Reconstruction 7.4 (2007)

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Welcoming the Outside: A Reading of Hospitality and Event in Derrida and Deleuze / Tyler Kessel

We do not know what hospitality is.

Derrida, "Hostipitality"

It is not easy to think in terms of events.

Deleuze, Dialogues II

<1> In their introduction to Between Deleuze and Derrida, Paul Patton and John Protevi argue that "while Deleuze seeks to begin with the pure outside or plane of immanence and show the construction of the inside or transcendent plane by restriction or folding of the outside, Derrida seeks to show that the outside or plane of transcendence is prior or interior to the supposed inside or plane of immanence"(6-7). Drawing on the distinction Patton and Protevi make, the following essay reads Derrida and Deleuze via their relations to - and more to the point, their welcoming of - the outside that animates and confuses the difference between inside and outside. This outside (which sometimes appears with a capital "o") is not a space to enter, occupy, or vacate. It exists outside the sway of external and internal in a nonspace where it is, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, "the not-external outside and the not-internal inside"(What Is Philosophy? 60). This outside is not accessed from a stable interiority; in other words, one does not gain access to this outside via the inside, by crossing over a readily accessible threshold, which leads to the question of the relation between the outside and hospitality Although both Derrida and Deleuze argue that the outside animates an inside, making possible the illusion that the inside exists immediately and presently, Deleuze's outside, one might suggest, plays an immanent role where Derrida's a transcendent. Deleuze's position inverts the common understanding of transcendent and immanent whereby what is transcendent lies 'outside,' while what is immanent lies 'inside.' If Deleuze believes that the outside is a plane of immanence, we must remember that for Deleuze this immanence is not immanent to anything; in other words, the outside is not the outside of the inside.

<2> It would be an understatement to say that Derrida's work has consistently scrambled the distinction between inside and outside (indeed any binary) - what Nicholas Royle calls an "uncanny unsettling" - even though he does not make many specific references to the Outside as such. Derrida's absolute hospitality - what I understand as a welcoming of the outside - contains an interruption that reveals the inside to be always already marked by the outside. We find the emphasis on the practical role of transcendence in Derrida's concern with the laws governing hospitality; for example, he reads the impossibility of absolute hospitality (a transcendence) as constitutive to the structure of conditional hospitality. For Derrida, the outside would be then located on a transcendent plane, which nonetheless can be found to have marked the inside. Derrida demonstrates the "contamination" of the host by the guest, on not only the etymological level (host and guest having the same root) but also on the conceptual level (within the perspective of unconditional hospitality especially, the host is taken hostage by the guest). That which comes from outside - the guest - comes to constitute the rights of the host - or that which waits on the inside. By common sense accounts, the outside ought to make an inside clear and distinct and provide a reliable border between inside and outside, but on Derrida's reading it demonstrates the impossibility of their neat separation.

<3> I will explore Derrida's laws of hospitality and the role of interruption and then go on to re-read hospitality through the event as conceived by Deleuze and Derrida. I take up, in part, Derrida's relation to the outside via hospitality in order to explore the nature and logic of an event that is always "to come," and, therefore, any experience of which constitutes an experience of the impossible, or a deconstructive moment. This amounts to saying that Derrida's (affirmative) deconstructive project is a working through of a relation to the outside. I bring to bear Deleuze's concept of event (or pure event) on Derrida's event in order to think hospitality differently; that is to say, to think differently a welcoming relation to the outside in Derrida. My aim is certainly not to demonstrate the shortcomings or relative failings of one or the other concept and then to triumphantly proceed; rather, the call to think otherwise guides my "convergence" (as Paul Patton recently called his own endeavor to think these concepts within a certain proximity[1]) between Deleuze and Derrida. The discussion leads me to wonder what thinking a convergence of Derridean hospitality and Deleuzian event might give rise to. In other words, if it is possible to think a "pure" hospitality - different from (un)conditional hospitality - what would its contours look like?

<4> The relation between Derrida's reading of hospitality and the Outside must begin with the distinction between conditional and unconditional. A conditional divide between inside and outside - what we might call relative exteriority and interiority - allows for movement. A movement from one to the other requires, of course, a threshold, that which divides and connects. There can be no movement from one to the other without this notion of the threshold. Derrida proposes that this threshold is actually hospitality itself, that hospitality stands in-between the exterior and interior, regulating flow and conduct. So, we would say that the relative division between inside and outside makes possible the event of hospitality, or at least conditional hospitality. The reliable, albeit relative, distinction between inside and outside makes possible the assignation of the foreigner, the guest, the master, the host. Absolute hospitality, however, does not obey this distinction; in fact, it abandons it for a relation with the Outside that exists outside the sway of external and internal in a nonspace where it is "the not-external outside and the not-internal inside"(What is Philosophy? 60). How? The "condition" for absolute hospitality is the welcoming of the absolute other, the un-circumscribed guest for whom/which the very distinction between inside and outside signifies a circumscription (later, we will examine this figure under the name of "absolute arrivant"). In other words, in order for there to be an absolute other to whom/which hospitality can be offered, the relative division between inside and outside (interiority/exteriority) must be abandoned. The absolute other arrives unannounced, unanticipated, unknown as if from the Outside (in fact, Derrida argues that in order for an event to come, the logic of 'as if' must not be interrupted[2]). Yet, with the Outside we do not have any movement from the outside to inside. This is because absolute hospitality - or what I would call welcoming the Outside - occurs as a Deleuzian event, not an actualized event - what Deleuze refers to as an "accident" - visible in the state of affairs. An actualized event of hospitality will always already be conditional, whereas a "virtual" event of hospitality will be absolute/unconditional.

