by Joe Larios
Review: Michael Naas, Threshold Phenomena: Derrida and the Question of Hospitality (New York: Fordham University Press, 2024), xiv + 235 pp.
Michael Naas’s Threshold Phenomena: Derrida and the Question of Hospitality is very precisely titled. While the book carefully examines the question of hospitality in Derrida, especially as that question was pursued in the first year (from mid-November 1995 to mid-May 1996) of a two year seminar on the topic that was given at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris, this question is nevertheless always analysed in relation to a thinking of the threshold, which structures and opens forth his analysis. As he says at the beginning of the work, remarking on his title:
the threshold is always the place from which the question is posed, and not just the question of hospitality but the question in general, including the question of whether and how to address others from the threshold and the question of philosophy’s commitment to the question as its primary mode of engagement. All this suggests that hospitality is not just one question among others for Derrida or for deconstruction but, perhaps, the very work and promise of deconstruction. (4, emphasis added)
The threshold thus becomes, for Naas, a key term for understanding hospitality which, in turn, is crucial for understanding the ‘very work and promise of deconstruction’ suggesting that these two terms function like other terms in Derrida (like the secret, differánce, the pharmakon, the trace, or justice among others) as non-substitutable analogues for what could be called the process and working out of deconstruction. As Geoffrey Bennington has pointed out, ‘A consistent argument for the non-originarity of identity can hardly propose a single name for the “origin” of that non-originarity’ (12).[1] Like these other terms, then, hospitality and the threshold open forth fields for thinking of the working of deconstruction which, as Naas continues, ‘is always a question of ethics, is always a deconstruction of hospitality, or indeed, as we shall see, a deconstruction as hospitality’ (4).
Even at this early point in his introduction, it is already clear that Naas will be slipping back and forth between these two key terms. As we have already seen, the threshold is ‘the place from which the question is posed’ and that question might be the question of hospitality or any other question. Thus, the threshold seems to be foregrounded. And yet, at the same time, hospitality ‘is not just one question among others’ thus seemingly foregrounding hospitality as the question that might very well define deconstruction itself. And yet, if deconstruction might be characterised as hospitality, it is also always working to deconstruct the very hospitality which it is. A clear priority between these terms cannot be sustained, but this is also why Naas sees these reflections from Derrida as illuminating something about deconstruction itself. As he explains:
What we see in the seminar is not quite Derrida’s method but rather his way of approaching the question from multiple directions, on multiple paths, with multiple resources, and oftentimes within the course of a single seminar session, approaching it and then backing off, trying one approach and then another, always advancing but somehow always returning to the point of departure. (4)
As he continues, he characterises this through the image of the threshold which marks not just Derrida’s thinking of hospitality but his thinking in general ‘as if the threshold—as a place or nonplace of difference—were what Derrida’s thinking has been about, that around which his thinking had turned, from the very beginning’ (8). It is through these comments that one sees that the ambition of Naas’s book goes beyond commenting and expanding upon Derrida’s reflections on hospitality through taking into consideration the threshold, but goes further to a consideration of how the threshold, as it specifically appears in Derrida’s remarks on hospitality, can be understood to demonstrate something crucial about the general working of deconstruction itself and its ‘not quite method’ which appears to function through repeatedly turning around thresholds it can never quite pass through.
While any fundamental priority between these terms cannot be established, it is clear that Naas is trying to elevate the term ‘threshold’, primarily to counteract the priority that ‘hospitality’ has lately been receiving. Thus, if Threshold Phenomena is titled as it is, with ‘threshold’ being first and above ‘hospitality’, it is only because of the already existing prevalence of the term ‘hospitality’ through the title given to Derrida’s two year seminar as well as other published works such as Of Hospitality, ‘The Principle of Hospitality’, or ‘Une hospitalité à l’infini’.[2] The primary position given to ‘threshold’ in the title thus brings forward the significance of this term for thinking through Derrida’s reflections on hospitality, allowing it to circulate freely and at the same level as hospitality. Indeed, as Naas says later in his introduction, ‘the central claim of this work is that essential to Derrida’s rethinking of hospitality is a reinscription or redeployment of the notion of the threshold, the place where hospitality is typically granted or refused’ (8). What Naas is thus arguing for is the idea that one cannot think hospitality without also thinking of the threshold. The archetypal image of the threshold that appears is that of the home where the prospective host must decide whether to open their home to the guest and allow them to cross over the threshold into their home which, with the guest within it, would no longer be wholly under the host’s control, even as the situation of hospitality usually presumes a clear delineation between the host and the guest and the sovereignty of the host over the guest so that the guest could be understood as allowed within the host’s home only thanks to the latter’s discretion and generosity which they have the capacity to freely give.
