ABSTRACT
This chapter engages with Derrida's critique of the concept of hospitality in Western philosophy and culture, which he defines as being a conditional hospitality, hospitality of invitation and not visitation. Hospitality as an ancient tradition with ethical imperatives has become politicized in Europe and the New World in the last two decades. Hospitality is important as an analytical concept since it opens up the debates of welcoming otherness' beyond issues of the reception of immigrants by their host' countries, towards more important problems of living together with people of different' cultural, religious and social affiliations. Derrida stresses that neither hospitality nor ethics can exist without politics or democracy and vice versa. Democracy, like hospitality is marked by the same aporia between the law and the laws, between incalculation, unconditionality and calculability, conditionality. The immigrant problem' is a label under which all problems in Europe are justified: economic decline, loss of supposed national identity, insecurity and crime.
