YASEMIN KARAAĞAÇ
Hostility, Hospitality, and Autoimmunity in Kadare’s The Fall of The Stone City
GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS: An International Journal in Contemporary Philosophy and Culture
Volume IV, Number 01 (2021): 09-24

Calamity and Immunity

HOSTILITY, HOSPITALITY, AND AUTOIMMUNITY
IN KADARE’S THE FALL OF THE STONE CITY
Yasemin Karaağaç

Abstract
The paper explores Ismail Kadare’s novel The Fall of The Stone City from theperspective of Derrida’s concepts of hospitality and autoimmunity. According toDerrida, the concepts of unconditional hospitality and autoimmunity overlap intheir absolute openness to the Other, which potentially constitutes both a risk andan opportunity in the context of deconstructing and destabilizing the binary
opposition between friendship and enmity. The aim of the paper is to show therelevance of this point in a discussion of key events in the novel. More specifically,
the invasion of Albania by German troops and the disastrous regime of Stalinist
communist partisans will be analyzed through Derrida’s concepts of hospitality andautoimmunity. In addition, the encounter of the German commander with his oldcollege friend, Albanian Big Dr Gurameto, during the invasion of Albania is seen
as suggestive of the breakdown of the clear distinction between friendship andenmity. The arrival of the German commander, who is Big Dr Gurameto’s oldfriend but an enemy in the eye of the public, will be examined also in view ofDerrida’s concept of arrivant, as well as of his concept of hospitality. In this sense,
this paper will discuss the destabilizing of the binary opposition between friendshipand enmity, and its engagement with hospitality and autoimmunity.
Keywords: Derrida, hospitality, autoimmunity, deconstructing, friendship, enmity

Ismail Kadare, the best-known Albanian author internationally and a laureate of a number ofprestigious literary awards, wrote much of his work under the Communist dictatorship of Enver
Hoxha. Like many other Albanian writers who experienced control, repressions, and often
imprisonment under the communist regime, Kadare suffered threats and had to compromise inorder to see his work published. However, he can still be considered a writer of subversive
works in the cultural context of socialist Albania. He has produced a variety of literary texts
that explore his country’s historical situation and culture, and his novels render him a unique

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Hostility, Hospitality, and Autoimmunity in Kadare’s The Fall of The Stone City

chronicler of Albanian history. Kadare, is known as both a guardian of the Albanian identityand “a universal writer in a tradition of storytelling that goes back to Homer.” 1
Albania was ruled by a Stalinist regime which lasted five years beyond the death of
Enver Hoxha in 1985. After consecutive breaks with Yugoslavia, Moscow, and China, by 1978,
the country was sealed off from Europe and the West, as much as from world communism. 2
During World War II it was invaded by both Italians and Germans, and after the fall ofcommunism it had its vested interest in the Kosovo War. During the communist regime, manyof Kadare’s works were censored, but they were published in various forms and formats, andwere both published and translated inside and outside Albania. In his early years, under the
Hoxha regime, Kadare realized that “a dictatorship may be made of harder material than the
dictator himself” and as he matured he thought that “the writer and the dictator share something
in their control over the worlds of imagination and reality.” 3 Based on his experiences during
the dictatorship years, Kadare offers a large body of novels, essays, and stories that present a
perspective on related political and historical events in the Albanian history to the readershipin Europe and the world.
The Fall of The Stone City4 can be seen as a great portrayal of the social and politicalsituation in Albania during the time of dictatorship, capturing the themes of resistance andtotalitarianism, as well as the dark political threats that the people faced during that period. The
events in the novel take place in the year 1943 in Kadare’s birthplace, the ancient stone city of
Gjirokastër, which had been occupied by the Italian army since 1939. In the course of the war,
the German Army invaded the city from occupied Greece to replace the Italian occupation witha new one. The novel thus depicts how the war disrupted people’s lives and how they struggled
against the political regimes of the various occupying forces, adding up to the Ottoman Empire,
Italian fascism, German Nazism, and Stalinist communism.
At this point, the Albanian resistance started with fire on German motorcyclists andtanks. The main action of the story began with the meeting of two old college friends – the Nazi
commander Colonel Fritz von Schwabe and Big Dr Gurameto, a popular surgeon in the city.
Gurameto invited von Schwabe for dinner at his home with other guests, including Little Dr
Gurameto, a friend and colleague of Big Dr Gurameto’s. The townspeople, who hear the musicfrom the doctor’s gramophone and the clinking of glasses and dishes from his house during thenight, presumed that Big Dr Gurameto betrayed his country, and even celebrated and toasted
the German invasion. However, Big Dr Gurameto persuaded his old friend to release the local
hostages, including a Jewish pharmacist captured by the Germans, to which von Schwabe
eventually conceded supposedly for the sake of their old friendship. Consequently, after the
hostages were freed, Big Dr Gurameto became almost a heroic figure for the Albanian people
for having secured better fortunes for the city. Still, the dinner remained a mystery for thetownsfolk until its secret was revealed at a later time when Stalinist functionaries arrested andtortured the two surgeons to speak out the truth about that evening.
1Peter Morgan, Ismail Kadare The Writer and the Dictatorship 1957-1990 (UK: Legenda, 2010), p. xv.
Ibid., p. 1.
3
Ibid., pp.115-116.
4
Ismail Kadare, The Fall of The Stone City (Great Britain: Canongate Books, 2008).
2

