# Questioning the boundary between “Us” and “Them” with Waldenfels and Derrida

Lucia Angelino

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Lucia Angelino. Questioning the boundary between “Us” and “Them” with Waldenfels and Derrida. Continental Philosophy Review, 2024, 57 (2), pp.185-207. 10.1007/s11007-024-09634-6. hal-05242146

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# Questioning the Boundary between « Us » and « Them » with Waldenfels and Derrida

Lucia Angelino

**Abstract**

Between what we call “us” and what we call “them”, a line must be drawn, which immediately becomes a contentious border, or a divide, that brings to the fore who “we” are, and that consigns to the background, or to the margin, those people who do not count as “us”. Wherever this border is traced — whether along the lines of existing nation-states, racial or linguistic communities, or political affiliations — the resulting potential for antagonism leads to both internal social tensions within a society and, at the level of nations, to outright war—the ultimate example of the friend/enemy divide conceptualized by Carl Schmitt. 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), can political thinkers be assured, that the “us/them” relation is by necessity one of hostility? In this paper I will set up a dialogue between Bernhard Waldenfels and Jacques Derrida around the figure of the stranger [*étranger*] — a figure which “frequently operates as a limit-experience for humans trying to identify themselves over and against others” (Kearney) — in order to challenge the logic of this presupposition. My aim is to show how the encounter between these thinkers allows us to challenge *at the same time* the antagonistic view of the “us/them” relation and the logic of binary opposition that informs it.

**Keywords** us/them distinction · Relative and radical strangeness · Conditional and unconditional hospitality · Bernhard Waldenfels · Jacques Derrida · friend/enemy distinction · Carl Schmitt
# 1 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.”<fnref n="1" /> In other words, no “we” ever defines itself as One without putting a “they” in front of it, with whom it competes. We owe the most influential formulation of this thesis to Carl Schmitt. 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,<fnref n="2" /> 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,’”<fnref n="3" /> 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.”<fnref n="4" /> Between what we call “us” and what we call “them” a line must be drawn, which immediately becomes a contentious 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”. Wherever this border is traced — whether along the lines of existing nation-states, racial or linguistic communities, or political affiliations — the resulting potential for antagonism leads to both social tensions *within* a society and, at the level of nations, to outright war — the ultimate example of the friend/enemy divide conceptualized by Carl Schmitt.

From this political perspective, antagonism is ineradicable. The most obvious problem with this position lies in the fact that the philosophical reflection is held at a “static” (vs. “genetic”) level and leaves behind the constitutive implication of identity and difference, i.e., the never completed process by which a “we” stands out from a “them.” In other words, this perspective endorses a dualistic and static understanding of collective identities which obscures the movement by which a relation of mutual identification (co-constitution) between “us” and “them” is established, while remaining an open process, never completed. More precisely, it removes from the analyst the means of an internal critique, summoning him, as it were, to submit to a binary logic, before having understood what is at stake — what is *socially* at stake — under the oppositional constitution of these two terms facing one another.

<footnote n="1">¹ Huntington (2003, 21).</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² Laclau and Mouffe (2001).</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ Mouffe (2013, 45).</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ Ibid.</footnote>
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,”<fnref n="5" /> can political thinkers be assured that the us/them relation is by necessity one of hostility?

In this paper 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="6" /> — in order to challenge the logic of this presupposition. In relation to this aim, Derrida and Waldenfels, although distinct in their respective approaches, seem to follow a similar strategy. They both decenter the self-referential (ego-centered) standpoint we naturally adopt in relating to “them,” the others, the strangers. 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 on 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.

In what follows, I will claim that the encounter between these two thinkers around the limit-experience of the stranger allows us to challenge *at the same time* the antagonistic view of the “us/them” relation and the logic of binary opposition that informs it. To unfold this argument, I will start by outlining the main challenges raised by the fried/enemy divide as described by Carl Schmitt. Then I will show how a careful analysis of this divide leads us to acknowledge that Schmitt’s friend/enemy opposition points towards a relational sense of political identities. This, in turn, will lead me to put forward an alternative framework for conceiving their relationship, by drawing inspiration from two contemporary thinkers: Jacques Derrida and Bernhard Waldenfels.

<footnote n="5">⁵ Derrida (2005; p. 113).</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ Kearney (2003, p. 3).</footnote>
## 2 Carl Schmitt and the friend/enemy dichotomy

Before getting to the main point of my argument, let me begin by setting forth the critical background of this paper. By way of introduction to this context, I will focus on Carl Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction which serves as a conceptual scheme for almost all contemporary conceptions of the “us/them” relation.