<5> If I am to read Deleuze's concept of the event into Derrida's hospitality, I must contend with an essential difference between the two concerning the nature of events. For Deleuze, all actualized events have a shadowy reserve in the virtual, where ideal events exist. This means that any actualized event of conditional hospitality always already has a relation to an absolute hospitality in the form of an ideal event. Even though the time of actual and ideal events differs, we can think of the two co-existing. For Derrida, this co-existence comes in the form of the laws of hospitality, not the events, which strictly speaking do not exist or which exist only as possible impossibilities. An event for Derrida is always to come. This leads him to conclude that absolute hospitality cannot strictly speaking come about, even though the laws governing it have a special relation to conditional hospitality. Although Derrida's reading of hospitality depends upon a real division between outside and inside that can and must be crossed, the event of hospitality requires a virtual outside insofar as absolute hospitality allows the absolute other to make itself at home.

<6> Although Derrida does not use the term 'uncanny' in his lectures on hospitality, the invocation of the 'strange' and 'impossible moment' implies the presence of the uncanny. Whereas I will later discuss, under the cover of Deleuze, the simultaneity of events of hospitality, I will here point to Derrida's reference to the simultaneity of the laws of hospitality, a relation he characterizes as a "strange plural." Derrida does not speak of the simultaneity, or the impossibility of events of hospitality because for him absolute hospitality does not and cannot exist in the state of affairs. This leads him to analyze the laws governing the two hospitalities, which simultaneously "imply" and "exclude" one another. Before discussing the Outside and its respective relations with the 'law' and 'event,' let us examine Derrida's assertion concerning the aporetic nature of the laws of hospitality. Derrida writes:

These two regimes of law, of the law and the laws, are thus both contradictory, antinomic, and inseparable. They both imply and exclude each other, simultaneously. They incorporate one another at the moment of excluding one another, they are dissociated at the moment of enveloping one another, at the moment (simultaneity without simultaneity, instant of impossible synchrony, moment without moment) when, exhibiting themselves to each other, one to the others, the others to the other, they show they are both more and less hospitable, hospitable and inhospitable, hospitable inasmuch as inhospitable. Because exclusion and inclusion are inseparable in the same moment, whenever you would like to say "at this very moment," there is antinomy. The law, in the absolute singular, contradicts laws in the plural, but on each occasion it is the law within the law, and on each occasion outside the law within the law. That's it, that so very singular thing that is called the laws of hospitality. Strange plural, plural grammar of two plurals that are different at the same time. One of these two plurals says the laws of hospitality, conditional laws, etc. The other plural says the antinomic addition, the one that adds conditional laws to the unique and singular and absolutely only great Law of hospitality, to the law of hospitality, to the categorical imperative of hospitality. (Of Hospitality 79-81)

Derrida makes it clear that these laws have two different relationships with one another: spatial and temporal. On the one hand Derrida states that a "hierarchical" relationship inheres between the absolute and conditional laws that places the absolute law "above" the conditional. On the other, he says that their mutual implication and exclusion constitute a "simultaneity" or "instant of impossible synchrony." In this impossible moment the absolute law exists "within" the conditional laws as the "outside the law" within. In other words, Derrida seems to be saying that the absolute law occupies a space both outside and inside (the law), but that this occupation occurs in an impossible moment, which is to say that it occurs outside of chronos. In order to be spatially both inside and outside the absolute law must be outside chronological temporality. Derrida calls this impossible yet necessary union a "strange plural" - when/re the conditional laws are added to the absolute to create "the laws of hospitality." This simultaneity is mad. If we think of this simultaneity of laws graphically as the symbol for infinity - ¥ - we find these laws to have a chiasmic encounter out of and back to which exclusion and implication flow. Even though unconditional hospitality remains "to come," the law of unconditional hospitality reaches out from this beyond to have a chiasmic encounter that constitutes a "strange plurality."

