The Aporetic Relationship Between the Unconditional Ethics of Hospitality and Politics

This chapter explores a number of issues that arise from the possibility of transforming the ethics of hospitality, characterized by infinite responsibility and unconditionality, into concrete politics and law. While acknowledging ‘the necessity of a relation between ethics and politics, ethics and justice or law,’ Derrida is not satisfied with a politics of hospitality adorned with some ethical elements. Only if politics maintains a relationship of deduction with ethics as infinite and unconditional responsibility for the other can we hope that hospitality transcends the so-called pragmatic requirements of a specific context as well as the power of the sovereign state or host society. For Derrida, while such a ‘deduction’ is necessary, there remains—and must remain—a ‘hiatus’ or ‘silence’ between ethics and politics or law in terms of the forms their relationship must take each time. There is no prior specific answer, maxim or rule to the question ‘what ought I do’ in a particular case.