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When the Stalinist regime took over the country, the two foremost investigators in
Albania at the time, Shaqo Mezini and Arian Ciu, examined the full list of the surgeons’ patients
because the two doctors were charged with planning to commit political murders of communist
leaders. In the process of the investigation, Big Dr Gurameto learned that the man who was
supposed to be his old friend attending the dinner back then was a German Colonel called Klaus
Hempf, who only presented himself as Fritz von Schwabe. The two Nazi colonels met bychance in a field hospital in May 1943. The mortally wounded von Schwabe asked – as daying
wish – his fellow officer, who was to be transferred to Albania, to find and bid farewell to his
old Albanian college friend. Hempf promised to carry out his wish, as von Schwabe died in hisarms on May 11, 1943. Four months later, on September 16, 1943, the Nazi tanks invaded
Albania and the name of the city, Gjirokastër, reminded Hempf of his promise. When reaching
to Big Dr Gurameto, Hempf passed himself off as Colonel Fritz von Schwabe, even as the latter
had already died on the front a few months before. Subsequently, Big Dr Gurameto supposedthat he was greatly altered by time and his wounds. Thus, in due course, the deathbed encounter
between von Schwabe and Hempf in a military hospital was followed by the mysterious dinner
and, years later, by the Stalinist political investigation, after extracts from Hempf’s diary madethese events known.
The novel vividly depicts this period of Albania’s history and the victims of the German
invasion. It also presents us with a picture of the totalitarian communist regime that followed,
which was supposed to liberate the Albanian people from the fascist occupying forces but
instead brought about another disastrous rule. In this framework, The Fall of The Stone City alsooffers a perspective for discussion of binary oppositions such as hospitality and hostility,
friendship and enmity, as these are the primary concepts explored in the novel. Kadare tells hisstory from a perspective that challenges well-established notions by juxtaposing them with theiropposites in the course of the events he narrates. It will be primarily these binary oppositions
that will be analyzed here through Derrida’s concepts of hospitality and autoimmunity.
In this respect, the challenged borders between these binary oppositions prompt an
examination of the notion of foreigner/stranger, who can appear as enemy or friend within
Derrida’s concept of hospitality. In Of Hospitality,5 Derrida analyses the sense of hospitality(xenia), which derives from the Latin hospes, meaning ‘host, guest, or stranger’. Since by its
etymology it carries its contradiction within itself, hospitality can be understood as the receptionof a stranger (Xenos) in a most general sense which accommodates two opposing meanings.
Derrida points out that this is indicated in the translation of Xenos in French with twocontradictory meanings: as étranger (stranger or foreigner) or as hôte (host).6 Thus, for him,
this coexistence of meanings reveals the apparently paradoxical relation between hospitality
and hostility, in which both of these concepts haunt each other ambivalently – “the foreigner
welcomed as a guest or as enemy. Hospitality, hostility, hostpitality.”7
In this framework, Derrida carries his study further and puts forward two kinds of
hospitality, namely, unconditional and conditional hospitality. For Derrida, the ideal hospitality
is unconditional hospitality where the Other is welcomed with no expectation to adapt to the5

Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, translated by Anne Dufourmantelle (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
Ibid., p. 41.
7
Ibid., p. 45.
6

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traditions, conditions or rules of the host. That is, in unconditional hospitality, the Other is
accepted with absolute openness. This indeed implies a risk that the guest might turn out to be
an enemy/parasite. And yet, the uninvited guest/stranger might be as well a friendly guest. This
ambiguity in the sense of hospitality can be related to Derrida’s concept of autoimmunity, which
is described as “that strange behavior where a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, ‘itself’works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its own immunity.” 8 In otherwords, autoimmunity can be seen as a potentially destructive threat to its own immunity while
it tries to protect its own community or sovereignty. Since it is the instance of the body attacking
its own immune system, autoimmunity can be considered an internal occupation which also
allows the intrusion of the Other.9 Derrida further explains autoimmunity in Rogues as follows:
For what I call the autoimmune consists not only in harming or ruining oneself, indeed in destroying
one’s own protections, and in doing so oneself, committing suicide or threatening to do so, but, more
seriously still, and through this, in threatening the I (moi) or the self (soi), the ego or the autos,
ipseity itself, compromising the immunity of the autos itself: it consists not only in compromisingoneself (s’auto-entamer) but in compromising the self, the autos – and thus ipseity. It consists not
only in committing suicide but in compromising sui- or self-referentiality, the self or sui- of suicide
itself. Autoimmunity is more or less suicidal, but, more seriously still, it threatens always to rob
suicide itself of its meaning and supposed integrity.10

Thus, autoimmunity can be understood in terms of a self-attacking move, which allows for thedestruction of one’s self, such that the relation “is neither one of exteriority nor one of simple
opposition or contradiction.”11
On this basis, Derrida’s hospitality and hostility will be used as umbrella concepts
throughout the discussion of the theme of friendship and enmity. The paper aims to explore theinterwoven relation of hospitality and hostility in the novel by examining the two old friends’
promises and threats to each other in the context of friendship and enmity under the German
occupation of Albania. As it is related to the theme of hospitality, the concept of the arrivant
will be analyzed here as well; and additionally, the communist regime will be discussed as a
destructive threat from the perspective of autoimmunity.
Besides hospitality, hostility and friendship are also underlined in The Kanun of LekëDukagjini, the traditional Albanian legal code mentioned in the novel. As Ramazan Balcı
explains, “The Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini had continued to survive as a national law which had
never lost its effectiveness among Albanians, since the 11th century. The works on this subject,evaluate this code as a part of the oral folk tradition, and especially draw attention to its cultural
aspect.” 12 In addition, in his Essays on World Literature: Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare(2018), Kadare emphasizes the importance of the guest as having almost deified status for the8

Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 100.
9Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 123.
10
Ibid., p. 45.
11
Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, p. 114.
12
Ramazan Balcı, “The Ottoman Practices of The Kanun of Dukajini: The Method of Cibal,” Türkiyat Mecmuası,
Vol. 26, No. 1 (2016), p. 33.

