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# The Limit-Experience of the Stranger. A Critical Perspective on the “Us/Them” Divide

Lucia Angelino

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Lucia Angelino. The Limit-Experience of the Stranger. A Critical Perspective on the “Us/Them” Divide. Human Studies, 2024, 48 (1), pp.281-297. 10.1007/s10746-024-09765-y. hal-05242238

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# The Limit-Experience of the Stranger. A Critical Perspective on the “Us/Them” Divide

Lucia Angelino

## Abstract

The “we” is not only a way of calling people together. The “we” tends also to perform acts of exclusion. According to political studies, the antagonism resulting from this process is ineradicable and leads by necessity to fragmentation both *within* and *between* groups — the ultimate example of the friend/enemy divide conceptualized by Carl Schmitt. Nowadays, however, the increasing great migratory processes produced by globalization intensifying the formation of multicultural societies demand a re-examination of such a political view and call for new pathways for the future. Once this is recognized, the problem we encounter is the following: can we think of nothing else along the boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ but an antithesis, nothing else but an antagonism? Under what conditions, “from within what axiomatic” (Derrida, The politics of friendship. Verso, 2005), can political thinkers be assured that the us/them relation is by necessity one of hostility and exteriority? How does contemporary philosophy offer new viewpoints coming from old insights? With a view to address these questions, this paper set up a dialogue between Bernhard Waldenfels and Jacques Derrida around the limit-experience of the stranger and probe their reflections on its *in-between* position — in-between the enemy and the guest — as a challenge to the antagonistic view of the “us/them” divide as well as to the logic of binary opposition that informs it.

**Keywords** Us/them distinction · Relative and radical strangeness · Conditional and unconditional hospitality · Bernhard Waldenfels · Jacques Derrida · Emmanuel Levinas · The limit-phenomenon of the stranger
Introduction

According to a famous thesis, made familiar by political thinkers like Carl Schmitt, and more recently Samuel Huntington, “we know who we are [...] only when we know whom we are against” (Huntington, 2003: 21). We owe the most influential formulation of this thesis to Schmitt (2007, 2017). Essentially, it postulates that certain collective identities (i.e., political identities, such as nation-states and, at the broadest level, civilizations, as well as tribes, ethnic groups, religious and linguistic communities, etc.) cannot emerge without referring to a constitutive Other, a “Them” distinguished by its existential and radical opposition to the “We” of the collective identity. From this standpoint, the process of creating enemies is an inherent component of the process of being a self, of acquiring or appropriating an identity.

It is precisely this process that the notion of “constitutive outside” borrowed from Jacques Derrida and introduced in the political field by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (Mouffe & Laclau, 1986), can help to elucidate. Drawing on Derrida’s central idea that every identity is relational, insofar as it is “constructed through the assertion of a difference, the determination of another, which serves as its ‘exterior’” (Mouffe, 2013: 45), Chantal Mouffe supports the following thesis: collective identities are also dependent on an “external” other, symbolically conceived, or existentially experienced as an antagonist other or as an enemy. In the same vein, she claims that “the creation of a ‘we’ can only exist through the formulation of a ‘they,’ and entails drawing a frontier between those who belong to the ‘we’ and those who are outside of it” (Mouffe, 2013: 45). Between what we call “us” and what we call “them” a line must be drawn, which immediately becomes a border, or a divide, that brings to the fore who “we” are and consigns to the background, or to the margin, those who do not count as “us.” According to this political view, the antagonism resulting from this process is inescapable and leads by necessity to fragmentation both *within* and *between* societies — the ultimate example of the friend/enemy divide conceptualized by Carl Schmitt.

Nowadays, however, the increasing great migratory processes produced by globalization intensifying the formation of multicultural societies demand a re-examination of such a political view and call for new pathways for the future. By eroding territorial and cultural boundaries, globalization is producing, first of all in Western societies, an ambivalent proximity of the Other. At this point, the constitutive Other — who was the “enemy” in primitive and modern societies — is among us (or lives *within* us): we can no longer relegate him to the outside nor does he come and go, but he can be increasingly be identified with the Simmelian figure of the “stranger within”<fnref n="1" /> who “comes today and stays tomorrow” (Simmel, 2009: 601), and challenges the order and cohesion of a given community from the standpoint of its ‘differential inclusion’ (or in-between position) that turns critical of existing identities, hierarchies, boundaries and norms of recognition. Traversed by a constitutive paradox owing to which he appears as an internal and distant presence, close by and extraneous at the same time, accessible and inaccessible, the “alien is a limit phenomenon par excellence” (Waldenfels, 2011: 8), or “a symptom that precisely turns the ‘we’ into a problem,

<footnote n="1">¹ G. Simmel “Excursus on the Stranger” (2009: 601–620).</footnote>
perhaps makes it impossible” (Kristeva, 1991: 1). Hovering between the knowable and the unknowable, it marks the *threshold* where the “we” come up against its own limits where it does not, cannot, recognize itself. Its true opposite is precisely “ourselves,” in what would be a complete adhesion, without remainder, in what would be a “we” hermetically closed on itself, tightly tightened around itself.

Once this is recognized, the problem we encounter, which will be addressed in this paper, is the following: if we assume that globalization has rendered obsolete the idea of a clear dividing line between inside and outside, as well as the idea of a constitutive Other, meant as that which can be projected or expelled outside, in a spatial and territorial *elsewhere*, how are we to conceive the relationship between “us” and “them”? And, more precisely, how does the figure of the “stranger within” force us to reconceptualize the traditional ways of conceiving the boundary between “us” and “them”? Can we think of nothing else along the boundaries between “us” and “them” but an antithesis, nothing else but an antagonism? Under what conditions, “from within what axiomatic” (Derrida, 2005: 113), can political thinkers be assured that the us/them relation is by necessity one of hostility and exteriority? How does contemporary philosophy offer new viewpoints coming from old insights?

