Since Glas you have been working on the notion of what you call

‘the gift’, or that which escapes the circular motion of spirit or reason in the Hegelian sense. Recently, you have attempted to define more directly the nature of this quite central motif in works such as Given Time and The Gift of Death, while endeavouring to relate it to themes such as hospitality, community and the political. There seems, in other words, to be a direct relationship between the notion of the gift and many of your current preoccupations. In brief, therefore, could you tell us how you actually go about applying the idea of the gift to the aforementioned notions which are becoming predominant in your work?

JD: In fact it is the same logic which is at work in both cases. How could we relate briefly the gift and hospitality? Of course, it is obvious that hospitality is supposed to consist in giving something, offering something.

In the conventional scene of hospitality, the guest gives something in gratitude. So there is this scene of gratitude among hosts and guests. In the same way that I have tried to show that the gift supposes a break with reciprocity, exchange, economy and circular movement, I have also tried to demonstrate that hospitality implies such a break; that is, if I inscribe the gesture of hospitality within a circle in which the guest should give back to the host, then it is not hospitality but conditional hospitality. That is the way hospitality is usually understood in many cultures, such as the Greek and Islamic cultures. The host remains the master in the house, the country, the nation, he controls the threshold, he controls the borders, and when he welcomes the guest he wants to keep the mastery. ‘I am the master of the house, the city, the nation’—that is what is implied in this form of conditional hospitality. This conditionality, which is also the conditionality of the gift as exchange, finds a number of examples in the history of our cultures. The one which interests me most, however, is Kant’s example in

‘Perpetual Peace’,² in which he advocates universal hospitality as the

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condition of perpetual peace. To summarize very briefly, he says that peace must be perpetual; if you make peace only provisionally in order to resume the war, this would not be peace but armistice or cease-fire. For a peace really to be a peace, a promise of eternal peace must be at work.

Such a concept of peace implies, therefore, universal hospitality; that is, all the nation-states should guarantee hospitality to the foreigner who comes, but only under certain conditions: first, being a citizen of another nation-state or country, he must behave peaceably in our country; second, he is not granted the right to stay, but only the right to visit. Kant has a number of sharp distinctions about this. I would call this ‘conditional hospitality’, and I would oppose it to what I call ‘unconditional’ or ‘pure’

hospitality, which is without conditions and which does not seek to identify the newcomer, even if he is not a citizen.

Today this is a burning issue: we know that there are numerous what we call ‘displaced persons’ who are applying for the right of asylum without being citizens, without being identified as citizens. It is not for speculative or ethical reasons that I am interested in unconditional hospitality, but in order to understand and to transform what is going on today in our world.

So unconditional hospitality implies that you don’t ask the other, the newcomer, the guest, to give anything back, or even to identify himself or herself. Even if the other deprives you of your mastery or your home, you have to accept this. It is terrible to accept this, but that is the condition of unconditional hospitality: that you give up the mastery of your space, your home, your nation. It is unbearable. If, however, there is pure hospitality it should be pushed to this extreme.

I try to dissociate the concept of this pure hospitality from the concept of ‘invitation’. If you are the guest and I invite you, if I am expecting you and am prepared to meet you, then this implies that there is no surprise, everything is in order. For pure hospitality or a pure gift to occur, however, there must be an absolute surprise. The other, like the Messiah, must arrive whenever he or she wants. She may even not arrive. I would oppose, therefore, the traditional and religious concept of ‘visitation’ to ‘invitation’:

visitation implies the arrival of someone who is not expected, who can show up at any time. If I am unconditionally hospitable I should welcome the visitation, not the invited guest, but the visitor. I must be unprepared, or prepared to be unprepared, for the unexpected arrival of any other. Is this possible? I don’t know. If, however, there is pure hospitality, or a pure gift, it should consist in this opening without horizon, without horizon of expectation, an opening to the newcomer whoever that may be. It may be terrible because the newcomer may be a good person, or may be the devil; but if you exclude the possibility that the newcomer is coming to destroy your house—if you want to control this and exclude in advance this possibility—there is no hospitality. In this case, you control the borders, you have customs officers, and you have a door, a gate, a key and so

on. For unconditional hospitality to take place you have to accept the risk of the other coming and destroying the place, initiating a revolution, stealing everything, or killing everyone. That is the risk of pure hospitality and pure gift, because a pure gift might be terrible too. That is why exchange and controls and conditions try to make a distinction between good and evil. Why did Kant insist on conditional hospitality? Because he knew that without these conditions hospitality could turn into wild war, terrible aggression. Those are the risks involved in pure hospitality, if there is such a thing and I am not sure that there is.