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Albanian people according to The Kanun.13 Indeed, hospitality is to such an extent at the coreof The Kanun that penalties have to be applied if someone breaks its rules. Since it plays suchan important role in the Albanian culture, hospitality cannot be simply ignored.14
As mentioned above, for Derrida, ideally hospitality is unconditional, which essentiallymeans welcoming the Other without asking questions about his or her name, identity, state ororigin; as opposed to conditional hospitality, which requires the guest to adapt to the rules andthe norms of the host. More broadly put, whereas in conditional hospitality the host has control
over the guest in terms of control over national borders,15 in its very essence Derrida’s claim
suggests that hospitality should be unconditional and should involve openness to the stranger
whoever or whatever she or he may be. As Derrida puts it, a visitor can be “a foreigner, animmigrant, an uninvited guest, or an unexpected visitor, whether or not the new arrival is thecitizen of another country, a human, animal or divine creature, a living or dead thing, male orfemale.”16 Thus, it can be said that unconditional hospitality does not limit the visitor – theOther – or force the visitor to adjust to the host’s space, for “hospitality should be neither
assimilation, acculturation, nor simply the occupation of my space by the Other.”17 Instead, as
he claims that unconditional hospitality should be ideally the case, for Derrida the host should
open his or her space without any request to do so:
I have to – and that’s an unconditional injunction – I have to welcome the Other whoever he or she
is unconditionally, without asking for a document, a name, a context or a passport. That is the very
first opening of my relation to the Other; to open my space, my home – my house, my language, myculture, my nation, my state and myself.18

Hence, Derrida, in his comments on unconditional hospitality, emphasizes the ambiguous
relation between the host and the Other, and especially the moment that welcoming “the Other
whoever he or she is unconditionally” implies a risk. As Derrida points out, this risk functions
such that “I have to accept if I offer unconditional hospitality that the Other may ruin my own
space or impose his or her own culture or his or her own language.” 19 It is therefore uncertain
whether the visitor is a friend who brings peace or is an enemy who will harm the host. Instead,
Derrida argues, “The one inviting becomes almost the hostage of the one invited, of the guest,
the hostage of the one he receives, the one who keeps him at home.” 20
According to Derrida, an aporia stands at the centre of the concept of hospitality interms of the opposition of “The law (of hospitality), in its universal singularity, to a pluralitythat is … a number of laws that distribute their history and their anthropological geography

13

Ismail Kadare, Essays on World Literature: Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare (New York: Restless Books, 2018),
p. 78.
14
Ibid., p. 75.
15Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, p. 135.
16
Ibid., p. 77.
17
Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, “Politics and Friendship: A Discussion with
Jacques Derrida,” 1997, http://www.dariaroithmayr.com/pdfs/assignments/Politics%20and%20Friendship.pdf
18
Ibid.
19
Ibid.
20
Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, p. 9.

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differently.”21 He elaborates further that in this sense “The law is above the laws. It is thus
illegal, transgressive, outside the law.”22 Thus, one can say that both concepts (of law and laws)
depend on each other, that this is a two-way dependence as “the unconditional law of hospitality
needs the laws, it requires them” in order to become “effective, concrete, determined.” 23 In thissense, the conditional hospitality corrupts the unconditional hospitality, and vice versa. As
Derrida puts it, “We will always be threatened by this dilemma between, on the one hand,
unconditional hospitality that dispenses with law, duty, or even politics, and, on the other,
hospitality circumscribed by law and duty. One of them can always corrupt the other, and thiscapacity for perversion remains irreducible. It must remain so.” 24The slippery ground of this concept is supported by Derrida’s concept of autoimmunity.
In his article “Hostipitality,” he argues that this dilemma results in hospitality auto-immunizing
itself:Hospitality is a self-contradictory concept and experience which can only self-destruct – put
otherwise, produce itself as impossible, only be possible on the condition of its impossibility – orprotect itself from itself, auto-immunize itself in some way, which is to say, deconstruct itself –
precisely in being put into practice.25

In this sense, Derrida takes the biological term ‘autoimmunity’ in order to deconstruct‘hospitality’ as the self-destructive tendency of the political and philosophical theories that areapparently intertwined with the concept of the Other. The key moment here is that if
unconditional hospitality involves openness to stranger, then, it implies a risk. Autoimmunity,
on Derrida’s view, emulates this risk highlighting the vulnerability and powerlessness of theimmune system, which works to destroy its own protection. What here makes the juxtaposition
between unconditional hospitality and autoimmunity possible is that, although they are different
concepts, they share common features such as risk and promise.26 They both convey “a double
bind of threat and chance, not alternatively or by turns promise and/or threat but threat in thepromise itself.”27
Thus, for Derrida, autoimmunity 28 is a direct attack against itself – its own immune
system – for itself. It is self-destructive and a “quasi-suicidal” drive attacking one’s own
21

Ibid., p. 79.
Ibid., p. 79.
23
Ibid., p. 79.
24
Ibid., p. 135.
25
Jacques Derrida, “Hostipitality,” Angelaki 5, no.3 (2000), pp. 4-5.
26
Andrea Timár, “Derrida and the Immune System,” p. 5.
27
Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, p. 82.
28
Derrida appropriates this medical term standing for the biological condition in which living system immunize
itself against its own immunity. His use of the term dates back to the 1990s, particularly in Spectres of Marx
(1994), Politics of Friendship (1997), and Faith and Knowledge. He admits that it is a central concept in his
philosophy, especially following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, most notably in an interview with
Giovanna Borradori (2003), and, later on in Rogues (2005). However, Derrida’s formulation shows contrasts withactual implications of the biological concept. As Andrea Timár points out, Derrida’s concept is closer to the body’s
reaction to infection by the AIDS virus, which “stands in an uneasy, almost spectral relationship with autoimmune
diseases. For whereas in autoimmune diseases the immune system destroys the body’s own organs, during HIV
22

