The Unconditional Condition of Peace

Abstract

This article, inspired by the Derridean thinking of hospitality, attempts to reflect upon the conditions of peace and hospitality, taking a reading of Kant's ‘Toward Perpetual Peace’ as its guiding thread. It endeavours to show that the peace that inhospitable nations maintain between themselves is necessarily illusory, as they continue to amass the restrictive conditions of their hospitality. The hypothesis is proposed that the guiding thread that links the elements of the hyperbolic ethics that Derrida deploys in his ‘questions of responsibility’ seminars indeed concerns this unconditional condition of peace, of which hospitality is the first law.