<7> This difference - between law and event - marks an important divergence between Derrida and Deleuze, one that Gregg Lambert has recently explored via the site of literature in "The Subject of Literature Between Derrida and Deleuze: Law or Life?" Recall from Derrida's "Before the Law" that the law or, more precisely, the law of the law waits as that which incites yet arrests at the threshold. From this position outside (the law) it governs an inside. And yet, in Kafka's story it is the country man who waits outside the gate, deep within which lies the law. Here, we must deal with the pertinence of these laws. Conditional laws of hospitality pertain to actual events in the state of affairs, and as such they have a historicity. We can talk about the relative adherence of an actual event of conditional hospitality to its laws (and, of course, to the absolute law). The absolute law of hospitality does not pertain to any event in the state of affairs; it pertains to what Deleuze calls a pure event, which nonetheless maintains immanence to any actualization. So, we might say that while conditional laws pertain directly to actual events of hospitality, the absolute law pertains indirectly via the conditional law. And while the absolute law pertains directly to a pure event of hospitality, the conditional laws pertain only indirectly.

...Hospitality...interrupted...hospitality...

<8> Before I continue to examine any possible relation between Derrida's hospitality and the Outside, an interruption of this essay is in order. An interruption by the question, What - if any - is the role of interruption in hospitality? To think interruption we must move along temporal and spatial lines, or at least being in movement. There is something taking place, occurring, happening, going along; and then there is something from the outside, from the future, that causes a rupture in that movement. To interrupt creates a temporal break or cut. It creates a new space, one in which the interrupted has no more room (if only temporarily). The time and space of the interruption is of the future, and as such interruptions are not invited or planned, they are the totally unexpected and unknown (In this sense, the distinction between guest and visitor will become important.). The intruder shatters comfortable movement. Again, interruptions come from the future (à-venir) to create ruptures in time and space.

<9> I will describe two kinds of interruption vis-à-vis hospitality: internal and external. By internal interruption we mean an interruption that comes from within the scene, or logic, of hospitality, which is to say either from the guest, host, or hospitality itself. Only when the identity of the 'guest' and 'host' is in question - or, in other words, when identity has been interrupted - can absolute hospitality come to pass. Derrida claims that hospitality interrupts itself, which, of course, means that 'interrupted hospitality' is redundant for Derrida. Any hospitality, then, is always already auto-interrupted. Derrida speculates that hospitality's auto-interruption comes in the form of "self-limitation or self-contradiction" within the law of hospitality. He writes, "As a reaffirmation of mastery and being oneself in one's own home, from the outset hospitality limits itself at its very beginning, it remains forever on the threshold of itself...it governs the threshold - and hence it forbids in some way even what it seems to allow to cross the threshold to pass across it. It becomes the threshold"("Hostipitality" 14). In other words, hospitality interrupts itself at the "outset" even before hospitality proper occurs or just as it occurs. We should wonder, then, if this is an interruption at all. Must not hospitality be under way in order for a proper interruption to take place? Or is the interruption so perfect that it is constitutively bound with the achronological moment of hospitality? But that is not all. Derrida continues, "There must be a threshold. But if there is a threshold, there is no longer hospitality"(14). Derrida does not claim, however, that this "aporetic contradiction" is hospitality or that "wherever hospitality is, there is no hospitality." There is hospitality, only a hospitality that comes after hospitality, that overcomes the aporia of the threshold. "If there is hospitality, the impossible must be done" (and this is why hospitality is properly deconstruction)(14). This seemingly paradoxical state of affairs resolves itself when we differentiate, as Derrida does, between conditional and unconditional hospitality. Conditional hospitality requires the threshold; unconditional hospitality forbids it. Yet both events share the name hospitality. Obviously we must attend to this distinction if we are to make any headway vis-à-vis the Outside.

<10> Whereas internal interruption comes from within the scene of hospitality, external interruption comes from outside the scene, or logic, of hospitality; or, from the Outside. We do not yet know what this looks like. Such an interruption, however, cannot properly touch the scene of hospitality. I have said that the Outside does not allow for movement, crossing, or even a proper threshold. If this is indeed the case, then an interruption from the Outside would be such that hospitality would be interrupted before it began. There is, then, an interruption of the future that reaches into the past. To answer the question I posed earlier, that because "internal" interruption comes from within an already-produced scene of hospitality it can only ever hinder or halt it, but that "external" interruption, on the other hand, produces and cancels the conditions of possibility for Derrida's absolute hospitality. What is more, this interruption qua the Outside is that which must be welcomed. Hospitality's relation to the Outside comes, then, under the sign of "interruption."

