The Event of Hospitality

This chapter deals with the event of hospitality. Derrida defines the event as a radical break with a previous state of things. An event of hospitality should not merely unfold, activate, or accomplice what is already possible; the event of hospitality should consist in the arrival of the impossible. Only as such can the event of hospitality bring about the arrival of the heterogeneous, the ‘absolutely other.’ If hospitality is offered only to those to whom it is possible to offer hospitality, then there is no event of hospitality. Since it is impossible, the event of hospitality cannot be predicted, scheduled, or pre-planned. But it also cannot be announced, shown, or described. The event is always unique; it is an exception and therefore escapes any calculation, that is, it does not fall under the generality of any particular knowledge, analysis, or judgment. The event of hospitality also goes beyond the ‘I can’ and beyond the specific conventions required by what John L. Austin called ‘performative’ or ‘performative linguistic enunciations’ in his theory of speech acts.