HOSP 6 (3) pp. 243–255 Intellect Limited 2016
Hospitality & Society
Volume 6 Number 3
© 2016 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/hosp.6.3.243_1
GERASIMOS KAKOLIRIS
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Hospitality and non-human
beings: Jacques Derrida’s
reading of D. H. Lawrence’s
poem ‘Snake’
ABSTRACT
KEYWORDS
This article presents Jacques Derrida’s reading of D. H. Lawrence’s poem, ‘Snake’.
The question guiding the reading of this particular poem concerns the extent to
which our ethical responsibility (as hosts) extends to non-human animals as well.
Derrida analyses this poem under the burden of Levinas’s uncomfortable hesitation to grant animals a ‘face’, and therefore to make humans ethically responsible
towards them. In Derrida’s reading of the poem, hospitality ceases to fall under the
condition that the other must be a human. In the unexpected encounter between
the man-narrator and a snake in the poem, hospitality blurs the boundaries allowing the Other to appear in non-anthropocentric terms, claiming a place within the
human ethical responsibility. If ‘hospitality’ means the crossing of boundaries,
then it requires allowing the other of the human, the animal, to cross the boundary traditionally fixed between the two, yet without having to prove first that the
animal is ‘like the human’, namely without assimilating the otherness of the animal
into the human. Hospitality renegotiates the issue of crossing the limits-boundaries
between species.
hospitality
animals
Derrida
D. H. Lawrence
Levinas
ethics
responsibility
243
Gerasimos Kakoliris
1. Derrida uses the
neologism ‘carnophallogocentric’ in
order to refer to three
dominant aspects of
western thought and
culture: meat-eating,
virility and reason.
There is, according
to him, an ‘affinity
between carnivorous
sacrifice, at the basis
of our culture and
our law, and all the
cannibalisms, symbolic
or not, that structure
intersubjectivity in
nursing, love, mourning
and, in truth, in all
symbolic or linguistic
appropriations’
(Derrida 1994: 43,
2002a: 247).
In the summer of 2015, an ‘uninvited’ cat along with her three fearful
kittens moved into the storeroom of the staircase in the three-storey
building where I live. Suddenly, just like that, without an invitation
and without submitting to us a request of hospitality in any language!
Without seemingly knowing that the abode in question was under our
ownership and that she had to respect that. It is well known that cats do
not read ownership contracts. But even if that were the case, it would
not change the state of hostageship we were facing. The cat had put
us in a position of responsibility and we had no authority of decision
on that. Nothing could change the fact that four little creatures had
bestowed their existence upon us. No possible ‘no’ could ward off the
responsibility we had not chosen, namely a responsibility that comes
before any choice. No possibility of escaping the other, who, in this
case, was an animal.
What is the place occupied traditionally by animals in the practices of hospitality? Certainly, they are rarely seen as guests or even hosts. Animals – as
non-human beings who do not fall within an ethics of hospitality – draw their
given ‘value’ in relation to hospitality from their real or symbolic usefulness in
‘carno-phallogocentric’1 meals of hospitality. Animals are often ‘sacrificed’ on
the altar of hospitality, especially among men, as was the case, for example,
of Abraham during the hospitality of the three angels. According to Genesis,
Abraham ‘ran unto the herd, and fetched a calf tender and good, and gave
it unto a young man; and he hasted to dress it’ and then laid it along with
milk and butter before his guests (Genesis, 18: 7–8). As Derrida observes in
his interview with Jean-Luc Nancy under the title of ‘“Eating Well”, or the
calculation of the subject’, the subject, including the subject of hospitality –
who is dominated by the scheme of ‘the virile strength of the adult male, the
father, husband, or brother’ – is not content by simply wanting ‘to master and
possess nature actively. In our cultures, he accepts sacrifice and eats flesh’
(Derrida 1992: 295, 1995: 281). Not only our practices but also the hegemonic discourse of western thought and religions, including its most original
forms as, for example, those assumed in the work of Martin Heidegger or
Emmanuel Levinas, are governed by a ‘sacrificial structure’, in the sense that
they allow the killing of animals without considering this as a crime.
In the session of 27 February 2002, included in The Beast and the Sovereign,
Vol. I. (Derrida 2008a, 2009), Derrida refers to D. H. Lawrence’s poem, ‘Snake’
(see end of article). The question guiding the reading of this particular poem
concerns the extent to which our ethical responsibility (as hosts) extends
to the animals in general. Derrida analyses this poem under the burden of
Levinas’s uncomfortable hesitation to grant animals a ‘face’, and therefore to
make humans ethically responsible towards them. In Levinas’s philosophical language, the ‘face’ represents the Other’s fundamental (yet unfounded)
ethical dimension within an interpersonal relation. In one of his interviews in
1986, when Levinas was asked by his collocutors whether non-humans have
a ‘face’ – in the sense that he himself attributes to this particular term – the
only thing that he was prepared to say was ‘I don’t know’:
According to your analysis, the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ is revealed
by the human face; but is the commandment not also expressed in the face of an
animal? Can an animal be considered as the other that must be welcomed? Or is
it necessary to possess the possibility of speech to be a ‘face’ in the ethical sense?