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immune system, which was to protect oneself and one’s own identity. 29 Furthermore, Derrida
explains that autoimmunity also allows for the intrusion of the Other through the destruction of
the immune system. 30 As this is a situation in which, as a result of internal corruption, theimmune system destroys itself, the suggestion here is that this sense of autoimmunity also
destabilizes the binary opposition between friend and enemy. Respectively, the relation offriend and enemy between Colonel Fritz von Schwabe and Dr Gurameto here will be discussed
in terms of this sense of autoimmunity as well. And overall, along Derrida’s sense of
unconditional hospitality, so specified as autoimmunity, The Fall of The Stone City can be readas destabilizing this binary opposition by making it possible for the Other to be understood asboth a threat and an opportunity.
The story begins in the stone city of Gjirokastër in 1943 in the middle of World War
II. In September 1943, Albania was occupied by Nazi forces and German soldiers advanced on
the ancient gates of the city. The two popular surgeons, Big Dr Gurameto and Little Dr
Gurameto, having the same surname without a family connection, are presented as having asignificant role in the unfolding events. The important difference between the two doctors isthat Big Dr Gurameto studied in Germany whereas Little Dr Gurameto studied in Italy, which
was to play a part in their respective professional esteem in the course of the events. The Italianinvasion, or, as some people called it – “Albania’s unification with Italy,” changed the“equilibrium between the two doctors and elevated one at the expense of the other.” 31 The
relation between the two doctors is another important factor to analyze in the novel from theperspective of autoimmunity. In the novel, Little Dr Gurameto is presented as the projection of
Big Dr Gurameto’s unconscious, a “projection which the people around him for some
inexplicable reason had accepted.” 32 From this point of view, the projection of Big Dr
Gurameto’s unconscious can be seen as an autoimmune system.
In 1943, Italy lost her big brother, Germany, and the German Army was coming as a“friend” with the aim of liberating the country from “the hated Italian occupation and restoring
Albania’s violated independence,” as written in the leaflets that were dropped from German
aircrafts over Gjirokastër. 33 The leaflets, which were prepared in two languages, German andAlbanian, caused different opinions among the city’s inhabitants: it was possible for Germany
to be seen as a friend or an enemy. It is important to note here that for Derrida the arrival orvisitation of the other can also be an invasion. As he puts it, “if I accept the coming of the other,
the arriving (arrivance) of the other who could come at any moment without asking my opinion

infection, the immune system destroy itself, and becomes entangled in a process that inevitably leads to its total
destruction. Thus, Derrida’s definition of autoimmunity echoes, in fact, the medical definitions of AIDS, but unlike
AIDS, autoimmunity becomes a political concept in Derrida’s thinking”. (See Andrea Timár, “Derrida and the
Immune System,” Et al: Critical Theory Online, 2015, http://etal.hu/en/archive/terrorism-and-aesthetics2015/derrida-and-the-immune-system ).
29
Michael Lewis, “Of (Auto) Immune Life: Derrida, Esposito, Agamben,” in Medicine and Society, New
Perspectives in Continental Philosophy, ed. Darian Meacham (New York: Springer, 2015), p. 216.
30
Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 123.
31
Ismail Kadare, The Fall of The Stone City, p. 4.
32
Ibid., p. 164
33
Ibid., p. 6.

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and who could come with the best or worst of intentions: a visitation could be an invasion by
the worst.” 34 In the same vein, in Aporias (1993), Derrida presents us with his notion ofarrivant:
The new arrivant, this word can, indeed, mean the neutrality of that which arrives, but also the
singularity who arrives, of he or she who comes, coming to be where s/he was not expected, where
one was awaiting him or her without waiting for him or her, without expecting it, without knowing
what or whom to expect, what or whom I am waiting for – and such is hospitality itself, hospitality
toward the event.35

In this sense, the arrival of Colonel Fritz von Schwabe, a commanding officer of the German
Army, can be considered as that of an uninvited guest or as a new arrivant. Although, as
accompanied by German tanks and troops, he appears a destructive stranger and an inevitable
force against Albania, as a new arrivant he is not yet “an invader or an occupier, nor… acolonizer,’’36 even if he also becomes one. He actually claimed that he came to Albania in order
to find his old college friend and he expected to be welcomed by the Albanian hospitality as
laid down in The Kanun. When von Schwabe and Big Dr Gurameto met, the doctor failed torecognize his college friend. He thought that he could not recognize him because of the passingof time, his military uniform, or the two scars on his face, but an emotional reunion still took
place:“Like the Nibelungenlied, eh? Or the Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini? Do you remember what you told
me in the Widow Martha’s Tavern? About Albanian honour, hospitality?” ...
“I’ve dreamed of this meeting for so long,…and so when they gave me orders to take this tankdivision and occupy Albania, my first thought was of you. I would not invade Albania but save it,
unite it with the eternal Reich and of course, before anything else, I would find you my brother. And
I set off happily to the country where honour rules, as you used to say.”37

Von Schwabe proceeded to show his disappointment from the Albanian hospitality: “DrGurameto, they fired on me in your city…I was fired on. I was betrayed… It was my fault for
believing you. Nostalgia had turned me soft and without thinking I had put my men in mortal
danger… Gurameto, you traitor, where’s your Albanian honour now?”38 Fritz von Schwabe
makes it clear that he already expected his old friend’s warm welcome and unconditional
hospitality as presented in the old days, “I sent you word. I dropped thousands of leaflets fromthe air. I told you I was coming as a guest. I asked the master of the house, ‘Will you receive
guests?’…Where is your honour, Dr Gurameto? Have you nothing to say?”39 As the novel has
it, von Schwabe criticizes the host’s tradition even though he himself is an arrivant or a guest.
Although he does not question Gurameto’s Albanian identity directly, he calls into question his
Albanian tradition of hospitality. We can note here that on Derrida’s view the arrival ofotherness surprises the host, “enough to call into question, to the point of annihilating or
Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida, “Hostipitality,” Angelaki 5, no.3 (2000), p. 17.
Jacques Derrida, Aporias (Stanford: Stanford University, 1993), p. 33.
36
Ibid., p. 34.
37
Ismail Kadare, The Fall of The Stone City, p. 31.
38
Ibid., p. 32.
39
Ibid., p. 32.
34
35

