Derridean ”Unconditional Hospitality” and New Image of European Borders
Basia Nikiforova
Lithuanian Culture Research InstituteAbstract
Migration and borders are at the heart of critical, radical geography and new materialism. Jacques Derrida’s concept of 'unconditional hospitality’ helps us to rethink the past to the present and needs to be deconstructed according to current and future changes. While this ideal may not be fully attainable in practice, it can inspire border researchers to strive for more inclusive and empathetic ways of understanding and engaging with border issues. The notion of marginalising solidarity with refugees reflects the shift in priorities during the pandemic. What does marginalising solidarity mean for border researchers? First, the symbolic reconstruction of political entitlement and exclusion from social life; second, the intensification of internal and external borders; third, the growing priority of security over humanitarianism in public opinion and political discourse. The article highlights issues such as the duality of the migrant and the multiple paths to legal status. The race and religious affiliation of the migrant are important components of the Other.
Keywords:
Derrida, hospitality, humanitarian crisis, mass migration, refugees, responsibility, solidarityReferences
Agamben, G. (1998). Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Daniel Heller-Roazen (trans.). Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Google Scholar
Agamben, G. (2005). State of Exception. Kevin Attell (trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Google Scholar
Balibar, E. & Swenson, J. (2004). We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Journal of International Affairs. 57, 2, 190-192.
Google Scholar
Balibar, E. (2004). Europe as Borderland. The Alexander von Humboldt Lecture in Human Geography. http://www.ru.nl/socgeo/colloquium/ Europe%20as%20Borderland.pdf.
Google Scholar
Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, 3, 801-831 https://doi.org/10.1086/345321.
Google Scholar
Bauman, Z. (1993). Postmodern Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Google Scholar
Benhabib S. (2005). The Legacy of Jacques Derrida. PMLA, Vol. 120, No. 2 (Mar., 2005), pp. 464-494.
Google Scholar
Bensmaïa, R. (2017). Gilles Deleuze, Postcolonial Theory, and the Philosophy of Limit. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Google Scholar
Borradori, G. (2002). Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Google Scholar
Cantat, C. (2016). Rethinking Mobilities: Solidarity and Migrant Struggles Beyond Narratives of Crisis. Intersections. EEJSP 2, 4, 11-32. DOI: 10.17356/ieejspv2i4.286
Google Scholar
Cixous, H. (2004). Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint. Beverly Bie Brahic (trans). New York: Columbia University Press.
Google Scholar
Cixous, H. (2005). Stigmata. London and New York: Routledge Classics.
Google Scholar
Conradi, E. (2015). Redoing Care: Societal Transformation through Critical Practice. Ethics and Social Welfare, 9,2, 113–129. doi:10.1080/17496535.2015.1005553.
Google Scholar
Cowan, D-E. (2007). Religion on the Internet, in Beckford J.A. and Demerath III (eds). The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, London, Sage, 357-376.
Google Scholar
Cusset, F. (2008). French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Google Scholar
Czajka, A. (2016). Democracy and Justice. Reading Derrida in Istanbul. London & New York: Routledge.
Google Scholar
Derrida, J. (1986). ‘‘Shibboleth,’’ in Midrash and Literature, Geoffrey H. Hartman and Sanford Budick (eds). New Haven: Yale University Press, 307–47.
Google Scholar
Derrida, J. (1991). L’autre cap, suivi de La démocratie ajournée. Paris: Minuit.
Google Scholar
Derrida, J. (1992). The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, translated by P-A Brault and M. Naas, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Google Scholar
Derrida, J. (1992). Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority. In Drucilla Cornell et al (eds.) Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. Oxfordshire: Routledge.
Google Scholar
Derrida, J., Malle, E., Vermeren, P., Peretti, Ch. de, Sohm, B. (1994). The Deconstruction of Actuality. An Interview with Jacques Derrida. Radical Philosophy, 68: 28–41.
Google Scholar
Derrida, J. (1995). The Gift of Death. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Google Scholar
Derrida, J. (1996). Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf, New York: Routledge.
Google Scholar
Derrida, J. (1997). Politics and Friendship: a Discussion with Jacques Derrida. Edited by G. Bennington. Centre for Modern French Thought, University of Sussex. Available from: ww.sussex.ac.uk/Units/frenchthought/derrida.htm
Google Scholar
Derrida, J. (1998). Hοsρίtalίty, Justice and Responsibility: Α Dialogue with Jacques Derrida. In Richard Kearney & Mark Dooley (eds.). Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Phίlosophy. London: Routledge.
Google Scholar
Derrida, J. et al. (2001). A Discussion with Jacques Derrida. An Exchange between Jacques Derrida and Sydney seminar participants. Theory and Event, issue 5.1, 15-16.