Q: In your early essay, ‘Violence and Metaphysics’,³ you consider the question of a phenomenon of the other, and you move on to state that

‘no one more than Husserl has been sensitive to the singular and irreducible style of this matrix and to original non-phenomenologization indicated within it’. Would you still agree with this judgment and regard Husserl’s account of the other as being of continuing relevance to your own work?

JD: Yes and no. Yes, because I think it is still a very profound lesson that Husserl taught us, and even Levinas. In the fifth Cartesian Meditation, Husserl insists that there is no pure intuition of the other as such; that is, I have no originary access to the alter-ego as such. I should go, as you know, through analogy or appresentation. So the fact that there is no pure phenomenon, or phenomenality, of the other or alter-ego as such is something which I think is irrefutable. Of course, it’s a break within phenomenology, with the principle of phenomenology, and it is within the space opened by this break that Levinas found his way. I think this is true, but it doesn’t mean that we subscribe to the whole context of Husserl’s statement. However, if we take this simple axiom or principle, the principle which betrays the principle of phenomenology, and keep this apart from phenomenology, it is still valid for me. Now you can transport this statement into another context, which Levinas does and which I shall do, too. But when I have to explain pedagogically to students what Levinas has in mind when he speaks of ‘the infinity of the other’, of the infinite alterity of the other, I refer to Husserl. The other is infinitely other because we never have any access to the other as such. That is why he/she is the other. This separation, this dissociation is not only a limit, but it is also the condition of the relation to the other, a non-relation as relation. When Levinas speaks of separation, the separation is the condition of the social bond. There is such a non-intuitive relation—I don’t know who the other is, I can’t be on the other side.

This has been strongly prepared by phenomenology; in Husserl and in Merleau-Ponty the ego is first the origin of the world; that is, there is a zero-point of space and time here. That is what I mean when I say ‘I’, and in this place ‘you’ cannot be, it’s irreplaceable. I can’t be in your zero-point. Even if we agree that we see the same thing, the condition

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for such an exchange is that the two origins of the world can never coincide.

That is why death is the end of the world and birth is the origin of the world. There is an infinite number of origins of the world. So from the point of view of Husserl’s fifth Cartesian Meditation I remain a strict phenomenologist.

Q: How do you envisage the connection between ‘justice’, on the one hand, and what you define as ‘the moment of strategy, of rhetoric, of ethics and of polities’ (Limited Inc…) which seems to give rise to a process in your work, one which takes the form of the injunction ‘one must’ assume responsibility?

JD: Let me, very awkwardly, try to approach these difficulties. In your question you located the ‘we must’ on the side of strategy, politics, ethics.

Yes, and no: the ‘we must’ has no process; it is foreign to the process.

When I feel that ‘I must’, on the one hand, of course, I enter a process, but in the name of something which doesn’t tolerate the process. It’s immediate. For instance, I must answer the call of the other: it’s something which has to be absolute, unconditional and immediate, that is, foreign to any process.

Now, of course, if I want to be responsible to the ‘I must’, to the immediate imperative, the unconditional ‘I must’, then in the name of this just response I have to engage myself in a process; that is, to take into account conditions, strategy, and rhetoric and so on. That is a great dilemma, I have no solution to that. If I told you that I have a solution I would be lying. I think there is no solution, no rules or norms for that.

The response, not the solution, should be invented each time, at each moment in the singular situations. This, of course, doesn’t exclude the process, but at some point when I respond, if I want to respond in the name of justice, I have to invent singularly, to sign, so to speak, the response.

Now, you know that I began using the name or the word ‘justice’ very late in my process, and I try to distinguish between ‘justice’ and ‘right’

(le droit); that is, I try to make a sharp distinction between ‘justice’ and

‘the law’ or the ‘right’. On the side of the right you would put what you called, a little hastily, politics, ethics, rhetoric (ethics and politics, for me, are also on the other side). Now, when I made this distinction I knew we should not oppose justice to the law, to the history of right. Of course, the history of right can be deconstructed, can be transformed. There is the history of the law, of legal concepts, and because of that the legality can be transformed, deconstructed, criticized, improved. This is an infinite process within the legal space. But this process unfolds itself in the name of justice: justice requires the law. You can’t simply call for justice without trying to embody justice in the law. So justice is not simply outside the law, it is something which transcends the law, but which, at the same

time, requires the law; that is, deconstruction, transformations, revolutions, reformations, improvement, perfectibility—all that is a process. So even if justice is foreign to the process, it nevertheless requires the process, it requires political action, rhetoric, strategies, etc. What is foreign to strategy requires strategy. That is the double-bind which causes the difficulty.