Proceeding from the assumption that “All political concepts, images and terms have a polemical meaning [*einen polemischen Sinn*],”<fnref n="7" /> Schmitt claims in his famous essay entitled *The Concept of the Political* that thought must be also *polemical*. Accordingly, he utilizes a logic of binary oppositions to examine the logic underpinning economics (profitable and unprofitable), aesthetics (beautiful and ugly), and morality (good and bad), to argue that the political does not conform to any of these, but has its own essential dichotomy. In taking his bearings by this general relationship, Schmitt defines “the distinction between friend and enemy” as “the specific political distinction.”<fnref n="8" /> Importantly, Schmitt insists on the public nature of these categories. Here the enemy is *our* enemy, the one with whom we fight as a group. In his own terms, “An enemy exists only when, at least potentially, one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity [...] The enemy is *hostis*, not *inimicus* in the broader sense.”<fnref n="9" /> At great length, Schmitt insists on the fact that political enmity is not defined by extrinsic criteria. Rather, it is a formal intensity, directed against the one “against whom we fight” and that unifies “us” as friends who identify that enemy. Schmitt goes on to explain this peculiar identification:

> The political enemy need not be morally evil, or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor [...] But he is, *nevertheless, “the other, the stranger;* and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, *existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible.*<fnref n="10" />

The political enemy would in fact be the stranger who, as Schmitt says, negates one’s own forms of life and “therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to *preserve* one’s own form of existence.”<fnref n="11" /> According to Schmitt, a properly political (and therefore collective) identity can only be formed in the face of such an existential threat of annihilation by another collective identity.

The central aspect of Schmitt’s claim that is relevant to the issue we are concerned with, is that “by facing the friend-enemy distinction [...] we (a ‘we’) will be able to be clear about what ‘we’ are and what it is ‘rational’ for ‘us’ to do.”<fnref n="12" /> The underlying presupposition of this claim is that *our* own identity is defined essentially by reference to an enemy, authoritatively defined as a threat to our identity. In other words,

<footnote n="7">⁷ Schmitt (2007; p. 30).</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ Schmitt (2007; p. 26).</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹ Schmitt (2007; p. 28).</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ Schmitt (2007; p. 27 emphasis added).</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹ Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹² Strong (2007; xxi).</footnote>
the battle with the enemy provides us knowledge about “who we are.” This same
conclusion is confirmed in Schmitt’s use of the sibylline sentence “*The enemy is our
own question as a figure.*”<fnref n="13" /> As acutely observed by Heinrich Meier, this poetic
phrase, borrowed from Theodor Däubler’s *Hymne an Italien* (Munich, 1916), seems
to give expression to the insight that:

> we know *ourselves* insofar as we know our enemy and insofar as we define our enemy by defining *ourselves* [...] We know him to be our enemy who places us in question or the one whom we place in question.<fnref n="14" />

In fact, as Schmitt further explains: “In this mutual recognition of recognition — in which I recognize him as the enemy and even must recognize that he recognizes me as the enemy — lies the greatness of the concept:”<fnref n="15" /> the enemy *forces* us into a confrontation, in which we are grasped *wholly* and *existentially*. Inasmuch as he places us in question, and reveals him as our enemy, he also urgently directs us to “our own.” In other words, we must face him in order to gain our own limit and our own figure. In this respect, as Tracy Strong observes, Schmitt appears to be inspired by Hegel’s master-slave dialectic whereby the master and slave become what they are through the other and, more specifically, through the recognition accorded them by the other. In his own words, “the concrete recognition of the other as an enemy and the consequent establishment of one’s own identity sounds something like Hegel’s Master and Slave, especially if read through a Kojevian lens.”<fnref n="16" />

In conclusion, the important takeaway here is that Schmitt’s friend/enemy opposition points towards a relational sense of political identities. As Andreas Kalyvas acutely observed, “it must be noted that Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction points to a relational and anti-essentialist dimension of political identities” insofar as “for Schmitt, political conflicts constitute the central mechanism of identity-formation through which each term of the relation simultaneously consolidates and enforces the identity of the other.”<fnref n="17" />

In other words, because the political self depends upon the real threat of a belligerent other, the two parties — the political sovereign (“us”) and the enemy (“them”) — are brought to their “individual” identities by each other. Accordingly, “political identities cannot be closed, self-referential.” Instead, “they are relational and interactively constructed, dependent on a ‘constitutive outside’ designed symbolically as the ‘negated other.’”<fnref n="18" /> In this respect, the strength of Schmittian construction, and its relevance for the question we are concerned with here, lie in “the constitutive and fluid

<footnote n="13">¹³ Schmitt (2017; p. 168). In the *Glossarium* (1991) we can read the poetic verse in full as follows: “The enemy is our own question as a figure. / And he will hunt us, and we him, to the same end” (*Sans an Palermo*), cited in *Glossarium* 213.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ Meier (2011; p. 44).</footnote>

