Derrida: On Method, On Hospitality, On Ethics. Reflections in the Margin of "Hospitalité I"

Abstract

The topic of hospitality is crucial for the world of today, but philosophy has given surprising little attention to it. One important exception are Jacques Derrida’s seminars on Hospitalité, only recently published in French. The purpose of the present article is to provide a hermeneutic path through the first seminar as an invitation to further readings and discussions. In the first part, the paper highlights the method followed by Derrida: the philosopher adopts a complex methodological track, often starting from analyses of ordinary language and then going through a deconstructive reading of texts in the history of thought. It is through this methodological path that the concept of hospitality can emerge, in the second parte, as an inherently impossible concept, oscillating between absolute hospitality as a law and limited hospitality as an experience. In the last part, it will be shown how, for Derrida, the question of hospitality will come to be coextensive with the question of ethics: hospitality will ultimately reveal itself as a kind of paying attention to the stranger that defines the place of our own dwelling.