Foreigner (Lat. perigrinus)

In the following chapters I explore two related conceptual personae of the stranger: first, the stranger determined as the foreigner, or simply as a wanderer (perigrinus); and second, the stranger determined as either a “stranger-enemy” or a “stranger-guest” (xénos). At the same time, while not all other persons are strangers, all strangers are necessarily other people; however, today we must ask who can be defined as a stranger—that is, from what external boundary or frontier does the stranger first arrive? This is an important question for us to reconsider, especially when all contemporary territorial boundaries have been overrun and made permeable and subject to change, and there is neither a distinctly “foreign” place nor a central location, or polis (i.e., the imperial city, the capital). Along with the obsolescence of an earlier territorial conception of geopolitical formations (such as the form of the nation-state itself), this might be classified among the various signs of dispersion that have accompanied the processes of globalization—the multiplication of centers, the permeability of all borders and territories, and the dizzying loss of orientation between an interior dwelling place, or homeland, and an uninhabited exterior region, or frontier.

It is important to underline that this general disorientation, which is already figured spatially in the metaphor of globalization itself, has had important consequences for the juridical and social determination of the stranger as one who arrives from a definite place that is “foreign” and “outside.” Recalling our earlier citation from the etymology of Benveniste: “The stranger is one who comes from outside” (Lat. aduena), or simply “one who is beyond the limits of community” (Lat. perigrinus). Consequently, “there is no ‘stranger’ as such; within the diversity of these notions, since the stranger is always a particular stranger, as one who originates from a distinct statute.”1 Moreover, following Derrida’s recent interrogation of the concepts of “boundary” or “limit-horizon” that are implied by the above definition of the stranger’s particular appearance, we might say that the stranger is the manifestation of a social, political—perhaps even anthropological—aporia. In other words, the stranger is another name for the aporia that exists between what Derrida has defined as the insistence of “a universal (although non-natural) structure and a differential (non-natural but cultural) structure.”2

The different responses exhibited toward the stranger’s perspective reveal a strange “double-bind” (Derrida) that can also be found to structure the material sign of cultural difference as such. This is because the determination of cultural difference must always occur in relation to a perspective introduced by a cultural or social stranger who occupies the border position, so to speak, marking the appearance of the distinction between the inside and outside. Therefore, the recognition of cultural difference appears from the perspective of the stranger who apprehends its “otherness” and introduces this perception as either a hermeneutic factor within the group’s self-reflection around its own natural belonging to the group or is conceived as the point where the stranger’s perspective is excluded and the stranger comes to be determined as the foreigner. In either event, we can conclude that a stranger’s perspective must be maintained—even produced, cultivated, and “worked-over,” as in the case of dream-work—in a distinct social notion, whether the idea that characterizes the cultural relation to the stranger takes the form of open warfare or deep feelings of gratitude.

For example, cultural narratives are ineluctably drawn toward the position and consciousness of the stranger as if toward the points of contact with their own external and internal (or psychic) borders. Therefore, the stranger is a being who is situated on the border of the group, at the limit of a collective sense of belonging; at the same time, it is the concrete appearance of the stranger that is the occasion for the group’s own internal differentiation, including the spectrum and multiple degrees of familiarity and nonfamiliarity, belonging and nonbelonging, with which any socius is dynamically composed. As Georg Simmel first observed concerning the history of the European Jews:

The stranger is no “owner of soil,” . . . and although in intimate relations, he may develop charm and significance, as long as he is considered a stranger in the eyes of the other, he is not an “owner of soil”—soil not only in the physical, but also in the figurative sense of a life substance which is fixed, if not a point in space, at least in an ideal point of the social environment.3

We can regard the figure of the stranger as representing the hypostasis of the sociological activity that belongs to the mental life of a given historical society. Consequently, Simmel often describes the being of the stranger in terms similar to the Kantian definition of the schema: the condition and symbolic coordination of the spatial relationships that bring phenomena in touch with points that are either virtual or outside its own closed organization. In the Kantian concept, it is this formal operation of the schema, linked with the imagination that opens the bordered spatial organization of phenomena to a duration, that enables the possibility of movement or change.