<11> What does it mean, then, to extend hospitality to the Outside? And, if we are inclined to think of this arrival in terms of an entity, what does it mean to extend hospitality to an Outsider, something of the Outside? On the face of it, the welcoming implies that the Outside crosses a threshold to the inside. Yet, as I have said this is a completely illogical maneuver for the Outside. To offer hospitality to the Outside is to invite the Outside in. But the Outside cannot enter. It is always already just about to enter. If the Outside enters it does so not as the Outside but as the fold of the Outside - the inside. The Outside does not present itself as such, but animates the present. Can we say, then, that hospitality comes from the Outside? At this juncture we meet Derrida's future: à-venir or what is "to come." For Derrida, hospitality - and in particular absolute hospitality - comes from the future:

In this sense hospitality is always to come [à-venir], but a 'to come' that does not and will never present itself as such, in the present <and a future [avenir] that does not have a horizon, a futurity - a future without horizon> . To think hospitality from the future - this future that does not present itself or will only present itself when it is not awaited as a present or presentable - is to think hospitality from death no less than from birth. ("Hostipitality" 14)

Like our inability to experience the Outside as such, we cannot experience Derrida's unconditional hospitality. Moreover, that unconditional hospitality remains 'to come' makes possible other hospitalities that we can experience in the present and anticipate coming in the future (of this present). In other words, to welcome Derrida's future means never welcoming the future. We must not allow the future to interrupt the present. We must think 'welcome' otherwise.

<12> To briefly review: Offering hospitality to the Outside appears to mean offering hospitality to that which paradoxically is constitutive of absolute hospitality and impossible to welcome. As I have suggested, the Outside cannot cross a threshold, only mark the threshold. To shed some light on this non-crossing, this nonpassage, let me turn to one of Derrida's most concentrated texts on the arrival of the absolute other, or what he calls the "arrivant" - Aporias. To say, as I will for clarity's sake, that there is an "absolute" arrivant absolutely distinct from an arrivant somewhat misstates Derrida's position. As we will see with Deleuze's event, even when Derrida writes "absolute arrivant," he means an "arrivant," for an arrivant is by definition unconditioned. Hospitality requires an arrival, but Derrida carefully distinguishes between an ordinary arrival - which would go by the name "arrivant" - and an extraordinary arrival - which would go by the name "absolute arrivant." In what follows Derrida begins to explain the arrivant vis-à-vis the threshold:

One does not expect the event of whatever, of whoever comes, arrives, and crosses the threshold - the immigrant, the emigrant, the guest, or the stranger. But if the new arrivant who arrives is new, one must expect - without waiting for him or her, without expecting it - that he does not simply cross a given threshold. Such an arrivant affects the very experience of the threshold, whose possibility he thus brings to light before one even knows whether there has been an invitation, a call, a nomination, or a promise. What we could here call the arrivant, the most arrivant among all arrivants, the arrivant par excellence, is whatever, whoever, in arriving, does not cross a threshold separating two identifiable places, the proper and the foreign, the proper of the one and the proper of the other..."(Aporias 33-4)

In considering this arrival, in even talking about or referring to the "arrivant," we perform a paradox of reference, whereby we must refer to that which defies reference. We refer to that which has not yet come into being. So, in a sense, we come to an aporia in beginning to talk about the absolute arrivant. We deny any shade of singularity to that to which we must extend hospitality based on its absolute and whatever singularity. Extending hospitality is nothing if not an openness to infinite singularity (or an infinite reconcatenation of singularities).

<13> The "arrivant" does not cross a pre-existing threshold, which is strange only if one thinks that any form of hospitality utterly depends on such a threshold and the crossing thereof. As we have already seen, Derrida claims that at once where there is a threshold there is no hospitality, yet hospitality depends on a threshold. Once again, that conditional hospitality depends on this threshold - which brings into play all the laws of that hospitality - and absolute hospitality requires its absence, for any trace of threshold or door always already circumscribes that which and who arrives, makes this claim tenable. What we are dealing with, then, in the case of the absolute arrivant is absolute hospitality. But if this arrivant does not cross a pre-existing threshold, yet "affects the very experience of the threshold," does its arrival effect or produce a new threshold? In other words, do we have any form of threshold in the experience of the coming of the absolute arrivant? If so, what distinguishes these thresholds?

<14> Perhaps a clue to answering this question lies in the fact that for Derrida this "absolute arrivant does not yet have a name or an identity"(my italics 34), for this implies that the arrivant will have a name or identity.

No, I am talking about the absolute arrivant, who is not even a guest. He surprises the host - who is not yet a host or an inviting power - enough to call into question, to the point of annihilating or rendering indeterminate, all the distinctive signs of a prior identity, beginning with the very border that delineated a legitimate home and assured lineage, names and language, nations, families and genealogies. The absolute arrivant does not yet have a name or an identity. It is not an invader or an occupier, nor is it a colonizer, even if it can also become one."(Aporias 34)

But if the arrivant attains one of these identities at the moment of arrival, certainly its status as absolute arrivant disappears into that new name or identity. Again, if the absolute arrivant occasions the materialization of a threshold - presumably existing in the impossible moment - then at that moment of materialization the absolute arrivant also attains some name or identity. Which is to say the presence of a threshold requires the presentation of name or identity. If we accept this requirement, we are positioned to claim that the absolute arrivant is the arrivant that never arrives, that cannot arrive. Or, and this requires some patience, the absolute arrivant arrives in madness. Derrida refers to this moment, though not directly, a surprise. In other words, the unexpected arrival creates a moment of wonder. But we should also keep in mind that either an unexpected attack or a gift could produce this moment of wonder. How can we think about this moment in terms of "interruption" instead of surprise?

