Ethics, power and space: International hospitality beyond Derrida

Abstract

Phone: +44 (0)2890 973165 Fax: +44 (0)2890 975048 2 Jacques Derrida's writings on hospitality make him, along with Emmanuel Levinas, perhaps the concept's foremost theorist and describe a rich textured web of paradoxes and uncertainties.While it is conventional to begin with a definition of hospitality, Derrida (2000: 6) warns us that 'We do not know what hospitality is', as it 'rebels against any self-identity, or any consistent, stable, and objectifiable conceptual determination'. Yet, despite this chronic ambiguity, we are offered Derrida's apparently un-Derridean assurance that hospitality is ethics (Derrida 1999a: 19); not just an ethics, but ethics itself (Derrida 2001: 16-7). While immensely provocative, this claim is not really unpacked nor its implications drawn out in the depth one might wish. Furthermore, Derrida links this notion of hospitality as ethics to an understanding of power and control as sovereign mastery, a link which is potentially very limiting for how we use and understand hospitality in a global context. This article seeks to reaffirm the importance of hospitality for discussions of international ethics, but also to suggest a way in which we can push beyond the limitations imposed by Derrida.When we interrogate the implications of hospitality as ethics, we reveal a constitutive link between ethics, power and space within practices of hospitality. As it operates to form relations between self and other, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion, those distinctions also need to be policed, managed and controlled, even after the threshold of the home is crossed. Such management and administration of hospitality takes us beyond sovereign mastery and its statist implications. Furthermore, the acts of welcoming and controlling work to produce the home itself, its spatiality (internal and external borders) and its affectivity (feelings of belonging and nonbelonging). I argue that if we are to retain Derrida's aim of transforming and improving the practice of international hospitality (2001: 22-3), we must pay attention to the ways that his assumptions are being disrupted.The article begins by exploring what it means to say that ethics is hospitality in an international context, arguing that actual acts of hospitality can be conceived as spatial and affective relational practices. The second section outlines the implications of this claim for the power relations operating in practices of hospitality, especially those that manage the space of the home and (re)produce its affective dimensions. The third section examines what an investigation of spaces created as homes through everyday practices of international hospitality might look like, focusing on refugee camps. These are non-state, non-sovereign, extra-territorial spaces that are produced through the practice of a hospitality towards those most in need, thereby disrupting the assumptions of Derrida and international ethics regarding who/what can be a host, a home and

Solidarity in spaces of ‘care and custody’: The hospitality politics of immigration detention visiting

“…A defining feature for Bulley (c.f. Baker, 2010) is that 'hospitality requires spatial boundaries that it simultaneously displaces through their crossing' (Bulley, 2015). For Bulley, it is this spatiality that separates hospitality from other instances of taking responsibility for the other: hospitality occurs when spatial networks distribute power to allow one to perform as host and constructs the other as a mobile visitor that is temporally moored in the space of the host (Lynch et al, 2011).…”

“…Firstly, the assumption that demarcations of belonging in a place determines who can take on hospitality roles has led to theorists to view hosts and guests as automatic products of social conditions rather than as objects of strategy. Those interested in thinking through hospitality beyond Derrida's vision have identified situations that do not conform to the dominant migrant-guest, state-host dynamic (Humbracht, 2015;Rozakou, 2012) as well as situations where guests over time become hosts (Bulley, 2015). However, few have explored spaces where there is ambiguity, strategy and play with hospitality roles.…”

Disciplinary Government and Providing Accommodation for Employees

“…Çalışanlara işletmenin mülkünde konaklama olanağı sunmak, çalışanların kapatılmalarıyla ilişkilidir; kapatılmaysa disipline edici iktidarın işlemesini yoğunlaştırır (Foucault, 2015: 215-217, 432); ağırlanma ve kapatılma ilişkisi için ayrıca bkz. Bulley, 2015;Lynch vd., 2011: 8). Bunun nedeni işletmenin çalışanlarını çalışma dışında da gözetleyebilmesidir.…”

“…Genel olarak, işletmeler ağırlamayla müşterilere/konuklara ve çalışanlara değer biçerler (Lugosi, 2014). Her değer biçme, bireyleri belirli kategorilere veya statülere koyarak çeşitli normları oluşturur ve iktidarı işletir (Foucault, 2015;Bulley, 2015). Bu kapsamda ağırlama pratikleriyle işletmeler müşterilerin gözünde işletmenin imajını yükseltebilirler veya çalışanlar üzerindeki disiplinlerini oluşturabilirler (Lugosi, 2014).…”

Giving Aid Inside the Home

“…So far, critics of refugee hospitality have focused on host states (e.g. Mason 2011) and aid organizations within refugee camps (Bulley 2015) and detention centers (Rozakou 2012). However, the hospitality of humanitarian actors in urban settings has hardly been addressed, a laudable exception being Estella Carpi's study of NGO-sponsored hosting of refugees in a Lebanese border town.…”