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ Schmitt (2017; p. 168).</footnote>

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ Strong (2007; p. xx).</footnote>

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ Kalyvas (1999; p. 95).</footnote>

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ Ibid.</footnote>
character of political identity-formation implicitly contained in Schmitt’s discussion of the friend/enemy relation.”<fnref n="19" />

As interesting as this point might be, the main problem with this interpretation is that it downplays the fragility of Schmitt’s construction, and leaves out two different, but related, problems upon which it actually depends: namely, the problematic logic of binary opposition that informs the friend/enemy distinction and the self-referential aspect of Schmitt’s analysis of the sovereign-other relation (i.e., Schmitt’s decisionism). In fact, although Schmitt recognizes that the other plays a crucial role in the life of the political, he continues to hold that the autonomous sovereign decision about the enemy is crucial to the political. This is precisely the issue with which Derrida begins his lengthy critical discussion of Schmitt in *The Politics of Friendship*, a discussion characterized throughout by the “aporia of decision,”<fnref n="20" /> which makes every decision a ‘passive’ decision, “an originarily affected decision,”<fnref n="21" /> i.e., the decision “of the absolute other in me, the other as the absolute that decides on me in me.”<fnref n="22" />

In other words, the problem with Schmitt’s position, as clearly identified by Derrida, is that the decision identifying the enemy-other *both* presupposes *and* institutes the political self, *both* presupposes *and* produces the political group or the political “we,” although the schema of decision that Schmitt adopts tends regularly — at least, in its ordinary and hegemonic sense — to imply the “instance of the subject, a classic, free, and willful subject,”<fnref n="23" /> deciding on its enemy.

That is why Derrida raises the “What comes first?” question:

> The practical identification of self – and from one self to another – the practical identification of the other – and from the other to other – seem to be [in Schmitt] sometimes conditions, sometimes consequences, of the identification of friend and enemy.<fnref n="24" />

Arguably, if the enemy-other is not imaginary or symbolic (not a psychic construction),<fnref n="25" /> but relates to and emanates from a concrete experience (the threatening presence) of a bellicose other, Schmitt’s view of the enemy as given by a sovereign decision is fallacious and misleading, insofar as “we” are affected by the decision of the other to annihilate “us,” and therefore instituted, as a political identity, by receiving a threat from the other.

In conclusion, the genesis of the political self (the identity-formation process) disallows the decision about the enemy on which Schmitt, nonetheless builds his case

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">²⁰ Derrida (2005; p. 68).</footnote>

<footnote n="21">²¹ Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">²² Derrida (2005; p. 69).</footnote>

<footnote n="23">²³ Derrida (2005; p. 68).</footnote>

<footnote n="24">²⁴ Derrida (2005; p. 116).</footnote>

<footnote n="25">²⁵ Schmitt makes this point very clear when he explains that “the friend and enemy concepts are to be understood in their concrete and existential sense, not as metaphors or symbols, not mixed and weakened by economic, moral, and other conceptions, least of all in a private individualistic sense as a psychological expression of private emotions and tendencies;” Schmitt (2007; p. 27–28).</footnote>
(i.e., Schmittian decisionism and the instance of a free, willful subject it implies). That is why Derrida says that a decision emanating from the sovereign identity of a subject “never decides anything,”<fnref n="26" /> since for “a decision to be a decision, it must be made by the other in myself.”<fnref n="27" /> Among commentators, Alexandre Lefebvre develops this argument further, by exploring “Carl Schmitt’s conception of the political from the position of the *aggressed*,”<fnref n="28" /> and thereby arguing that:

> *Beneath the apparently active, identifying decisionism of the *Concept of the Political* (1932), Schmitt articulates the insight that 'we' enter our political being *only under the threat* of existential annihilation. In this way, the genesis of the political occurs when 'we' are perceived to be the political victim of an enemy aggressor.*<fnref n="29" />

Lefebvre probably goes too far in drawing the conclusion that “Schmitt’s *Concept of the Political* motivates a theory of the genesis of the political as *received from the other*,”<fnref n="30" /> and that “rather than interpret the identification of the enemy as a declarative act” we should be able to see how the political self “forms from a wound, a wound that the other inflicts prior to its designation as ‘enemy.’”<fnref n="31" /> However, the relevance of Lefebvre’s reading is that it brings to light an anterior otherness installed in the very heart of the collective self (or its sovereign representative).

Accordingly, and in line with Derrida’s first line of critique in *The Politics of Friendship*, we must reject the idea of a political self (a “we”) constituted by actively identifying or judging who its enemy is, and admit that the friend/enemy relation is far more complex than one party (the political self) simply and unilaterally identifying the other as enemy-other.

