|
...Paris--Praga Mexico
Politics an "impossible counsel" (Derrida, Monolingualism 30). On the one hand, we are unconditionally open to the other, to others. Such unconditional opening to what or who comes is the minimal condition of life. Absolute exposure to the other provides the horizon without horizon of what Jacques Derrida calls the law of unconditional hospitality, which stipulates that we welcome any other without conditions, without asking for name. On the other hand, hospitality in fact requires conditions, because there is no hospitality without decision, without responsibility, without my deciding whom or what to grant entry to my house. Although we are unconditionally exposed to the other and although there is the law of unconditional hospitality, such unconditional exposure and hospitality cannot be conceived as an ideal toward which we aspire. Unconditional hospitality cannot be opposed as pure hospitality to a corrupted conditional hospitality. As Martin Hagglund explains, unconditional hospitality is the minimal condition for any hospitality whatsoever. Importantly, unconditional hospitality means that we can never know what or whom to welcome, we cannot know who or what arrives at our door. Upon opening the door to the friend, it is always possible that the guest will be the enemy of the host. Because such possibility always exists, it is impossible to require that one exercise an absolute hospitality, that one not decide who does and does not enter the house. Hospitality cannot require that one open the door to one who would destroy the host. To define hospitality in terms of an opposition between unconditional and conditional hospitality would thus require us to accept, as the highest possibility of hospitality, whomever or whatever arrives at our door; it would require us, therefore, to suspend all discrimination. As a consequence, we would be incapable of protecting ourselves from what or who came, from what Hagglund calls violent visitations: "If I did not differentiate [...] if I did not discriminate, [...] between what I welcome and do not welcome, what I find acceptable and unacceptable, it would mean that I had renounced all claims to be responsible, make judgments[...]. Moreover, it would mean that I had opened myself without reservation to whatever is violently opposed to me and can extinguish everything that is mine, including my principles of hospitality" ("Necessity" 66).
Hagglund's explanation of the heterogeneity and indissociability of unconditional and conditional hospitality makes clear why unconditional hospitality cannot be conceived as a Kantian Idea toward which we ought to strive; indeed, he spells out why such a regulatory idea is undesirable, for at the moment such hospitality would be actualized, it would no longer be hospitable in that the host would always already be the hostage of the other. Nevertheless, without the absolute exposure to the other, without the openness to the future, and thus without the law of hospitality, nothing happens. In "The Deconstruction of Actuality," Derrida explains: "The coming of the event is what cannot and should not be prevented; it is another name for the future itself. This does not mean that it is good--good in itself for everything or anything to arrive; it is not that one should give up trying to prevent certain things from coming to pass (without which there would be no decision, no responsibility, ethics, or politics)" (94). The constitutive tension between unconditional exposure to the future and the necessity of conditioning our relation to the other leads Hagglund to assert: "Thus, the question of hospitality cannot finally be mastered. Even the most securely guarded borders may be transgressed or compromised from within. Without this constitutive risk, there would be no need for protection in the first place. In effect, all limitations of hospitality are at the same time exposed to what they seek to exclude, haunted by those who--rightly or not--question the legitimacy of the determined restrictions" ("Necessity" 66). In sum, the limits of the in itself or en si are, from the beginning, always already violated. From before the beginning, the "I" is visited, threatened, by the other, exposed in its home--in itself--to violation.
The reason why absolute hospitality is at once necessary and impossible is time or, more exactly, temporalization. As Borges noted in a lecture in 1978, "time is an essential problem. I mean we cannot do without time. Our consciousness is continually passing from one state to another, and that is time: succession" (Borges oral 111, my translation here and following). "Succession" is the minimal definition of time. In order that there be succession, however, it is necessary that the present--the nunc stans or the nun--is not. Borges explained: "The present moment is the moment that consists of a little past and of a little future. The present in itself does not exist [El momento presente es el momento que consta un poco de pasado y un poco de poroenir. El presente en si no existe]" (119). This is the rule or principle of temporalization: time is only possible if the present does not exist in itself. If time is succession, then it must also be conceded that it is impossible for anything or anyone to be in itself, to be absolutely self-present. Temporalization, however, is not a concept of time. It is the form neither of interiority nor of exteriority. Borges understood this: "Why does no one step twice in the same river? In the first place, because the waters of the river flow. In the second place [...] because we ourselves are a river, we are also fluid. That is the problem of time. It is the problem of the fugitive: time passes" (112). It is worth recalling Borges' remarkable conclusion to "Nueva Refutacion del Tiempo," which Mexican writer Juan Garcia Ponce cited at the beginning of La errancia sin fin: "And yet, and yet," Borges wrote, "To deny temporal succession, to deny the 'I,' to deny the astronomical universe, are acts of apparent desperation and secret consolations. Our destiny [...] is not frightening because unreal, it is frightening because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance of which I am made. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that tears me apart, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire [...]" (Obras completas 2: 149; Selected Non-Fictions 332, translation slightly modified; quoted in Garcia Ponce, Errancia 15-16). We are, then, constitutively temporal, but temporalization is not properly our own; it is neither simply inside us nor simply outside us.
