On the Mediterranean’s Shores
Derridean Hyperbolic Hospitality and Its Limits
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5195/jffp.2025.1100Abstract
The Mediterranean Sea has always been a site of crossings, encounters and becomings. Since the early 2010s, however, migrants coming primarily from Africa and West Asia now cross the water knowing that they are voyaging between life and death, and increasingly, they see that they test the limits of the hospitality that those on the northern shores of the Mediterranean are willing to extend. The Mediterranean becomes what Édouard Glissant refers to as a “matrix” of migrant precarity, particularly as European governments abdicate any responsibility for those boats that capsize on the high seas. After their perilous journey across the Mediterranean, migrants are unsure as to whether Europeans will grant them a hospitable reception, or, for that matter, allow them to remain. In a world where “millions and millions of living beings—human or not—who are denied not only their basic ‘human rights,’ which date back two centuries and are constantly being refined, but first of all the right to a life worthy of being lived,” questions of migration and hospitality, particularly through an engagement with the work of Jacques Derrida, become more urgent than ever.
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