Beginning with this paradigmatic image, which will function as the key image of hospitality and the threshold throughout Naas’s text, the relation between the terms of host and guest and the presumption of the sovereign power of the host will be questioned, reversed, and deconstructed as Naas follows closely upon Derrida’s own analyses, both performing the function of clarifying and succinctly summarising Derrida’s own remarks while also expanding upon these comments to apply these ideas to both ancient and contemporary examples of threshold phenomena that clarify key points and show the broad applicability and relevance of these reflections.
After the introduction, the book has a tripartite structure consisting of sections titled ‘Preliminaries: Questions on the Threshold’, ‘The “Concept” of Hospitality’ and ‘The Wall, the Door, the Threshold, the Hotspot’, followed by a conclusion. These three sections each consist of six parts that elaborate upon the key themes of the section in question. The text is organised like a stone fruit in the sense that a central core of exegesis and analysis by Naas on Derrida’s key comments on hospitality and thresholds occupies the central core of the book (section two). This core is surrounded by sections that primarily explore and expand upon these ideas through detours into either ancient Greek culture (section one) or contemporary issues (section three).
While one might think that, without the explanatory work of section two, that section one would be hard to pull off, Naas succeeds in doing so through a combination of laying down just enough groundwork in the introduction and carefully choosing his examples. The section is, after all, titled ‘Preliminaries’ for a reason. It is here that Naas slowly moves us toward the more complex discussion of hospitality and the threshold that will occupy section two by, first, spending some time analysing its appearance primarily within creative works from ancient Greek culture. While he discusses Plato in this section, the bulk of this section is devoted to Homer. Thus, while the Symposium, the Timaeus, and the Republic all make appearances here, the greater part of the analysis is devoted to the Odyssey and the Iliad as well as Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus.
In chapter 1, ‘Hodos and Odos (Homeric Hospitality 1)’, Naas picks up where he left off at the end of his introduction where he had discussed a homograph in Greek where, as he explains, there are:
two nearly identical words, hodos (ἡ ὁδός)–the word at the basis of our word ‘method’ (from meta-hodos), hodos meaning a path or a road…and the nearly identical odos (ὁ ὀδός or ὁ οὐδός), meaning ‘threshold,’ which is spelled exactly the same way and so differs only in its breathing or aspiration and in its gender, with hodos being feminine and odos masculine. (12)
This curious homograph titles this brief chapter where he argues for Homer’s stature as ‘our first great thinker of hospitality’ (17) by discussing the way in which hospitality structures both the Iliad (which, he says, is premised entirely on ‘a transgression of the laws or customs of hospitality’ (17)) and the Odyssey.
This gives way to chapter 2, ‘Translating Hospitality’, where Naas continues reflections begun in the first chapter on the foreigner (after considering the fact that the Odyssey begins with Athena disguised as a foreigner (xenos) speaking to Telemachus (19)). Chiefly, this leads to an analysis of the function of language and the way in which communication is necessary for the host to invite the guest in, thus inducing the stranger to speak the host’s language to receive hospitality at all. This leads to some reflections about the communicative difficulties that can arise, for instance, in a situation of border control. The question and difficulty of translatability appear through an image of communication across a border such as when Naas points to the ‘terrible injustices that can occur when translators or interpreters are not made available at borders, detention centers, immigration offices, or courts’ (24). This emphasis on language and translation also leads Naas into some of Derrida’s wordplay such as how the step (pas) of hospitality (done as it must be done within the limits of concrete existence) cannot but betray the fullness of an unlimited hospitality, thus appearing insufficient at fulfilling the promise of hospitality and, in that sense, not being (pas) hospitality. Similarly, in French, the word hôte can mean ‘guest’ or ‘host’, depending on context, thus indicating a radical reversibility of terms. This chapter thus lays some of the groundwork about the relationship between language and hospitality that Naas will elaborate on later since, as Naas says, the threshold phenomenon of ‘translation is always at the heart of the question of hospitality’ (24).