Derrida ties this conclusion to his second line of critique which is oriented towards the logic of binary opposition that informs the friend/enemy distinction. Derrida famously engages in a long-standing critique of thinking based on a straightforward logic of “versus.” This thread of thought can be followed in Derrida’s work since at least *Dissemination* where Derrida points to a “crisis of versus.”<fnref n="32" /> It emerges in a more explicit fashion in *The Politics of Friendship* whose overall aim is openly to “oppose opposition,”<fnref n="33" /> that is more precisely to put into question the ontological assumptions underpinning Schmitt’s binary friend–enemy division. For Derrida, it is only possible to posit a binary opposition by understanding that each pole is defined in pure terms: a pure friend *versus* a pure enemy. As Derrida notes, however, “in practice, in other words, in this political practice that history is—this difference between the disagreements never takes place. It can never be found. Never concretely. As a

<footnote n="26">²⁶ Derrida (2005; p. 68).</footnote>

<footnote n="27">²⁷ Derrida (1999b; p. 67).</footnote>

<footnote n="28">²⁸ Lefebvre (2005; p. 83).</footnote>

<footnote n="29">²⁹ Lefebvre (2005; p. 93).</footnote>

<footnote n="30">³⁰ Lefebvre (2005; p. 83).</footnote>

<footnote n="31">³¹ Lefebvre (2005; p. 93).</footnote>

<footnote n="32">³² Derrida (1983, p. 21).</footnote>

<footnote n="33">³³ Derrida (2005; p. 122).</footnote>
result, the purity of *pólemos* or the enemy, whereby Schmitt would define the politi-
cal, remains unattainable.”<fnref n="34" /> In other words, there is a discrepancy between the logi-
cal division upon which Schmitt bases his analysis and the actual practices of politics
that simply do not and, importantly, cannot accord with the purity inherent in this
conceptual understanding.

In conclusion, as Gavin Rae clearly summarizes, “by calling into question the
binary opposition upon which Schmitt’s understanding of the political depends, and
showing that it depends upon the impossible purity inherent to an abstract binary
opposition rather than the logic of contamination inherent to concrete practical
events, Derrida argues that Schmitt’s conception of the political is, in reality, funda-
mentally flawed.”<fnref n="35" />

By way of conclusion to these preliminary remarks, let me state without further ado what is the fragility of the Schmittian construction, and what is its relevance for the issue we are concerned with here: the nature of the “us/them relation.” The main fragility of Schmitt’s analysis lies in the claim that the friend/enemy relation is based on a clear dividing line between the two correlative poles (i.e., in the logic of binary opposition that informs the friend/enemy distinction in Schmitt’s “oppositional or ‘polemological’ logic”).<fnref n="36" /> Its strength lies in the insight that “political identities are not closed, self-referential,” but rather “relational and interactively constructed, dependent on a ‘constitutive outside’ designed symbolically as the ‘negated other.’”<fnref n="37" /> In other words, the strength of Schmitt’s friend/enemy division is that it points towards a “relational and anti-essentialist sense of political identities.”<fnref n="38" /> This means more precisely that “us” and “them,” far from being two autonomous and self-closed identities, like monads that can be placed in opposition to one another by setting up a scene of dyadic conflict — e.g., “friend/enemy” — always exist in relation to one another, and can never exist outside of this relation which constitutes them. But how are we to understand this relationship philosophically?

One of the challenges that Schmitt’s thinking on the friend/enemy distinction
brings forth is how to conceive of this relation, especially in a multicultural world. By
extending the deconstructive reading of Schmittian thought carried out by Jacques
Derrida, I propose to consider “us” and “them” not as opposite, but rather as rela-
tive terms, which cannot exist without one another and therefore tacitly presuppose an
intertwining (Ineinander). However, to begin with, it’s worth asking how it has come
about that the stranger has turned into an enemy both in individual and, more
importantly, in collective consciousness.

<footnote n="34">³⁴ Derrida (2005; p. 114).</footnote>

<footnote n="35">³⁵ Rae (2016; p. 71).</footnote>

<footnote n="36">³⁶ Derrida (2005; p. 246).</footnote>

<footnote n="37">³⁷ Kalyvas (1999; p. 95).</footnote>

<footnote n="38">³⁸ Ibid.</footnote>
3 Bernhard Waldenfels on relative and radical strangeness

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.”<fnref n="39" /> 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.”<fnref n="40" /> 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.<fnref n="41" /> 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.”<fnref n="42" /> 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’”<fnref n="43" /> raises a strong barrier between “us” and “them” and is “realized by different forms of centrism:”<fnref n="44" /> 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.”<fnref n="45" /> *Ethnocentrism* “can be taken as a collective form of egocentrism,”<fnref n="46" /> 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.”<fnref n="47" /> 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.”<fnref n="48" /> 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 antagonism between us and them. Indeed, if we start from