With a view to addressing these questions, I will set up a dialogue between Bernhard Waldenfels and Jacques Derrida around the figure of the stranger [étanger] — a figure which “frequently operates as a limit-experience for humans trying to identify themselves over and against others”<fnref n="2" /> — and probe their reflections on its *in-between* position — in-between the enemy and the guest — as a challenge to the antagonistic view of the “us/them” divide as well as to the logic of binary opposition that informs it. In relation to this aim, Derrida and Waldenfels, although distinct in their respective approaches, seem to follow a similar path. They *both* break with the traditional ways of thinking of the stranger as something opposed to selfhood from without, by inheriting the methodological panacea provided by Husserl, which consists in taking the “sting” of pure exteriority out of the alien. And they both take the alterity of the stranger as an interrogation of ourselves, as a reminder that we have already been interwoven with the stranger (i.e., the stranger is already *inside* us) and that *our* identity, *our* borders, *our* “at-home” are not per se domains in which to play master in any dogmatic way.

In doing so, they place the *emphasis elsewhere*: rather than focusing on the border that marks the stranger as an enemy — *either* on this side or the other — they focus on the threshold — neither really inside nor truly outside — on which the stranger dwells as a guest. Rather than emphasizing the binary opposition between “us” and “them,” they describe the way in which the topography of the stranger challenges such a clear-cutting line, suggesting that it tacitly presupposes something which we could call with Norbert Elias and Maurice Merleau-Ponty an interlacing or an intertwining (a chiasm). This means more precisely that the “own” and the “stranger,” far from being self-enclosed and autonomous identities (like monads) which can be placed in opposition to one another, by setting up a scene of dyadic conflict — e.g., “friend/enemy, “us/them” — are always in a process of differentiation, more or less mixed, lacking a fixed and accomplished identity.

<footnote n="2">² Kearney (2003:3).</footnote>
In this paper, I claim that the encounter between these two thinkers around the limit-experience of the stranger has the potential not only to challenge the antagonistic view of the “us/them” relation but also to overcome the logic of binary opposition that informs it. Still, and to begin with, it is worth asking how it has come about that the stranger has turned into an enemy (hostility) both in individual and, more importantly, in collective consciousness.

Bernhard Waldenfels on the Limit-Phenomenon of the Stranger

To answer this question, let's start with Bernhard Waldenfels' distinction between "relative" and "radical" strangeness. "For centuries," explains Waldenfels, "we find only what I call a relative kind of alienness, dependent on a limited standpoint" (Waldenfels, 2007: 3). This limited standpoint is centered on the ego and its own sphere of ownness to which all that is considered strange, even the *alter ego*, is subordinated. On the basis of this point of view, "the phenomenon of the alien is domesticated, which literally means: adapted to and integrated into one's own house or home" (Waldenfels, 2007: 3). Importantly, this scene of domestication, or appropriation, is predetermined in a vertical, not horizontal way, so that strangers are not seen as other people, but as inferior and enemy people (Waldenfels, 2007: 15). Beyond mere self-interest, this process of appropriation is rooted in the reign of *logos* that privileges rational likeness. There is, explains Waldenfels, "a kind of *egocentrism* that reduces the alien to the own. [...] This sort of egocentrism, centered on the ego and its own sphere, is complemented by a logocentrism centered on the logos as a set of goals and rules, reducing the alien to the common" (Waldenfels, 2007: 14). In other words, we tend to approach the stranger on the basis of ourselves, of who we are, where we are, of our limited access to the world. "This process of appropriation based on what Macpherson has called 'possessive individualism'" (Waldenfels, 2007: 14) raises a strong barrier between 'us' and 'them' and is "realized by different forms of centrism" (Waldenfels, 2007: 14); not only is there, as we have seen, a kind of *egocentrism* complemented by a kind of *logocentrism*, but also a kind of "*ethnocentrism*, centered on the 'we' of one's own group, tribe, nation or culture" (Waldenfels, 2007: 14). *Ethnocentrism* "can be taken as a collective form of egocentrism" (Waldenfels, 2007: 15), but in its two specific forms – nationalism and eurocentrism – and especially in the form of *eurocentrism* it "should be interpreted as a mixture of ego- and logocentrism" (Waldenfels, 2007: 15). It is a centrism that is special in its claim to universality, in that it does not "defend its own culture as one among others, but as the incarnation or vanguard of mankind" (Waldenfels, 2007: 15). Thus, the center happens to be an all-encompassing reason, and what does not fit into its scheme is marginalized or, ultimately, eliminated.

In conclusion, whether the circle is narrow or wide, this model – of life and thought – of *centration* is in itself problematic: not only does it disclose a *relative strangeness*, in which the stranger is reductively defined in my terms (as an alien-intruder for us), but it also instigates a tendency towards subordination and appropriation which, though often preconceptual, must be eliminated from any inquiry set on tracing a way out of the antagonism between us and them. Indeed, if we start from *egocentrism*,
"anyone who encroached on my 'at home,' on my ipseity, on my power of hospitality, on my sovereignty as host" is regarded "as an undesirable foreigner and virtually as an enemy" (Derrida & Dufourmantelle, 2000: 54f.).

The historical and philosophical deconstruction of the two foundation stones of this model of thought — egocentrism and logocentrism — "increasingly undermined by a *decentering* of the individual and collective ego" and by "a *dispersion* of reason" (Waldenfels, 2007: 15), dissipated into plural forms of rationalities, allows Waldenfels to disclose a "radical" rather than "relative" strangeness, which is a strangeness in its own right.

The standpoint he adopts for such a move is the standpoint of the body or rather of a bodily self, which is "not master in its own house," and in relation to whom the "Other arises as co-original as myself and to some extent as earlier than myself" (Waldenfels, 2007: 81).

