8 Mar 2020

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

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