From the above descriptions, we might also conclude that the consciousness of the stranger produces a certain imaginary function within the mentality of the group. The logic structuring the relation to the social stranger, as well as the logical coordinates of the stranger’s formal perspective in a particular socius, can be demonstrated by a poetic formula that can be drawn from Simmel’s sociological investigation: the stranger is, at the same time, the distancing of what is near and the nearing of what is distant. Because of this mental activity, any distinct stranger that is identified within a given culture would be a reflection of the material relationships that belong to culture alone; therefore, each stranger embodies a singular limit that cannot be crossed out or translated without doing violence to his very appearance. And yet, because of the extreme ambiguity and the fluid nature that belongs to the signification of borders, including the transformation of the absolute partition of life and death into a shared moment of cultural experience and identity, the anthropological and social categories that determine the being of the stranger suffer an inherent ambiguity—especially when the stranger’s entire being is grasped and made to manifest the sign of cultural difference. From these observations we may conclude, therefore, that the difference between cultures bears an important relationship to the manifestation of the intra-anthropological partitions according to which a culture treats its own particular strangers.

Nevertheless, if it is also true, according to Benveniste’s definition, that “there is no stranger as such” and that every stranger is a case of the particular, then there is also no generalizable or ontological expression of “otherness” from which the positive social stranger originates; thus, the philosophical and ethical notions of the “other” only appear from the perspective that reduces (or brackets) the positive contents of the stranger’s being. As a result of this “reduction,” all the other concrete attributes that might define the person or the individual vanish into an abstract image of the stranger as someone who bears only a few superficial traits of resemblance (a name, a language, sexual and racial characteristics, age, etc.). Of course, a stranger is usually determined from the perspective of a subject who is “at home,” who dwells within his or her own familiar and customary limits; consequently, the stranger appears as a being who is “outside” these limits, who is out of place, or whose very relation to place is as yet unknown and thus likely to become a subject of interrogation. At the border crossing or checkpoint, I present my passport to the border police in order to declare that I am legally a stranger, that I come from a definite place of origin, that my encroachment into another territory is only temporary, and that my estrangement is not volatile or likely to lapse into a permanent state. This is because, first of all, I have presented myself or introduced myself in the sense of “giving myself up.” At this very moment, my identity is poised between the senses of citizen and deportee. I have turned myself in to the authorities at the border for questioning, implying that I already have accepted and recognized the authority of one who questions me with regard to my legal identity and who will determine the rights accorded to this identity, specifically with regard to my right to travel “beyond the limits of my own community.”

This moment of identification—one might even say “interpellation,” since in this moment the stranger is “hailed” and must submit himself or herself to the rule of the stranger-host—is constantly threatened by ambiguity and the possible lapses that overdetermine it as a performative event. For example, recently when returning to the United States, a Nigerian woman and her children who were in front of me in line were questioned concerning the reason for their entry, the names and addresses of family members in the United States, the number of times she has crossed the border in the last year, the address and vocation of the brother that she visited in Los Angeles four months earlier, why her visit lasted three months, how she paid for travel to the United States, and, since another family member paid for her, who was sponsoring her current trip and what was the source of this money. The woman compliantly answered these questions with an air of familiarity—apparently, she was no stranger to Homeland Security—even though it was obvious that many of the answers to the questions posed to her were already on the computer screen in front of the agent. Nevertheless, it was clear that her rights at this moment were extremely limited, conditioned by positive laws that all refer more to the state’s right to secure and police its own borders and to identify everyone who seeks entry, for whatever reason (economic, political, tourist, commercial, personal, or familial). For example, she could not “prefer to remain a stranger” and refuse to answer certain questions or claim certain information as private or personal without subjecting herself to certain peril, including detainment, further interrogation, and the possible denial of entry. It would appear, from this routine example, that the law’s right to identification (or recognition) was more or less absolute—an absolute right of the host to identify the stranger as either enemy or guest—while her right to her own identity, including the right to enjoy a certain sovereignty over possessing its attributes or to offer them freely for the purposes of identification or recognition, is conditional on the absolute priority granted to the state’s right to identify all strangers at its borders. Given the regularity of media reports of detainees and certain “other strangers” who are held indefinitely “at the step of the territory,” it appears that the state has the right, approaching an absolute right, to protect its borders from encroachment by certain kinds of strangers, to identify all who pass through, and to determine the hostile or peaceful nature of the temporary guest.

