Urban space does not simply exist; the land first needs to be tamed

Urban space does not simply exist; the land first needs to be tamed. By the time the British arrived in Singapore in 1819, their approach to land and nature had already been determined. All it needed was the complementary will and the easy compliance of the population for the opening up of that territory. As soon as tigers 'appeared' to and for humans, their very existence needed to be wished away. The island was, quite simply, not big enough for two alpha predators.

Kevin Chua, 'The Tiger and the Theodolite: George Coleman's Dream of Extinction' in Animals (Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Ltd, 2016) p. 216

Animals and the development of modern cities

The process of domestication of some animals like dogs, simultaneous with the systematic marginalization or removal from city centres of certain other animals, both wild and livestock, which started in the Renaissance and intensified in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries across Europe, is for Alÿs an integral aspect of the emergence of the modern era and the development of modern cities.

Miwon Kwon, 'Dogs and the City' in Animals (Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Ltd, 2016) p. 203

If nature is like art

But if nature is like art, this is always because it combines these two living elements in every way: House and Universe, Heimlich and Unheimlich, territory and deterritorialization, finite melodic compounds and the great infinite plane of composition, the small and large refrain.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, 'Percept, Affect, Concept' in Animals (Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Limited, 2016) p. 114

Perhaps art begins with the animal

Perhaps art begins with the animal, at least with the animal that carves out a territory and constructs a house (both are correlative, or even one and the same, in what is called a habitat). The territory-house system transforms a number of organic functions – sexuality, procreation, aggression, feeding. But this transformation does not explain the appearance of the territory and the house; rather it is the other way around: the territory implies the emergence of pure sensory qualities, of sensibilia that cease to be merely functional and become expressive features, making possible a transformation of functions.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, 'Percept, Affect, Concept' in Animals (Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Limited, 2016) p. 112

Becoming-animal exercises the ethical art of embracing the animal as gifted

In short, becoming-animal exercises the ethical art of embracing the animal as gifted. Through its indifferent hospitality man does not so much become an animal as disintegrate into the visual grounding of all actual beings.

Seung-Hoon Jeung, 'A Global Cinematic Zone of Animal and Technology' in Animals (Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Ltd, 2016) pp. 99-100

Hospitality itself, opens or is in advance open to someone who is neither expected nor invited

But pure or unconditional hospitality does not consist in such an invitation ("l invite you, l welcome you into my home, on the condition that you adapt to the laws and norms of my territory, according to my language, tradition, memory, and so on"). Pure and unconditional hospitality, hospitality itself, opens or is in advance open to someone who is neither expected nor invited, to whomever arrives as an absolutely foreign visitor, as a new arrival, nonidentifiable and unforeseeable, in short, wholly other. l would call this a hospitality of visitation rather than invitation. The visit might actually be very dangerous, and we must not ignore this fact, but would a hospitality without risk, a hospitality backed by certain assurances, a hospitality protected by an immune system against the wholly other, be true hospitality?

Jacques Derrida, in Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror (The University of Chicago Press, 2003) p. 162

An exceptional state where there is no host/guest power structure

What renders 'ecological hospitality' impossible is not the human host's abandonment of his ownership and control […] but primarily the animal guest's complete indifference to the host. […]

No animal, indeed, has the concept of and respect for the hospitable human's property and protection. What underlies this animality is antiphusis, as aforementioned, with nature as dark, violent, rotten, hostile, which appears negative in the anthropocentric frame, but which fundamentally implies neutrality for the human. […]

In other words, pure hospitality that is always impossible when offered by the human to the animal might be possible when we rethink it the other way around. […]

Genuine hospitality is, then, that which can be only recognized, retroactively, by the visitor and not the inviter, in an exceptional state where there is actually no host/guest power structure. Derrida also suggests a 'hospitality of visitation rather than invitation', adding that the visit might actually be very dangerous, but 'a hospitality without risk, a hospitality backed by certain assurances, a hospitality protected by an immune system against the wholly other' could not be true hospitality. This true hospitality is again almost impossible to realize, whereas its significance may lie in that it serves as the conceptual idea of actual tolerance, if not perfect, still needed in reality […]. Yet we can go further than this conceptual justification of pure hospitality or gift on the human's side if we posit the visitor not as the host but as the guest of animal hospitality in a zone of indeterminacy between subject and object. Visitation would thus be viewed as an ethical adventure of abandoning one's subjectivity as a host, becoming a volunteer homo sacer who can be killed without being sacrificed in anti-nature, and finding oneself to be in an unprepared and unexpected hospitality without any symmetrical exchange or companionship with the other. Does this not suggest an ethics that is not responsible for the other as a vulnerable sufferer but responsive to the other as a pure gift? A truly ethical act might be to accept the other's being in itself as a gift to me in the realization that it is I who is vulnerable and thus virtually accepted by the very other, gifted its unintended hospitality.

