“With Arms Wide Open”

Abstract

The arrangement of furniture in space provides pathways for habits-the reading lamp placed just here, the television just here, the particular spices on the rack placed just so in relation to this person's taste and cooking habits. Iris Marion Young 1 I was making spaghetti sauce one evening a few years ago and found myself adding curry powder to the pan. Not because I was trying some unusual flavor combination, but because a stranger I had joyfully welcomed into my home over a dozen years before had taken it upon herself to reconfigure the spice rack to suit her needs rather than mine. Thirty years after leaving my parents' home, I was once again sharing a kitchen with another woman. Derrida describes the scene of hospitality as "a family scene,"2 but in investigating the dynamics of the domestic scene of welcome, transformation, and appropriation suggested by my story, I will be inhospitable, if not hostile, to his intent in Of Hospitality by reprivatizing an investigation he wishes to render both public and political, "more than political" (OH, 139, emphasis in original), because of its deconstructive power. I reject the public space Derrida creates for his own discourse partly in response to his claim that "It's the family despot, the father, the husband, and the boss, the master of the house who lays down the laws of hospitality" (OH, 149, translation slightly modified), that is, in response to an all too familiar public domestic space in which families consist of powerful husbands and fathers, parricidal sons, grieving daughters,3 and murdered wives/concubines, but mothers are glimpsed only in the margin. Partly, however, my inhospitality is also in response to the way in which Derrida closes his own text to any redemptive feminist discourse on hospitality by concluding with descriptions of the sexual abuse and mutilation of women that serve, he suggests, as the mark of the tradition of hospitality to which "we" might be heirs.4 The mother, then, and the possibility of a maternal heritage in the discourse of hospitality and hostility that Derrida outlines. Derrida, of course, is aware of this other heritage. He discusses the mother and the mother tongue, as well as their impossibility and their absence, briefly in Of Hospitality, and in much greater depth in the text that serves as a bookend for it, Monolingualism of the Other. In this second text, Derrida is concerned with those aspects of the social self one comes to by birth, and he indirectly refers to Of Hospitality as its "more problematic and troubled"5 complement, if not its supplement: (One day it will be necessary to devote another colloquium to language, nationality, and cultural belonging, by death this time around, by sepulture, and to begin with the secret of Oedipus at Colonus... a secret he guards, or confides to the guardianship of Theseus. a secret that, nevertheless, he refuses to his daughters, while depriving them of even their tears, and a just `work of mourning.') (MO, 13, emphasis in original) But although Monolingualism of the Other is obsessed with the mother (and her tongue), there is little concern with the situation of the mother herself. Derrida elides, for instance, the not insignificant difference between his mother's relationship to French as both her language and the language of the alien "metropole" and the illiteracy of Abdelkebir Khatibi's mother and aunt both in their own language and in French. Instead, Derrida immediately moves on to discuss the different relationships their sons developed to French, one having a "mother tongue" and the other (Derrida) not (MO 36). What then is the hospitality of the mother and the mother tongue? To welcome the known other into one's body (in an act of metonymical intercourse) is a quite different experience from that of harboring an unknown, but continually growing, alien at the core of one's being. In Of Hospitality, Derrida offers an unintended list of the fears that can accompany this process: Let us say yes to who or what turns up, before any determination, before any anticipation, before any identification, . …