absolute hospitality requires that I open up my home and that I give not only to the
foreigner (provided with a family name, with the social status of being a foreigner,
etc.), but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other, and that Igive placeto
them, that I let them come, that I let them arrive, and take place in the place I
oVer them, without asking of them either reciprocity (entering into a pact) or even
their names. The law of absolute hospitality commands a break with hospitality by
right, with law or justice as rights. (Derrida 2000 , 25 )
Derrida insists on the diVerence between the conditional and the uncon-
ditional form of the concept: absolute hospitality remains irreducible to
ordinary, conditional hospitality, ‘‘as strangely heterogeneous to it as justice
is heterogeneous to the law to which it is yet so close, from which in truth
it is indissociable’’ (Derrida 2000 , 26 ). Moreover, he argues, it is this
diVerence and the fact that the conditioned form of the concept inevitably
refers to the unconditioned form that ensures the possibility of criticism
of existing social practices. Thus, in his analysis of law and justice,
he argues that the law is deconstructible in a way that justice is not,
precisely by reference to the unconditioned concept of justice. Elsewhere,
he suggests that in the same way that the law can be modiWed or improved
by appealing to justice, so we can ‘‘inspire’’ new forms of forgiveness by
reference to the paradoxical idea of the unforgivable (Derrida 2001 c, 53 ). In
similar fashion, the idea of unconditional hospitality underpins the possi-
bility of improvement or progress in the existing conditional forms of
welcome extended to foreigners:
It is a question of knowing how to transform and improve the law, and of knowing
if this improvement is possible within an historical space which takes placebetween
the Law of an unconditional hospitality, oVereda priori to every other, to all
newcomers,whoever they may be, andtheconditional laws of a right to hospitality.
(Derrida 2001 b, 22 )
Derrida’s concept of the unconditioned bears a remarkable resemblance to
Rorty’s cautionary use of the word ‘‘ ‘true’ (or any other indeWnable norma-
tive term such as ‘good’ or ‘right’)’’ (Rorty 2000 , 12 ). Rorty deWnes this
cautionary use as ‘‘the use we make of the word when we contrast justiWcation
with truth and say that a belief may be justiWed but not true’’ and suggests
that this is all the pragmatist may allow in place of the moment of uncondi-
tionality which Habermas thinks necessary in order to ground critique (Rorty
2000 , 4 ). Since Rorty rejects any transcendent concept of truth in favor of
historically speciWc and contingent protocols of justiWcation, he takes this
cautionary use of ‘‘true’’ to mark the ever-present possibility that what we
138 paul patton