<footnote n="39">³⁹ Waldenfels (2007; p. 3).</footnote>

<footnote n="40">⁴⁰ Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="41">⁴¹ Waldenfels (2007; p. 15).</footnote>

<footnote n="42">⁴² Waldenfels (2007; p. 14).</footnote>

<footnote n="43">⁴³ Waldenfels (2007; p. 14).</footnote>

<footnote n="44">⁴⁴ Waldenfels (2007; p. 14).</footnote>

<footnote n="45">⁴⁵ Waldenfels (2007; p. 14).</footnote>

<footnote n="46">⁴⁶ Waldenfels (2007; p. 15).</footnote>

<footnote n="47">⁴⁷ Waldenfels (2007; p. 15).</footnote>

<footnote n="48">⁴⁸ Waldenfels (2007; p. 15).</footnote>
egocentrism, “anyone who encroached on my ‘at home,’ on my ipseity, on my power of hospitality, on my sovereignty as host”<fnref n="49" /> is regarded “as an undesirable foreigner and virtually as an enemy.”<fnref n="50" />

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,”<fnref n="51" /> 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.”<fnref n="52" /> This phenomenological standpoint, which he borrows from Merleau-Ponty,<fnref n="53" /> 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. 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 accen- tuations [...] than with clear-cutting separations.”<fnref n="54" /> 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,”<fnref n="55" /> 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 (*Urscheidung*) or a “primordial distinction.” 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”<fnref n="56" /> and Anthony Steinbock as a “liminal phenomenon.”<fnref n="57" />

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 insur- mountable. The alien (experience) only exists in contrast to the own, and vice versa. The paradox is reinforced by the fact that this constitutive intricacy, this structural

<footnote n="49">⁴⁹ Derrida and Dufourmantelle (2000; p. 54).</footnote>

<footnote n="50">⁵⁰ Derrida and Dufourmantelle (2000; p. 55).</footnote>

<footnote n="51">⁵¹ Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="52">⁵² Waldenfels (2007; p. 81).</footnote>

<footnote n="53">⁵³ 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; p. 74–75). See also Waldenfels (2007; p. 81–82).</footnote>

<footnote n="54">⁵⁴ Waldenfels (2009; p. 84, my translation from French).</footnote>

<footnote n="55">⁵⁵ Waldenfels (2011; p. 75).</footnote>

<footnote n="56">⁵⁶ Waldenfels (2011; p. 8).</footnote>

<footnote n="57">⁵⁷ Steinbock (1995, p. 179).</footnote>
entanglement between the “own” and the “alien,” crosses each term of the relation-
ship. 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 Ber-
nhard Waldenfels clearly states: “If the own is interwoven with the alien, this also
mean that the alien begins in ourselves and not outside ourselves, or rather, it means
that we are never entirely at home with ourselves.”<fnref n="58" /> This is an essential point. For, if
“the alien begins in ourselves and not outside ourselves,”<fnref n="59" /> and if the alien “seeks us
out in our own home,”<fnref n="60" /> then the sphere of ownness is never completely closed off,
completely severed from the outside. This radical non-coincidence with itself char-
acteristic 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”<fnref n="61" /> (an impregnable asymmetry) keeps them apart and is related to the fact that alienness (i.e., radical strangeness), in contrast to otherness, manifests itself in the form of an original inaccessibility or as an “excess which *exceeds* the respective pre-given senses and laws and *diverts* from them. In fact, it occurs solely in the shape of such excess and divergence.”<fnref n="62" /> “At the limits of every order, the alien emerges in the shape of something extraordinary.”<fnref n="63" /> It is indeed “the *surplus* of otherness or of heterogeneity,”<fnref n="64" /> which exceeds *at the same time* “the given order”<fnref n="65" /> and the “playing field of our own possibilities.”<fnref n="66" /> It is the “*surplus* of experience, which leads us beyond the existing orders and finally joins a spatiotemporal *shift*, based on the fact that the self-reference” is broken and “never returns to itself.”<fnref n="67" /> In this respect, it “resembles the depth of the past or the shades of perception, except that it definitively exceeds the realm of one’s possibilities”<fnref n="68" /> and would no longer be derivable from a unilateral alienation or appropriation of the own.

