Derrida on Xenophobia as Fear of Technology
We see all around the world a fear of internationalization these days. We also see the acknowledgement that great things can come from the advancements of the modern world. But we also see a suspicion of globalization, of immigration, and of international trade. We see this in the resurgence of conservative movements in the U.S. and U.K., just in recent years. I’ve had several good friends say to me in discussions of these recent developments along the lines of, “I feel the same way — immigration, foreigners in our country, internationalization, is it a good thing or bad thing? I don’t know”. Jacques Derrida, a postmodern “deconstruction” theorist claims that this resurgence is, in part, caused by the disruption of our sense of “home” caused by globalization and modern technological developments.
Jacques Derrida talks about xenophobia in several articles I will be quoting in an attempt to extract his take on xenophobia, hospitality, globalization, the “home”, and sense of place. The works I will be quoting are Of Hospitality, a series of essays on the foreigner and the foreign, and Echographies of Television, a series of filmed interviews where Derrida discusses technology and communication and its effects on modern society.
When discussing his concepts of otherness and responsibility, it is important to note that Derrida was indebted to the concept of “infinite responsibility to the Other” as put forward by Emmanuel Levinas, which formed the basis of his philosophy of “ethics as first philosophy” putting ethics before metaphysics or as the basis for all knowledge. Derrida argues that “a politics that does not retain a reference to this principle of unconditional hospitality is a politics that loses its reference to justice” (Echographies 17). Later, I will talk a little bit more about Derrida’s concept of “unconditional hospitality”, where he argues that in part, we need to rely on a moral imperative that we should welcome anyone into our home, regardless of their identity and who they are, unconditionally. This is tempered by conditional laws of hospitality which we need to rely on to filter, and protect the integrity of our home. Regarding justice, and remembering what happened during World War II, Derrida acknowledges that as a public memory returns, the worst returns as well, and we can recall the familial and privatizing resurgences happening today in the same way they happened in the past. “Even as we remember the worst (out of respect for respect for memory, the truth, the victims, etc.), the worst threatens to return. One phantom recalls another…signs are announcing this return — in a totally different context…of nationalism, of racism, of xenophobia, of anti-Semitism.”(Echographies 23) As one thing is recalled to memory by public record, the memory of the antithesis of this thing is also recalled. “Exactly the same thing is repeating itself, exactly the same thing.”(Echographies 24), as we can see in history the repeating of xenophobia repeating itself, we must adapt these memories and the lessons learned to our current situation and understand how it is different.
The technological sphere, Derrida claims, is dominated “today, by television in general”(Echographies 34), and increasingly being dominated by the internet, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Netflix, and technological advancements in communication. In these:
“Already I have the impression that our control is very limited. I am at home [chez moi], but with all these machines and all these prostheses watching, surrounding, seducing us, the quote ‘natural’ conditions of expression, discussion, reflection, deliberation are to a large extent breached, falsified, warped. One’s first impulse would therefore be to at least try to reconstitute the conditions in which one would be able to say at the rhythm at which and in the conditions in which one would be least inappropriate…it is particularly difficult in front of the camera. What is more, the “home”…is no doubt what most violently affected by the intrusion, in truth by the breaking and entering of the tele-powers we’re getting ready to talk about here — as violently injured, moreover, as the historical distinction…between public and private space.”(Echnographies 34–35)
While being watched by technology, we feel uneasy, and not “at home” in fact we feel “foreign” in front of the camera, and our sense of home is violated. Martin Heidegger, who also influenced Derrida, talks a lot about how Dasein (The way of being of the human being) “dwells alongside the world”, as if one is fundamentally “not at home in the world”. He also talks about how Anxiety, or becoming aware of our being-towards-death, makes us feel fundamentally “not at home in the world”. It as if the very presence of foreignness “puts me in question” (Of Hospitality 3). Roland Barthes talks about seeing oneself in photography or in a photograph as a profound disturbance -
“a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity …to become an object made one suffer as much as a surgical operation…In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art…I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death.. I am truly becoming a specter…the photographer must exert himself to the utmost to keep the photograph from becoming Death”(Barthes 12–14).
