Prof. Dr. Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung 

with Manuela García Aldana

Block Seminars

Wednesdays 10:00 - 17:00 at HKW

First meeting: 21.05.2025

**

Block Seminars at HKW(10:00 - 17:00)

21.05.2025

25.06.2025

02.07.2025

16.07.2025

23.07.2025

**

Caminante, no hay camino / Traveler, There Is No Road

— On guests and hosts, hospitality and hostility —

“Caminante, son tus huellas

el camino y nada más;

Caminante, no hay camino,

se hace camino al andar.

Al andar se hace el camino,

y al volver la vista atrás

se ve la senda que nunca

se ha de volver a pisar.

Caminante, no hay camino

sino estelas en la mar.”

Traveler, your footprints

are the only road, nothing else.

Traveler, there is no road;

you make your own path as you walk.

As you walk, you make your own road,

and when you look back

you see the path

you will never travel again.

Traveler, there is no road;

only a ship’s wake on the sea.

Antonio Machado’s “Caminante, no hay camino / Traveler, There Is

No Road”

At the core of spatial strategies and the politics of space is the question of movement and

displacement, of who ist the host and who the guest, who has or does not have space,

who gives and who is not given space and under what conditions… in short, at the crux of

spatial strategies is the question of the intersection between hospitality and hostility:

Hostipitality.

As history reveals, from time immemorial, humans have moved, freely or by force, from A

to B, and have always relied on the hospitality of the host to find a resting place. In his

philosophy of hospitality Derrida differentiates between the ‘law of unlimited hospitality’

and ‘laws of hospitality’:

“The law of unlimited hospitality (to give the new arrival all of one’s home and

oneself, to give him or her one’s own, our own, without asking a name, or

compensation, or the fulfilment of even the smallest condition), and on the other

hand, the laws (in the plural), those rights and duties that are always conditioned

and conditional, as they are defined by the Greco-Roman tradition and even the

Judaeo-Christian one, by all of law and all philosophy of law up to Kant and Hegel in

particular, across the family, civil society, and the State.” 1

Derrida who considers hospitality as always conditional sees the exercise of hospitality on

two practical levels of inviting and welcoming the ‘stranger’ at the personal level of the

private home or at the level of the nation state. But Derrida sees in the concept of

hospitality an ambiguity that stems far back from its proto-Indo-European etymological

derivation, which encompasses the words ‘stranger’, ‘guest’, but also ‘power’. 2 This power

gradient inherent in the concept of hospitality is at the root of what Derrida called:

“an essential ‘self limitation’ built right into the idea of hospitality, which preserves

the distance between one’s own and the ‘stranger’, between owning one’s own

property and inviting the ‘other’ into one’s home.” 3

So by welcoming someone into your home, you the host thus have the possibility of

exercising power. Here a few things could be taken into consideration. So while you give

your guest a ‘roof over his head’, the pleasure derived doesn’t only come from the altruistic

act, but also pleasure is gotten from keeping your guest at your mercy, especially if there is

an existential, economic and political dependence. Also, the power of making the guest the

‘other’, constructing the subordinate, or through a process of identification the guest might

be stamped or categorized. So concepts of hospitality see-saw in balancing acts of the

host renouncing and at the same time proclaiming his mastery. So the concept of

hospitality encompasses these schizophrenic acts of invitation or attraction to ‘feel at

home’, but at the same time repulsion by reminding that the guest doesn’t share property

and is expected to leave. So the guest is always a guest and always in a state of limbo,

except in those cases like in colonialism where the guest comes with the power of

suppression, denigration, dispropriation, dispossession and dehumanisation. Otherwise,

the guest is always in a state of coming and never arriving. Looking at Derrida’s points

from the perspective of the nation state, e.g. in Germany, Netherlands or Belgium with the

concepts of the Gastarbeiter (migrant guest workers), or in the Nordic countries

invandringsarbetarskraft (workforce-immigration), who imported workers from Turkey, Italy,

Spain and all over the Southern Hemisphere from the 1950s to 70s, this would mean that

1 J Derrida Of Hospitality, Anne Du fourmantelle invites Jacques Derrida to respond (Stanford, Stanford

University Press 2000)

