The Strain of Hospitality

“I think it is the duty of the poet
to obtain citizenship for an increasing
horde of nameless emotions".

We are here to dedicate several kinds of conversation--among the French and the Americans, among poets, listeners, hermeneuts, and those who think alongside poetry-- to a philosopher of difference in a country, and an institution, that has staked much on politics of identity, a politics thoroughly committed to—no matter its best intents--policing borders of its assorted othernesses. Under some circumstances to ”do deconstruction” has in the US academy also been subject to such identity staking-out, and such policing. Yet one thing to say about Derrida’s work is that it is capacious, and that it is easy to hear in it a tone of generosity if one listens for it.

Now, it is one of the key features of the IWP, the program instrumental in bringing us into the same room for this occasion, to be constitutionally entirely undisciplined, because fundamentally driven by praxis.

This praxis—and it is here “we” owe a debt for posing the questions in the middle of the table not only to Derrida the philosopher of practical reason but also to Derrida the co-founder of the International Writers’ Parliament and its network of cities of asylum—is particularly interrogated by two key terms in his later work, ‘cosmopolitanism,’ and ‘hospitality,’ with their attendant contradictions as they manifest themselves in our politics of writing.

Yesterday evening, as part of the same YAH program, the IWP and the Center for Human Rights here at UI co-signed the “cities of asylum” proclamation and membership. Thus the city (Iowa City) has taken it upon itself, precisely, to enter cosmopolitics, by acting as a cosmo-polis [hard as it is to believe], that is as a city prepared to confront the borders of the State, in a sovereign manner, by granting an asylum sooner than the State would.

But of course the State is also our patron: without the State neither the program not the university would ultimately have any protection whatsoever against the forces, and the rhetoric, of the market. Without the aporia of the State, rather than concerning ourselves with the possibility of cosmopolitanism we would be forced to concern ourselves exclusively with the spirit of globalization.

Secondly, the spirit of hospitality-- “ethics itself”: to be at all meaningful, Derrida’s writing insits, hospitality must operate unconditionally—not as one option among others but as absolute willingness to acknowledge otherness in the place where we live, in our home.

But --as those who have seen the small cosmopolitan unit of 30-something writers which gathers here every fall-- the strain the such a notion of hospitality emerges daily: given that we understand our home as a certain kind of writing our willingness indeed ability to be hospitable to other ideas about writing is at once the ultimate strain in and on our hospitality. To quote: “It is a question of knowing how to transform and improve a law…which takes place between the Law of an unconditional hospitality, offered a priori to every Other…and the conditional laws of a right to hospitality, without which the unconditional law of hospitality would be in danger of remaining pious and irresponsible desire, without form and without potency.” (22-23)

At its most apparent these “conditional laws of a right to hospitality” assume the form of the Other’s right to be listened to, and to be heard. This is what at best transpires in the moment of translation with its own impossibility—of which my colleagues will next be speaking.

And yet. It is under the sign of this “and yet” that we process this afternoon. Soyez bienvenus.