Abstract

The question of the foreigner remains, as is well known, a pressing issue, now more than ever, even as “we allow the intolerable to happen : not just death, suffering, deportation, nameless woe, but also the imbecilic destruction of Europe and the Mediterranean’s chances in the new world to come,” as Jacques Derrida already noted in August 1995. This article retraces his seminars and public interventions as he calls for another concept of hospitality, thus wresting it away from fantasies of blood and autochthony, even from the notion of a common language. Indeed, his emphasis on hostipitality gives rise to another experience of citizenship and of the political, of responsibility before the other. Lastly, the relationship between unconditional hospitality and non-knowledge also helps explain why a politics that tries to measure up to it necessarily implies poetic invention. More so than other aspects (geopolitics, urban planning, social work, international law) that are affected by the problem of hospitality, hospitality’s poetic dimension may well reveal itself to be the most crucial of all.