of expressions for “chief.” Thus tribunus “chief of the tribe,” in Gothic kindins (