Barthes suggests that the other with his camera makes me question myself, by putting questions to me, a “subject who feels himself becoming an object”, thus the experience of many is to feel uncomfortable in front of the camera. I personally have been asked many times — “Who will you show this to? Where will you post this picture” when doing street portraits of strangers. I am to them a stranger, and they a stranger to me.
Photography, being filmed, makes us question ourselves (in reference to the idea of the foreigner as he or she perceives us, such as in photography or television) but not only that, the presence and question of an actual foreigner or the foreigner in general makes us question ourselves and our ideas -
“It is often the Foreigner (xenos) who questions. He carried and puts the question…puts the question of the logos of our father Parmenides…The foreigner shakes up the threatening dogmatism of the paternal logos: the being that is, and the nonbeing that is not. As though the Foreigner had to begin by contesting the authority of the chief, the father, the master of the family, the “master of the house,” of the power of hospitality, of the hosti-pets”(Of Hospitality 5)
In this paragraph Derrida is talking about Socrates, who is put to death for corrupting the youth of Athens, and in popular knowledge to questioning authority and questioning the very conception of Being as it was understood at the time. In doing so he threatens the authority which condemns him as guilty for doing so. One has to ask how often we blame foreigners for problems, how often they are scapegoated and how often Xenophobia and this displacement is a defensive reflex. It is as if the foreigner, by speaking a foreign sort of language as Socrates does in his thesis, is acting as if he were a foreigner — and by questioning our norms and accepted truths, “evokes at once blindness and madness” (Of Hospitality 10), as Oedipus, the parricide, evokes when he comes to Colonus and Athens in Oedipus at Colonus.
Recalling Derrida into our memory, how does this relate to the violation of our sense of “home”, of the modern confusion of public and private space? The heart of technology is that it creates a displacement, or “deterritorialization” since people can communicate across borders, images and video can be viewed across space, and all of this can happen within my home.
“What is happening in the world today in the form of what is currently called a ‘return of nationalisms,’ a ‘reappearance of fundamentalisms,’ twitching around the phantasms of soil and blood, racisms, xenophobias, ethnic wars or ethnic cleansing…the here-and-now becomes uncertain, without guarantee: anchoredness, rootedness, the at-home are radically contested. Dislodged. This is nothing new…the at-home has always been tormented by the other, by the guest, by the threat of expropriation. It is constituted only in this threat. But today, we are witnessing such a radical expropriation, deterritorialization, delocalization, dissociation of the political and the local, of the national, of the nation-state and the local, that the response, or rather the reaction, becomes: “I want to be at home, I want finally to be at home, with my own, close to my friends and family” (Echnographies 79)
In other words, fear of the other is not fear of the other as such, but fear of the whole network and apparatus of technology, that does violence to our sense of home and sense of self. Even the very idea of a nationalism, or a system, or an identification, is called into question because of the connectedness of the world, because such things almost don’t exist anymore except as a specter, a recalling by us of the past and resurrecting memory in an attempt to be “at home”, as a suspicion of globalization.
Technology, is meant, for Derrida is meant as the Greek techne, which is often translated as “art or craft” or according to the Miriam Webster dictionary, “Art, Skill, especially: the principles or methods employed in making something or attaining an objective”, and using a pencil to write to write a letter, drawing a picture, or using early film photography and such basic technologies can be defined as “techne” in general. When he discusses globalization and the return of nationalisms, he is thus discussing the rise of globalization caused in part by technology, technological innovations such as television, email, and mass communication, as well as advances in trade and transportation that allow the more efficient exchange of goods and commodities.
Derrida goes into the technological realm further and claims that -
“From the moment when a public authority, a State, this or that State power, gives itself or is recognized as having the right to control, monitor, ban exchanges that those doing the exchanging deem private, but that State can intercept since these private exchanges cross public space and become available there, then every element of hospitality gets disrupted. My “at home” was also constituted by the field of access via my telephone line (through which I can give my time, my word, my friendship my love, my help, to whomever I wish, and so invite whomever I wish to come into my home…now if my ‘home’, in principle inviolable, it is also constituted, and in a more and more essential, interior way, by my phone line, but also by my e-mail, but also by my fax, but also by my access to the Internet…intervention of the State becomes a violation of the inviolable, in the place where inviolable immunity remains the condition of hospitality…wherever the home is violated…you can foresee a privatizing and even familialist reaction, by the widening of the ethnocentric and nationalist, and thus xenophobic circle: not directed against the foreigner as such…but against the anonymous technological power…which threatens, with the home” the traditional conditions of hospitality” (Of Hospitality 51).