2 K O’Gorman ‘Modern Hospitality: Lessons from the past’ Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management 12

(2) 2005 pp 141–151

3 JDCaputoDeconstructionInANutshell:Aconversationwith Jacques Derrida (New York, Fordham University

Press 2002) p 110

these so called ‘guests’, who were and are still expected to leave will forever be in a state

of limbo. The scenario becomes even more complex when one thinks of other

constellations, e.g. refugees that come into a country as mostly unwanted ‘guests’,

especially because their coming in not tied to any particular economic gain on the side of

the host, or contexts of colonial dependencies. Here again the power gradient expresses

itself in multifold dimensions, e.g. the coloniser as a ‘guest’ using force to stay in the

colony, the ex-coloniser using force to evict the ex-colonised from the territory of the

metropolis etc.

The relationship between the host and the guest is conditional, and it is a thin line between

being a guest or a parasite, as both exist sometimes simultaneously, side-by-side, parallel,

one-after-the-other. Despite this, Derrida puts in question the limitations of national

hospitality toward legal and illegal immigrants.

How can the concept of hospitality be understood in our contemporary with massive shifts

to the politically extrem right across the globe? What are the conditions that make the

conditional hospitality still count as hospitality? Are there any possibilities of creating

moments of unconditionality before they get suffocated by conditional hospitality? How

does the violence of the nation state exercise hostility on its weakest citizens?

According to popular lore some regions around the world, be it Minnesota, Pakhtunistan

(the Land of hospitality), African countries or the Orient are said to be most hospitable and

hence such expressions like “Minnesota nice” or “Southern hospitality”. Coming to think of

it, hospitality holds a very important place in many cultures, and their myths. In Greek

mythology Zeus was the god of hospitality and one of the ways of worshiping Zeus was to

be hospitable to strangers, so every passer-by is said to have been invited into the family

house and the stranger’s feet were washed, food and wine were offered and the stranger

was made comfortable even before asking the strangers name. From a biblical point of

view, there are numerous counts of hospitality. An early one, and absurd one, is in

Genesis 19 (The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah), where Abraham’s nephew Lot not

only pleadingly beckons two angels into his house, baked unleavened bread and made

them a feast and also protects them from rape by a wild mob and instead offers his two

daughters to the mob (!) in the name of hospitality:

“Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you,

bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes: only unto these

men do nothing; for therefore came they under the shadow of my roof.” 4

4 Genesis 19;8, Holy Bible (King James Version)

This later saved Lot from the subsequent destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

If one were to take a yawning leap into modern European philosophy, even a figure like

Immanuel Kant formulated outstanding legal thoughts on the subjects of ‘hostility’ and

‘hospitality’ in his treatise on international law of 1795.

“[…] hospitality means the right of a stranger not to be treated as an enemy when

he arrives in the land of another. One may refuse to receive him when this can be

done without causing his destruction, but so long as he peacefully occupies his

place, one may not treat him with hostility. […] it is only a right of temporary sojourn

that all men have as a right to associate by virtue of their common possession of the

surface of the earth, where, as a globe, they cannot infinitely disperse and hence

must finally tolerate the presence of each other. Originally, no one had more right

than another to a particular part of the earth.” 5

In this indeed astonishing position, Kant makes clear that universal hospitality in a right to

humanity, and less a matter of philanthropy than of right. Despite his stressing on the

temporality of the sojourn of the guest, Kant makes a point against hostility and micro-

space nation state mentality, but endorses a global thinking of the earth as a common

space. At any rate, we are all just passers-by on this earth and thus every human

existence is but temporal. Again in his Toward Perpetual Peace – A Philosophical Sketch,

in ‘The law of world citizenship is to be united to conditions of universal hospitality’, Kant

tries to distinguish between peacefully setting foot into a territory and asking to be

accepted into that society from being accepted into the society. Though it is not very clear

as to what line he chooses there, he makes the point that hospitality means the right of a

visiting foreigner not to be treated as an enemy. Kant even thereby goes a far as naming

hospitality as a precondition for ‘perpetual peace’ between nations and mankind. But the

ultimate point Kant tries to make in his reflections on notions of hostility and hospitality,

using the spatial strategies metaphor, is that:

“human beings enjoy a universal right to hospitality because they share a space, the

‘surface of the earth’” 6 .