If time destroys us, as Borges asserts, it is no less the minimal condition of possibility of our life. The condition of life is death. We are finite, but we are infinitely finite because time is infinite in its finitude. It is infinite because it is incessant. It is finite because there can be no succession without change and what changes is, by definition, finite. Thus, time does not endure in itself. If time endures or, better said, if we endure, it is rather as memory, but memory does not persist absolutely. On the contrary, according to Borges, who cites Augustine, although "we are made, in large measure, of our memory," "that memory is made, in large measure, of forgetting" (Borges oral 113). An absolute memory would not be memory; it would be the perpetual present of Funes the memorious, who (as the narrator reports) is incapable of thinking because thought is an act of generalization, of abstraction, which is to say, of forgetting (Obras completas 1: 490; Collected Fictions 137). Strictly speaking, Funes cannot even have an identity, because identity requires forgetting in order that the differences in and from ourselves do not appear to us. Of Funes Borges writes, "His own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him every time he saw them" (1: 489; 136). Every time he sees himself, he appears foreign, strange, to himself. A total memory would absolve and thus make impossible the synthesis necessary in order to unify and comprehend all the impressions of one self. Memory, then, is constituted in the negation of memory; it is constituted in oblivion: in order to remember ourselves it is necessary that we forget ourselves. Both memory and forgetting are effects of time. Time is constitutive negation.
Because we are made of time and because time is never simply in itself, we are both infinitely open to the other, to the future, and incapable of living, of surviving, without imposing limits on that openness. Unconditional hospitality, therefore, is both the minimal condition for survival and impossible. As a consequence of its impossibility, hospitality is necessarily political. If we are temporal beings and if there is nothing that is not temporal, then there is no absolute principle that governs us, that determines the relations between us from the beginning, once and for all. Any principle that attempts to regulate the relation to whatever or whoever comes is also temporal; hence the principle is necessarily also exposed to the future that it would regulate. It should be clear that such regulation is impossible. This means that any universal law is inapplicable as universal: in the instant of its application, the universal law becomes singular. This is the moment of justice, the decision of which is always provisional; qua provisional, the just decision cannot avoid the possibility of equivocation, of being just in name only, that is, as if it were just.
The aporia of hospitality has consequences for the relation of ethics to politics. Precisely because justice must always run the risk of injustice, which means that if there is justice, it is unjust, it is necessary to speak of politics not as the impure stepchild to a purer ethics, but as the condition of possibility of any possible ethics. In other words, the opposition between an uncontaminated ethics and a contaminated politics misses the point insofar as both ethics and politics are effects of the temporalization constitutive of the aporia of hospitality. Because we are unconditionally open to the other, we necessarily, in order to be hospitable in the first place, impose conditions on the other and on ourselves; yet these conditions in no way absolve the unconditional exposure to the other, to what comes.
For example, take...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
have been removed from this article.
More articles from Discourse (Detroit, MI)
Messianic-city: ruins, refuge and hospitality in Derrida.(Jacques Derr..., March 22, 2005
Is nothing secret?(Essay), March 22, 2005
Unhostly historical discourses in Ariel Dorfman's Heading South, Looki..., March 22, 2005
Hawthorne, sacrifice, sovereignty.(Nathaniel Hawthorne)(Critical essay..., March 22, 2005
Piercing the screen of words: reflections on the political poetics of ..., March 22, 2005
Looking for additional articles?
Search our database of over 3 million articles.
Looking for more in-depth information on this industry?
Search our complete database of Industry & Market reports by text, subject, publication
name or publication date.
About Goliath
Whether you're looking for sales prospects, competitive information, company
analysis or best practices in managing your organization,
Goliath can help you meet your business needs.
Our extensive business information databases empower business
professionals with both the breadth and depth of credible,
authoritative information they need to support their business
goals. Whether it be strategic planning, sales prospecting,
company research or defining management best practices -
Goliath is your leading source for accurate information.
|
%20%20&position=1)