Hospitality and Non-Human Beings

This chapter presents Jacques Derrida’s reading of D. H. Lawrence’s poem ‘Snake.’ The question that guides the reading of this particular poem concerns the extent to which our ethical responsibilities as hosts extend to non-human animals. Derrida analyzes this poem under the weight of Levinas’ uncomfortable hesitation to grant animals a ‘face’ and thus make humans ethically responsible to them. In Derrida’s reading of the poem, hospitality ceases to be conditional on the other being human. In the unexpected encounter between the male narrator and a snake in the poem, hospitality blurs boundaries and allows the other to appear in non-anthropocentric terms and claim a place within human responsibility. If ‘hospitality’ means crossing boundaries, then it requires allowing the other of the human, the animal, to cross the boundary traditionally established between the two, but without first having to prove that the animal is ‘like the human,’ that is, without assimilating the otherness of the animal into the human. Hospitality renegotiates the question of crossing the boundaries between species.