“Hospitality is poetic or is not at all,” Jacques Derrida claimed in a parenthetical comment to which he never returned. Homeless Hospitality takes up the challenge of thinking poetic or literary hospitality in relation to Derrida’s influential analysis of hospitality’s aporetic concept. Hospitality has to be at once conditional and unconditional—a conditional welcoming of a stranger into a home under the control of a host, but also an unconditional welcoming, without mastery, of an unimaginable other. This book argues that poetic or literary hospitality is unconditional hospitality as a linguistic event. Unconditional hospitality is unrepresentable, but literary texts can decommission mimetic and instrumental language and perform a radically passive poetic welcome.

Homeless Hospitality begins with Kant, who reimagined hospitality for modernity as a cosmopolitan right. “There is no unconditional hospitality in Kant,” Derrida claims; but a close reading of Toward Eternal Peace discloses a poetic hospitality flickering in Kant’s treatise, as the text briefly departs from its juridical and representational idiom and covertly welcomes a homeless hospitality unassimilable to the Kantian postulate of a right to property. From Kant, the book turns to Franz Kafka, Clarice Lispector, and Paul Celan to show how literary writing performs the possibility that “hospitality is poetic or is not at all.”