So to repeat, when we talk of this ‘we must’, of this responsibility, the ‘we must’ is always foreign to the process. However, in the name of this ‘we must’ we have to enter the process, and to analyse and to transform infinitely. This is a strange logic indeed. But I would not simply oppose, on the one side, the field of politics, ethics and rhetoric, and, on the other side, justice. We have to pay attention to their heterogeneity, I would insist on that. They are heterogeneous, and because of this one calls for the other: they are indissociable. If I wanted to formalize in a very abstract, empty, or formal way, this situation, I would say that there is at the same time heterogeneity, radical heterogeneity, between two terms, but at the same time the two terms are indissociable. Decision, an ethical or a political responsibility, is absolutely heterogeneous to knowledge. Nevertheless, we have to know as much as possible in order to ground our decision. But even if it is grounded in knowledge, the moment I take a decision it is a leap, I enter a heterogeneous space and that is the condition of responsibility.

This is not only a problem but the aporia we have to face constantly.

For me, however, the aporia is not simply paralysis, but the aporia or the non-way is the condition of walking: if there was no aporia we wouldn’t walk, we wouldn’t find our way; path-breaking implies aporia. This impossibility to find one’s way is the condition of ethics.

Q: Richard Rorty has suggested that, in texts such as The Post Card and Glas, you have entered a whole new literary genre. But it seems that Glas in particular can be read as a dramatization of the kind of ethical undecidability you have spoken of here today, even if that risks reducing it to the status of an illustration. My question is, how do you look back on Glas from the perspective of your current thinking on ethics and undecidability?

JD: I think you are right and Rorty is not. Rorty wants to dissociate in my work philosophy, which is worthless, and literature, which is interesting to him. Of course, this is not the way I view it.

First, let us take the example of The Post Card. I hope that this text is not simply a literary piece: I think it is an attempt to blur the borders between literature and philosophy, and to blur the borders in the name of hospitality—that is what hospitality does, blur the border—by writing some sentences, some undecidable sentences, which put in question the limits of what one calls philosophy, science, literature. I try to do this performatively, so to speak. This gesture, to the extent that it is successful,

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does not belong to philosophy, to literature, nor to any genre. However presumptuous it might sound thus, I think this text does not belong to these fields called philosophy or literature.

Going back to Glas, it is certainly not a literary piece, no more than The Post Card, however literary it might be in some respects. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t call it, and this was your word, a ‘dramatization’ of philosophical or theoretical issues that I would then have put on stage. Perhaps there may be some truth in this, but essentially I think it is something else, a way of asking questions about the borders by using the examples of Genet and Hegel. So there are quite a lot of problems, political, ethical, and psychoanalytical, which are addressed in this book, but with the final aim of writing a text, of producing some signature, some unique idiom.

It is a text which constantly asks the question of signature: of Hegel’s signature—Genet’s signature, what does it mean to sign and to seal, and a host of related questions. But to make of this elaboration of the question of signature, to make a signature, this is almost nothing. What is a signature? It is just something to be deciphered, to be read, whatever consequences that may have. It is very ambitious to go beyond the borders of philosophy and literature, but also very modest. It is just a signature, just one among others: Genet, Hegel, and mine countersigning theirs.

Q: Deconstruction is concerned with a critique of centres of control, as was the work of Michel Foucault. As a method, what can deconstruction offer to advance our ethical understanding of power beyond the analysis already proposed by Foucault?

JD: I don’t know. But I don’t think deconstruction ‘offers’ anything as deconstruction. That is sometimes what I am charged with: saying nothing, not offering any content or any full proposition. I have never ‘proposed’

anything, and that is perhaps the essential poverty of my work. I never offered anything in terms of ‘this is what you have to know’ or ‘this is what you have to do’. So deconstruction is a poor thing from that point of view.

Now, perhaps using the strategy of deconstruction, you may for yourself understand, not what power is, but what powers may be in such and such a context. Of course, if I wanted to justify at any cost what I am doing, I would say that everything that I do is concerned with the question of power everywhere. The question of power is so pervasive, however, that I could not isolate the place where I deal with just the question of power.

What interests me in what Foucault says about power is not the claim that everything is power, or will to power, in society, but his proposition or assumption that there is no such thing as ‘the Power’, and that today power is in fact dispersed and not concentrated in the form of the state.

There are rather only micro-powers. This is a more useful approach, that is, not to rely on a homogeneous and centralized concept of power. From

that point of view, I think this is the condition of a new politics, a new approach to politics. I think this is very necessary and useful.

Nevertheless, my concern will be this one: of course we have to pay attention to micro-powers, to invisible or new forms of power, larger or smaller than the state, or foreign to the logic of the state. We should not, however, forget the state: the state is still very strong, the logic of the state is still very strong. It is today undergoing an unprecedented process.

What one calls ‘globalization’ or mondialization, the constitution of new

What one calls ‘globalization’ or mondialization, the constitution of new