<footnote n="58">⁵⁸ Waldenfels (2011; p. 76).</footnote>

<footnote n="59">⁵⁹ Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="60">⁶⁰ Ibid. p. 3.</footnote>

<footnote n="61">⁶¹ Waldenfels (2011; p. 15).</footnote>

<footnote n="62">⁶² Ibid., p. 81.</footnote>

<footnote n="63">⁶³ Ibid., p. 4.</footnote>

<footnote n="64">⁶⁴ Waldenfels (2007; p. 13).</footnote>

<footnote n="65">⁶⁵ Waldenfels (2007; p. 13).</footnote>

<footnote n="66">⁶⁶ Waldenfels (1995; p. 116).</footnote>

<footnote n="67">⁶⁷ Waldenfels (2011; p. 18).</footnote>

<footnote n="68">⁶⁸ Waldenfels (1995; p. 116).</footnote>
Absence, distance, and separation are not attributable to a temporary lack, to some-
thing that is not (or not yet) available to, or understandable by, us. On the contrary,
absence, distance or inaccessibility characterize strangeness as such. If one begins
with the alien, as it is encountered pre-conceptually in experience, it appears as a
form of withdrawal: its givenness eludes our grasp. At the same time, the stranger is,
in a certain way, accessible to us, through the effects he produces on us, by appearing
and disappearing, in other words, through his “bodily absence.” As Waldenfels puts
it: “Alienness presents itself in the flesh, as absence in flesh and bone (*absence en
chair en os*).”<fnref n="69" />

It is precisely for this reason that the encounter with the alien is an abrupt and
disruptive event, which appears under the double guise of an intrusion into the own
and of an affection that overcomes it. In order to characterize further the experience
of the alien (i.e., radical strangeness), Waldenfels emphasizes one aspect in particu-
lar, 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.”<fnref n="70" /> For instance, “I feel myself looked at or addressed
prior to hearing somebody utter certain words or produce certain sounds.”<fnref n="71" /> 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 lets 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,”<fnref n="72" /> a pathos that “continuously imports elements which are ‘alien
to the ego’ [*Ichfremdes*].”<fnref n="73" />

The term pathos or “affect” denotes precisely our feeling caught up in an event,
which not only exceeds our possibilities and capacities — whether these are per-
sonal-dispositional or historical-cultural — but also overflows the margins of the
sphere of ownness and, by the same token, disturbs the grounds of any given order.
In this respect, the experience of the stranger means a “questioning of the own,”<fnref n="74" /> a
questioning that interrogates us first.

From this standpoint, the relationship between the “own” and the “alien” entails a
disproportion — an “irreducible asymmetry”<fnref n="75" /> — that nothing can resolve. Between
what belongs to the own (“us”) and what is strange (“them”) there is as little synthesis
as between waking and sleeping, life and death, young and old. There is therefore no
reciprocity/reversibility between the own and the stranger, but an inequality in their
relationship which can cause a certain adversity. It is undoubtedly Bernhard

<footnote n="69">⁶⁹ Waldenfels (2011; p. 43).</footnote>

<footnote n="70">⁷⁰ Waldenfels (2007; p. 82).</footnote>

<footnote n="71">⁷¹ Waldenfels (2007; p. 83).</footnote>

<footnote n="72">⁷² Waldenfels (2011; p. 84).</footnote>

<footnote n="73">⁷³ Ibid., p. 29.</footnote>

<footnote n="74">⁷⁴ Waldenfels (2011; p. 19).</footnote>

<footnote n="75">⁷⁵ Ibid., p.15.</footnote>
Waldenfels who highlighted the most this lack of reversibility, related to the fact that “alienness, in contrast to otherness exhibits an impregnable asymmetry.”<fnref n="76" />

To sum up, there is a fruitful and insoluble contradiction here: on the one hand, the “own” and the “stranger” always exist in a structural entanglement with each other, and can never exist outside of this relationship (intertwining) which constitutes them. On the other hand, they do not occupy the same place; their relationship entails an irreducible asymmetry. What is remarkable here is that these two perspectives seem to be at odds with each other. If we follow the first perspective, the relation between the own and the alien is one of complicity and encroachment: the own and the alien are woven into the same fabric, they are the two sides of the same tissue, a tissue that cannot be splintered. According to the second perspective, the own and the alien are set against each other, and their relation is one of an inequal split which can cause a certain adversity. Whereas the first model gives precedence to the idea of an intertwining, to the intricate embroilment of the own and the alien, in the second the emphasis is placed on divide and imparity.

It is this latter understanding of the relation between the own and the alien which emphasizes a constitutive and irreducible asymmetry that raises several issues with regard to our topic. For how can we escape antagonism in a non-symmetrical and non-reciprocal encounter with the stranger? How can the stranger's arrival, felt as a disquieting demand, stimulate a creative response, rather than hostility or xenophobic drive? How can we maintain imparity between the alien and the own, while assigning them an equal role in the constitution of the liminal experience of their encounter? How can we reconcile the idea of an a priori correlation between the two elements of the relationship (mutual entanglement) with that of an equally constitutive and irreducible asymmetry?