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rendering indeterminate, all the distinctive signs of a prior identity, beginning with the very
border that delineated a legitimate home and assured lineage, names and language, nations,families and genealogies.”40 In this sense, von Schwabe can be considered an arrivant, who
surprises Big Dr Gurameto and has enough authority to question his hospitality, Albanianhonor, and loyalty to The Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini. Thereupon, Big Dr Gurameto defended
himself, saying:“I did not fire on you, Fritz.”“Really? It was worse than that. Your country fired on me.”“I answer for my own house, not the state.”“It comes to the same.”“It does not come to the same. I am not Albania, just as you are not Germany, Fritz. We’re somethingelse.”41

After this conversation, Big Dr Gurameto invites von Schwabe for dinner. It is not known tothe city’s population what this occasion was really about – “Some still called it the ‘dinner ofshame’ but others referred to it as the ‘resurrection dinner’.” 42 Some people thought that
Gurameto’s plan was to “cock a snook at the Germans,” while others believed he followed the
Albanian custom and welcomed them, opening his house to everyone, friend or foe.43 However,
Big Dr Gurameto’s intention was different: he was planning to convince Fritz von Schwabe torelease the Albanian hostages taken by the occupiers. On that evening, Big Dr Gurameto, whilelooking out for his guest towards the gate of his yard, felt sorrow that he had never known
before. In this case, applying Derrida’s sense of unconditional hospitality appears to beseemingly impossible, as this requires that one accept the guest without any anticipation or
expectation, while relinquishing control over one’s own space. Derrida’s remarks on the aporiaof hospitality are fitting here:
For there to be hospitality there must be a door. But if there is a door, there is no longer hospitality.
There is no hospitable house. There is no house without doors and windows. But as soon as there
are a door and windows, it means that someone has the key to them and consequently controls theconditions of hospitality. There must be a threshold. But if there is a threshold, there is no longer
hospitality.44

In this sense, it can be said that the threshold of the house is already a representation of the limit
for unconditional hospitality. Hence, the concept of unconditional hospitality, or pure
hospitality, seems impossible. Although Big Dr Gurameto, as the master of the house, showed
his hospitality to the colonel and the German servicemen, the colonel’s confession effectively
turned the master of the house into stone; hence, Big Dr Gurameto’s hospitality turned into
conditional hospitality upon asking the colonel to release the hostages:

40

Jacques Derrida, Aporias, p. 34.
Ibid., p. 32.
42
Ibid., p. 27.
43
Ibid., pp. 21-22.
44
Jacques Derrida, “Hostipitality,” p. 14.
41

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“And so, as I told you, when the order came to occupy – I mean to unite Albania, my first thought
was that I would visit my brother. I would find him wherever he was. And look, I have come. But
you… You fired on me, Gurameto. Treacherously, behind my back.”“It wasn’t me.”“I know. But you know better than I do that your Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini demands blood. German
blood was split. Blood is never counted as lost… Eighty hostages will wash away that blood. While
we are dining here, my men are rounding them up.”45

Here, the dilemma at the heart of the hospitality, which Derrida sets out in Of Hospitality
emerges again: “How can we distinguish between a guest and a parasite? In principle, thedifference is straightforward, but for that you need a law; hospitality, reception, the welcome
offered, have to be submitted to a basic and limiting jurisdiction.”46 Although Big Dr Gurameto
granted Fritz von Schwabe access to his house as if he were a valued guest, von Schwabe turned
out to be a parasite and broke the code of honor at the heart of hospitality. As Derrida states,“Not all new arrivals are received as guests if they don’t have the benefit of the right tohospitality or the right of asylum, etc. Without this right, a new arrival can only be introduced‘in my home’, in the host’s ‘at home’, as a parasite, a guest who is wrong, illegitimate,clandestine, liable to expulsion or arrest.”47 Therefore, apparently, it can be said that the guest
turns out to be a destructive enemy – a parasite – or a threat, who ruins the host’s nation or
space and abuses the host’s hospitality. Undeniably, this implies the risk of pure hospitality,
for, as Derrida says, “[…] That is the risk of pure hospitality and pure gift, because a gift might
be terrible, too.” 48 In the novel, Fritz von Schwabe violates Gurameto’s hospitality, which
potentially shows the colonel as a destructive enemy. Apparently, the collapse of the ethicalboundaries of being a guest and a friend displays the ambivalent nature of the friendshipbetween two men. At this point, this leads us to another of Derrida’s works, The Politics ofFriendship, in which Derrida discusses the paradoxical closeness between friendship andenmity in the lens of integration between politics and friendship. Big Dr Gurameto asked thecolonel to free the hostages; however, the colonel insisted on not releasing them until he learned
the name of the people who fired on him: “Gurameto, my brother, I do not want to spill Albanian
blood. I came as a guest, with promises and gifts, but you fired on me. Give me those damned
names, give them to me and the hostages are yours, instantly.” 49
Here, other relevant questions arise: What does it take to understand a private friend or
a guest as a public enemy? Alternatively, what does it take to distinguish friends from the public
or the private enemy?
Derrida takes these questions and reinterprets the communal and individual enemy,
which are also discussed by Carl Schmitt. Schmitt, argues that the meaning of friend can be
only determined within the distinction between friend and enemy. 50 For Schmitt, in politics, theenemy is always the public enemy; however, Derrida’s reading of Schmitt deconstructs thisapproach. As Derrida puts it, “The enemy in the political sense need not be hated personally,
45