As another example, while entering Dublin a few years ago as a “traveling professor,” a man in front of me was suddenly detained when it was discovered that he had criminal charges pending in another country. He was denied entry; in fact, he was asked to wait outside the gate until officials from Interpol arrived armed with machine guns to take him into custody. An armed guard immediately appeared from a room just to the side of the booth to attend to the man and keep him company while the police were en route. He was a Polish laborer who was entering Dublin to undertake some work, but the information concerning his criminal activity in his own country had caught up with him. It was clear that the state had the right to deny his right as a stranger and foreigner—his identity as a suspected criminal had circumvented his rights as a stranger, a visitor, a guest, a temporary worker—and the state was within its right to rescind the rule of hospitality. From these common examples—I could provide others, including the reports of detainees and certain “other strangers” who are being held indefinitely in prisons outside the United States since 9/11—this right appears un-conditional. The state’s right to sovereignty over the integrity of its own territory is not determined by mutual consent or recognition; if it were, then this would be a conditional right, contingent on the recognition of this right by another subject. As in the case of the Nigerian woman recounted above, the state’s right does not flow from her recognition of its authority; it would exist without her consent, which is why she does not have the right to remain a stranger to it or refuse to become subject to its mandate. Of course, as in the second example, of the man who was refused entry after being identified as a suspected criminal (in other words, as a potential “enemy”), the state can enforce its right, but this is not the source of its sovereignty either, which is to say that the right of territory is not necessarily derived from its force or threat of violence but, recalling the definition given by Benveniste above, appears as something statutory. As Derrida has written concerning this strange tension that is also exhibited in both occasions around the question of hospitality: “This collusion between the violence or the force of law (Gewalt) on one side, and hospitality on the other, seems to depend, in an absolutely radical way, on hospitality being inscribed in the form of a right.”4

In the third definitive article to his treatise Toward Perpetual Peace, Kant argues that the stranger’s right to hospitality can be understood as a “universal right.” He derives the universal nature of this right from two sources: first, from the law of nature (ius naturale), which is the universal right to the preservation of one’s own nature, which is to say, one’s own life; and second (and unique to Kant’s theory of right, as I return to discuss in the conclusion), from what could be called the universal right of society (Gesellschaft)—that is, “a right of temporary sojourn, a right to associate (zugessellen), which all men have.”5 At the same time, the right to hospitality is provisional and temporary (i.e., a right of temporary resort or visitation) for Kant and thus is not to be confused with the right of being determined as a “stranger-guest,” as I discuss in the next section. Accordingly, “the stranger may not lay claim to be entertained by right as a guest—for this would require a special friendly compact to make him for a certain time the member of a household—he may only claim a Right of Resort or of visitation.”6 In the Kantian definition, moreover, the right to hospitality can be understood as belonging to the class of rights pertaining to immunity. Strangers shall be immune from immediately being treated as an enemy; although “one may refuse to receive him when this can be done without causing his destruction, so long as he peacefully occupies his place, one may not treat him with hostility.”7 Thus, the stranger must not initially be identified as an enemy, nor should the stranger’s intention be immediately determined as hostile; such a determination should only come about after the fact, when the stranger violates one of the conditions of hospitality, that of peacefully occupying his place.

We might wonder, however, what is “universal” in this case, and how this right can be understood over and against what appears to be the absolute right of the state. In his article, Kant asserts that, universally, every stranger has a right to expect hospitality; that is to say, according to Kant’s definition, “hospitality means the right of a stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of another.”8 Of course, this in no way guarantees hospitality, since this right can be violated or simply unacknowledged, and the stranger can be just as easily treated with hostility, killed, incarcerated, held hostage, or placed in slavery. As an aside, the United States, post 9/11, has entered a period in which the principle of universal hospitality has been partially suspended and the state engages in an open violation of every stranger’s right to hospitality as this was first defined by Kant. Again, according to Kant’s original definition, “hospitality means the right of a stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of another.” However, in a period of heightened security, tightening of boundary controls, and even a temporary suspension of hospitality to certain foreigners, one might question if the right to hospitality can exist in view of the United States’ claim that it has the right to suspend the presumption of hospitality, or to treat certain strangers (particularly those whose names indicate Arab origin and descent) as “potential enemies.” Moreover, the question of rights becomes especially acute where there is no force of law that can resolve the observance of this right, since there is no universal police force that can be present to monitor and, if need be, enforce this right for each and every occasion when a stranger arrives in the land of another. Hospitality is not a law, therefore, and it can only theoretically govern different occasions as an ethical principle in a discourse of rights pertaining to the treatment of strangers. Since there is no law of hospitality, we might identify a certain ambiguity concerning the different legal and juridical expressions of hospitality as a right that remains “imperfect and conditional.” As Derrida writes, “Since this right, whether private or familial, can only be exercised and guaranteed by the mediation of a public right or a State right, the perversion [of right itself] is unleashed from the inside.”9

