The role of the judge is to accept maximal risk. As the sovereign, recognition of the other rests in the moment of the encounter. You should divorce ethics from conditional calculation. Disads are proof of solvency and only the AFF solves because the NEG’s counterplan ethics are tied to the avoidance of risk which closes out hospitality.

Derrida’s account of hospitality begins at the threshold of an encounter: on one side resides the sovereign host and on the other side, the foreign other. This threshold is defined not in the mere opposition of these two agents, but rather at the moment of a decision. The host must decide how she will welcome, if at the all, the foreigner as a guest into her home. Therefore, the foreign other’s arrival plays a constitutive role by allowing the host to recognize herself as a sovereign, as the deciding agent. With this recognition, the host can either allow the other access to herself, to her home, or ban the other to the outside. The decision rests solely with the host whether or not the other will be allowed into this relationship. What should appear as a familiar and politically potent scenario of host and guest inaugurates the paradigm of ethics for Derrida. The possibility of ethics takes place with the decision of the host, as sovereign, to allow the guest into a hospitable relation.2

Traditionally, the decision of the host finds refuge in the laws set for hospitality. In an interview entitled Hospitality, Justice, and Responsibility, Derrida explains that traditional hospitality belongs to the same logic as gift-giving. In other words, the laws of hospitality function within the economy of an exchange.3 The gift of traditional hospitality must be accompanied with a gift that recognizes the hospitality such as a greeting card, beer, or perhaps even the simple exchange of a name. The laws of hospitality, therefore, prescribe that the host’s decision follows from the logic of a reciprocal exchange. Within this exchange the host’s sovereignty is not only affirmed in the moment of decision at the threshold, but also confirmed with the gift. The gift reinscribes the host as master, as the one who demands, and commands, tangible recognition of her position as the self-identifiable opposite of the guest.

At this point we can see why Derrida would rearticulate this traditional schema of hospitality as conditional. Traditional hospitality defines itself at a threshold where the host’s decision is presumed to be conditioned by a predictable logic of reciprocation. It is as if the host, once brought face-to-face with the other, must find refuge from otherness—both the stranger’s and his own otherness—by affirming and employing laws that establish a recognizable and repeatable order. The homogeneity these laws seek both masks and wards off any unexpected contestation of the established order. Thus, the very foundation of hospitality, welcoming the other, requires that the host’s decision function as a cog within the hospitality machine. In this machine, the other is not welcomed as other, but rather as another already appropriable cog. The other’s foreignness is not enjoyed and celebrated as foreign, but is instead appropriated and muffled by the stranger’s ability to comply with the laws, i.e., the ability to provide a gift in return. For Derrida true hospitality cannot subsume the other and therefore cannot participate in this machine of homogenization. To redefine hospitality, a reinterpretation of the decision at the threshold is necessary.

To free hospitality from the conditions that reduce the other into an economy of knowledge and sameness, the decision of hospitality must be unconditional, without laws. Unconditionality would allow the hospitable gesture to emerge freely from the host. For Derrida, simply following through to a self-determined end undermines the very possibility of free decision. In fact, Derrida argues that a decision is not determined by the “self” per se, but rather that “for a decision to be made, it must be made by the other in myself.”4 The conception of decision as arising out of “the other in me” highlights the inadequacy of any decision that anticipates and follows from the laws of conditional hospitality. I must appeal to the other in me—the other outside the realm of knowledge—because the self-present me, such as me as host before a threshold with a guest on the other side, is always already inscribed within a calculable economy of knowledge and exchange.

Derrida recognizes that even within the raw experience of an encounter with the other, the host is still subject to laws of identification and appropriation. Therefore, while these laws and the knowledge they provide are indispensable to my decision, they nevertheless will subject me to a logic that pre-determines the decision. Derrida explains, “If we knew what to do, if I knew in terms of knowledge what I have to do before the decision, then the decision would not be a decision. It would be the application of a rule, the consequence of a premise, and there would be no problem, there would be no decision.”5 With conditional hospitality, no decision, in the Derridian sense, actually occurs; rather, the logic of exchange has already anticipated and determined the host’s response to the foreigner. And, as discussed above, this conditional relationship necessarily reduces the otherness of the guest into the logic of sameness and knowledge, even though “decision, an ethical or a political responsibility, is absolutely heterogeneous to knowledge.”6 To avoid the consequences of conditional hospitality, a decision should arise from the otherness within me that absconds from laws of conditional hospitality and calls forth the unconditional acceptance of the other as other. Decisions must therefore be difficult and even terrible, but only from difficulty and terror can the host emerge from the paralysis of undecidability and invoke the otherness that is shared with the guest as opposed to the sovereignty that is not.

With this account of the decision in mind, unconditional hospitality requires the absence of any traditional agency. The host as sovereign of the house withdraws from her selfidentifiable place of mastery, freeing the otherness within and opening herself to the otherness without. Derrida envisions this hospitable gesture rhetorically as a split of the self. He explains, “There would be no responsibility or decision without some self-interruption, neither would there be any hospitality; as master and host, the self in welcoming the other, must interrupt or divide himself or herself. This division is the condition of hospitality.”7 Unconditional hospitality exposes the division of the master and thus suspends her mastery over the home.

Accompanying the suspension of mastery, unconditional hospitality also requires the host to welcome any other, all others, the absolute other, no questions asked. The tether to conditions must be completely snapped. Thus, “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 custom officers, you have a door.”8 An absolute exposure of this sort should engender absolute fright and absolute emptiness. To be absolutely open to anyone would entail an exposure that leaves every bit of the host outside the host, as if she had poured herself out, like Zarathustra’s sun, to the other she does not know and refuses to know. This unconditionality is what Derrida demands. There must be no moment of exchange; there must be no check points; there must be utter and complete exposure: this is the only suitable gift.

To further explicate what unconditional hospitality entails, Derrida also problematizes the functioning of language at the threshold of hospitality. “Does hospitality consist in interrogating the new arrival?” asks Derrida, “Does it begin with the question addressed to the newcomer: what is your name .... Or else does hospitality begin with the unquestioning welcome, in a double effacement, the effacement of the question and the name.”9 The host cannot even ask the other his or her name; this traditionally amicable offer involves a notion of exchange, of familiarity, of identity, of knowledge. Therefore, even this seemingly benign discursive practice must be excluded in the decision of unconditional hospitality.

However, while complete openness radically excludes logos, even to the extreme of forbidding language from hospitality, it also, in the same gesture, radically includes the other. “The awaited guest is not only someone to whom you say ‘come’” says Derrida, “but ‘enter,’...occupy me, take place in me.”10 Moreover, with this occupation, “the master of the house is at home, but nonetheless he comes to enter his home through the guest.”11 Derrida’s statement sounds counterintuitive, but in fact is not: the guest allows the master to “enter his home” because the guest calls forth the other within the host. An encounter with the foreign other, through the decision of unconditional hospitality, provides the host with a complete picture of her home, which must consist of both the self and the other within. The heterogeneous singularity of the guest opens the host to her own infinite singularity, thus exposing an impassible distance and yet, “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,” and this is the shared moment of hospitality.12