Threshold Phenomena

“Threshold Phenomena: Jacques Derrida and the Question of Hospitality” considers Jacques Derrida’s thinking of hospitality in light of his recently published two-year seminar from the mid-1990s on the topic. The essay begins by putting the question of hospitality into the context of the recent COVID pandemic and the ways in which the pandemic changed, sometimes just in the short term and sometime more permanently, our practices of hospitality in both our homes and our nation-states. The essay then considers the role of the question in Derrida’s treatment of hospitality, distinguishing a philosophical or definitional question posed about the foreigner from a socio-political question posed by the sovereign to the foreigner from, finally, a putting-into-question of the sovereign by the foreigner, an ethical questioning that disrupts the supposed power and authority of the sovereign and opens the door to what Derrida calls “unconditional” hospitality. What follows is a long analysis of Derrida’s treatment of the aporia or antinomy between this unconditional, unlimited hospitality and the conditional, reciprocal hospitality of customs, laws, and treaties. The essay concludes by considering Derrida’s claim that, in addition to thinking hospitality in terms of both the unconditional and the conditional, hospitality must also be understood as an “arts or a “poetics,” in short, as the title of the essay suggests, as a perpetual and always fragile negotiation of the threshold.