Why introduce friendship into hospitality?

Critical work on hospitality in the wake of Derrida has usually focused – befitting certain political exigencies of our unequal globalised world – on the other ‘stranger’, the guest who arrives and who is unknown. Yet this other, however foreign, is welcomed according to the laws of hospitality as mon prochain (‘my neighbour’ as it is sometimes rendered in English), and the model of the one who is close to me (mon prochain) is the brother-friend. In this chapter I shall begin by focusing on friendship, most often understood as a spiritual fraternity, and the tensions even within friendship between the difference or strangeness of any other (even a friend) and the sameness and proximity of the friend. I shall then unsettle this a little by introducing women, sexual difference, into that masculine bond.

Both Levinas and Derrida often refer to friendship (amitié) alongside hospitality, each mutually reinforcing the other. While the arrival of the stranger is recognised as a critical limit situation, our everyday experience of hospitality is most often with kin or friends.