In what follows, I will claim that addressing these questions requires us to venture down the path trodden by Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas in their respective reflections on hospitality — in an intertwining of proximities and differences that I will not examine here in detail. My approach rests on the conviction that the issues raised by Waldenfels' formulation of the “us”/“them” relation (viewed through the relation between the “own” and the “stranger”) stand out better and can be solved if we take into account Derrida's reflections on hospitality. This is why in the next section I will present a Derridean account of the “us”/“them” relation based on the antinomy of hospitality, in relation to Levinas' logic of substitution.

## 4 Derrida on conditional and unconditional hospitality

As we discussed in the second section, Jacques Derrida famously engages in a long-standing critique of thinking based on a straightforward logic of “versus.” When it comes to the “us” versus “them” divide, the aporetic logic 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

<footnote n="76">⁷⁶ Ibid., p. 76.</footnote>
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="77" /> as claimed by Levinas in *Totality and Infinity*) graciously “hostage” (“the subject is a hostage,”<fnref n="78" /> as claimed by Levinas, in *Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence*) to its “host.”<fnref n="79" />

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="80" /> entitled “Step 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 Klosowski’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

<footnote n="77">⁷⁷ Levinas (1969; p. 299), as well as in the chapter entitled “Phenomenology of Eros.”</footnote>

<footnote n="78">⁷⁸ Levinas (1998; p. 112; 114), as well as in the chapter entitled “Substitution.”</footnote>

<footnote n="79">⁷⁹ Derrida (1999a; p. 43).</footnote>

<footnote n="80">⁸⁰ 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*, “A note on hospitality,” in *Acts of Religion* (2002, pp. 356–357). The thread of hospitality also shines, at other times, on 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 (Derrida 2021) and *Hospitalité*, vol. 2, seminar (1996–1997), Paris, Seuil, 2022 (Derrida 2022). Derrida, however, as usual, had written several other texts published at the same time as the seminar in various contexts: cf. 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.</footnote>
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.<fnref n="81" />

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 nonethless 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.”<fnref n="82" />

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.

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.

<footnote n="81">⁸¹ Derrida and Dufourmantelle (2000; p. 124–125).</footnote>

<footnote n="82">⁸² Ibid. 125.</footnote>
Although Derrida explicitly draws upon the story described by Pierre Klossowski in *Roberte ce soir* (1953), there is an obvious reference to Emmanuel Levinas behind this theoretical shift (i.e., reverting the subject-host to the subject-hostage, the *wel-coming* host, who considers himself the owner of the place (*hôte*), to a guest, *wel-comed* in his own home), which breaks with a conception of hospitality linked to ipseity (i.e., to a 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”<fnref n="83" /> 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.”<fnref n="84" />

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.<fnref n="85" />

This is why the scene of hospitality described by Derrida sets out, each time, the para-doxical logic of “substitution”<fnref n="86" /> 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 a paradoxical reciprocity that Levinas exemplarily highlights in *Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence*.<fnref n="87" /> Otherwise said, the specific action of hospitality concretizes, each time, the most intimate 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

<footnote n="83">⁸³ Derrida (1999a; p. 52).</footnote>

<footnote n="84">⁸⁴ Levinas (1998; p. 114).</footnote>

<footnote n="85">⁸⁵ Derrida (1999a; p. 99).</footnote>

<footnote n="86">⁸⁶ As Derrida explicitly admits in (2002, p. 365–375).</footnote>

<footnote n="87">⁸⁷ Levinas (1998; chapter IV entitled “Substitution”).</footnote>
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.<fnref n="88" />

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*).”<fnref n="89" />

“While such an antinomy remains, as it has to, perfectly contradictory,”<fnref n="90" /> 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.”<fnref n="91" />

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.”<fnref n="92" /> 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?”<fnref n="93" />

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”<fnref n="94" /> — 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

<footnote n="88">⁸⁸ Derrida (1999a; p. 41).</footnote>

<footnote n="89">⁸⁹ Derrida and Dufourmantelle (2000; p. 125).</footnote>

<footnote n="90">⁹⁰ Derrida and Dufourmantelle (2000; p. 125–127).</footnote>

<footnote n="91">⁹¹ Derrida (1999a; p. 93).</footnote>

<footnote n="92">⁹² Derrida and Dufourmantelle (2000; p. 3).</footnote>

<footnote n="93">⁹³ Derrida and Dufourmantelle (2000; p. 27–28).</footnote>

<footnote n="94">⁹⁴ Borradori (2003; p. 128).</footnote>
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 vio-
lence, 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."<fnref n="95" /> 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."<fnref n="96" /> 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 abso-
lute, unknown, anonymous other; and that I give *place*, let come, arrive [...] without
demanding that he gives his name or enter into some reciprocal pact."<fnref n="97" /> 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."<fnref n="98" /> 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 incal-
culable, 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.”<fnref n="99" /> 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.”<fnref n="100" />