Seung-Hoon Jeung, 'A Global Cinematic Zone of Animal and Technology' in Animals (Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Ltd, 2016) pp. 97-98

To explore a larger bio-polis

Ontological others of the human call for our attention in this regard, urging us to explore a larger bio-polis emerging between, and encompassing both, the human world that becomes ever more globally homogenized and its radically external-immanent environment, natural or technological. The question of how to face this environment requires complexly ethical rather than simply political attitudes, since biopolitics concerns not a new public sphere so much as the condition of any such polis.

Seung-Hoon Jeung, 'A Global Cinematic Zone of Animal and Technology' in Animals (Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Ltd, 2016) p. 96

Nature did not pre-exist culture in that its idea was not born until culture named and incorporated it

Nature did not pre-exist culture in that its idea was not born until culture named and incorporated it into the conceptual frame of what humans believe as reality. Only within this frame does nature appear to be the opposite of our lifeworld, while the frame itself remains cultural.

Seung-Hoon Jeung, 'A Global Cinematic Zone of Animal and Technology' in Animals (Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Ltd, 2016) p. 94

Man is the animal that must recognize itself as human to be human

In truth, Linnaeus's genius consists not so much in the resoluteness with which he places man among the primates as in the irony with which he does not record – as he does with other species – any specific identifying characteristic next to the generic name Homo, onlt the old philosophical adage: nosce te ipsum (know yourself). Even in the tenth edition,when the complete denomination becomes Homo sapiens, all evidence suggests that the new epithet doesnot represent a description, but that it is only a simplification of that adage, which, moreover, maintains its position next to the term Homo. It is worth reflecting on this taxonomic anomaly, which assigns not a given, but rather an imperative as a specific difference.

An analysis of the Introitus that opens the Systema leaves no doubts about the sense Linnaeus attributed to his maxim: man has no specific identity other than the ability to recognize himself. Yet to define the human not through any nota characteristica, but rather through his self-knowledge, means that man is the being which recognizes itself as such, that man is the animal that must recognize itself as human to be human.

[...]

Homo is a constitutively 'anthropomorphous' animal (that is, 'resembling man', according to the term that Linnaeus constantly uses until the tenth edition of the Systema), who must recognize himself in a non-man in order to be human.

In mediaeval iconography, the ape holds a mirror in which the man who sins must recognize himself as simia dei (ape of God). In Linnaeus'soptical machine, whoever refuses to recogninze himself in the ape, becomes one.

Giorgio Agamben, 'Taxonomies' in Animals (Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Ltd, 2016), pp. 82-83

Answering for a dwelling place

We had also recalled the fact, at one point, that the problem of hospitality was coextensive with the ethical problem. It is always about answering for a dwelling place, for one's identity, one's space, one's limits, for the ethos as abode, habitation, house, hearth, family, home. So we should now examine the situations where not only is hospitality coextensive with ethics itelf, but where it can seem that some people, as it has been said, place the law of hospitality above a "morality" or a certain "ethics."

Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality (Stanford University Press, 2000) pp. 149-151 

To be hospitable to animals, plants and the gods

To say that a human being can offer hospitality only to another man, woman, or child is thus to make humanity an animal species like any other. "Isn't what is peculiar to humans instead their being able to be hospitable to animals, plants . .. and the gods?" says Derrida.

Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality (Stanford University Press, 2000) p. 140 

A law without imperative

Let us note parenthetically that as a quasi-synonym for "unconditional," the Kantian expression of "categorical imperative" is not unproblematic; we will keep it with some reservations, under erasure, if you like, or under epoche. For to be what it "must" be, hospitality must not pay a debt, or be governed by a duty: it is gracious, and "must" not open itself to the guest [invited or visitor], either "conforming to duty" or even, to use the Kantian distinction again, "out of duty." This unconditional law of hospitality, if such a thing is thinkable, would then be a law without imperative, without order and without duty. A law without law, in short. For if I practice hospitality "out of duty" [and not only "in conforming with duty"], this hospitality of paying up is no longer an absolute hospitality, it is no longer graciously offered beyond debt and economy, offered to the other, a hospitality invented for the singularity of the new arrival, of the unexpected visitor.

Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality (Stanford University Press, 2000) pp. 81-83

An insoluble antinomy

In other words, there would be an antinomy, an insoluble antinomy, a non-dialectizable antinomy between, on the one hand, The law of unlimited hospitality (to give the new arrival all of one's home and oneself, to give him or her one's own, our own, without asking a name, or compensation, or the fulfilment of even the smallest condition), and on the other hand, the laws (in the plural), those rights and duties that are always conditioned and conditional, as they are defined by the Greco-Roman tradition and even the Judeo-Christian one, by all of law and all philosophy of law up to Kant and Hegel in particular, across the family, civil society, and the State.
[...]

This pervertibility is essential, irreducible, necessary too. The perfectibility of laws is at this cost. And therefore their historicity. And vice versa, conditionallaws would cease to be laws of hospitality if they were not guided, given inspiration, given aspiration, required, even, by the law of unconditional hospitality. These two regimes oflaw, of the law and the laws, are thus both contradictory, antinomic, and inseparable. They both imply and exclude each other, simultaneously. They incorporate one another at the moment of excluding one another, they are dissociated at the moment of enveloping one another, at the moment (simultaneity without simultaneity, instant of impossible synchrony, moment without moment) when, exhibiting themselves to each other, one to the others, the others to the other, they show they are both more and less hospitable, hospitable and inhospitable, hospitable inasmuch as inhospitable".

Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality (Stanford University Press, 2000) pp. 77-79

There is no house or interior without a door or windows

In order to constitute the space of a habitable house and a home, you also need an opening, a door and windows, you have to give up a passage to the outside world [l'etrangerl. There is no house or interior without a door or windows. The monad of home has to be hospitable in order to be ipse, itself at home, habitable at-home in the relation of the self to itself.

Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality (Stanford University Press, 2000) p. 61 

One can become virtually xenophobic in order to protect or claim to protect one's own hospitality

The perversion and pervertibility of this law (which is also a law of hospitality) is that one can become virtually xenophobic in order to protect or claim to protect one's own hospitality, the own home that makes possible one's own hospitality. [...] I want to be master at home (ipse, potis, potens, head of house, we have seen all that), to be able to receive whomever I like there. Anyone who encroaches on my "at home," on my ipseity, on my power of hospitality, on my sovereignty as host, I start to regard as an undesirable foreigner, and virtually as an enemy. This other becomes a hostile subject, and I risk becoming their hostage.

Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality (Stanford University Press, 2000) pp. 53-55

Does hospitality begin with the unquestioning welcome

Does hospitality begin with the unquestioning welcome, in a double effacement, the effacement of the question and the name? Is it more just and more loving to question or not to question? to call by the name or without the name? to give or to learn a name already given? Does one give hospitality to a subject? to an identifiable subject? to a subject identifiable by name? to a legal subject? Or is hospitality rendered, is it given to the other before they are identified, even before they are (posited as or supposed to be) a subject, legal subject and subject nameable by their family name, etc.?

Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality (Stanford University Press, 2000) p. 29

The law of absolute hospitality commands a break with hospitality by right

A proper name is never purely idividual.

If we wanted to pause for a moment on this significant fact, we would have to note once again a paradox or a contradiction: this right to hospitality offered to a foreigner "as a family," represented and protected by his or her family name, is at once what makes hospitality possible, or the hospitable relationship to the foreigner possible, but by the same token that limits and prohibits it. Because hospitality, in this situation, is not offered to an anonymous new arrival and someone who has neither name, nor patronym, nor family, nor social status, and who is therefore treated not as a foreigner but as another barbarian. We have alluded to this: the difference, one of the subtle and sometimes ungraspable differences between the foreigner and the absolute other is that the latter cannot have a name or a family name; the absolute or unconditional hospitality I would like to offer him or her presupposes a break with hospitality in the ordinary sense, with conditional hospitality, with the right to or pact of hospitality. In saying this, once more, we are taking account of an irreducible pervertibility. The law of hospitality, the express law that governs the general concept of hospitality, appears as a paradoxical law, pervertible or perverting. It seems to dictate that absolute hospitality should break with the law of hospitality as right or duty, with the "pact" of hospitality. To put it in different terms, absolute hospitality requires that I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner (provided with a family name, with the social status of being a foreigner, etc.), but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other, and that I give place to them, that I let them come, that I let them arrive, and take place in the place I offer them, without asking of them either reciprocity (entering into a pact) or even their names. The law of absolute hospitality commands a break with hospitality by right, with law or justice as rights.

Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality (Stanford University Press, 2000) pp. 23-25