This phenomenological standpoint, which he borrows from Merleau-Ponty<fnref n="3" />, allows him not only to disclose a “radical” strangeness that would no longer be derivable from a unilateral alienation or appropriation of ownness but also to overcome the opposition between the “own” and the “stranger” in favor of an original *intertwining* or an *ineinander*, an *inside each other* that breaks any form of egocentrism and undermines any sort of *centrism*. This figure of thought “means firstly that “the ‘own’ and the ‘stranger’ are *more* or *less* entangled with each other as a net can be tightened or loosened, and secondly that between them there remain *blurred boundaries*, which have more to do with accentuations [...] than with clear-cutting separations” (Waldenfels, 2009: 84). This entanglement means more precisely that the “own” and the “stranger,” far from being “opposed to each other like monads, which are closed in themselves” (Waldenfels, 2011: 75), and which one could place opposite one another by setting up a scene of dyadic conflict — typically “us/them,” “friend/enemy” — emerge from an original split or a “primary division” (*Urscheidung*). In this respect, they always stand on one side and the other of the same threshold. It is for this reason that Waldenfels describes their relationship as a “limit phenomenon” (2011: 8) and Anthony Steinbock as a “liminal experience” (1995: 179). Precisely because they are not formed by setting limits, but rather by mutually differentiating from each other<fnref n="4" />. In other words, “the own, which originates equiprimordially with the alien” (Waldenfels, 2011: 75) does not arise from a mere process of delimitation (*Abgrenzung*), nor from a simple demarcation, but rather from a process of *differentiation*, in which “that what detaches itself from the other owes its origin and its continued existence to the processes of detachment itself” (Waldenfels, 1995: 115).

For this very reason, neither the “own” nor the “stranger” can be regarded as the “original sphere” since they both exist in a continual becoming as cutting off from

<footnote n="3">³ See the following passage: "Being affected by and exposed to what is alien to myself (*Ichfremdes*) depends neither on our knowing nor on our willing i.e. on our consciousness, it is related to our body. The domain of our body includes all that really has to do with me without being done by me. In this regard the body which Merleau-Ponty once called an 'inborn complex' [...] comes close to the unconscious, to the corporeal ego (*Körperich*) and to the corporeal language of symptoms in Freud's psychoanalysis," Waldenfels (2007: 74f.). See also Waldenfels (2007: 81f.).</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ See Anthony J. Steinbock, in its analysis of the co-generation of home/alien, home world/alien world, normal/abnormal, (Steinbock, 1995: 179).</footnote>
one another. This is the sense in which they are, “co-generative” (Steinbock, 1995: 179). There is nothing that precedes this process of differentiation, which begins wherever one of the poles of the relationship differentiates itself from the other<fnref n="5" />. As such, the “own” and the “stranger” always exist in relation to each other and can never exist outside of this relationship (intertwining) which constitutes them. The relationship between them is therefore a priori and structural. In this sense, it is insurmountable. The alien (experience) only exists in contrast to the own, and vice versa. This is an essential point for us. For the borderline here described as “liminary” (and not pre-liminary) seems to challenge the logic of binary opposition – based on a clear-cutting line – that informs the “us”/“them” divide, and shed new light on their co-constitutive relation. Owness and foreignness are not formed by positing external limits or frontiers but rather exist in a continual becoming as mutually delimited from the one other.

The paradox is reinforced by the fact that this co-constitutive relation, this structural entanglement between the “own” and the “alien,” crosses each term of the relationship. Everything happens as if the ambiguous relationship (the nexus) of the Own and the Alien reverberates within two terms of the relationship, as following the Merleau-Pontian model of “chiasm.” The “own” is not simply opposed to the “stranger;” it experiences this opposition within itself. Here, the “stranger” is not only external to the “own” — that which lies outside the “sphere of ownness” — it also characterizes the intimate relationship that the “own” has with itself: an alienness within, and not outside ourselves. The “own” contains an internal alienness within itself. As Bernhard Waldenfels clearly states: “If the own is interwoven with the alien, this also means that the alien begins in ourselves and not outside ourselves, or rather, it means that we are never entirely at home with ourselves” (2011: 76). This is an essential point. For, if “the alien begins in ourselves and not outside ourselves,” and if he/she seeks us out in our own home, then the sphere of ownness is never completely closed off, completely severed from the outside. This radical non-coincidence with itself characteristic both of the own and of the alien is what makes the encounter between them possible. This can happen precisely because the self is never completely at home with itself because the alien pervades it from the very beginning.

That the own and the alien are intertwined like the front and back of the same fabric does not mean, however, that the difference between them is abolished, nor that their co-constitutive relativity can entail a “reversibility of perspectives.” On the contrary, an “irreducible asymmetry” (Waldenfels, 2011: 15) keeps them apart. This unavoidable asymmetry arises because the alien is given to me – as Husserl described it with a rarely reached radicality – in the mode of “genuine inaccessibility and incomprehensibility” (Husserl, 1973: 631), as “verifiable accessibility of what is originally inaccessible” (Husserl, 1950: 144). This paradox which combines possibility and impossibility in a remarkable way, points to the fact that the alien has nothing from a pure *lack* – as if he were something that is not (or not yet) available

<footnote n="5">⁵ See Waldenfels (2011: 75); Waldenfels (1990: 24): « The division into own and alien [...] stems from a process of self-differentiation. At least one of the members of the relation plays a part in this process, by differentiating itself from the other ». We find a similar idea in Derrida (2021: 81): « cela commence partout où du dedans se constitue, partout où une ligne de seuil, un limen, sépare une intériorité d'un dehors [...] ».</footnote>
to, or understandable by, us but knowable in itself. On the contrary, absence, distance or inaccessibility characterize strangeness as such. In this regard, the alien appears as a form of *withdrawal*: its givenness eludes our grasp, just as much as it evades the framework of prevailing orders. In other words, the alien shows itself by eluding us, it is given as not being able to be given and experienced as not being able to be experienced.