Chapter 3, ‘Masters of the House: Hospitality and Sovereignty’, continues the work of thinking of the relationship between the host and the guest by analysing and questioning the mastery and sovereignty traditionally given to the figure of the host as the one who offers hospitality to the guest from out of their position of power and, more generally, connects this to the mastery of the subject identified with the term ‘ipseity’ that Derrida deconstructs as a part of his interrogation of the way that the terms guest and host reverse themselves in the context of hospitality where the host, precisely by opening their home to the guest, can become hostage to the guest’s infinite demand.
Chapter 4, ‘Xenos and Xenia (Homeric Hospitality 2)’ returns to Homer to discuss the Greek terms xenos (which ‘means both guest and stranger–guest, though also friend or foreigner and, potentially, enemy’ (39)) and xenia (where ‘one agrees to offer hospitality not just to one individual but to an entire family, sometimes from one generation to the next’ (39–40)) to analyse a scene from the Iliad where enemies on the battlefield discover a relationship of xenia between them that obliges them to, not only put down their arms, but exchange armour. For Naas, the key significance of this scene lies in a sort of faith or madness that accepting this relationship of xenia appears to imply. The exchange of armour is what ratifies hospitality, but it does so in an asymmetrical way. As Naas explains, ‘Zeus takes away Glaucus’s good sense, his sense of equitable exchange, causing him to give away golden armor for bronze, that is, armor worth more than ten times the armor he receives in return’ (42). Hospitality, it would seem, requires a radical faith and a departure from reason which puts one at risk but also opens one up to the other. As a sort of mad opening to the other, how can hospitality be regulated?
Chapter 5, ‘On Dying Abroad: Oedipus (on the Threshold) at Colonus’, consists of a careful analysis of Sophocles’ play with respect to the two thresholds that Oedipus passes over the course of the play to enter, first, Athens and, second, the afterlife. Interestingly, however, Naas notes that the terminological ambiguity between hodos and odos is present in the text of this play, so that his own reading of it remains unstable, as if knowledge of whether Oedipus is described as taking a path to Athens or crossing a threshold into it remains a secret in the same way that the secret of Oedipus’ burial place is necessary for his death to be a blessing upon the city of Athens. But this secret, too, of Oedipus’ burial place functions as a secret only because it is held by someone, namely, King Theseus and his heirs, as well as withheld from others who would want it, such as Antigone. This produces a complex concatenation of terms as Antigone’s mourning remains held back. It cannot seem to reach its destination but remains on the threshold to a knowledge which only Theseus has and which he cannot give up lest the blessing of Oedipus upon Athens turns into a curse. All of this opens up many questions, and not just about Sophocles’ play. No doubt this is Naas’s intent in giving this chapter a title that resonates with the contemporary experiences of exile that many people now have. How should one think of the experience of exile, especially when it ends with no return, in dying abroad? And in what sense is the fact of dying abroad a blessing and a curse?
Finally, section one ends in chapter 6 with ‘Plato’s Xenoi’ where Naas considers Plato’s use of the term xenos and how this can be read in relation to Homer. He is particularly interested in the way in which Plato appears to go against the Homeric idea that the xenos (or stranger) could be a god in disguise since the perfection of the gods would imply their unchanging forms. But this rejection of ambiguity for the gods implies, for Naas, a general rejection of ambiguity and, thus, a wish to ‘purge the language of hospitality of all those ambiguous or ambivalent words that seem to plague it’ (56-57). But things are also more complex than placing Plato on the side of precise codification since he will also introduce the radically receptive figure of hospitality in the khōra. Nevertheless, the tension between Plato and Homer that Naas identifies does give the reader a clear sense of some of the different approaches to hospitality and anticipates the more theoretically dense discussions that will come in the following section.