Ismail Kadare, The Fall of The Stone City, p. 35.
Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, p. 59.
47
Ibid., p. 59.
48
Jacques Derrida, “Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility,” p. 71.
49
Ismail Kadare, The Fall of The Stone City, p. 39.
50
Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. G. Collins, ( London, UK: Verso, 2005), p. 373.
46

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Hostility, Hospitality, and Autoimmunity in Kadare’s The Fall of The Stone Cityand in the private sphere only does it make sense to love one’s enemy, that is, one’s
adversary.”51 Derrida suggests here that one can destroy one’s enemy in the public sphere while
continuing to love him/her in private:
The friend (amicus) can be an enemy (hostis). I can be hostile towards my friend, I can be hostile
towards him publicly and, conversely, I can, in privacy, love my enemy. From this, everything would
follow, in orderly, regular fashion, from the distinction between public and private. Another way ofsaying that at every point when this border is threatened, fragile, porous, contestable … theSchmittian discourse collapses.52

In this sense, for Derrida, “friend and enemy are not mutually exclusive opposites.” 53 Although
Derrida focuses on the concept of friendship, he believes that enemy precedes the friend andthat war is a condition of friendship. 54 In this sense, the love of the political enemy at a personallevel can be seen as the most notable aspect of Kadare’s novel. Although Fritz von Schwabe
was a public enemy, he released Albanian hostages for the sake of his friendship with
Gurameto, giving the order to free the hostages, including also a Jewish pharmacist, following
a long discussion with Big Dr Gurameto:“Dr Gurameto, you’ve broken your word. There is a Jew here.”“A Jew? So what?”“So what? You know I can’t release Jews.”“Jews, Albanians, it’s all the same.”“It’s not the same, Gurameto, not at all.”“Albanians do not betray their guests. You know that, Fritz. This Jew is a guest in our city. We can’t
hand over a guest.”“Because the Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini forbids it?”
“I told you this long ago in the tavern. It’s been our law for a thousand years.”55

Based on the dialogue above, although the two men have different political views, von Schwabe
and Big Dr Gurameto appear to embody the paradoxically close relationship between friendshipand enmity. In this relation, it is very indicative that the friendship argument applies also to theJewish hostage, even though the colonel’s hostility towards Jews is quite obvious. This isbecause, despite being a political and public enemy, Fritz ultimately turns out to be a friend at
a personal level: “The doctor and the colonel muttered to each other in private for a long timeand again the situation changed. Nobody explained why. Colonel Fritz von Schwabe, bearer of
the Iron Cross, took a deep breath and ordered the hostages to be freed. Not just some, but allof them.”56
Meanwhile, at the dinner, Big Dr Gurameto’s daughter passed round the drinks to thecolonel, then to her father, her mother, the others present, and finally to her fiancé. Aftereveryone emptied their glasses, they collapsed on the sofa and the carpet and fell into a deep51

Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, p. 88.
Ibid., p. 88
53
Antonio Calcagno, Badiou and Derrida: Politics, Events and their Time. (London: Continuum, 2007), p. 46
54Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, pp. 132-172.
55
Ismail Kadare, The Fall of The Stone City, pp. 45-46.
56
Ibid., p. 47.
52

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sleep. The next morning, she woke up and found herself lying fully clothed on the bed in her
parents’ room. In the living room, she “saw them stretched out where they had fallen, arms
outspread and mouths gaping, her father, fiancé and mother, in whose lap an officer had laid
his head; and then the colonel, his face still masked, and the others, frozen, white, like
sculptures.”57 She thought that her father had already planned to poison his guests alongsidewith his own family; Big Dr Gurameto suspected his daughter of the same. 58 But nobody could
solve the mystery of the situation, i.e. nobody knew who had put the poison into the drinks.
Here, the German colonel and soldiers who were supposed to dominate the doctor’s spacebecame victimized in the house. The guests became oppressed subjects in the host’s place andthe host turned out to be the oppressor. Thus, there seems to be a reversal of the relation between
host and guest into a relation of victimized guest and host oppressor. At this point, the supposed
poisoner was trying to protect her family and home by serving the drinks to the colonel andsoldiers, and took the risk of serving the same drinks to the whole family. This can be discussed
in terms of autoimmunity. The supposed poisoner directly attacked herself/himself and her/his
whole family, making the gesture of autoimmunity, which is “both self-protecting and selfdestroying, at once remedy and poison.” 59 According to Derrida, “Autoimmunity is always
more or less suicidal, but more seriously still, it threatens always to rob suicide itself from its
meaning and supposed integrity” as “it consists not only in committing suicide but incompromising sui- or self-referentiality, the self or sui- of suicide” 60 In this way, theautoimmune entity apparently threatens the whole family in order to protect them against theGerman oppressors. As has been discussed above, despite the threat of the Nazi occupation, itis the supposed poisoner himself/herself who arguably constitutes the greatest threat to thefamily.
It has been suggested that the concepts of hospitality and autoimmunity are similar inthat both contain openness to the outside, which implies risk. As Michael Naas says:
If autoimmunity describes the way in which an organism, an individual, a family, or a nation,
compromises its own forces of self-affirmation so as to become open and vulnerable to its outside,then autoimmunity is always a kind of hospitality – the welcoming of an event that might wellchange the very identity of the self, of the autos, the welcoming of an event that may thus bringgood or ill, that may invite a remedy or a poison, a friend or a foe. To be open to the event, to offer
hospitality, it is essential not to know in advance what is what or who is who.61

Immunity can be bound up with the conditional hospitality where people are able to protect
their sovereignty and defend themselves from the intrusion of the Other. Thus, ‘‘autoimmunity
is not an absolute ill or evil. It enables an exposure to the other, to what and to who comes –which means that it must remain incalculable. Without autoimmunity, with absolute immunity,
nothing would ever happen or arrive; we would no longer wait, await, or expect, no longer
expect one another, or expect any event.”62
57