I am here reminded a little bit of Michel Foucault’s conception of the “Panoticon” or system of surveillance which assures that power, and in particular state power can intervene and discipline, and form and monitor individuals (see his book Discipline and Punish). While Foucault attempts to write his book on “power” with power as a neutral concept and in a descriptive way, it’s hard to read his work without negative connotations, perhaps due to our familial or privatizing reaction to reading his description of discipline and punishment. Thus there is a certain violence done with the sovereignty of oneself over ones home, “no hospitality without finitude, sovereignty can only be exercised by filtering, choosing, and thus by excluding and doing violence.” (Of Hospitality 55)
Now, whether or not what Derrida states is true, he is highlighting a situation of my “home” where communication and surveillance interrupts my sense of “home”, another example where technology in the form of surveillance intervenes in my home and makes me feel “not-at-home”, “All these techno-scientific possibilities threaten the interiority of the home, and really the very integrity of the self…these possibilities are experienced as threats bearing down on the particular territory of one’s own and on the law of private property.” (Of Hospitality 55)
In Of Hospitality, Derrida discusses the taking in and welcoming of the other or stranger into one’s home. Importantly he opposes conditional aspects of hospitality — such as the “screening” of someone or determining their identity before accepting them. To this he opposes the law of absolute hospitality (which is similar to Kant’s idea of the Categorical Imperative), which is an ideal that we should accept any foreigner regardless of who they are, without giving them a “face” or identity.
“It seems to to dictate that absolute hospitality should break with the law of hospitality as right or duty, with the ‘pact’ of hospitality. To put it in different terms, absolute hospitality requires that I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner (provided with a family name, with the social status of being a foreigner, etc.), but to the absolute unknown, anonymous other, and that I give place to them, that I let them come, that I let them arrive, and take place in the place I offer them, without asking of them either reciprocity (entering into a pact) or even their names. The law of absolute hospitality commands a break with hospitality by right, with law or justice as rights. Just hospitality breaks with hospitality by right; not that it condemns or is opposed to it, and it can on the contrary set and maintain it in a perpetual progressive movement; but it is as strangely heterogeneous to it is justice is heterogeneous to the law to which it is yet so close, from which in truth it is indissociable” (Of Hospitality 26–27)
Thus absolute hospitality is not a right or duty, it is an absolute and infinite responsibility towards the other. It seems that Derrida derives his treatment of the other again here from Levinas, who posits that ethics and justice are first philosophy.
Popular or “practical” common wisdom holds that technology and progress cannot be stopped. Nietzsche is more cynical take on conservatism was told by him as follows in The Twilight of the Idols:
“43. Whispered to the conservatives. — What was not known formerly, what is known, or might be known, today: a reversion, a return in any sense or degree is simply not possible. We physiologists know that. Yet all priests and moralists have believed the opposite — they wanted to take mankind back, to screw it back, to a former measure of virtue. Morality was always a bed of Procrustes. Even the politicians have aped the preachers of virtue at this point: today too there are still parties whose dream it is that all things might walk backwards like crabs. But no one is free to be a crab. Nothing avails: one must go forward — step by step further into decadence (that is my definition of modern “progress”). One can check this development and thus dam up degeneration, gather it and make it more vehement and sudden: one can do no more.” (Nietzsche Section 43, pg. 78)
While Nietzsche to me reads as a conservative theorist, he is often used by modern conservatives, especially the Far Right and historically by the Nazis, he is often accused of being misinterpreted and used out of context by both. However, this quote itself holds that progress cannot be stopped, and subtly calls into question the idea that somehow virtue is only found in the past, and that salvation can only be found in traditional values and ideals, and not in the possibilities offered by the future. One can be sure, however, that Nietzsche, unlike Derrida, valued tradition and “German culture” more than so-called “decadence”, which proved after his death to be a dangerous proposition.
Works Cited
Derrida, Jacques. Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews. Polity, 2002.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Hospitality. Stanford UP, 2000.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Hill and Wang: New York, 1980.
Nietzsche, Friederich. Twilight of the Idols. Hackett, 1997.