It is precisely for this reason that the alien is a “limit-phenomenon par excellence” (Waldenfels, 2011: 8), precisely because it remains on the limit of givenness, on the edge of accessibility and confronts us with a lived impossibility, im-possible as measured on the possibilities that are available for us. Not only is the alien not given now — “being always something more or other than what it seems to be, thus being endowed with horizons of sense and being symbolically undetermined” (Waldenfels, 2003: 27) — but it is never in principle given at all: it is indeed, and precisely, “the ‘itself’ of showing itself, the *Sich* of the *Sichzeigen*, that does not appear in what shows itself” (Waldenfels, 2003: 27).

At the same time, however, the alien appeals to our senses, it appears through the effects he produces on us, by appearing and disappearing, and thus it is, in some way, accessible through its, incarnate, “bodily absence” (*leibhaftige Gegenwart*), like the temporal dimensions of past and future. In its distant closeness, the alien presents itself “in the flesh, as absence in flesh and bone (*absence en chair en os*)” (2011: 43).

In order to characterize further this paradoxical experience (i.e., radical strangeness) which exceeds the sphere of sense based on my intentions, Waldenfels emphasizes one aspect in particular, connected to the fact that “the otherness or the alienness of the Other announces itself… in terms of pathos, of a specific *Fremdaffection*. We are touched by others before being able to ask who they are and what their utterances mean. The Other’s otherness, which overcomes and surprises us, disturbs our intentions before being understood in this or that sense” (Waldenfels, 2007: 82). For instance, “I feel myself looked at or addressed prior to hearing somebody utter certain words or produce certain sounds” (Waldenfels, 2007: 83). I feel myself seen by the Other before I see him or her, I feel myself seized by the desire of the Other before seeking him or her. In short, “the alien, which takes us outside of ourselves and let us transcend the boundaries of the specific order, cannot be anything that we bring about by our own volition. It is only conceivable as a pathos that happens to us” (Waldenfels, 2011: 84), a pathos that “continuously imports elements which are ‘alien to the ego’ [*Ichfremdes*]” (Waldenfels, 2011: 29).

Here lies an essential intuition which serves as a springboard for more general and penetrating insights. If the alien is never given like an object that we intend (i.e., *as something* endowed with a certain sense), but rather as a *pathos* (*Af-fektion*) we undergo (i.e., *as something* which provokes sense without being meaningful itself, yet still *as something* by which we are touched, affected, stimulated, surprised), then it appears as such only in terms of something to which we respond. In this regard, it breaks the “noesis-noema” structure of intentionality, as much as the circle of communication, and calls for a new form of responsivity, for a special logic of response
that differs considerably from the logic of intentional acts, as well as from the logic of comprehension and from the logic of communicative (conversation)<fnref n="6" />.

From this standpoint, the alien, who hides in the Other's demand, appears as a "questioning of the own" (Waldenfels, 2011: 19), a questioning that challenges us first and puts our own possibilities in question. As important as this phenomenological insight might be, the underlying difficulty haunting this view is the following: how the stranger's arrival, felt as a disquieting demand that "interrupts the familiar formations of sense and rule, thus provoking new ones" (Waldenfels, 2003: 30), can stimulate a "creative response" (Waldenfels, 2003: 35), rather than hostility or xenophobic drive?

In what follows, I claim that addressing this question requires a far more radical reconceptualization of intentionality as hospitality and a new, ethical orientation that I will sketch by venturing down the path trodden by Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas — in an intertwining of proximities and differences that I will not examine here in detail.

## Derrida on Conditional and Unconditional Hospitality

As it is well known, Jacques Derrida famously engages in a long-standing critique of thinking based on a straightforward logic of *versus*. Faced with the famous thesis that “we know who we are [...] only when we know whom we are against” (Huntington, 2003: 21), Derrida replies that the ethics of hospitality offers a radical, albeit complicated, alternative to the infamous friend/enemy dichotomy made familiar by political thinkers like Carl Schmitt and, more recently, Samuel Huntington. It not only brings to light the fact that the self (host) is no longer fully “master of her or his home,” insofar as the guest crosses the threshold that separates what belongs to him or her from what is foreign. It also bears to testimony the fact that the self is never an autonomous identity, but a guest (“the subject is a host,”<fnref n="7" /> as claimed by Levinas in *Totality and Infinity*) graciously “hostage” (“the subject is a hostage,”<fnref n="8" /> as claimed by Levinas, in *Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence*) to its “host”

In order to grasp this line of thought, let us begin with the scene of hospitality, described by Derrida in the fifth session of his seminar *On Hospitality*<fnref n="9" /> entitled “Step

<footnote n="6">⁶ As it is well known, the alternative envisioned by Waldenfels appears in the shape of a new sort of responsive phenomenology, which is “grounded in pathos and directed toward responsivity” (Waldenfels, 2011: 21).</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ Levinas (1969: 299), as well as in the chapter entitled “Phenomenology of Eros.”</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ Levinas (1998: 112; 114), as well as in the chapter entitled “Substitution.”</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹ As Gil Anidjar clearly resumes, “The thread of hospitality can be followed in Derrida’s work since at least *Writing and Difference*, most notably, though not exclusively, in his readings of Levinas. It has emerged in a more explicit fashion in *Politics of Friendship, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas*, and recently in *Of Hospitality*, Gil Anidjar (2002) “A note on hospitality,” in Derrida (2002: 356f.). The thread of hospitality also shines, at other times, in the foreground throughout most of Derrida’s work. My aim here is not to trace Derrida’s discussions of hospitality throughout his corpus, but rather to focus mainly on the seminar on hospitality held by Derrida at the EHESS between 1995 and 1997, recently published in French under the title: *Hospitalité*, vol. 1, seminar (1995–1996), Paris, Seuil, 2021 and *Hospitalité*, vol. 2, seminar (1996–1997), Paris, Seuil, 2022. Derrida, however, as usual, had written several other</footnote>
of hospitality,” where Derrida focuses on the moments at the threshold of our identity in which the arrival (rise, irruption) of the stranger breaks the self-interested circularity of the ego and, at the same time, sets in motion the reversal of roles by which the host (master of the house) becomes the hostage of the one he receives — a paradoxical reversal of roles, which Derrida draws from his reading of Pierre Klossowski’s novel *Roberte ce soir* and which he will make the common thread of his reflections on hospitality.

