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