Derrida's Vision of Hospitality

I have written a couple of papers that have touched on this, one of which I'm going to try and get published by ThirdMill in the coming weeks. One thing that I stress about this is that Scripture's vision of hospitality is very comprehensive, and so is Derrida's. Given Derrida's stature as the great deconstructionist philosopher of the 20th century, we are obligated to converse with his views. In my view, when we do so, we find Derrida's vision to be profound and quite revolutionary, but also dangerously out of step with Scripture.

If there is a simple way to describe Derrida's views on hospitality, it is as follows:

1) The only kind of hospitality that deserves to be called 'hospitality' is what he calls 'pure hospitality'.

2) Pure hospitality, in order to be pure, does not resemble the actual hospitality practiced by humans. Actual hospitality is preferential, restrictive, and violently conformative. Pure hospitality, on the other hand, is completely open and completely accepting.

3) For Derrida, the practice of actual hospitality is violent because it necessarily excludes people (since we can't invite the entire world over to our house), insists on acceptable standards of conduct (most of us don't invite people over so they can run around our house breaking everything in sight), and perpetuates larger structures of injustice and exclusivity that pure hospitality must eliminate. In affect, actual hospitality reinforces and fosters the very dynamics of injustice, inequality (host vs guest), and coercion that pure hospitality is designed to eliminate. This makes our actual hospitality inhospitable, and also highlights the impossibility of achieving pure hospitality in a violent world, since the possible highlights the impossible each time it is extended.

4) For Derrida, we must embrace a hospitality of visitation rather than a hospitality of invitation. A hospitality of visitation introduces radical surprise into hospitality, in that 'the other' is allowed into our homes/nations (yes, Derrida sees hospitality as a global system of ethics that deeply impacts issues such as immigration, amnesty/asylum). While Derrida's 'other' sounds rather transcendental, and to some extent is so, what he mainly means is having people in our homes whom we literally know absolutely nothing about. This is pure hospitality. Actual hospitality's practice of asking questions and getting to know people before we ever invite them into our homes is not hospitable, but interrogatory, because our questions are never pure, but always tainted in motive. For Derrida, actual hospitality is always tainted by self-serving motives, whether it's the expectation of a gift in return, or a feeling of self-congratulation. In Derrida's mind, actual hospitality is always an economy of exchange, and gift-giving is never purely altruistic.

Derrida draws many implications from this. He is not bashful in saying that pure hospitality might be terrible, because we could be inviting a saint or the devil into our homes. But to Derrida, it doesn't matter who it is, and he emphatically says so. Derrida believes that if our hospitality is not willing to allow for the possibility that the newcomer is coming to destroy our home (if we insist on eliminating this as a possibility beforehand), then we are not being hospitable. Instead, we are exercising power over the guest that is unjust and perpetuates inequality among people. For Derrida, pure hospitality is the act of always leaving the door open, the lock unlocked, and having a willingness to give absolutely everything we have for every other person. There must be absolutely no limit on the extent to which we are willing to be trespassed upon by our guests. If we hold back at all, we are not being hospitable because we are insisting on being the masters and owners of our home, and thus, have the right to dictate terms (even subtle terms) to our guests. For Derrida, pure hospitality necessarily entails giving up the mastery and ownership of our own space so that it in affect is no longer our space. This results in an equally shared space of host and guest where the host has no authority over the guest (because the host no longer has mastery over the space) and places no conditions on the guest's conduct (because the host no longer owns the space).

Derrida thinks that pure hospitality implies certain metaphysical principles as well. The future must be completely open and non-determinate (this gives us the radical surprise of hospitality), and we must recognize that in a sinful world, pure hospitality is impossible to achieve (which literally leaves Derrida in tears in his writings).

As Christians, how do we respond to this? Even if we recoil at the insistence that we have to be willing to invite the devil into our home in order for us to be considered hospitable, it's not that hard to see how Derrida's attack on traditional hospitality is highly thought-provoking. After all, Derrida, in some respects, is not that far from what Francis Schaeffer used to preach at L'Abri in regards to welcoming newcomers who you knew might very well steal from you (shades of Le Miserables). As Christians, we have to be very careful not to dismiss Derrida solely because we just don't like what he says and don't want to do what he says. We have a higher authority than our own predispositions and preferences. We need to be asking what a Biblical response is to Derrida. Is everything he's saying completely out of step with Scripture, some of it, none of it?

Rather than rehearse what I've already written in other papers about this, I'm going to hold off on answering this in a blog in the hopes that one of my papers might be published in the next month or so. If this doesn't happen, I will then offer some thoughts about this in a few blog posts. But hopefully, the interested reader will be able to see a fairly succinct response within the context of a published paper. Stay tuned...