The master of the house, “waits anxiously on the threshold of his home” for the stranger he will see arising into view on the horizon as a liberator. And from the further distance that he sees him coming, the master will hasten to call out to him: “Enter quickly” [...], quickly, in other words, without delay and without waiting. [...] hurry up and come in, “come inside,” “come within me,” not only toward me, but within me: occupy me, take place in me, which means, by the same token, also take my place, don’t content yourself with coming to meet me or “into my home.” [...] Strange logic, but so enlightening for us, that of an impatient master awaiting his guest as his liberator, his emancipator. It is as if the stranger or foreigner held the keys. [...] It’s as if (and an as if always lays down the law here) the stranger [...] could save the master and liberate the power of his host; it’s as if the master, qua master, were prisoner of his place and his power, of his ipseity, of his subjectivity (his subjectivity is hostage). So, it is indeed the master, the one who invites, the inviting host, who becomes the hostage — and who really always has been. And the guest, the invited hostage, becomes the one who invites the one who invites, the master of the host. (Derrida & Dufourmantelle, 2000: 124f.)

These *Difficulties*, he continues, can be formalized through a seemingly simple antimony: “We thus enter from the inside: the master of the house is at home, but nonethe- less he comes to enter his home through the guest — who comes from outside. The master thus enters from the inside as if he came from the outside. He enters his home thanks to the visitor, by the grace of the visitor” (Derrida & Dufourmantelle, 2000: 125).

One might then say that the “welcome to come” is what makes possible the “recollection of the at home” with oneself, even though the welcome also, of course, presupposes recollection, that is the intimacy of the at home with oneself (the dwelling, the house) in an extremely significant interplay of relationships between recollection [recueillement] and welcome [accueil] that appear impossible to disentangle. In fact, everything happens as if the host, the master of the house, could fulfill his mission as host, and therefore his mission of hospitality, only by being invited by the other into his own home, by being welcomed by the one he welcomes into his own home.

texts published at the same time as the seminar in various contexts: see in particular Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, *Of Hospitality*. Anne Dufourmantelle invites Jacques Derrida to respond, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000, which includes sessions 4 and 5 of the seminar, quoted here in this translation by Rachel Bowlby.
From another viewpoint, that of subjectivity, one might say that the “self” gains access to its own selfhood only through the hospitable welcome of the other, who comes from outside, so that there is always already something foreign in his identity. And this is the reason why the absolutely other, the most exterior, is at the same time the most intimate. To be oneself — to seize oneself *from within* — is to seize oneself by the same gesture that consists in turning outwards to respond to the Other’s call. In this sense, welcoming the stranger is both a questioning of my ego (my freedom, my spontaneity as a living being) and the very origin of the original “self” (or *ipse*) — more radical than the ego (*moi*) — which I am because I can relate to myself, to my “at home,” only to the extent that the irruption of the other has preceded my own selfhood. Or, to put it another way, I can access my most intimate self only by welcoming the other, whose disturbing irruption shatters the enclosure of my egocentric selfhood. In other words, I find my being-at-home, and my being-myself as a subject (l’*être-soi chez soi* – l’*ipseité même*) in and through the guest who comes from outside. I come to myself in the movement that welcomes the wholly other. Since I can reach my true selfhood, and my being “at-home” with myself, through the other — the guest, the stranger — I cannot do without this other. But for this very reason, the other, the guest, is also a *breach*, a *disjunction*, within the self, an obstacle that prevents it from achieving the self-mastery and self-possession to which it aspires. My “self” and my being “at-home” are not something I possess: my “self” is irremediably infected with an otherness that prevents me from being *fully* one and *fully* at home with myself. In welcoming the guest, my self is interrupted. To put it differently, there is a strangeness *in* me. And this strangeness must be radical enough that I can’t even re-appropriate it in one way or another. But if there is, indeed, “foreignness or heterogeneity in selfhood,” Derrida tells us, that means that before any organized hospitality, the other is already there.

To explain more fully, the encounter with the external stranger (i.e., the intersubjective encounter with the stranger as a foreigner, whether he be a migrant, refugee, or illegal immigrant, categorized in political or social terms, and thus organized or conditional hospitality) is prepared by and made possible through the recognition of an internal strangeness or Otherness, an alterity *in* the self, at work in the very structure of selfhood. It is only because there is a kind of “internal alterity” within the subject — what Levinas calls the “other in me”<fnref n="10" />— at the level of pre-conscious or pre-reflective sensibility<fnref n="11" />—term by which Levinas refers to that region of responsiveness that precedes and constitutes the ego—that the subject can be claimed by the other; it is only because the Other is impressed upon me from the start that “relatedness is possible”<fnref n="12" />.

Although Derrida explicitly draws upon the story described by Pierre Klossowski in *Roberte ce soir*, there is an obvious reference to Emmanuel Levinas behind this theoretical shift (i.e., reverting the subject-host to the subject-hostage, the *welcoming* host, who considers himself the owner of the place (*hôte*), to a guest, *welcomed* in his own home), which breaks with a conception of hospitality linked to ipseity (i.e., to a

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ Levinas (1998: 125), for instance.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹ See in particular the paragraph entitled “Vulnerability and contact” in Levinas (1998: 75–81).</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹² Critchley (2007: 62).</footnote>
self that dominates the other, the *ipse*, *potis*, *potens*, master of the house). We cannot
fully grasp the meaning of this theoretical shift and its implications without referring
to Levinas, for whom hospitality presupposes an “interruption of the self by the self
as other” (Derrida, 1999a: 52) as well as a dispossession or a withdrawal, by which
the *ipse* is expropriated from its ipseity, and thus delivered to the other (*hostage*),
even to all the others, since for Levinas “The word ‘I’ means *here I am*, answering for
everything and for everyone” (Levinas, 1998: 114).

