To Dream Europe: Derrida, Europe and Hospitality

Abstract

At his last conference in France, on 8 June 2004, in Strasbourg, under the title “Le souverain bien – ou l’ Europe en mal de souveraineté”, Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), always very concerned about Europe and the future of Europe, dared to admit that he dreamed of “a Europe whose universal hospitality and new laws of hospitality or the right of asylum would make it the Noah’s Ark of the 21st century”. Through the question of unconditional hospitality – which, as I try to point out, emphasizes the singularity of Deconstruction as a philosophical idiom and through which Derrida rethinks, with a very different amplitude and justice, the “universal hospitality” of Kantian inspiration – it is the silhouette of hope and of responsibility of Europe, shaped by this dream of Derrida, that I try to sketch here.