Section two opens with ‘Stranger Things’ where Naas (re)turns to the question of the foreigner as a sort of preliminary reflection of what will be discussed in the chapters that follow. By focusing on the foreigner, Naas is able to begin a discussion contrasting the conditional and the unconditional versions of hospitality, connecting it to the conceptualisation of the stranger from a particular other to an absolute other. In the process, he delineates five senses of ‘the question of the foreigner’ as (1) ‘a question about the foreigner, a question we can pose about the foreigner in general’, (2) an ethico-political question ‘about what to do with the foreigner’, (3) ‘the question one poses to the foreigner’, (4) ‘the question that comes from the foreigner’, or (5) in a Levinasian register, ‘that which puts the host himself into question, a putting or calling into question…of the very ability of the host to ask or even to answer questions from a position of power and authority’ (64-65). The sequence of questions itself demonstrates this movement from the specificity of a concrete other (‘who are they?’) to the internal rupturing of the ipseity of the self by being always already put in question by the always other stranger.
Chapters 8 and 9 together form the central axis (or perhaps threshold) around which this book turns, reflected in the antimetabole of their titles of ‘Conditional and Unconditional Hospitality’ and ‘Unconditional and Conditional Hospitality’. While there is a lot of slippage between these two chapters due to the interweaving of these ‘concepts’, the first of these two chapters focuses primarily on laying out in greater detail than previously what both conditional and unconditional hospitality are and what distinguishes them before going on to begin an analysis of the paradoxical relationship between the two hospitalities that will be further refined in the following chapter.
In chapter 8, therefore, Naas explains the self-deconstructive nature of each form of hospitality alone, before beginning to demonstrate how each one also needs (yet also ruins) the other. For example, he explains that conditional hospitality is ‘a hospitality of laws and limitations, a determined and actual, real, effective hospitality…that limits those who can enter, and it treats those who have already entered as guests who could turn into enemies’ (70) with its central risk being that ‘by determining and limiting hospitality, it risks always turning hospitality into hostility’ (72). By contrast, Naas explains that ‘Absolute hospitality is indeed a kind of “mad” hospitality, an aneconomic hospitality that exceeds the reasoned and reasonable, economic hospitality that is called conditional hospitality’ (73) with its central risk being ‘that it can open…a wild, untamed, uncivilized space of pure or unchecked violence that would cause hospitality to lose all meaning…since there are no laws or norms or third parties, no contracts to regulate an exchange’ (72). Even before discussing the aporetic relationship between the two hospitalities, they already appear haunted by the possibility of perversion, either through too much regulation turning the guest into an enemy or too little regulation leading to a destruction of the very frame of reference for the giving of hospitality by nullifying the meaning of the terms of the relationship. As he summarises it at the end of this chapter:
The risk of conditional hospitality…are the risks associated with the identification of hospitality with identity and power…The risk of unconditional hospitality is, it seems, the risk or the danger of pure difference or difference without distinction…There is thus a hospitality of identity and a hospitality of difference…both of which can lead to the end of hospitality. (75-76)
While Naas already mentions in chapter 8 how the relationship between the two hospitalities has been characterised by Derrida as an aporia, a paradox, or an antinomy, it is in chapter 9 that he goes into detail on what this means. While chapter 8 focused primarily on each type of hospitality on its own, chapter 9 focuses primarily on the relationship between them. Each hospitality appears as a sort of corrective rupture to the other hospitality, thus demonstrating the need that each type has for the other. Conditional hospitality requires the orientation towards unconditional hospitality as a kind of always available self-critique which would help to perfect it. Meanwhile, unconditional hospitality requires conditional hospitality to be made effective and real in the concrete world. A way of describing this that Naas adopts from Derrida is through the distinction between the law and laws. As Naas explains, ‘The laws of hospitality need the law of hospitality so as not to negate themselves, ruin themselves, and the law of hospitality needs the laws of hospitality in order to become effective’ (86). In other words, the law of unconditional hospitality which, as unconditional, can never be fully achieved through codified human rules must, nevertheless, be actualised in some way even if such an attempt can never reach completion. This actualisation can only happen through the limited, finite, and conditional laws of hospitality that must do their best to heed the law of hospitality they can never actually achieve. Thus, as Naas says, ‘the law of unconditional hospitality requires or calls for laws’ (86). By the end of this chapter, Naas gives us seven ways of characterising the relationship between the two hospitalities: language, law, experience, desire, possibility, effectivity, and perfectibility. Many of these will appear again in later chapters.