As Derrida explains, commenting on Levinas:

A hyperbolic transgression brings about a disjunction in the immanence to the
self. In each case [sic.], this disjunction has to do with the pre-originary ex-
propriety or ex-appropriation that makes of the subject a guest [hôte] and an
hostage, someone who is, *before* every invitation, elected, invited, *and* visited
in his home as in the home of the other, who is *in his own home in the home of
the other*, in a given *at home*, an at home that is given or, rather, loaned, allot-
ted, advanced before every contract, in the ‘anachronism of a debt preceding
the loan’. According to the logic of this advance, a logic that is at once peaceful,
gentle, and ineluctable, the welcoming one is welcomed. He is first welcomed
by the face of the other whom he means to welcome. (Derrida, 1999a: 99)

This is why the scene of hospitality described by Derrida sets out, each time, the para-
doxical logic of “substitution” <fnref n="13" /> operating in the entrails of the self, whereby identity
is inverted in such a way that the subject is subjugated (hostage) at the very moment
when it arises in the accusative (*here I am*) — a logic of aparadoxical reciprocity that
Levinas exemplarily highlighted in *Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence*<fnref n="14" />.
Otherwise said, the specific action of hospitality concretizes, each time, the most inti-
mate ontological structure of the self: the madness of an unlimited welcome which is
always the truth of the self as soon as it accesses significance.

Through the logic of substitution brought to light by Levinas we are reminded of
this implacable law of hospitality, which we already encountered in Derrida's reading
of the novel *Roberte ce soir* by Klossowski:

The *hôte* who receives (the host), the one who welcomes the invited or received
hôte (the guest), the welcoming *hôte* who considers himself the owner of the
place, is in truth a *hôte* received in his own home. He receives the hospitality
that he offers *in his own home*; he receives it *from his own home-which*, in the
end, does not belong to him. The *hôte* as host is a guest. The dwelling opens
itself to itself [...] as a “land of asylum, or refuge.” The one who welcomes
is first welcomed in his own home. The one who invites is invited by the one
whom he invites. The one who receives is received, receiving hospitality in
what he takes to be his own home, or indeed, his own land, according to a law
that Rosenzweig also recalled. (Derrida, 1999a: 41)

<footnote n="13">¹³ As Derrida explicitly admits in (2002: 365–375).</footnote>

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ Levinas (1998, chapter IV entitled “Substitution”).</footnote>
Thus, “the guest, the invited hostage, becomes the one who invites the one who invites, the master of the host. The guest becomes the host’s host. The guest (*hôte*) becomes the host (*hôte*) of the host (*hôte*)” (Derrida & Dufourmantelle, 2000: 125).

“While such an antinomy remains, as it has to, perfectly contradictory” (Derrida & Dufourmantelle, 2000: 125–127), it reminds you — as Waldenfels also does — that we have always been interwoven (and entangled) with strangers, that *our* household, *our* borders, *our* identity are not, per se, domains in which we play master in any dogmatic way. For Derrida, “this axiom also holds for the space of a nation. The ground of the territory has nothing natural about it, nothing of a root, even if it is sacred, nothing of a possession for the national occupant” (Derrida, 1999a: 93).

In the end, this antinomy inverts the common scene of hospitality: it is not we, as hosts, who are masters of the scene, but we who are very much in question in a provocative way.

To get to such a conclusion, Derrida orients his own discussion of hospitality by disclosing (and actually displacing) the specific question “of” the stranger. The issue he deals with has to do with whether or not “the foreigner were first of all *the one who* puts the first question or *the one whom* the [host] address the first question” (Derrida & Dufourmantelle, 2000: 3). Who, in fact, dominates the scene: the host who decides, as master at home — *chez lui* — who to invite into his home, or the absolute stranger, who, asking the first question, puts the host into question?

Following one of the directions it takes, the question of the foreigner introduces the question of hospitality: “Does hospitality consist in interrogating the new arrival? Does it begin with the question addressed to the new comer: what’s your name? Or else, does hospitality begin with the unquestioning welcome, in a double effacement, the effacement of the question *and* of the name?” (Derrida & Dufourmantelle, 2000: 27f.).

When the foreigner is the one to *whom* the host addresses the first question, hospitality is always “conditional,” which means subjected to specific preconditions and laws. The law of conditional hospitality — “the one that is most commonly practiced by individuals, families, cities or states” (Borradori, 2003: 128) — reserves the right of each host to evaluate, select, and choose those he or she wishes to include or exclude: i.e., the right to discriminate. Such discrimination requires that each visitor identify him or herself before entering one’s home. And this process involves at least some degree of violence or a certain injustice. When hospitality is “conditional” it becomes the kind of thing that may *not* happen in a given circumstance: “we offer hospitality only on the condition that the other follow our rules, our ways of life, even our language, our culture, and so on” (Borradori, 2003: 128). Failing to meet the conditions of hospitality, the stranger could become *persona non grata*: if he/she lacks the right appearance, has the wrong skin color, does not have a recognizable name, or is just unknown, he/she is not accepted by the person who opens the door: the host does not recognize him/her as one of their “own” and thus the door is “slammed in his face” as we say.

By contrast, there is for Derrida an unconditional hospitality that, once recovered, should put into question such questioning, since it is the stranger who “interrogates us first, even puts us into question” (Derrida, 2002: 402). Unconditional hospitality, explains Derrida, “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*, let come, arrive [...], without demanding that he gives his name or enter into some reciprocal pact" (Derrida & Dufourmantelle, 2000: 29). In other words, "pure and unconditional hospitality," which is "hospitality *itself*" for Derrida, "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" (Borradori, 2003: 128f.). It is *visit* as opposed to *invitation*, it is the immediate welcome without condition, without rules, without measures, without calculation. It is the unlimited, unintentional exposure to what happens, to the incalculable, to the event, to whatever comes.

