Only the cp is moral---unconditional hospitality’s openness is itself a gross violation of hospitality---we must must exclude war criminals

Derrida’s examination of unconditional hospitality belongs to a discourse demanding that hospitality be extended—without anticipation, prejudice, or identification—to an unexpected visitor, foreigner, guest, immigrant, or stranger. This absolute openness to the newcomer on the principles of the heart, however, involves ethical risks and limitations inherent in the neighbor. Žižek locates the neighbor in its violent brutality over against Freud’s traumatic intruder (a thing that hystericizes us and disturbs the balance of our way of life). The presupposition to be resisted here, Žižek warns, is the ethical gentrification of the neighbor, “the reduction of the radically ambiguous monstrosity of the Neighbor-Thing into an Other as the abyssal point from which the call of ethical responsibility emanates” (“Neighbors” 163). That one must be radical in offering hospitality to the other stems from Derrida’s belief in overcoming violence and exclusion via pure openness and unconditional hospitality toward the Other. I am opposed to this Derridean notion of ethical hospitality. Crucial here, however, is an ideological shift from a neighbor in the simple sense, to the neighbor in its radical otherness. The neighbor in its radical otherness disturbs; the neighbor “remains an inert, impenetrable, enigmatic presence that hystericizes” (Žižek, “Neighbors” 140-1). Therefore, my meditation on the figure of the neighbor is a corrective move against unconditional hospitality that accentuates the limitation of ethical universality. This logic is implied in the critique of Derrida’s “opening without horizon,” and contextualized in representations of the Bosnian genocide in Peter Maass’s Love Thy Neighbor. 1 Ethnic cleansing, neighbor-on-neighbor violence, and dehumanization of the Other read as the portrayal of humankind at its worst. Complicating Derrida’s notion of ethical hospitality are narratives of mass atrocities within which lurks the neighbor—the unfathomable abyss, the radical otherness in all its intensity and inaccessibility. Against the Ethics of Unconditional Hospitality An act of hospitality can only be poetic. – Derrida2 Stories orbiting the questions of ethics, violence, and the Bosnian war have faded from our public consciousness. Today, Bosnian political developments and survivors’ accounts of the atrocities receive occasional press coverage, largely through reporting about war crimes trials at The Hague (i.e., Slobodan Milošević and Radovan Karadžić’s trials for war crimes during the wars in Kosovo, Bosnia, and Croatia). At the most basic level such questions about war and religious conflict highlight a revived sense of urgency within the context of ethics and violence. Furthermore, breakdowns of economic and familial structures, systemic violence, and human rights violations reflect a distinct scene shift that characterizes modern wars; a politico/ideological move from inter to intra-national conflict. Chaos, violence, and death that ensued in Bosnia in 1992 add to the complexity of intra-national conflicts, and more specifically highlight the atrociously orchestrated neighbor-to-neighbor violence. These systemic implementations of violence are never ahistorical or abstract, but always already part of concrete intersubjective, political, and ideological contexts within which they are mobilized. It is in this light that I revisit Derrida’s notion of ethical hospitality—the ideology that teaches us not to objectify the Other—and the vulgarity of Slobodan Milošević and Radovan Karadžić, the traumatic intruders, the neighbors. Derrida’s incalculable hospitality, the opening without horizon of expectation to the newcomer whoever that may be, is an aporia at best and an impossible demand at worst. Conditional hospitality is inscribed in the very possibility of unconditional hospitality and the opening to the “absolute arrivant,” the foreigner. He elaborates upon this newcomer who is not even a guest, who: surprises the host—who is not yet a host or an inviting power—enough to call into question, to the point of annihilating or rendering indeterminate, all the distinctive signs of a prior identity, beginning with the very border that delineated a legitimate home and assured lineage, names and language, nations, families and genealogies. The absolute arrivant does not yet have a name or an identity. (Aporias 34) It is precisely Derrida’s unconditional hospitality which remains conditioned by the histories, languages, and “the conditional laws of the right to hospitality,” imposed on the newcomer (On Cosmopolitanism 22). The possibility of impossible hospitality is therefore, purely theoretical and conceptual; conditioned by political inequalities, economic exploitation, injustice, war, homophobia, xenophobia, racism, and so on. Accordingly, the absolute arrivant without a name or identity, the foreigner, can always violate and extinguish these laws of hospitality. Within the unconditional hospitality to otherness, inscribed in the element of the foreigner are the unpredictable violent “visitations” that demonstrate the limit to incalculable hospitality. Although unconditional hospitality and exposure to the other requires the suspension of all discrimination, there is always a possibility that the foreigner will be the enemy of the host. Because such possibility exists, unconditional hospitality remains merely conceptual; it is impossible to require that the host not decide who does or does not enter the house. Unconditional hospitality is, therefore, a self-contradictory concept; it deconstructs itself precisely by being put into practice (“Hospitality” 8). Unconditional hospitality requires a host to open the door to a foreigner who might bring harm. This aporia of hospitality is necessarily political. The laws of political (conditional and exclusive) hospitality refer to the cultural and ideological structures, which preexist the subject, and interrogate the event of the contact with the other, the foreigner, the stranger. The premise of unconditional hospitality, however, is that the neighbor, someone whom I know from within, cannot be my enemy. Nevertheless, gross violations of hospitality, including massive atrocities and human rights abuses are occurring not between strangers, but between neighbors.3 The neighbor is one such figure of the Other toward whom my relationship is that of familiarity, common language, and proximity. Underlying Derrida’s unconditional hospitality is fear of the Other—the fear of the unfathomable abyss of radical otherness that transgresses, compromises, and disturbs from within. The neighbor. Fear Thy Neighbor What’s the moral difference between slitting a man’s throat or slicing off his balls? – Maass 51 To recognize the Other is thus not primarily or ultimately to recognize the Other in a certain well-defined capacity (“I recognize you as...rational, good, lovable”), but to recognize you in the abyss of your very impenetrability and opacity. – Žižek, “Neighbors” 138-9