Returning to the assertion of “the right of association” as one of the underlying principles of hospitality, it is important to notice here that Kant’s discussion departs significantly from a traditional discourse of rights. Although “association” (or society in general) is universally the condition of the discourse of rights—if there were no society, there would be no need for a discourse that stipulates the conditions and the limits of actions that define the social bond—it also true that “association” is usually not listed as an explicit right, except in the narrower sense of the right to “political association.” However, Kant is not speaking here of a right to political association (a right to self-government or self-legislation) but rather of a right to “associate” (a natural right to society) in a more general and even universal sense. That is, he is speaking of the human as an essentially gregarious animal, though in a sense not strictly limited to the subject as a political animal (homo politikoi) but as an animal that “associates” with others in order to preserve its essential nature. In the accompanying phrase, “the right to temporary sojourn,” moreover, Kant seems to further define that the primary motive for “association” is not politics but something more akin to travel, commerce, communication, translation—in short, all forms and manners of “intercourse.” In other words, the universal right of hospitality pertains to the definition of the human as a stranger, and the stranger is always one who travels, who departs from his or her place in the customary and familiar, who sets out on the open road. But then, if hospitality is a right that naturally belongs to the stranger who travels, then how can the stranger also be defined by Kant as one who “peacefully keeps to his place”? Of course, the irony implicit in Kant’s definition is the inherent contradiction it contains, since no stranger qua stranger could ever be said to actually keep to his place, since the stranger is, by definition, one who sets out, who departs from his place and arrives at another.

In the Introduction to Metaphysics (1953), Heidegger points to the essential definition of the Greek as “a stranger” but also to the Greek dasein as involving the process of “becoming a stranger” of estrangement, which is fundamentally bound to the sense of movement. The stranger in movement, or the movement of estrangement, is both the “casting off from” and “casting out of” (poeisis) the limits of place (poria). Heidegger’s commentary in the following passage on this proto-European stranger reveals the essential relation to migration:

We are taking the strange, the uncanny (Das Unheimliche), as that which casts us out of the homely, i.e., the customary, the familiar, or the secure. The “unhomely” prevents us from making ourselves at home and therein it is overpowering. Man is the strangest of all, not only because he passes his life amid the strange understood in this sense, but because he departs [he sets out and travels] from his customary, familiar limits, because he is the violent one, who, tending toward the strange in the sense of the overpowering, surpasses the limit of the familiar.10

From the above passage we might conclude that, in a certain sense, it is a natural state for man to be in motion—that is, to enter into a state that necessarily entails becoming a stranger. For Kant, however, the implicit aim of the process of estrangement and movement is nothing other than society itself, but society no longer determined by political goals or the familial and ethnic kinship; rather, the goal is society itself determined as visitation, temporary association, communication, commercium, and the exchange of the guest–host relationship. At the same time, it is important to emphasize that the universal right to society (Gesellschaft) is not entirely a positive state in Kant’s account either but first arrives from the fact that humans cannot disperse themselves across the continuous and limited surface of the globe to avoid each other and eventually must “finally tolerate the presence of one another.”11 According to this description, the “right to associate” does not practically originate from a positive and gregarious spirit but rather is something that only gradually develops in man, begrudgingly, as a spirit of toleration—in other words, in the expression of the personality of the law itself. This is because, left to our own inclinations, we would prefer to be alone, not disturbed or agitated by the irritating presence of others. Implicitly, it is this impulse that functions as the cause of the initial dispersion of individuals and communities in Kant’s description of nature’s “grand design” in which each attempts to find, to quote a biblical phrase that is frequently employed by Levinas, “his own place in the sun.” Consequently, there is a constant and overriding drive to withdraw from proximity to others and, one might easily imagine, especially from strangers whose very presence brings an “allergic reaction” on the part of the ego, since every encounter with a stranger brings with it the inevitable specter of hostility. Yet since this withdrawal has become practically impossible, when translated onto the confines of the earth’s inhabitable surface (basically, the limited number of hospitable regions interspersed by vast wastelands of water, sand, and ice), we must inevitably learn to put up with the presence of others and, according to Kant, even the most annoying of others, with the presence of strangers to whom we owe a certain debt of hospitality.