Ibid., p. 48.
Ibid., p. 119.
59
Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, p. 124.
60
Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p. 44.
61
Michael Naas, Derrida from Now On, p. 32.
62
Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, p. 152.
58

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In addition, in the context of autoimmune logic, the communist Albanian groups can beseen as the other threat to life in Albania. As the course of events unfolds in the novel, thecommunists claim that the nationalists and royalists are preparing to do a deal with theGermans.63 However, communists’ calls for war provoked only chaos and anxiety throughout
the city. They knock on the doors and brake into houses: “‘Territorials’ as the local communists
were called, helped the patrols to carry out arrests of prominent nationalists.”64 The conspiracy
to demolish the entire city, cabals and other horrors lead people to go against their own allies.
In this context, Derrida argues, “In all wars, all civil wars, all partisan wars or wars forliberation, the inevitable escalation leads one to go after one’s rival partners no less than one’s
so-called principal adversary.” 65 Thus, while the communist groups are supposed to protect
their own country, they themselves constitute also a threat to the Albanians. This finds an
explanation within Derrida’s sense of autoimmunity. He argues that the autoimmunity turns on
itself, and “must then come to resemble [its] enemies, to corrupt itself and threaten itself inorder to protect itself against their threats.” 66
In 1953, the two surgeons were arrested on suspicion of murder and charged with being
terrorist doctors: “The Soviets themselves had broadcast the news, calling it ‘murder in a whitecoat’.”67 The accusation was in the political murder of communist leaders; supposedly, “Under
the direction of a Jewish organization known as the ‘Joint’, a group of doctors was preparing
the greatest crime in the history of mankind: the elimination by murder of all the communist
leaders throughout the world, starting with Joseph Stalin.” 68 The foremost investigators ofAlbania’s Communist regime, Shaqo Mezini and Arian Ciu, interrogated the two doctors forthe murder of patients during surgical procedures, and tortured them in the Cave of Sanisha
until they died. The interrogation was to make them confess ‘the whole truth’ about the dinneron the night of the reunion Big Dr Gurameto with his old college friend who turned out to becommander of German troops invading Albania. 69 The investigators were not convinced by Big
Dr Gurameto’s answers: “Isn’t it a bit like of one of those old fairy tales we learned at school?
Quite apart from the dinner with music and champagne, the release of the hostages and thesalvation of the city, doesn’t it look a bit like a game? Why not stop this charade and tell us
what was really behind it?”70 They did not believe Gurameto’s answers because Colonel Fritz
von Schwabe had allegedly died in a field hospital in Ukraine long before that dinner. 71
Furthermore, the investigators maintained that Big Dr Gurameto was part of the aforementioned
Jewish organization because he asked von Schwabe to release a Jewish pharmacist that night.
Thus, they considered it an evidence against him and claimed that Big Dr Gurameto wascollaborating with the Nazis to establish Jewish rule throughout the world, and to murder the63

Ismail Kadare, The Fall of The Stone City, p. 55.
Ibid., p. 68.
65
Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, p. 112.
66
Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p. 40.
67
Ismail Kadare, The Fall of The Stone City, p. 102.
68
Ibid., p. 103.
69
Ibid., p. 113.
70
Ibid., p. 113.
71
Ibid., p. 116.
64

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world communist leaders, starting with Stalin. 72 In this sense, we can also note that the “newregime” of communism appears to attack its own integral protection at the level of the state by
destroying its own immune system. That is, the Stalinist regime corrupts the city of Gjirokastër
and Albania, pushing the city as a whole through a peculiar autoimmune destruction. As
Michael Lewis says, “the greatest threat of terror comes from within, in that destruction of theimmune system which allows the relatively strict border between one’s self and the outside tocollapse, not because of an external enemy’s attack but as a result of internal corruption.” 73
Although the new regime was supposed to be associated with “reconstruction,” it seemed thatit came to resemble an enemy. Stalinists’ anger, aimed at Gjirokastër because of the conspiracy
plot, threatened the whole city. The Stalinist functionaries who interrogated and tortured thesurgeons constituted the threat to the life in the city. In this sense, the autoimmune entity canbe seen as turning on itself and starting to resemble enemy of Albania. Since autoimmunity
implies opposites such as threat and chance, protection and destruction, the Stalinist regime, as
Other, can be seen at first as promise, but then – as provoking an attack against the city. For
Derrida, autoimmunity is essentially a relationship between self and other; however, it also
deconstructs the binary opposition between self and non-self. Since autoimmunity is a selfdestructive system, which implies an eroding of our defense mechanism to protect ourselves, it
directly attacks itself such that the relation of self and other is no longer one of exteriority. Thus,
according to the logic of this system, the self turns into a non-self or Other who sees itself as athreat to itself. In the same way, the communist regime can be interpreted also as self and Otheror exterior force, whereas Little Dr Gurameto, who is an opposition of Big Dr Gurameto, canbe seen as a non-self figure who was created as the self’s defense mechanism.
At the end of the novel, in September 1993, shortly after the fall of communism inAlbania, both doctors’ graves were exhumed.74 It was discovered that one of the shackled menthat were exhumed was not Little Dr Gurameto but someone else who was never identified. 75
Since the little doctor had left so few traces behind himself, people began to doubt whether heever existed76 and many believed that “Little Dr Gurameto had been merely an exteriorizationor projection of Big Dr Gurameto’s unconscious.” 77 This particular situation can be considereda model of autoimmunity on the level of the psyche. As Derrida says, “To put it a bit
sententiously in the interest of time, without autoimmunity there would be neither
psychoanalysis, nor what psychoanalysis calls the ‘unconscious’.” 78 In this sense, Big Dr
Gurameto arguably created a persona in his subconscious in an attempt to protect himself. Thatis, he may have created this persona as a projection of his own negative sides in an attempt toprotect his own status and his own life, very much as the living ego maintains its own
autoimmunity in itself. This is the sense in which Little Dr Gurameto might be considered a
non-self figure indicative of the self’ protective apparatus. As Derrida explains in Specters ofMarx, “the living ego is auto-immune. To protect its life, to constitute itself as unique living
72

