ABSTRACT
There are two obvious responses to the undecidability of ethical concepts: either acknowledge them and resolve that an ethical foreign policy is impossible and perhaps even dangerous in its impossibility; or, ignore the contradictions and paradoxes and act as if we know who/what ‘we’ ‘are’, what responsibility and hospitality mean and how they can be enacted. Both these responses are rejected as fundamentally unethical: the fi rst because it acknowledges itself as such; the second because, as Derrida says of responsibility, any inadequate thematisation of the ethical is itself an irresponsible, unethical thematisation.1 It mischaracterises and misleads, allows one to think one has acted responsibly when the opposite is true and limits our awareness of other, perhaps more responsible, possibilities. But what other response, what other solution, is there for the undecidability of ethical foreign policy?