It goes without saying, of course, that both tolerance and hospitality are inherently conditional by their very definition. There is a limit to my hospitality, beyond which I can refuse any further hospitality to the guest who attempts to usurp my place (or, to employ Kant’s phrase again, who “doesn’t peacefully keep to his place”). Likewise, I can only be tolerant of the other’s presence up to a certain point, after which I am fully within my rights to refuse my own presence in retaliation, which is to say, a threat to withdraw any further society. Both of these conditions, which are common enough to be part of any social relation and comprise the implicit understanding of the conditions and external limits of the most quotidian of social liaisons, have the possibility of open hostility as their ultimate guarantee. Within these limits, there is society defined as the possibility of hospitality, exchange, communication, and generosity. Beyond them, there is only the promise of aggression, war, retaliation, and even genocide. Consequently, Kant’s use of the word “tolerance” (Duldsamkeit) to characterize what could be called the fundamental mood of society (Gesellschaft) is extremely appropriate, since tolerance (Duldung) is merely the “negative” (i.e., absence) of open aggression, or warfare. If Kant seems to designate this as the dominant social spirit, perhaps this is utterly practical, since it perfectly describes the feeling we have toward others we encounter—especially toward others who appear to us as strangers and for whom we have no previous social relationship, except the most abstract relation that defines the spirit of law itself, which only minimally demands of us simply to be tolerant of the other’s bare right to exist.

What Kant is describing in very subtle terms can be developed in a manner that is not very different from the description of the social relation to another person as a certain “hostage-taking” situation in the writings of Levinas.12 As with Kant, perhaps to an even more emphatic degree, Levinas describes the personality of the ego by the natural qualities of solipsism and narcissism and the interruption of society as an unwelcome intrusion into this primitive state of nature (i.e., think of the infant who is not aware that others exist outside the confines of his or her primitive consciousness, including the parents and other global persons). Therefore, we might even consider the being of the stranger as a hypostasis of this intrusive encounter with society, in the sense that every appearance of the stranger is accompanied by a law that demands the subject be hospitable and tolerate the irritating presence of another, which the solipsistic ego would naturally understand as a law of being hostage to the presence of the stranger. Naturally, such a law cannot but create a degree of resentment—both to the stranger and to the social ideas of toleration and hospitality. This resentment forms the character of the “social egoism” that marks the inherent limits of any expression of toleration and hospitality.

Recalling the examples offered earlier, we could hypothesize that certain communities, such as the state and its representatives, have incarnated a certain portion of this spirit of resentment and social egoism. This often colors what could be called the fundamental personality of certain groups and associations, even to a degree that certain subjective expressions of this personality are translated to the individual members who identify with the group’s overall conservative interests. Why is it, I have often wondered, that the border officials never seem entirely happy to greet me when I visit another country? Why do they respond to my simple request for hospitality with a subtle look of menace in their eyes? If this seems somewhat “Kafkaesque,” perhaps it is because the answer to the above queries can be found in the short parable related to Josef K. at the end of The Trial, in which it is said that the law is neither particularly happy to see you come nor very sad to see you go. It merely allows you to enter or gives you permission to depart with an equal amount of indifference. Its affect, therefore, is purely a lack of emotion, that of tolerating you in principle but only under certain conditions and never with any display of interest or affection. In this sense, in the eyes of the law, we are all strangers; although this does not necessarily presuppose that all strangers are equal in the eyes of the law.