After completing the analysis of these two core chapters, the remainder of section two is occupied with elaborations upon these ideas in a few different directions. In chapter 10, ‘The Art or Poetics of Hospitality’, Naas focuses on ‘hospitality in terms of grace or graciousness…as a sort of art or poetics, a kind of politesse’ (97). These remarks take Naas in an unexpected direction since, in this chapter, Aristotle becomes a central point of reference as this politesse moves towards tactfulness and, thus, the art of finding the right balance or mean of, as Naas says, offering hospitality ‘in the right way, at the right time, and in the right amount, that is, not too little or not too much’ (97). Since this tactfulness has no standard to be followed, but requires judgement, it becomes a creative act as well, leading Naas to make some remarks on invention. Chapter 11, ‘Why So Much Kant?’, considers Derrida’s comments on Kant with a focus on what he says about Kant’s apparent privileging of truth-telling over hospitality as seen in the famous example of the murderer at the door and how this logically leads to a sort of police state without hospitality since the private space into which the guest would be welcomed is destroyed by the overriding imperative to tell the truth. Finally, section two ends with ‘Xenos Paradox: Hospitality and Autoimmunity’ where Naas returns to the question of the xenos (or the foreigner) in a different register as he discusses some of Derrida’s comments on, and usage of, autoimmunity as a figure of self-deconstruction even going so far as to say that ‘every concept is autoimmune’ (119).
In Naas’s final section, he looks at a variety of different issues where Derrida’s comments on hospitality might function as a useful theoretical resource. These chapters often flow back and forth between comments Derrida made and extrapolations from those comments to think through contemporary issues. It begins with ‘Dirty Foreigners: The Question of Purity’ where the focus is, once again, on the foreigner but this time with a topical focus on contemporary questions of immigration and border control centred on the EU. Chapter 14, ‘Homing Devices: Teletechnology and the Question of Private Space’, begins by thinking about xenografts and the bizarre usage of the term (since every graft is technically a xenograft) before going on to focus on ‘teletechnologies’ such as the phone, the internet, or social media and how these have redrawn the border between the public and the private.
Chapters 15 and 16 function together, with both thinking about language, identity, phantasms, and nostalgia with heavy reference to Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin. While chapter 15, ‘Phantasms of Fatherlands and Mother Tongues’, primarily focuses on the phantasm of the mother tongue as a site of origin that, ultimately, comes from the other in a sort of ‘originary’ exappropriation, chapter 16, ‘Phantasms of Mother Tongues and Mobile Phones’, takes these reflections further by thinking through the meaning of the mother tongue with the image of the mobile phone. That is, the language one speaks is a phōnē (φωνή) that one carries with oneself wherever one goes (mobile) and yet, as has already been established, to the extent that it is construed as a sort of origin of identity, it is a phantasm and so ultimately prosthetic and technological. In all these ways, the mother tongue appears to be like a mobile phone.
