Rethinking the Notion of Hospitality in Migration Cinema. La faute à Voltaire (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2000)

Abstract

The crisis of Syrian refugees, the questioning of the Schengen treaty or the impending referendum in the UK, called for within the horizon of increasingly closing off the European borders to immigrants, force us to reconsider the notion of hospitality. Derrida establishes two types of hospitality, an unconditional one, located above the law, and one subjected to the law of hospitality itself, according to which not everybody is welcome or invited into the host country. Mireille Rosello warns us about the danger of using the terms «invited» or «host country», which have been fully internalized. To be invited means that one can be «uninvited», or «expelled», at any time, since to invite someone implies a unilateral act on the part of the one making the invitation. Many immigrants, however, are not «invited» to the host countries, they work in them and hence contribute to the bulding of the countries they live in Poetical Refugee (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2000) provides a perfect setting to think about the feasibility of unconditional hospitality in the 21st century.