At this point in our analysis, therefore, we should note one flaw in Kant’s definition of the stranger’s universal right of hospitality—that it presupposes that every stranger is potentially a host, or that he or she has a commensurable and reciprocal position vis-à-vis the master in his own land. From its origins in the Greek systems of philosophy and civil law (the laws of the polis), we might conclude that the concept of the stranger we have been discussing is that of a very particular stranger indeed! The European stranger is essentially a despot (master of the house), and must therefore be capable both of travel and of returning to his own home. In other words, the “universal right of hospitality” is a right that only exists between equals; the host merely recognizes himself in the place of the guest, “respects” his own law and enjoys his own substance in temporarily “alienating” his own mastery to the guest, who appears in the place of the master. The host welcomes the guest, who, in turn, recognizes the host as host, the master as master. It is for this reason, as Derrida argues elsewhere, that the identity of the master is in some sense completely dependent on the relation to the guest and the stranger: “It gives the welcoming host the possibility of having access to his own proper place.”13 The concept of right in the so-called right to hospitality, consequently, must be understood specifically in the form of an alienated right—the right of the master, or host, which has undergone alienation in the place of the guest. It is this form of alienation that gives all acts of hospitality a certain exchange character, and the German language that Kant employed uniquely offers the resources for distinguishing between alienation defined as “estrangement” (entfremden) and alienation defined as “exchange” (eintäuschen). But this also implies that the stranger is merely an alienated master, and the stranger’s right to hospitality, then, only extends to those subjects who can change positions in the reciprocity of the guest–host relationship, or who can temporarily alienate their status as masters in one place in order to enjoy the temporary sojourn as the guest in another.

If hospitality only pertains to the rights of strangers and strangers are implicitly defined as displaced masters or hosts who enter into a pact or exchange with other hosts, then how does the right to hospitality extend to those who cannot claim this right? In the case of the particular stranger defined as the “deportee,” for example, as we will see later on, or in the case of the stranger who appears as the homeless refugee within the national borders of the state, the mutual recognition between hosts is not a basis for the claim to hospitality, which is why it may often go unrecognized in their case. In other words, if we have discovered earlier that the right of every stranger to temporary sojourn is based on a more fundamental right, “the right to society,” we might notice in the exceptional case of these strangers that this right to association remains a source of ambiguity, and this is especially true on those occasions where violence, either natural or in the case of wars, is located as the cause of estrangement. Thus, when the desire for association (or society) is not the motive of the stranger’s movement, we might wonder whether there is a right to hospitality, properly speaking. The “refugee,” for example, whose very existence petitions a host for refuge, for safety and protection, is neither a guest nor another host; therefore, the refugee is not a stranger in the sense defined above and thus, as we might expect, has no legal claim to hospitality. There is no pact that the refugee can claim, no exchange of hospitality, but rather a purely dependent and statutory relationship to the host. In this case, it is often only in the name of another master, or a “third” (in the name of justice or human rights), that intervenes to demand hospitality for the other who cannot claim this right for himself or herself. In other words, it is only in the name of another despot, perhaps even a “universal despot” (humanity), that the law of hospitality is extended to give temporary sojourn to the stateless and the homeless.

This is the legal character and personality of the claim for “respect and dignity” (aidós, a specific obligation I discuss in the next chapter), which is that of a surrogate claim, in the name of another host. However, because this claim is not made as a pact among equals, a certain ambiguity surrounds it, and what is granted is not hospitality strictly speaking but merely the minimal recognition of the right to live (i.e., to the juridical status “bare life,” employing Agamben’s phrasing). Consequently, in the refugee camps that exist under this contract between two hosts, only a minimal degree of hospitality is guaranteed, barely enough to preserve the image of humanity from injury—that is, nothing more than to preserve the image of the host from suffering violence and degradation (recalling Plato’s image of “self-laceration” in reference to the image of the body proper of the host). As Jacques Lacan first argued, acts of charity are not necessarily “altruistic” in nature but are inevitably invested with a certain narcissistic spirit of self-preservation—most of all, the investment in the proper image of the human body as whole and intact. Consequently, because there is a certain ambiguity that also defines the body as a “host,” we may notice that the care extended to refugees is often limited to the preservation of the body and does not address the particularity of the individuals or their rights, which go unrecognized as a class. Although the refugee is also a subject who has suffered the violation of his or her political, legal, and juridical rights as well, it is primarily to the body that a certain debt of hospitality is paid in the name of the master-host. In other words, the refugee, as a certain limit-example of the stranger, has been reduced to a purely bodily existence and exists only to the degree that the violence suffered by the body causes the host to suffer through sympathy and to feed, clothe, and nourish the body of the refugee defined as an unwelcome and temporary guest.