Google Scholar
Derrida, J. (2002). Inconditionnalite ou souverainet?: L’universit? Aux fronti?res de l’Europe. Allocutions by Dimitris Dimiroulis and Georges Veltsos. Athens: Patakis.
Google Scholar
Derrida, J. (2005). Rogues. Two Essays on Reason. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Google Scholar
Ferrari, S. (2019). The secular state in a declining Europe. Beyond the end of the European universal dream. Journal of Law, Religion and State, 7, 13-30.
Google Scholar
Fox, C. F. (1994). The Portable Border. Site Specificity, Art and Representations at the U.S-Mexico Border. Social Text, no. 41, 61–82, 1994, https://doi.org/10.2307/466832.
Google Scholar
Fox, M. J. & Reece, A. (2013).The Impossible Decision: Social Tagging and Derrida’s Deconstructed Hospitality. Knowledge Organization. 40(4), 260-265.
Google Scholar
Gasché, R. (2007). Views and Interviews: On ‚Deconstruction’ in America. Austin: The Davies Group Publishers.
Google Scholar
Gasché, R., & McCance, D. (2008). Crossings: An Interview with Rodolphe Gasché. Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, 41, 4. https://www.fabula.org/actualites/27468/mosaic-vol-41-no-4-decembre-2008.html
Google Scholar
Hartman, S. (2022). City of Refugees: The Story of Three Newcomers Who Breathed Life into a Dying American Town. Boston: Beacon Press.
Google Scholar
Kant, I. (2006). Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History (Rethinking the Western Tradition). New Haven: Yale University.
Google Scholar
Kearney, R. (2003). Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness. London: Routledge.
Google Scholar
Kolossov, V. (2005). Theorizing Borders. Border Studies: Changing Perspectives and Theoretical Approaches, Geopolitics 10, 4, 28.
Google Scholar
Kutash, E. (2019). Jacques Derrida: The Double Liminality of a Philosophical Marrano. Religions, 10, 2, 68. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10020068
Google Scholar
Levinas, E. (1969), Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, Alphonso Lingis (trans.), Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
Google Scholar
Massumi, B. (2012). Affective Attunement in a Field of Catastrophe. Interview Brian Massumi with Erin Manning. (June 6). https://www.peripeti.dk/2012/06/06/affective-attunement-in-a-field-of-catastrophe/
Google Scholar
Meyer B. & Peter van der Veer (eds.). (2021). Refugees and Religion. Ethnographic Studies of Global Trajectories. London: Bloomsbury Academic. DOI 10.5040/9781350167162
Google Scholar
Miller, J. H. (2005). The J. Hillis Miller reader. Julian Wolfreys (ed.). Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Google Scholar
Mouffe, C. (2013). Agonistics. Thinking the world politically. London and New York: Verso.
Google Scholar
Moxnes, H. (2014). Global citizenship – why do we need utopian visions? In Aksel Braanen Sterri (ed.) Global Citizen – Challenges and Responsibility in an Interconnected World. Rotterdam, London, Taipei: Sense Publishers, 5-14.
Google Scholar
Murray, S-J. (2006). Thanatopolitics: On the Use of Death for Mobilizing Political Life. Polygraph: An International Journal of Politics and Culture, 18, 191- 215.
Google Scholar
Ricoeur P. (1986). Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. George Taylor (ed.). New York: Columbia University Press.
Google Scholar
Rosello, M. (1998). Representing illegal immigrants in France: from clandestines to l’afaire des sans-papiers de Saint-Bernard’. Journal of European Studies 28, 137–151.
Google Scholar
Rosmarin, A. (1985). „On the Theory of ‚Against Theory’.” Against Theory: Literary Studies in the New Pragmatism. Ed. W. J. T. Mitchell. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1985. 80-88.
Google Scholar
Sells, M. A. (1994). Mystical Languages of Unsaying. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Google Scholar
Snyder, T. (2005). The Wall around the West, Eurozine. http://www.eurozine. com/articles/2005-01-06-snyder-en.html
Google Scholar
Twyford, E. (2021). A thanatopolitical visualization of accounting history: Giorgio Agamben and Nazi Germany. Accounting History, (Online First), 1-23.
Google Scholar
Young, R. (1990). White Mythologies. Writing History and the West. London and New York: Routledge.
Google Scholar
Zanfrini, L. (2021). Europe and the Refugee Crisis: A Challenge to Our Civilization,” United Nations Academic Impact, https://www.un.org/en/academic-impact/europe-and-refugee-crisis-challenge-our-civilization.
Google Scholar
Authors
Basia NikiforovaStatistics
Downloads
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Border and Regional Studies

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.