Abstract
We can only begin to grasp hospitality as we enact it and yet, in the moment of enactment, hospitality eludes us. In this paper I look at the enactment of hospitality in the relationship between Iranian citizen-hosts and Afghan refugee-guests in the Islamic Republic of Iran, in order to reflect more broadly on questions of Derridean hospitality. Moving between the theoretical and the ethnographic, I forcefully bring to bear on a situation of protracted refugee displacement, a notion of hospitality that has, to a large extent, remained abstract and unanchored. The scalar shifts between the domestic and the national (so integral to Derrida’s theorising of the hospitable), are here reproduced in an examination of Iranian hospitality that simultaneously considers the juridical framework of asylum in the Islamic Republic and the domestic or homely expression of welcome, that occurs in the ushering of the guest over the threshold and the sharing of food around the sofreh.
Highlights
We can only begin to grasp hospitality as we enact it and yet, in the moment of enactment, hospitality eludes us
Derrida argues that the limits placed on Kantian hospitality and the contractual conditions that circumscribe permanent residency illuminate the aporetic nature of hospitality
This represents a deliberate effacement of the logic of hospitality that has previously governed Iranian–Afghan relations within the Islamic Republic
Summary
In order to understand Derridean hospitality we must turn to its origins in Kantian cosmopolitanism. Derrida argues that the limits placed on Kantian hospitality and the contractual conditions that circumscribe permanent residency illuminate the aporetic nature of hospitality. We see a tension between what Derrida calls the law of (unconditional) hospitality—a “law beyond laws”—and the laws of hospitality, which are inscribed in the relationship between states and act to place limits and conditions on hospitality. In addressing this tension Derrida is concerned with the implications of Kantian hospitality on the contemporary regime of asylum that circumscribes the lives of refugees globally (Derrida 2001). Through the ethnographic accounts described below, threads the vital question of whether Derrida’s hostipitality formulation can be usefully applied to contemporary Iran and how, in turn, the Iranian experience might open up to us new ways of thinking hospitality
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