“in Paris, as was the case last night, there’s no longer really a “here” and a “there,” no longer a host and a refugee.”
Last month, in reading a book on the works of Jacques Derrida, I was struck by how prescient he was to identify hospitality as a central problem for an era of globalization, one that he also related to the European project; and to pose hospitality, or openness to the other, as an alternative to immunity, or the negative definition of freedom as the absence of harm from the other, as a more promising path forward for liberal democracy as it evolves.