<15> Even though Derrida stresses the indeterminate status of the absolute arrivant, he chooses to characterize it as a "disarmed...newly born child." The choice of identities is not, of course, arbitrary. Derrida's baby remains open to the future and arrives in surprise; which is to say its arrival does not have an end, which is to say that it remains outside the logic of teleology. Of course Derrida does not say that the absolute arrivant is a baby, only like one. But to say that something is like a newborn baby is to place it under the canopy of indeterminacy. Lacking its own, the absolute arrivant can only ever be like some name or identity. Again, we must refer to that which it is not in order to understand its singularity. Beyond a "telos" or "eskhaton," the absolute arrivant defies tracking, measuring, or calculation of any sort. And if a sense of promise inheres in the coming of the absolute arrivant, Derrida tells us this cannot be a "determinable promise." The promise, if it is there at all, cannot be placed, traced, or anticipated. And perhaps most importantly if the promise remains indeterminable, its ability to be broken becomes unclear. That is, can an indeterminable promise be broken? Or kept? Like the Outside, the absolute arrivant promises nothing; or, because it comes from the Outside, the absolute arrivant interrupts without interruption.

<16> Like différance itself, the absolute arrivant occupies a nonspace where production rules and reduction are defied:

Now the border that is ultimately most difficult to delineate, because it is always already crossed, lies in the fact that the absolute arrivant makes possible everything to which I have just said it cannot be reduced, starting with the humanity of man, which some would be inclined to recognize in all that erases, in the arrivant, the characteristic of (cultural, social, or national) belonging and even metaphysical determination (ego, person, subject, consciousness, etc.). (Aporias 34-5)

The coming of the absolute other comes under the name "arrivant," which Derrida contends cannot be reduced to the human. Without name or identity, the absolute arrivant denies our power of naming, our power of reaching into the past to name that which has not arrived. And even though Derrida does not read the absolute arrivant as an "intruder," I suggest that this arrivant does interrupt. Without preparation or readiness for the absolute arrivant, it is destined to interrupt. But interrupt what? Derrida claims that the arrivant does not arrive at a predetermined place, locale, or end; rather, the coming of the arrivant occasions absolute hospitality, or the "experience of the threshold"(Aporias 33). In keeping with Derrida's insistence, let me call absolute hospitality - or an experience at the threshold - an experience of interruption or, better, an interruption of the experience of interruption. In other words, the coming of the absolute arrivant - that which lacks name or identity - occasions an absolute hospitality before which there was no host (the host comes with the arrivant) which interrupts any attempts at an interruption of that coming and threshold.

<17> Is it possible to say 'yes' to the unexpected? Does the absolute arrivant even allow for a 'yes'? Does saying 'yes' already place us within the logic of host and master? In other words, already in saying 'yes' do we expect the unexpected, thereby drawing it into the realm of circumscription? Might we not be better off offering our 'yes' to interruption? To the possibility of interruption? To the letting be of interruption? For, if we do not expect the absolute arrivant - even through a saying 'yes' - then its arrival constitutes an interruption; it is in this way that I claim absolute hospitality to be an interrupted hospitality.

Welcoming the Event Outside

<18> In "I'm Going to Have to Wander All Alone"[3] we find the concept of event between Derrida and Deleuze marking the beginning of Derrida's public mourning for Deleuze. Derrida begins his work of mourning for Deleuze with the event of death, an event everyone had anticipated or "feared." But this death brings an end to the "thinker of the event and always of this event in particular" (meaning death as an event) and marks the event of (public) mourning. Yet, as Derrida points out, there is more than one event; that is, we have "this event" - presumably the death of Deleuze - and another that contains "a sad infinity" - presumably death qua event (192). These events parallel, of course, the event of Derrida's mourning and mourning qua event.