This pure hospitality, “without which,” according to Derrida, “there is no concept of hospitality, applies to the crossing of a country’s borders, but it has also a role in everyday life: when someone arrives, when love arrives, for example, we take a risk, we expose ourselves” (Derrida & Roudinesco, 2003: 102). As for Levinas, hospitality is not simply reduced to the reception of the foreigner in his nation. It is, rather, the primary attitude of the self before the other. It characterizes an original opening that would come first. As soon as I open up to the other, I am already in a certain hospitable disposition towards alterity. In other words, and quite literally, “intentionality opens, from its own threshold, in its most general structure, as hospitality, as welcoming of the face” (Derrida, 1999a: 50).

As Derrida clearly outlines in *Sur Parole*, where he reflects on his appropriation of Levinas’s account of hospitality as primary attitude of the self before the other:

> From this point of view, hospitality comes first. To say that it is primary means that even before being myself, and who I am, *ipse*, the irruption of the other must have preceded my own ipseity. This is why, in the trajectory of Levinas that I try to reconstruct [...], we set off thinking about welcome as the primary attitude of the self before the other, from thinking about welcome to thinking about the hostage. I am in a certain way the hostage of the other, and the hostage situation where I am already the other’s guest as I welcome the other into my home, where I am the other’s guest in my own home, that hostage situation defines my own responsibility. (Derrida, 2003: 66)

In a word, “intentionality *is* hospitality” and “the force of this copula carries hospitality very far” (Derrida, 1999a: 50). Derrida’s work on hospitality suggests the *critical* force of the copula “is.” “For if intentionality opens, from its own threshold, in its most general structure, as hospitality” (e.g., as *pull toward* the other, *attention* to the speech, or *welcoming* of the face, and not thematization), if “it does not let itself be circumscribed or derived” and “if hospitality originarily conveys the whole of intentional experience, then it would have no contrary: the phenomena of allergy, rejection, xenophobia, even war itself would still exhibit something that Levinas explicitly attributes to or allies with hospitality” (Derrida, 1999a: 50). In other words, “hostility” presupposes and still attests to hospitality, from this perspective introduced by Levinas and appropriated by Derrida: “Whether it wants or not, whether we realize it or not, hostility still attests to hospitality: ‘radical separation,’ ‘relation with the
*other* [...] 'attention to speech,' or 'welcome of the face'. There is no intentionality before and without this welcoming of the face that is called hospitality" (Derrida, 1999a: 50).

The crucial implication drawn by Derrida here is that the claim of hospitality is not a choice. We are always and already called, whether we like it or not. Thus, despite ourselves, we are called to host the stranger. Even though we can choose to be concerned predominantly with ourselves, *hostile* to alterity, rejecting an eth- ics of hospitality, hospitality’s claim is not a choice, precisely because we are, first and foremost, vulnerable and sensing subjects, subjected to substitution (hostages), constantly exposed and sensitive to what is outside of ourselves, constantly fissured and interrupted.

As important as this point might be, we may wonder whether Derrida has effec-
tively drawn all the consequences from the thesis that “intentionality is hospitality”
and whether in light of this analysis, the characterization of the “us” and “them”
relation as an antagonism can be maintained. Indeed, if intentionality is “a sensible
[...] experience of *receiving*, a gesture of welcoming” (Derrida, 1999a: 48) and not
a thematization, an innate drive or an awareness and hence ultimately a “Desire for
the Other absolutely transcendent” (Levinas, 1969: 172), driven by a pull toward
that which one cannot foresee, a desire to host the unknown, a primordial movement
toward that which one cannot imagine or foresee (nor fully grasp), the axiological
asymmetry between “us” and “them” is accomplished as a positive event. Between
“us” and “them” there is no longer an antithesis, dialectically correlative with an axi-
ological priority of the “own” over the “alien” Rather, there is a primordial openness
to what is other than us, a desire understood as a pull toward the other, an “opening”
never closed, or a desire without any promise of resolution, a desire preserved by
the conjunction and that inhibits any fusion, fuels a reciprocal, though not always
symmetrical exchange, and preserves the hunger that gives desire its motor. In such
a relational dynamic there is no center (whether it be the “we” or the “they,” the own
or the stranger) but rather an ongoing decentering which crosses the reference to one-
self (we) with the reference to the other (them). Ultimately there is a responsiveness
allowing us to think together the stranger’s singular otherness — which itself presup-
poses a radical separation — and the deployment of “a space in-between” or rather an
interlacing which means more than a relationship between two terms placed opposite
each other. Such a relation is by definition reciprocal (a two-way street) though not
always symmetrical. If anything, one might speak here of a symmetry of asymmetry.

The “positive deployment of this pacific relation with the other without frontier or
any negativity” (Levinas, 1969: 172) occurs for Levinas, as indeed for Derrida, in
language (in linguistic hospitality where translation promotes a mediation between
host and guest languages), which is “contact across a distance, relation with the non-
touchable, across a void” (Levinas, 1969: 172). It “takes place in the dimension of
absolute desire” (Levinas, 1969: 172). In this same relationship, the radical exterior-
ity, or if we prefer the absolute otherness of the stranger, would be converted into
intimacy and, beyond the relationship between interior and exterior, there would be
room for an in-between space which would provide the ultimate scene where the
positive unfolding of this peaceful relationship without antagonism between “us” and
“them” would be played out in an act of pure or unconditional hospitality.
Although Derrida recognizes that “an unconditional hospitality is, to be sure, practically impossible to live” (Borradori, 2003: 129) and “can have no legal or political status” (Borradori, 2003: 129), he also believes that.

