Under the name of hospitality, we understand the generous opening of our space and time to another who is in principle a stranger. This willingness to welcome the other, both stranger and fellow, is an unconditional duty for anyone who wishes to live as a human being. Levinas and Derrida have written eloquently on this idea. But this is an old ‘Christian trope’. In fact, as Derrida notes in The Gift of Death, the mysterium tremendum of dying for the other is the secret of the historic and political responsibility that engulfs the future of European politics. The ‘weakness’ of a God who dies for the fellow other makes hospitality imaginable in a political context marked by the idea of a community with borders.

Derrida arrives at the idea of hospitality via the ideas of fraternity and friendship. In fact, in Politics of Friendship, Derrida undertakes the deconstruction of several political texts in which the idea of a political community is associated with that of proximity, as if it were an extension of the idea of the brotherhood proper to the family. His aim is to situate the political beyond fraternity and consequently beyond the family schema. The political deals with the distant other who arrives to my side; not with the one who is in my genealogy. Separation is the condition of possibility, and at the same time of impossibility, of the political friend, he says, echoing Schmitt's political concept of the political as friend–enemy relationship.

Indeed, one of the Christian tropes that Derrida takes most seriously is the Judeo-Christian ethos of ‘brotherhood’. He speaks of the Christian semantics of fraternity, specifically of a ‘christianization of fraternization’. In fact, brotherhood was a Christian appropriation of the classical Greco-Latin trope: ‘brother or sister in religion’. According to Derrida, Kant's statement that ‘all men represent themselves as brothers under a universal father’ remains rooted in the need for natural fraternity, and thus refers to the anthropological schema of the family. By deconstructing the elements of ‘natural’ and ‘spatial contiguity’, generally attributed to fraternity, Derrida tries to decentre the Christian trope of fraternity.