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

<footnote n="95">⁹⁵ Borradori (2003; p. 128).</footnote>

<footnote n="96">⁹⁶ Derrida (2002; p. 402).</footnote>

<footnote n="97">⁹⁷ Derrida and Dufourmantelle (2000; p. 29).</footnote>

<footnote n="98">⁹⁸ Borradori (2003; p. 128–129).</footnote>

<footnote n="99">⁹⁹ Derrida & Roudinesco (2003, p. 102).</footnote>

<footnote n="100">¹⁰⁰ Derrida (1999a; p. 50).</footnote>
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.<fnref n="101" />

In a word, “intentionality is hospitality” and “the force of this copula carries hospitality very far.”<fnref n="102" /> 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.”<fnref n="103" /> 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: ‘*radi-cal 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.”<fnref n="104" />

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 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 ethics 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 effectively 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”<fnref n="105" /> and not a thematization, an innate drive or an awareness and hence ultimately a “Desire for the Other absolutely transcendent,”<fnref n="106" /> 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 axiological priority of the “own” over

<footnote n="101">¹⁰¹ Derrida (2003; p. 66).</footnote>

<footnote n="102">¹⁰² Derrida (1999a; p. 50).</footnote>

<footnote n="103">¹⁰³ Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="104">¹⁰⁴ Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="105">¹⁰⁵ Ibid, p. 48.</footnote>

<footnote n="106">¹⁰⁶ Levinas (1969; p. 172).</footnote>
the “alien.” Rather, there is a primordial openness to what is other than ourselves, 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 oneself (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 presupposes 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”<fnref n="107" /> 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.”<fnref n="108" /> It “takes place in the dimension of absolute desire.”<fnref n="109" /> In this same relationship, the radical exteriority, 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”<fnref n="110" /> and “can have no egal or political status,”<fnref n="111" /> 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.”<fnref n="112" />

<footnote n="107">¹⁰⁷ Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="108">¹⁰⁸ Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="109">¹⁰⁹ Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="110">¹¹⁰ Borradori (2003; p. 129). My translation.</footnote>

<footnote n="111">¹¹¹ Borradori (2003; p. 129).</footnote>

<footnote n="112">¹¹² Borradori (2003; p. 129).</footnote>
Here is a decisive intuition, which controls the most significant aporia, of an irre-
ducible double bind: on the one hand, hospitality only exists concretely by being
limited, imperfect each time — conditional and conditioned — therefore, necessar-
ily excluding. On the other hand, hospitality is nothing but being absolutely limit-
less, 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 hospital-
ity “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 antag-
onistic scheme which approaches the most extreme point of the friend/enemy antago-
nism. By contrast, “radical strangeness” and “unconditional hospitality” denote what
the arrival of the stranger may in fact actually require. It requires *at once* a decon-
struction of the “at-home”<fnref n="113" /> [*l’être-soi chez soi – l’ipseité même*] and an openness
to the other, beyond the same an original, unintentional exposure to the other, con-
sidered 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 neverthe-
less infinitely other. The other is irreducibly other, otherness is not measurable: the
other is radically other.”<fnref n="114" />

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 prom- ised
land beyond the circularity of the *ipse*, beyond all the borders which distin- guish
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 decenter-
ing from the *I*, and ultimately an openness which must be understood as “Desire for
the Other absolutely transcendent”<fnref n="115" /> and as vulnerability. “Unconditional hospitality
would be this vulnerability—at once passive, exposed *and* assumed.”<fnref n="116" />

<footnote n="113">¹¹³ Derrida (2002; p. 364).</footnote>

<footnote n="114">¹¹⁴ Derrida (1999b; p. 186–187). My translation.</footnote>

<footnote n="115">¹¹⁵ Levinas (1969; p. 172).</footnote>

<footnote n="116">¹¹⁶ Derrida (1999a; p. 141, footnote 51).</footnote>
# 5 Conclusion

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 philosophy suggests, or as a “dialectical negation” of our identity, otherness should be thought of as *différence* or as a radical foreignness, 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’”<fnref n="117" /> 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 much better theoretical framework for grasping the porosity of the boundary between “us” and “them” in a multicultural world than the friend/enemy opposition. Indeed, the relationship between “us” and “them” “seems to imply 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.”<fnref n="118" />

In closing, I would like to suggest that, although Derrida does not provide us with a political translation of his proposal, we can do no better than draw on his thought of hospitality for ways in which to develop a viable conception of the us/them boundary that is compatible with the recognition of pluralism (i.e., human plurality) in our societies.

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