Instruction DA---their attempt to impose conditions on hospitality to avoid an arbitrary net benefit creates the replication of the master host---that recreates hierarchies.

Responsibility is characterised by humility and a desire to learn. When encountering the other, one is called on to receive newness as a gift—new eyes to see the existing world—rather than with the inherent defensiveness of a master (host) with something to preserve. Responsibility requires sacrifice of surety and conservation. It opens the self, the home, and the world to the uncertainty of change that the new arrival presents. One does not, as host, deserve or possess a right to exploit and to unilaterally determine the conditions for another’s being. Instead, one is called on to understand one’s own responsibility as the scope of action that one can engage to respond to the other while preserving the other’s alterity. The responsibility is to act without dominance, arrogance, or self-preservation in response to the other. As such, in the Anthropocene, the only anthropocentrism that is acceptable is the recognition of a human’s unique responsibility for hospitality as a precept for encounter. Although Derrida notes that perfect hospitality is unattainable, responsibility is not. He advises that one acts responsibly when one locates the impetus for action in the context of the transient moment of welcome. Put another way, Derrida (2000) determines that “it is in the name of unconditional hospitality [which gives its meaning to all welcoming of the foreigner] that we must try to determine the best conditions, that is to say some particular legislative limits, and especially a particular application of the laws” (p. 7). Hospitality becomes the process by which the world addresses the key questions of the Anthropocene, including: What will the future look like? How should we conduct business, work, and live? What role will technology have in this? What forms of production and communication of knowledge are suitable for the Anthropocene? Finally, what narratives do we need in order to better understand the planetary role of humans as actors that afect the entire Earth system? (Trischler, 2016, p. 322) In society, and in the education leading up to full participation in citizenry, hospitality becomes the milieu for a constant mediation between self and other, guided by absolute alterity, and animated with humility. This act of mediation, although itself imperfect, is responsibility; and it becomes the fertile ground for ethical law, policy, and action. What does it mean to know, where is here, and what is now? Derrida (2000) states “Nous ne savons pas ce que c’est que l’hospitalité” and repeats, in English, “We do not know what hospitality is.” (p. 6). In follow up, he asks two questions that shed light on how to consider “knowing”: “will we ever know?” and “is it a question of knowledge and time?” (p. 6). This suggests that the epistemological implications of hospitality are subject to infuences of time and place, and that “knowing” is a necessarily incomplete action. To begin, alterity and humility offer good points of departure in comprehending the epistemological structure of hospitality. The other presents at the threshold of the host’s home and immediately provokes an epistemic challenge: Is the host a master of her home? Does she possess a certain knowledge of what is good and normal? In the model of knowing which asserts the host as master, there is an assumption that the stranger, the other, is less knowledgeable and might beneft from instruction. One can directly perceive how this imbalance in knowing would produce hierarchies, imperialisms, and inculcations. The host possesses the arrogance of certainty. This epistemological structure lies at the heart of many of the abuses of xenophobia and exploitation of both society and the natural world. Hospitality, on the other hand, inverts the assumption of knowledge, if not the imbalance of power. Within the paradigm of hospitality, the other presents at the threshold of the host’s home and presents an opportunity for learning. As noted previously, the guest is an opportunity to see an existing home anew. The guest is a teacher and the host is vulnerable to the exposure of new learning. The guest maintains her alterity—the host can make no claim of complete understanding or of superior knowledge. Instead, the host, with humility of attitude, becomes hostage to the other. Referring to Levinas, Derrida (2000) suggests that “the exercise of ethical responsibility begins where I am and must be the hostage of the other, delivered passively to the other before being delivered to myself” (p. 9). It is through this positionality, and only through the encounter with otherness, that one learns. A second consideration which relates to this epistemological structure of knowing, and to the incompleteness of knowing, is the way in which hospitality occurs in time and place. Derrida (2000) observes “if we do not know what hospitality is, it is because this thing which is not something is not an object of knowledge, nor in the mode of being-present” (p. 10). Because it exists in a tension, in an aporia, and in the double bind of acting towards an impossibly perfect welcome, hospitality is not a relic of history. It is not a codifiable known that can be categorized and ofered clear nomenclature. It is instead a movement, a gesture toward the horizon of the yet unknown and of the always unattainable. It is a movement now toward a future that is yet to come. Derrida (2000) contends: what we call hospitality maintains an essential relation with the opening of what is called to come [à venir]. When we say that ‘We do not yet know what hospitality is,’ we also imply that we do not yet know who or what will come… (p. 11) Hospitality presents a tension between the act of welcome in the present moment and the “essential relation” with what is to come. In the same way, there exists a tension with the question of place. Hospitality exists at the threshold. Yet, for there to be a threshold, there must be both an inside and an outside. As Derrida (2000) states, “to take up the figure of the door, for there to be hospitality, there must be a door. But if there is a door, there is no longer hospitality” (p. 14). The impossibility of hospitality is that it must overcome itself. It is both the obstacle to and the condition for freedom, for knowing, and for ethical action. This tension should not result in paralysis, but instead compel a relentless drive for what is to come, for what can be overcome at the threshold, and for responsibility.