Derrida deconstructs hospitality and all acts of welcoming by exposing them to their own impossibilities, that is, by opening them up to the unwelcomable, to what arrives unexpectedly, suddenly, and uninvitedly in its radical otherness and foreignness.
More specifically, according to Derrida, a hospitality that is truly worthy of the name occurs and first becomes possible only when it passes through and opens itself up to the impossible and the unconditional by welcoming the unwelcomable, the impossibly welcomable, guest.
For Derrida, to welcome only the welcomable guest is not to welcome at all, for this welcoming is nothing but a repetition of certain pre-decided and established codes, orders, norms, or rules.
This welcoming, in which only the welcomable guest is offered a welcome, conforms to the already existent possibilities and confirms the already possible possibilities, according to Derrida.
This welcoming, Derrida says, repeats, and is confined to, the possible, the masterable, and the already thought, imagined, and experienced. This welcoming negates, and is radically distanced from, a hospitality that is genuinely worthy of the name.
According to Derrida, a hospitality that is truly worthy of the name unconditionally welcomes, greets, and invites, for it is opened up to the absolutely foreign, the wholly different, the radically other, the unexpected arrivant, and the unwelcomable guest.
Derrida repeats the same strategy of deconstruction, which exposes the act to its own impossibility as its only condition of possibility, also in his deconstructing-problematizing of the events of, for instance, deciding the undecidable and forgiving the unforgivable.
Hospitality and Asylum-Seeking
In On Cosmopolitanism, Derrida questions, discusses, and endeavors to disrupt the processes of asylum-seeking by saying that what is unconditional and impossible in hospitality must be constantly brought up, put forward, and brought into view so that a transformation of the existing laws, rules, and forms of sovereignty could take place.
According to Derrida, any thinking toward the democracy to come must pass through the non-simple negotiations between the conditional and the unconditional in hospitality, that is, between the calculated and the impossible in hospitality.
These non-simple acts of negotiating, Derrida says, think toward the democracy to come and prevent this form of hospitality, which is deconstructed and hence destabilized and disruptive, from being only an abstract ideal or a hollowed-out theorizing.
Emmanuel Levinas and Welcoming the Other
In A Word of Welcome, an address commemorating and honoring Levinas, Derrida says that to welcome, to offer a welcome, is to indirectly and implicitly declare or acknowledge that the welcomer is at home, or in a place that only the welcomer governs, controls, and polices.
Hence, for Derrida, to welcome, to offer a welcome, does not only mean that the welcomed is allowed to enter and be received as a guest, but also that the welcomer is allowed to control and govern the space offered to the guest and to police the room into which the welcomed is allowed to enter.
Thus, for Derrida, to welcome, to offer a welcome, is to appropriate the Other to whom the welcome is offered. This welcoming, Derrida says, controls the Other by subjecting it to reductive processes whose aim is to render confirmed the already existent, the already oppressive, hierarchies, oppositions, and categorizations.
This welcoming, which takes place only through governing, policing, and controlling the Other, is not worthy of the name of hospitality, according to Derrida.
This is why Derrida introduces and refers to Levinas’s disruption and radicalization of the relation linking together the welcomed and the welcomer, for Levinas, according to Derrida, thinks, problematizes, and radicalizes hospitality and welcoming in such a way that disrupts the relation between the host and the guest, the welcomer and the welcomed.
For Levinas, hospitality, the event of welcoming the Other, does not arise from the host, but rather from the guest, from the Other itself. Levinas says that without the guest, without the Other, hospitality cannot occur.
Levinas radicalizes this view by saying that the at-homeness of the host emerges from and is grounded in the guest, in the Other. That is, only the guest can carry out the welcoming; only the guest can carry out the hosting.
In other words, Levinas exposes hospitality and all acts of welcoming to their own Impossibilities by grounding the welcoming and the hosting not in the host, but rather in the guest, in the wholly Other, in otherness itself.