Earlier on I cited a passage by Derrida in which he locates the degradation of the stranger’s right to hospitality at the interior of the private and familial space of intimacy. In other words, according to Derrida, all perversion begins at home, but perversion of what, exactly? Or rather, how is the stranger’s right to hospitality perverted by the primitive formations of interest and power (and desire) that flow from these intimate and familial spaces? These spaces have traditionally been defined according to the exclusive sense of the master (of the host and despot), in which the stranger has no place. In the sphere of the family, the stranger is first recognized as absolutely strange or foreign, or as not belonging and, therefore, as having no place from which to appeal in the name of rights. Recalling a familiar scene from a play by Bertolt Brecht in which a stranger suddenly enters the kitchen of a family dwelling, prompting the shock and fear on the part of the members of the family and the father’s violent response, every incursion of the stranger into the home is perceived as an act of violence, and thus, the stranger is immediately greeted there as an enemy. If there is no stranger in the sphere of the home, then we might conclude that there is no hospitality either, and no possibility of any discourse of rights, unless this is first introduced or mediated by some public law or civic right that is also accorded to members of the familial bond as surrogate rights, as in the claims of the right to immunity from violence in laws prohibiting child and spousal abuse. We might even phrase this in a more extreme sense by saying that the stranger has no relation to those spaces defined predominately by intimacy or familial belonging, and this is confirmed by the subjective mood that characterizes our relation to strangers as distinctly lacking these qualities.14 Hence, the subjective and emotional qualities that define our relation to strangers are bereft of any attributes of intimacy; in fact, they are characterized by the opposite affects—by a coolness of detachment, a certain indifference with regard to the person of the stranger, and even a certain sense of hostility or enmity toward the stranger’s presence. These emotional qualities that so naturally characterize our relation to strangers are not arbitrary but originate from the statutes that determine the stranger’s “place in society” at the boundary of the association (or “pact”) of the so-called natural bond—of kinship, blood (or race), intimate or private ties of affection, and desire.

One can see why Derrida would determine these intimate spheres as the origin of potential perversion of the rights accorded to strangers, since the stranger has no place there but is constitutionally defined as being outside or beyond these pacts (of kinship, blood or race, linguistic community, and even the quasi-contractual bonds of friendship and sexual intimacy). Consequently, as Derrida writes, “there is no foreigner [xénos, actually referring to the “guest stranger” as I discuss next] before or outside the xénia, this pact or exchange with a group, or more precisely, this line of descent.”15 In other words, recalling the definition given by Benveniste above, if there is no stranger that does not originate from a distinct statute or law, then the specific statute in question is the one that first constitutes the “pact” or “exchange” between members of a group, particularly the exchange and lawful transmission of identity and territory through a line of descent. The family member, or the one whose identity is constituted by the pact of the family, can enter the home without first asking permission, since this is already a stipulated term of the right to “association” that belongs to those subjects located at the interior of domus. However, as one who first approaches from outside the limits of the natural community, the stranger has no right to claim the provisions of this original social bond. From this analysis, therefore, it seems that the stranger’s right to hospitality is immanently open to perversion from the fact that this very right can only be defined in relation to the law of the host. As Derrida writes:

To suppose that one could have a perfectly stabilized concept of hospitality, something I do not believe, is the moment when it is already in the process of being perverted. The passage from pure hospitality to right and to politics is one of perversion, inasmuch as the condition [of perversion] is already implicit in this passage and, as a consequence, so is the call to a certain perfectability [of hospitality], to the necessity of ameliorating without end, indefinitely, its determinations, conditions, legislative definitions whether familial, local, national, or international. . . . Hospitality is, thus, immediately pervertible and perfectible at once: there is no ideal hospitality, but only statutes that are always already in the process of being perverted and of being ameliorated, even though such amelioration carries with itself the seeds of all future perversions.16