5 Kant, Immanuel: Zum ewigen Frieden. Ein philosophischer Entwurf. In Kant: Gesammelte

Schriften. Erste Abtheilung: Werke. Band VIII. Abhandlungen nach 1781.

Herausgegeben von der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. De

Gruyter 1923, Berlin/Leipzig, 341–386.

6 Minkkinen, Panu. "HOSTILITY AND HOSPITALITY."

Interestingly, most right-wing organisations base their violent world views and politics on

their European cultural values, which are known to be remnants of Greek culture, and

many of such organisations see their Judeo-Christian culture, tradition and religion at

stake. What about the values of unconditional hospitality that the aforementioned models

embody? What about these concepts of hospitality propagated by Immanuel Kant and co.

in the wake of nation state building and foundation making of modern European

philosophy?

In the diverse and heterogeneous cosmos of African philosophies, it is recurrent that

hospitality is perceived as “an unconditional readiness to share,” 7 i.e. giving without the

pressures of expectations, or to put it in Julius Gathogo’s elegant words “this sharing has

to be social and religious in scope. In view of this, it can be simply seen as the willingness

to give, to help, to assist, to love and to carry one another’s burden without necessarily

putting profit or rewards as the driving force.” 8 As African philosophers like G.I. Olikenyi 9

and co. have pointed out, the concept of hospitality stands as a backbone in many African

cultures and is considered to be one of the few characteristics in African societies that

have survived the 600 years of slavery, imperialism, colonialism, despotism and all sorts

of technology. The complexity of hospitality in many African cultures is the marriage of

African philosophies, African religions and the adopted religions of the colonisers, who

despite cruel acts in reality preached peaceful words of God, of which hospitality was on

the top of the list. And indeed hospitality could be considered a vital element in the

conception of personhood and of communality - that state of interdependence in relations,

socio-political structures, consciousness and philosophies or worldviews - in many African

societies, as expressed for example in Akan and Igbo philosophies. These virtues of

hospitality are not only revered for strengthening the bonds between human beings in their

societies, but also between the people and their collective and personal traditional gods. It

is in this line that in his aforementioned paper, Julius Gathogo expatiates on one of today’s

most popular and even exploited concepts or philosophies of hospitality, i.e.

“Unhu among the Shona of Zimbabwe; Ubuntu among the Nguni speakers of

Southern Africa; Utu among the Swahili speakers of East Africa; and Umundu

among the Kikuyu of Kenya, among others. Basically, it is both a philosophical and

a religious concept that defines the individual in terms of his or her relationships

7 A. Echema, Corporate personality in Igbo Society and the Sacrament of Reconciliation (Frankfurt am

Main: Peter Lang, 1995), 35.

8 Gathogo, Julius. "African philosophy as expressed in the concepts of hospitality and ubuntu." Journal of theology for

Southern Africa 130 (2008): 39.

9 G. I. Olikenyi, African hospitality: A model for the Communication of the Gospel in the African Cultural

context (Nettetal: Steylerverlag, 2001), 102.

with others. In the African context, it suggests that the person one is to become, by

behaving with humanity, is an ancestor worthy of respect or veneration. In other

words, those who uphold the principle of Ubuntu throughout their earthly lives will

be rewarded or promoted in death by becoming ancestors.” 10

This by no way should imply any idealisation of African societies, as the levels of hostility

experienced by some of the most vulnerable intra African refugees is well known and

documented.

This course will employ Derrida’s concept of hostipitality and the current HKW exhibition

“Musafiri — Of Travelers and Guests” as points of departure to deliberate on the

intersection of spatial politics and hospitality, the triggers of hostility in hospitality –

historically and in the contemporary.

Source material:

Jacques Derrida. Hostipitality.

https://eclass.uoa.gr/modules/document/file.php/PPP668/Η%20φιλοξενία/Derrida%2C%20

Hostipitality.pdf

Whose Land Have I Lit on Now? Contemplations on the Notions of Hospitality

https://www.archivebooks.org/whose-land-have-i-lit-on-now/

***

PROF. DR.  Bonaventure Ndikung

Individual meetings arranging  via Ayse Karahan:  Ayse.Karahan@hkw.de