Ibid., p. 121.
Michael Lewis, “Of (Auto) Immune Life: Derrida, Esposito, Agamben,” p. 219.
74
Ibid., p. 164.
75
Ibid., p. 164.
76
Ibid., p. 164.
77
Ibid., pp. 164-165.
78
Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p. 55.
73

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Hostility, Hospitality, and Autoimmunity in Kadare’s The Fall of The Stone Cityego … it must … take the immune defenses apparently meant for the non-ego, the enemy, theopposite, the adversary and direct them at once for itself and against itself.”79 It is in this sensethat Big Dr Gurameto’s creation of the little doctor can be seen as a kind of immune defense
on the level of the psyche. Whereas the destruction of the immune system, which allows theintrusion of the Other, allows us also to say that the notion of autoimmunity can be used fordeconstruction of the relationship between self and non-self, between self and other.80
In conclusion, The Fall of The Stone City is a remarkable novel which can be analyzed
from the perspective of Derrida’s concepts of hospitality, autoimmunity, friendship, and thearrivant, while destabilizing the binary oppositions between hostility and hospitality, friendshipand enmity. As has been noted, according to Derrida, the concepts of unconditional hospitality
and autoimmunity overlap in their core meanings because they are both open to the Other,which constitutes both a threat and opportunity. In this sense, as Derrida points out, the term
autoimmunity is fundamentally different from other terms beginning with ‘auto’: “While all theother autos words, without exception, express the power, independence, and stability of an
enduring self, autoimmunity evokes the powerlessness, vulnerability, dependence, andinstability of every self or autos.”81 Thus, the paper draws attention to the risk of autoimmunity
as a self-destructive term by investigating its sense through the political events and the level ofthe psyche. Overall, the aim of the paper has been to draw attention to the overlapping senses
of unconditional hospitality and autoimmunity as openness to the Other, which can beunderstood as both a threat and a promise.
In the novel, the binary opposition of friendship and enmity with regard to the two men
is discussed within the framework of deconstruction of the friend-enemy dichotomy, whichbecomes possible in terms of Derrida’s concept of autoimmunity. Here, the key moment in thesense of autoimmunity is that, while an autoimmune entity aims to protect itself, in reality it
constitutes a self-destructive threat to itself. Colonel Fritz von Schwabe as an arrivant was
shown as expecting to be welcomed with the traditional Albanian hospitality. And yet, thehospitality offered by Big Dr Gurameto turned into conditional hospitality. We can conjecture
here that either Big Dr Gurameto or his daughter used their immune defenses to destroy theenemy by attempting to poison the German Colonel and the other soldiers. At the same time,
the poisoning can also be understood as an autoimmune process, as Gurameto’s family was
exposed to the poison as well. Furthermore, a transposition of the concept of autoimmunity at
the level of psyche can shed light on Little Dr Gurameto’s presence as a reflection of Big Dr
Gurameto’s subconscious. The rivalry between Big Dr Gurameto and Little Dr Gurameto,
especially as represented at the level of psyche, could be discussed as competition between twoof them. So far, Big Dr Gurameto was the victor on every occasion while his colleague wascalled the loser. Big Dr Gurameto’s projection of his own failure on the imaginary little Dr
79

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, translated by Peggy Kamouf (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 177.
For other related discussions see Catherine MacMillan, “Looking for the Rogue: Democratic Autoimmunity in
José Saramago’s Seeing,” Global Conversations: An International Journal in Contemporary Philosophy andCulture, Vol. 4 (2021), pp. 27ff; as well as, Rossen Roussev, “Feminism, Deconstruction, and Literary Criticism:
A Deconstructive Feminist Reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Novel The Scarlet Letter with the Help of Alice
Jardine and Jacques Derrida,” Global Conversations: An International Journal in Contemporary Philosophy andCulture, Vol. 4 (2021), pp. 68-69, 81.
81Michael Naas, Derrida from Now On, p. 125.
80

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Gurameto can be understood as an attempt to protect the integrity of the ego. In this way, heapparently utilized immune defenses to constitute himself as a unique and significant figure in
public. Big Dr Gurameto’s immune defense suggests the concept of autoimmunity that helps
explain “how we inevitably turn against ourselves, against the very principles that constituteand sustain ourselves and our identities.” 82
In addition, in the novel, the communist regime brought a high level of oppression in
the city, including tragic results, as well as the psychological trauma of Big Dr Gurameto. Afterthe communist regime took over the city, Big Dr Gurameto was arrested and kept in the Caveof Sanisha which was the most terrifying dungeon of the city’s prison. The investigators
tortured him and the marks of torture were clearly visible on his face; Big Dr Gurameto’s
psychological state became deeply imbalanced. Like an immune system, which functions in an
uncontrollable way, the communist groups moved against the people in the city causing terror,
which in reality came from a group that was supposed to protect them. In this way, in
autoimmune fashion, the communists came to resemble their enemies.
Most generally, the work of Albania’s best-known writer, Ismail Kadare, depicts his
country’s history, culture, and traditions while keeping a close look to the concepts of
hospitality, hostility, and friendship. Here, these concepts are analyzed in the perspective of theconcept of autoimmunity to support the main argument of this paper regarding his novel The
Fall of The Stone City. However, the exploration of these concepts from Derridian perspective
may arguably serve as an investigative model for approaching other contemporary novels,
which deal with the experiences of hostility, hospitality, and autoimmunity within still otherpolitical, social, and cultural contexts.

82

Ibid., p. 33.

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