The Time of Dialogue 2000–2002 515
She then laid more aggressively into her ex-partner and his philo-
sophy, which she felt was disconnected from the reality that she had
just experienced:
In any case, philosophy too can put you in a bad mood: the
Derridean concept of ‘unconditional hospitality’, for example.
It is not merely absurd (though this still needs to be said), it
is provocative. While it seems praiseworthy to defend illegal
immigrants, this certainly cannot be done in the name of uncon-
ditional hospitality, since there is nothing more conditional than
hospitality. The unconditional, in general, answers the longing
of beautiful souls for the absolute and the pure. It is Kantian
in inspiration, in other words it sacrifi ces the understanding of
empirical reality to the purity of the concept. But it gives up the
attempt to think through reality as it is.^61In January 2003, in a long note to Rogues, Derrida replied almost
vindictively:
Unconditional hospitality, I emphasize. Several friends recently
brought to my attention a certain publication (‘a pathetic
Parisian tabloid in the style of Gala,’ as one of them put it)
whose author pontifi cates, without verifying anything, on
what I’ve written and taught for a number of years now under
the name unconditional hospitality. Obviously understanding
nothing, the author even gives me, as if still back in high school,
a bad grade and explains peremptorily in the margins of my
paper: ‘Absurd’! Well, what can I say?...
I have always, consistently and insistently, held uncondi-
tional hospitality, as impossible, to be heterogeneous to the
political, the juridical, and even the ethical. But the impossible
is not nothing. It is even that which happens, which comes, by
defi nition. I admit that this remains rather diffi cult to think,
but that’s exactly what preoccupies thinking, if there is any and
from the time there is any.^62Rather sadly, these seem to have been the last words exchanged
between Jacques Derrida and Sylviane Agacinski.
In July 2002, there was a fourth décade at Cerisy on Derrida’s work.
Édith Heurgon had suggested this to him in April 1999, shortly
after publication of The Animal That Therefore I Am. Derrida, very
touched, asked to think it over fi rst. ‘Your suggestion (a “Derrida
4” for 2002) leaves me feeling dreamy. It would be a bit crazy, don’t
you think?... I won’t say “no” but I need to think a bit more about
it.’^63 By August, he had decided to go along with the project.