<19> Before examining Derrida's event, I shall look at how Deleuze has described events. In "Future Politics," Paul Patton speculates that whereas Derrida stresses the atemporal "to come" of a 'democracy to come,' Deleuze "might have referred to the pure event of democracy"(24). I would like here to speculate on a "pure hospitality," which would mean an event of hospitality of a different order than the distinction between unconditional and conditional hospitality. In Deleuze's terms, Derrida's absolute hospitality as a concept is a counter-effectuated event, that is, an actual event from which a virtual has been drawn. But the question remains whether a "pure hospitality" would be interchangeable with unconditional hospitality. Derrida's allusion to different events marks an important aspect of the Deleuzian concept of event - its apparent duality. In thinking about an event, we are inclined to think where and when it took place, which implies that some observable action has fused with a measurable location and time. In thinking about Deleuze's event, however, we need to keep in mind the distinction between actual and virtual. Deleuze's events may be provisionally divided along two basic lines: the virtual and the actual. Whereas one may ask of the first type (actual events), "Where does the event take place?" and "When does the event take place?" - in other words, "What are its spatio-temporal coordinates?" - Deleuze's virtual event defies the spatio-temporal order, which we experience as what Deleuze calls the state of affairs. Or, to borrow Derrida's phrase, virtual events exist beyond the "horizon of anticipation." This explanation leads us to say, however, that there are virtual and actual events, when in fact Deleuze does not distinguish between types of events, but between an event - which exists virtually - and an 'accident' - which exists as an actualization of an event in the state of affairs. In other words, we can live accidents, but not events:

With every event, there is indeed the present moment of its actualization, the moment in which the event is embodied in a state of affairs, an individual, or a person, the moment we designate by saying 'here, the moment has come.' The future and the past of the event are evaluated only with respect to this definitive present, and from the point of view of that which embodies it. But on the other hand, there is the future and the past of the event considered in itself, sidestepping each present, being free of the limitations of a state of affairs, impersonal and pre-individual, neutral, neither general nor particular, eventum tantum.... It has no other present than that of the mobile instant which represents it, always divided into past-future, and forming what must be called the counter-actualization. (What is Philosophy? 151)

In order to understand the time of an event (and many other Deleuzian concepts), we must turn to a distinction between "chronos" and "Aion." "[I]n accordance with Chronos," according to Deleuze in The Logic of Sense, "only the present exists in time. Past, present, and future are not three dimensions of time; only the present fills time, whereas past and future are two dimensions relative to the present in time"(162). In the chronos we experience a continuous present, out of which we construct a past and future. An aspect of this experience is that "the present is in some manner corporeal"; which is to say that the "present measures out the action of bodies and causes"(162). A body affects another body through succession of present moments that have a causal link. The chronos is livable, in spite of or because it "is the regulated movement of vast and profound presents"(163), presents that are so perhaps because they absorb the past and future.

<20> With the "Aion" we have a different relation to past and future, which are now thought to "inhere or subsist in time"(164). In fact, the relationship flips - it is now the future and past that "divide the present at every instant and subdivide it ad infinitum into past and future, in both directions at once"(164), which means the Aion must be thought of in terms of the instant, not the present. This bidirectionality is thought in terms of a "straight line limitless in either direction"(165). This means that the Aion, insofar as it is "[a]lways already passed and eternally yet to come," responds simultaneously to the questions, "What has just happened?" and "What is about to happen?", but not to "What is happening?" And as such, the Aion does not contain bodies, but events, allowing Deleuze to characterize it as a "pure empty form of time"(165). The instant runs through the unlimited line of the Aion, but is "always missing from its own place," "without place," and as such it is "the paradoxical instance or the aleatory point"(166).

<21> In addition to the Aion, Deleuze and Guattari characterize the time of the event as a "meanwhile" or "dead time" that "does not come after what happens; it coexists with the instant or time of the accident"(What is Philosophy? 158). This coexistence is important when we consider that for Deleuze the event is intricately bound to sense, which does not inhere naturally and independently within accidents, bodies, or things. Rather, sense is given by nonsense via the event. In other words, we should not say that the event is sense, but the event makes sense possible, or, is the force behind it. If for Deleuze there is sense in the phrase "event of hospitality," for Derrida the two cannot be separated in this way, which is to say that event and hospitality have structural commonalities that disallow saying one is of the other. A Deleuzian event, on the other hand, will always first be an event and second an event of something. Whereas for Deleuze we might say the meeting of the pure event and accident of hospitality offers sense, for Derrida this sense is offered by the mad meeting of the laws of hospitality.

<22> Derrida's event comes from the future, but not the future of the present; rather, this future - or à-venir - is incalculable, unknowable and therefore impossible in the sense that possible is contrasted with potential. In other words, we must not confuse Derrida's event with that which takes place in the present's state of affairs, or what Deleuze calls "accidents." The event is "to come." The event comes. The event is that which comes. But that which comes or arrives can only do so unexpectedly or outside of an expectation that would already begin to circumscribe the event. Perhaps the most important conclusion to be drawn from this is that Derrida's event - in coming from the future - exists outside any temporal order. It will not arrive in time or just in time, for it is not for the temporal. This is the line Derrida takes in his essay "The future of the profession or the university without condition," where he asks in his "seventh point" concerning the future of the Humanities, "That which happens, takes place, comes about in general, that which is called event, what is it?"(53). Arguing against the notion that a performative produces the event of which it speaks, Derrida claims that the performative actually creates a "horizon of anticipation or precomprehension," which does not prevent something from happening, or happening "to me," but does prevent the incalculable from arriving. He writes:

As long as I can produce and determine an event by a performative act guaranteed, like any performative, by conventions, legitimate fictions, and a certain 'as if,' then to be sure I will not say that nothing happens or comes about, but what takes place, arrives, happens, or happens to me remains still controllable and programmable within a horizon of anticipation or precomprehension, within a horizon period. It is of the order of the masterable possible, it is the unfolding of what is already possible. It is of the order of power, of the 'I can,' or 'I may.' No surprise, thus no event in the strong sense. (53)

In Deleuzian terms, Derrida is roughly describing the production of 'accidents' in a state of affairs, or 'what is already possible.' This type of event continues a linking from present into future, a concatenation that could have been foreseen or understood in some way before it took place. We also need to note the italicization of "to me," which underscores the important distinction between events that happen to, or actualize in, an individual subject and events that are impersonal. In other words, we may think Derrida distinguishes between an event that happens to theparticular person (me) and events that happen to a person. This apparent affinity between Deleuze and Derrida concerning the personal/impersonal distinction, however, dissolves when Derrida retains the prepositional phrase "to me" when wondering about a different type of event, an event "in the strong sense." "For if," Derrida writes, "there is any, if there is such a thing, the pure singular eventness of what arrives or of who arrives and arrives to me (which is what I call the arrivant), it would suppose an irruption that punctures the horizon, interrupting any performative organization, any convention, or any context that can be dominated by conventionality"(53). Yet, in interrupting this horizon and convention we may presume that this event also interrupts "me"; that is to say, the "me" that experiences the first type of anticipated event does not remain the same if the second type arrives, for the interrupting of the horizon exposes, disrupts, irrupts "me," who inhabits this horizon. As Derrida says elsewhere, this event is not the "effect of a cause," which means, among other things, that no one in particular made it happen. And, again, in discussing the hymen's double bind, he writes, "The interruption of the hymen - which is nothing other than its coming to be, its event - does not arise from any decision. No one has the initiative"("Living On" 154). Even though we may infer that Derrida's events call for a personal and impersonal experience in a sense, the distinction still does not hold with respect to Deleuze's, which finds its example in death.

<23> Importantly for Derrida, the event "in the strong sense" does not interrupt the logic of "as if" in order to "take place"; in fact, a thinking of event requires the "as if" insofar as the event does not maintain a relationship with the possible, but the impossible. The event for Derrida, then, turns on a not interrupting the "as if." This means that the event does not take place, but this does not mean that it is virtual. To be impossible and virtual are not the same thing. Can we say, then, that Deleuze's and Derrida's events exist in the same time? In other words, is Derrida's "as if" roughly interchangeable with Deleuze's "Aion"? And even if this is the case, are the events' respective relations to these times the same? The answer may lie in the distinction Deleuze makes between, on one hand, virtual and actual and, on the other, real and possible. One hallmark of Deleuze's virtual is its reality as opposed to an actuality. The virtual is not livable in the sense that we live in the state of affairs, yet it has ideational content.

<24> To think of hospitality alongside Deleuzian events, then, takes it off in two directions - the livable and unlivable. On the one hand, hospitality would be that which one can, within the time of the present, extend to another person. On the other, hospitality would be an impersonal extending of hospitality in the time of the Aion. Do these two directions correspond to Derrida's conditional and unconditional hospitality? Provisionally, let me say, yes, conditional hospitality is livable, while unconditional is not. But whereas Derrida's conception of hospitality (and, of course, event) allows for only the laws of hospitality to co-exist, Deleuze's concept of event not only allows for, but requires a relation of co-existence between events. The difference lies on two planes. Derrida's à-venir and Deleuze's Aion fundamentally differ on their relation to the present. Even though both of these times do not extend linearly from - and thus refer back to - a present in any temporal manner; even though, in other words, they are both times out of joint, Derrida's future - as always to come - cannot be thought alongside the present in any form but only as an always unfulfilled promise. Deleuze's conception of the Aion can be thought alongside chronos as a real pure reserve from which events can be actualized. So, while the Aion - like à-venir - is inaccessible, unlivable, even properly unthinkable, it nonetheless retains what we might call a productive relation to chronos and actualized events and, by extension, conditional hospitality. As we have seen, unconditional hospitality exists as a concept, but its relation to conditional hospitality is one of the promise. The laws of unconditional hospitality and conditional hospitality "both imply and exclude each other" in a "strange plurality."