Let us return to the Kantian notion of “universal hospitality” in order to again raise the question concerning the origin of the stranger’s right to hospitality and how this can be understood against the group’s right to assign the terms (or statutes) that determine the very identity of the stranger as if from the inside. As Kant argues, the stranger’s right to lay claim to the surface of the earth stems from an original state in which “no one had more right than another to a particular part of the earth.”17 As the earth became more peopled and territories were established, particular rights were recognized by treaty and colonization. However, according to Kant, it is the design of the great artist, nature (natura daedala rerum), to populate the entire globe and utilize war as an instrument to distribute populations equally across its surface, even to the most uninhabitable and desolate regions of the earth (deserts, oceans, vast frozen steppes, and inaccessible jungles). In his argument, Kant resorts to a speculative myth concerning an original and even primordial time when no one enjoyed the right to lay claim to any part of the earth, since everyone possessed the surface of the earth equally. Thus the origin of both the stranger’s right to demand hospitality and the right to associate through travel and visitation (a right that “all men have”) have their origins in the “common possession of the surface of the earth.”18

In its most obvious sense, of course, this original state can be defined temporally, referring to a time before the invention of “territory,” before the families and clans claimed homes and tribal plots or principalities and nations emerged to claim certain whole portions of the earth’s surface, which they determined to solely possess and to enjoy exclusive rights to as their own native soil. However, Kant also asserts that this original determination continues to define the “uninhabitable parts of the earth,” such as the seas and deserts (and today one could also add the air to Kant’s list of vast wastelands that lie between communities). Thus, the common possession of the earth also extends to define these spaces that no one can exclusively possess but that are defined as spaces of pure communication or translation, which today would especially describe the wasteland of virtual spaces and the networked communications of satellites and internetworked communications. Since these spaces cannot be inhabited, the notion of “territory” cannot be applied to them; moreover, because the mutual interests to protect these spaces invest them, they are defined primarily by international laws that stipulate their temporary possession as the open spaces that lie between and outside the boundaries of the home. Consequently, the laws that define the guest–host relationship would not extend to these spaces either, since there are no masters, and therefore no hosts, and everyone is equally a stranger in these uninhabitable regions of the earth. It is precisely here, as Kant argues, where there is neither guest nor host, master nor stranger (neither foreigner nor stranger-guest), that the idea “of a law of world citizenship is no high-flown or exaggerated notion . . . but rather a supplement to the unwritten law of the civil and international law, indispensable for the maintenance of the public human rights and hence also of perpetual peace.”19

What is the unwritten law that Kant speaks of here but the one that we also found at the basis of the stranger’s right to hospitality and right to association (or society) and communication (linguistically, but also through travel and commercial intercourse)? The precedence—even transcendence—of this unwritten law can easily be demonstrated by the fact that, despite its absolute claim to sovereignty over its own borders and the right to enforce this claim by threats of violence or power (or by the constant vigilance of its border police), all borders nevertheless remain indefinitely open to communication with what lies outside, to the inevitable intercourse with strangers and foreigners (even before these are determined as “guests” or “enemies”). Here, we might pause to reflect that one of the underlying principles of globalization has been the sheer increase of communications of all kinds, particularly the rapid and almost instantaneous forms of intercourse such as television, faxes, the Internet, and cellular and satellite transmissions. These forms of communication can also be defined as pure spaces of communication and translation between communities governed by pacts and legal obligations and thus as subject to international and civil laws that pertain to spaces outside the territorial sovereignties that determine the guest–host relationship. Thus, it has almost become a cliché to say that globalization has also been marked by the quantitative increase of such spaces, but what is important to underscore is the growing frequency of the encounters where there is neither guest nor master (no “stranger–host” relationship), encounters that exist outside or even before the question of hospitality, since they take place outside the laws that continue to define the boundaries of the territory, even though they often occur inside the very limits of the proper domain, native soil, or home. In other words, we might see this phenomenon as the materialization of Kant’s thesis concerning the unwritten law of association—that is, the new forms of society that are emerging as a result of the communication between particular strangers, for whom the statutes concerning the positive limits of legal obligation and the stranger’s right to hospitality are still in the process of being written today.