Without at least the thought of this pure and unconditional hospitality, of hospitality *itself*, we would have no concept of hospitality in general and would not even be able to determine any rules for conditional hospitality [...] Without this thought of pure hospitality (a thought that is also, in its own way, an experience), we would not even have the idea of the other, of the alterity of the other, that is, of someone who enters into our lives without having been invited. We would not even have the idea of love, or of ‘living together (vivre ensemble)’ with the other in a way that is not a part of some totality or ‘ensemble’. Unconditional hospitality, which is neither juridical nor political, is nonetheless the condition of the political and the juridical. (Borradori, 2003: 129)

Here is a decisive intuition, which controls the most significant aporia, of an irreducible double bind: on the one hand, hospitality only exists concretely by being limited, imperfect each time — conditional and conditioned — therefore, necessarily excluding. On the other hand, hospitality is nothing but being absolutely limitless, unconditional. The very idea of hospitality grasped at its most demanding point implies unconditionality. From this point of view, hospitality is either unconditional or it is not, for it gestures towards the infinite otherness of the Other whose welcome calls into question my selfhood and radically transgresses the order of politics. While such an antinomy is unsurpassable, Derrida strives to show that this intrinsically aporetic antinomy is nevertheless fruitful. Indeed, although unconditional hospitality “is impossible,” it is, Derrida insists, no less “desirable,” insofar as it helps us to constantly correct the conditional laws of hospitality in the direction of perfectibility.

From this point on, it should be clear that “relative strangeness” and “conditional hospitality” are Waldenfels’ and Derrida’s terms for the manner in which *our relation* to “them,” the others, the strangers, subsists under a potentially egocentric and antagonistic scheme which approaches the most extreme point of the friend/enemy antagonism. By contrast, “radical strangeness” and “unconditional hospitality” denote what the arrival of the stranger may in fact actually require. It requires *at once* a deconstruction of the “at-home” (Derrida, 2002: 364) [*l’être-soi chez soi – l’ipseité même*] and an openness to the other, beyond the same an original, unintentional exposure to the other, considered not just in contrast to the self, as a “relative” other (the Other as other-than-self), but also as an excess, as foreigner in its own (the Other-as-alien, stranger in its own right). Here is another decisive intuition: if we can speak of “pure” or “infinite” hospitality, it is because these words “translate unconditionality. [...] Infinite, which goes with pure, simply marks the fact that the other, who is not infinite, is nevertheless infinitely other. The other is irreducibly other, otherness is not measurable: the other is radically other” (Derrida, 1999b: 186f.).

Make no mistake, however: the deconstruction of the *ipse* never pays for a pure and simple overcoming which would settle all accounts of borders, in the promised land beyond the circularity of the *ipse*, beyond all the borders which distinguish beings from each other. The preservation of the self is inevitable and even in
a legitimate sense: the latter alone, paradoxically but coherently, allows exposure to
the other, to what comes and to whom it comes. Nevertheless, the encounter with the
alien requires a dispossession from the structural priority of the own, thus a decen-
tering from the *I*, and ultimately an openness which must be understood as “Desire
for the Other absolutely transcendent” (Levinas, 1969: 172) and as vulnerability.
“Unconditional hospitality would be this vulnerability—at once passive, exposed *and*
assumed” (Derrida, 1999a: 141 footnote 51).

In conclusion, my argument is as follows. Though distinct in their approaches, Derrida and Waldenfels offer us an alternative way of thinking of others (or “They”), strangers in relation to whom a “we” arises. Instead of considering otherness as enmity, as political philosophers suggest, or as a “dialectical negation” of our identity, otherness should be thought of as *différence* or as *internal alienness*, whose true opposite is precisely “ourselves,” in what would be a complete cohesion, without nothing left behind, in what would be a “we” hermetically closed on itself, tightly bound around itself, and prisoner of its place, power and identity. As a sort of ‘collective equivalent’ of Rimbaud’s “I is another” (*Je est un autre*), we could say “We are *others*,” which means: we cannot do without those others (they) through whom we get into our “at home” and into our identity. In other words, the other, the stranger, the guest is in me and in the midst of my very identification. From that perspective, “them” cannot be reduced to a ‘dialectical negation’ of “us.” It is “not the ‘constitutive opposite’ of a concrete ‘us,’ but the symbol of what makes any ‘us’”’ (Mouffe, 2000: 13) fully one with himself impossible.

This is, I believe, the most important lesson that we can draw from these two
thinkers' encounter, which emerges when we put them in the presence of each other:
the binary opposition that informs the friend/enemy, us/them relation needs to be
challenged because any given identity includes traces of what it excludes or intends
to exclude (strangeness in ourselves and in others), and which, once welcomed, is
pregnant with a disclosive summons to our fundamental identity.

In light of these reflections, I would like to argue that Waldenfels’ topography of
the stranger and Derrida’s aporetic account of hospitality provide a more timely and
relevant theoretical framework for grasping the porosity of the boundary between
“us” and “them” in a multicultural world than the friend/enemy opposition, which is
utterly irreconcilable with two quintessential characters of the global age: the
weakening of the *inside/outside* contrast, and the disappearance of that separate and
reassuring *elsewhere* (or constitutive outside) where those who threaten the social
cohesion of a given community (a “we”) can be confined. Of value in their reflections
on the limit-phenomenon of the stranger, is that they question the opposition between
friend and enemy but also the very principle of this opposition, (i.e., an understanding
of each pole in pure terms: a pure friend *versus* a pure enemy). Finally, they support
an understanding of the “us” and “them” relation which is 1) neither exclusionary, as
it implies the radical indeterminacy of *both* the *inside* and the *outside* across a
boundary that cannot be exclusionary in any tangible sense, within an unending and
doomed process of identity-formation” (Siemens, 2012: 217); nor necessarily antag-
onistic, but rather *differential*, insofar as each term exist only in relation to the other
and simultaneously consolidates and enforces the identity of the other.
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