yayayayayayayayay!

Amazing news :) Today I asked Peter Anderson to be my supervisor for my creative writing dissertation and he pretty much said yes! Just have to send him a writing sample, then meeting with him after vac :) Am so excited, finally I can write my own stuff and have it critiqued by someone I respect... lots of pressure, but I can't wait to begin!

"I'm very much afraid I didn't mean anything but nonsense. Still, you know, words mean more than we mean to express when we use them; so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer means. So, whatever good meanings are in the book, I'm glad to accept as the meaning of the book." Lewis Carroll

My presentation on Derrida

My first honours presentation is tomorrow eeekkk! My life, for the past few weeks, has been consumed by trying to squeeze an immense amount of Derrida into too short a time. I have decided I love Derrida, I hate Derrida and I love to hate Derrida, and I hate to love to love to hate him too :p This is pretty much what Derrida does to your mind, he deconstructs everything you assume to be true, he twists it, turns it, plays with it and reinvents it so completely that you do not even know what you are looking at any more even though you know you've seen it before... a specter from the past, but one that will always reappear, so a specter from the future then. His theory is that everything can be deconstructed and must be deconstructed, it has to have an inherent perfectability and it must acknowledge its own historicity. He is not trying to destruct old ideas but merely to reconfigure them, to make them better, to reach their limit that cannot be reached, that we can only aspire to reach. In this way the dream of a utopia remains simultaneously possible in its impossibility. I like Derrida. I like his positivity. I like his idea of forgiveness as a striving to unconditionally forgive the unforgivable, and his idea of hospitality as conditional and unconditional. This is the piece I have done for tomorrow, most of it is directly from Derrida's interview just after 9/11.

Derrida and Hospitality

Simpson speaks most clearly of the concept of hospitality and its relation to 9/11 on page 168, at the end of his book. He says that “Derrida speaks of the violence of the host,” whereby to dare to say welcome is perhaps to insinuate that one is at home here, that one knows what it means to be at home… welcoming the other in order to appropriate for oneself a place and then speak the language of hospitality. He goes on to say ask how the host of nations, the USA can afford to imagine itself as not in place, as aggressively depriving others of their places in order to shore up the image of the integrity of its own, its right to remain the world’s host, giving and demanding hospitality as it sees fit to a smaller and smaller group of the deserving and willing.

The USA is an example of conditional hospitality. The other is welcomed by invitation only, on the condition that they assimilate, that they become us. They must take on our way of life, our rules, language, culture and political system. This hospitality creates regulated practices, laws and conventions on a national, international and as Kant says, cosmopolitical scale. When Derrida speaks of the violence of the host, he is referring to how the host has to believe that they possess and understand the home the other is entering- that it is our home not yours. In this way, by making the other, other, the host confirms their own belonging and power. It brings us to the idea that we only know ourselves because we are not the other. We only know what home means and our role within it because the other does not belong here. This brings us to what is most important in Derrida’s approach to ethics and politics: the unique obligation each of us has to the other. To speak the language of hospitality makes it seem as if the host tries to disguise conditional hospitality using the rhetoric of unconditional hospitality. The host makes it seem as if these conditions, this invitation does not exist, that everyone is welcome, which is simply impossible.

Pure or unconditional hospitality, is open to anyone that arrives unexpected and uninvited- an invitation isn’t required. This is what Derrida names the hospitality of visitation not invitation. Unconditional hospitality is dangerous and risky, but as Derrida says, a hospitality backed by certain assurances and carrying an immunity against the wholly other cannot be true hospitality can it? Unconditional hospitality is thus not practically possible and cannot be organised, it can have no legal or political status. However, we need it to have a concept of what hospitality is, therefore to determine the rules of conditional hospitality. It is also necessary to give us an idea of the other, or of the alterity of the other, in other words, of someone who enters our lives without invitation. And we need it in order to have any concept of love or living together with the other in a way that is not part of some totality or ensemble.

The USA will not welcome the other, unless they subscribe to the conditions of conditional hospitality. The power the USA has to impose these conditions on the other affirms their own power as the host, and their ability to forcefully reject the other gives their hosting role credibility and integrity. The USA sets the conditions of invitation, it decides who can enter the house and who is turned away, while it always expects to be let into the house of the other.

Unconditional hospitality is neither political or juridicial but is the condition of both of these. There is a fundamental paradox as the two hospitalities are heterogeneous and indissociable. Heterogeneous because in order to move from one to the other a huge leap is required, which is beyond knowledge and power, norms and rules. It is indissociable because it is impossible for us to open the door to the other, to expose ourselves to their coming, to offer them something without giving something determinate (something with defined limits, that is definite). The determination then has to re-configure the unconditional into certain conditions, or it gives nothing. The unconditional or absolute, risks being nothing if conditions do not make it something. This unique transition is always occurring between the two hospitalities.

So we have to have limits or conditions in place in order to give anything of meaning to the other. If we offer something beyond these limits we are effectively promising something that cannot actually exist, we are promising nothing, an ideal.