<25> Given Deleuze's insistence that events exist within the virtual, we may be tempted to ask, "Do events come from the Outside?" or "Do we experience the Outside via events?" Even though we may roughly think of the Outside as virtual - insofar as it is unlivable and not external - the virtual of the event is not this chaotic virtual, but a "consistent" one "that has become an entity formed on a plane of immanence that sections the chaos"(What is Philosophy? 156). So, we can/not say that an event comes from the Outside, but that events are of the Outside and have a more immediate relation to it. This relation raises the problem of the "everyday," which does not offer itself easily to the event. For my purposes here, however, let me roughly equate the everyday with the state of affairs (accidents) and the extraordinary with virtuality (pure events). This alignment allows me to make at least a provisional attempt to respond to this question (and then possibly extend that answer to other understandings of the everyday and extraordinary). Within Deleuze's and Derrida's understanding of events - as "pure" or "to-come" - any experience thereof is limited to thought. But this removes thought from the realm of the everyday.

<26> In turning to Deleuze's outside, we must contend with force, or a force that comes from the outside. For Deleuze, thinking is always a relation to the outside in the form of a force from the outside animating thought, creating an encounter. Referring to the line of the outside, Deleuze advocates a constant relationship: "We need both to cross the line, and make it endurable, workable, thinkable. To find in it as far as possible, and as long as possible, an art of living. How can we protect ourselves, survive, while still confronting this line?"(Negotiations 110). We can thus think of this force as an interruption from the outside in that in order for a force to make thought move in a different direction, it must be an interrupting agent, interrupting everyday thought, striated thinking, ruts and patterns. This is exactly the condition for hospitality. In other words, Derrida's absolute hospitality involves thinking as a relation to the Outside.

<27> For Derrida, let us remember, there is no situation in which absolute hospitality actually occurs. Yet, there is no conditional hospitality that does not depend upon the possibility of absolute hospitality for its occurrence. In other words, conditional hospitality must pass through the aporia of the interdependence between absolute and conditional hospitality in order to emerge. Absolute hospitality must not be tainted with any sense of entitlement, exchange, duty, hardship, or self-preservation. The host is for the guest. With conditional hospitality, the host always maintains a sense of duty as host, which entails the condition: I'll be a good host if you are a good guest. This conditional creates a negative distance between host and guest, where the host names, judges, and otherwise circumscribes the guest.

To what end...

<28> The arrival of Derrida's baby raises the question of hospitality and death, to which he himself alludes in "Hostipitality": "To think hospitality from the future...is to think hospitality from death no less than from birth"(14). This connection between death and hospitality - which Derrida addresses in a reading of Oedipus' death - brings to mind the longstanding relation between death and event, or, more precisely, death as event as thought by Blanchot and Deleuze. I am, of course, digging up the event of death, the death-event with which this section began. Let me think again, then, this death and a hospitality for this death with a passage from Logic of Sense where Deleuze quotes Blanchot's L'Espace littéraire:

Every event is like death, double and impersonal in its double. "It is the abyss of the present, the time without present with which I have no relation, toward which I am unable to project myself. For in it I do not die. I forfeit the power of dying. In this abyss they (on) die - they never cease to die, and they never succeed in dying." How different this "they" is from that which we encounter in everyday banality. It is the "they" of impersonal and pre-individual singularities, the "they" of the pure event wherein it dies in the same way that it rains. (152)

To return to a question raised earlier in this section, we may wonder if this "impersonal," this "it," is the same as Derrida's "me." Could we not say that within any possible "scene" of unconditional hospitality it - and not I - welcomes? In other words, the personal is conditional but the impersonal welcomes unconditionality. Even if this "it" may not be the proper term for that which welcomes the arrivant, if we think of hospitality as a pure hospitality, then indeed we can claim that "it" welcomes. If there were a "pure" hospitality, it would have a different relationship to any possible actualized events of hospitality. Thinking pure hospitality allows for a dangerous but productive relation to the outside, for while crossing over too far may result in death, crossing over just enough may result in new actualizations of the pure event of hospitality.

Works Cited

Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.

---. Negotiations: 1972-1990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.

Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet. Dialogues II. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Gauttari. What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Derrida, Jacques. "Living On" in Deconstruction and Criticism. trans. James Hulbert New York: Continuum, 1979.

---. Aporias. Trans. Thomas Dutoit. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993.

---. "Hostipitality." Trans. Barry Stocker and Forbes Morlock. Angelaki 5:3 (December 2000): 3-18.

---. Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.

---. "The future of the profession or the university without condition" in Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader. Ed. Tom Cohen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

---. "I'm Going to Have to Wander All Alone" in The Work of Mourning. Ed. Pascale- Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Grosz, Elizabeth. Architecture from the Outside. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001.

Patton, Paul. "Future Politics." In Between Deleuze and Derrida. Ed. Paul Patton and John Protevi. New York: Continuum, 2003.

Patton, Paul and John Protevi. "Introduction." in Between Deleuze and Derrida. New York: Continuum, 2003.

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