Response to Yarbakhsh Elisabeth. Reading Derrida in Tehran: Between an Open Door and an Empty Sofreh. Humanities, 2018, 7, 21

Demetra Kasimis

doi:10.3390/h8030140

Abstract

This critical engagement with Elisabeth Yarbaksh’s essay asks what Iran might be gaining from sustaining its particular form of (un-)hospitality. It considers whether Iranian dynamics of hospitality might be working to meet the specific political interests of the post-revolutionary “republic” and concludes with a comparison to classical Athenian migration (metoikia) politics.

Highlights

Afghans are the world’s most numerous refugees and Iran is home to the second largest population of them
As Elisabeth Yarbakhsh observes in her essay in this issue, “Afghan refugees in Iran identify hospitality primarily by its absence” (Yarbakhsh 2018, p. 1)
To make sense of the apparent contradiction that this vision helps sustain, Yarbakhsh turns to Jacques Derrida, who argues in Of Hospitality that hospitality is an ideal; on the ground, which is to say in political life, hospitality is always finite and conditional—it is actualized through practices of sorting and choosing (p. 3)

Summary

Introduction

Afghans are the world’s most numerous refugees and Iran is home to the second largest population of them. I was for this reason surprised when Yarbakhsh concludes that the “Iranian experience leads us to ask how Derrida’s ‘pure hospitality”, a “hospitality that imposes no conditions and asks no questions, might be sustained in practice, over decades of displacement” Might the closing injunction that Iranians ought to act more hospitably to refugees come at the expense of a more critical engagement with the material she opens up and begins to read diagnostically?

Results

Conclusion