Jacques Derrida: Hostipitality

Before even beginning, I will read, I will reread with you by way of an epigraph, a long and celebrated passage from Kant. To begin with, I will read it almost without commentary. But in each of its words, it will preside over the whole of this lecture and all questions of hospitality, the historical questions – those questions at once timeless, archaic, modern, current, and future [à venir] that the single word “hospitality” magnetizes – the historical, ethical, juridical, political, and economic questions of hospitality.
As you have no doubt already guessed, it is a question in Perpetual Peace of the famous “Third Definitive Article of a Perpetual Peace [Dritter Definitivartikel zum ewigen Frieden],”2 the title of which is: “Das Weltbürgerrecht soll auf Bedingungen der allgemeinen Hospitalität eingeschränkt sein”: “Cosmopolitan Right shall be limited to Conditions of Universal Hospitality.”