Chapter 17, ‘On Cosmopolitanism and Cities of Refuge,’ returns to issues of migration, refugees, and statelessness but, this time, through a consideration of ‘cities of refuge’ and their more recent incarnation as ‘sanctuary cities.’ Finally, section three ends with chapter 18, ‘Beyond Anthropo-Hospitality: Plants, Animals, Gods, and Clones’ where Naas broaches the question of offering hospitality to the non-human. This chapter does a lot with its limited space. One of the most interesting parts is on Derrida’s limited comments on cloning which he apparently kept mentioning as a topic he would be returning to during his seminar without ever quite returning to it sufficiently. Even with his limited comments, however, cloning proves to offer quite an interesting line for questioning since the clone’s relationship to the ‘original’ marks it as a sort of copy which, nonetheless, has its own history, thus distinguishing it. What becomes clear is that all the uproar about cloning ultimately falls flat since cloning cannot erase historicity. And since everything has a sort of historicity, everything is also possibly open to hospitality, though also possibly not. As Naas notes, Derrida generally appears to restrict hospitality to what is irreplaceable and irreplaceability to animate things (although he will sometimes speak of a hospitality to the event). However, Naas identifies an apparently unique instance in Hospitality 2 where Derrida appears ready to extend irreplaceability (and, therefore, also hospitality) to inanimate beings when he says, after giving a grain of sand as an example, that ‘Each unity, each identity, each singularity is irreplaceable in its factual existence’ (quoted on 194).
Having gone from the ancient Greeks to cloning and mobile phones, Naas’s book is a wide-ranging work that, nevertheless, always remains totally focused on hospitality and thresholds. It succeeds in its objective of demonstrating that a thinking of hospitality requires a thinking of the threshold and proceeds to demonstrate this repeatedly through its many examples of threshold phenomena organised around hospitality. Among these, his analyses of Greek culture and language are particularly enlightening and allow his expertise in this field to shine through. Furthermore, Naas convincingly argues for thinking of hospitality and the threshold as terms central to an understanding of deconstruction as being both an example and a deconstruction of hospitality itself, and as a way of understanding the ‘not quite method’ of deconstruction. Indeed, Naas actually returns to this in his conclusion subtitled ‘From Threshold to Threshold–Derrida’s Démarche’ thus indicating this movement around thresholds as a central aspect of Derrida’s thinking.
This emphasis upon the threshold that brings it forth to be a co-equal term with hospitality is one of the book’s main contributions. By doing so, Naas gives us a term and an image that serves multiple important functions. It gives us a language for thinking about the structure of Derrida’s thinking though it is also, as one would expect, an indeterminate language. In other words, is Derrida always approaching and withdrawing from thresholds or is he circulating around thresholds or perhaps passing from threshold to threshold or simply always suspended at the point of the threshold? All of these could be used to describe Derrida’s démarche or approach. Furthermore, the image of the threshold gives us a way of thinking of hospitality and contact with the other that has many different complex resonances. While the threshold is most often associated with the home and the aforementioned archetypal image of hospitality where the host welcomes the guest, thresholds can be found everywhere. As a liminal non-place between two distinct sites that holds open the contingent possibility of a transfer between spaces, the threshold brushes up against borders and membranes. It allows us to think through the social and political meaning of geographies and organisms and, in this way, pushes beyond the human as well, as we saw Naas gesturing to in the final chapter of section three.
In the end, the analyses and explanations of Derrida are always careful, lucid, and illuminating. And even though Naas specifically singles out the first year of the hospitality seminar as the text he will be primarily reading, there is quite a lot of commentary present on both the second year of the seminar as well as other texts from Derrida that discuss hospitality in both explicit and implicit ways. The depth of this work provides readers already familiar with Derrida with invaluable commentary on hospitality in Derrida as well as new ways of thinking about deconstruction and its applicability, while this work’s clarity makes it an excellent starting point for anyone interested in understanding more about Derrida, deconstruction, or the meaning and stakes of hospitality. It is an always interesting, ambitious, and meticulous work that will reward careful readers and will stand as a key text for anyone wishing to understand hospitality in the works of Derrida.
- Geoffrey Bennington, Interrupting Derrida (New York: Routledge, 2000) ↑
- Jacques Derrida, ‘Une hospitalité à l’infini’ in Manifeste pour l’hospitalité—aux Minguettes, Autour de Jacques Derrida, edited by Mohammed Seffahi, 97-106 (Grigny : éditions paroles d’aube, 1999) ; Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, with Anne Dufourmantelle, translated by Richard Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); Jacques Derrida, ‘The Principle of Hospitality’ in Paper Machine, 66-69, translated by Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005) ↑
