There is no hospitable house

There is almost an axiom of self-limitation or self-contradiction in the law of hospitality. As a reaffirmation of mastery and being oneself in one's own home, from the outset hospitality limits itself at its very beginning, it remains forever on the threshold of itself, it governs the threshold – and hence it forbids in some way even what it seems to allow to cross the threshold to pass across it. It becomes the threshold. This is why we do not know what it is, and why we cannot know. Once we know it, we no longer know it, what it properly is, what the threshold of its identity is.

To take up the figure of the door, for there to be hospitality, there must be a door. But if there is a door, there is no longer hospitality. There is no hospitable house. There is no house without doors and windows. But as soon as there are a door and windows, it means that someone has the key to them and consequently controls the conditions of hospitality. There must be a threshold. But if there is a threshold there is no longer hospitality. This is the difference,  the gap, between the hospitality of invitation and the hospitality of visitation. In visitation there is no door. Anyeon can come at any time and can come in without needing a key for the door. There are no customs checks with a visitation. But there are customs and police checks with an invitation. Hospitality thus becomes the threshold or the door.

Jacques Derrida, 'Hostipitality' in Angelaki, journal of the theoretical humanities, volume 5, number 3 (Routledge, 2000) p. 14

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

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