The Ethics of Hospitality / The Hospitality of Ethics

Abstract

This article contains an analysis of the concept of hospitality as defined in the thinking of Jacques Derrida, who applies the concept of an unsolvable aporia. Thinking about the ethics of hospitality takes place between the right (to) hospitality described by Kant, and the decision to open up to the Other, revealing the infinite hospitality of ethics. Questions posed by Derrida result from a combination of two different traditions of  thought: first, how to reconcile Kantian universal law with the particularity of political thinking, and second, how to introduce unconditional hospitality into a project of global governance. The author traces the efforts made to intersect the Kantian universalism with Lévinas’s ethical vision. She also analyses how this hospitality may refer to the (cosmo)political practice that is governed by general laws.