244 Hospitality & Society
Hospitality and non-human beings
I cannot say at what moment you have the right to be called ‘face’. The
human face is completely different and only afterwards do we discover
the face of an animal. I don’t know if a snake has a face. I can’t answer
that question. A more specific analysis is needed.
(Levinas 1988: 171–72)2
Derrida starts his commentary on the poem by saying:
One might wonder: OK, the snake has eyes, it has a tongue, it has a
head to some extent, does it have the face? What about the snake’s
face? And it’s under the sign of this serious, poetic question (especially for Levinas’s ethics), that I wanted to read you this text by D. H.
Lawrence, ‘Snake’.
(Derrida 2008a: 317, 2009: 237–38)
One of the most interesting aspects of the poem has to do with the fact that it
does not offer an idealized construction of non-human reality, but an encounter between a man and an animal (a snake in this case), not in a mythological
context3 but in reality and all its complexity and ensuing problems and questions.4 For Derrida, the poem raises in an exemplary manner the question to
what extent ‘an ethics or a moral prescription obligate us only to those like
us’, those similar to us, as implied by Levinas’s ethics, or whether ‘it obligate
us with respect to anyone at all, any living being at all, and therefore with
respect to the animal?’ (Derrida 2008a: 326, 2009: 244). Importantly, Derrida
refers here to a responsibility which ‘obligates us with respect to anyone at all,
any living being at all’ and not simply to humans or animals.5
This allows us to raise in passing the issue of ethical responsibility and
hospitality towards plants.6 For example, bending to water one’s plants, one
may discover an uninvited visitor: another plant, probably a weed that grew
next to his or her favourite gardenia. Full of love for his/her plant threatened
by someone else’s unexpected arrival and existence, he or she will probably uproot the ‘parasite’, hence restoring order in his or her garden but also
allowing his or her plant to grow undisturbed. Nonetheless, the fact remains
that he or she has sacrificed a life, namely the life of an unexpected visitor,
even if that was in favour of another plant’s life or well-being. The question
raised here is to what extent we are also responsible for our uninvited visitor
when that visitor is not a human or an animal but a plant.7 Can we recognize
in this case a plea of the kind ‘Thou shalt not kill’, as in the case of the human
face? The plant has neither face nor language. Yet, vulnerability does not need
a face or a language to become manifest. This does not concern humans or
animals, but any form of life. Life is permanently determined by its relentless
exposure to death. Above people and animals, the lack of hospitality towards
plants equals their death most of the times. Kant’s maxim that a stranger
‘can indeed be turned away, if this can be done without causing his death’
(1989: 105–06) is rarely applied in the case of a plant, despite the fact that, in
some cases, there is the possibility of uprooting an ‘unwanted’ plant from the
garden and re-planting it somewhere else. Yet, this possibility concerns only a
limited number of plants, only those for which re-plantation is possible. As is
well known, not all the plants can be re-planted.
Derrida’s detailed reading avoids the formulation of ethical arguments
and identifies those expressions in Lawrence’s poem (including important
metaphors) allowing him to undermine the anthropocentric view r­egarding
2. Levinas’s hesitancy
to grant animals
a ‘face’ should be
comprehended within
the more general
context of his negative
view regarding the
non-human domain
(Plant 2011: 56–57).
Nevertheless, in his
partly autobiographical
text ‘The name of a
dog, or natural rights’,
Levinas praises a dog,
Bobby, for its kindness
and hospitable feelings
towards him and
his fellow prisoners
during their captivity
by the Nazis – unlike
humans, who treated
them mostly if not with
hostility, certainly with
indifference. As Levinas
notes:
[A]bout halfway
through our long
captivity, for a few
short weeks, before
the sentinels
chased him away,
a wandering dog
entered our lives.
One day he came
to meet this rabble
as we returned
under guard from
work. He survived
in some wild patch
in the region of
the camp. But we
called him Bobby,
an exotic name, as
one does with a
cherished dog. He
would appear at
morning assembly
and was waiting for
us as we returned,
jumping up and
down and barking
in delight. For him,
there was no doubt
that we were men.
(1990: 153)
Some years later,
Levinas similarly recalls
in an interview:
In this corner of
Germany, where
walking through
the village we
would be looked at
by the villagers as
Juden, this dog
evidently took us
for human beings.
The villagers
certainly did not
www.intellectbooks.com 245
Gerasimos Kakoliris
injure us or do us
any harm, but their
expressions were
clear. We were the
condemned and
the contaminated
carriers of germs.
And this little dog
welcomed us at the
entrance of the
camp, barking
happily and jumping
up and down
amicably around us.
(2001: 41)
3. In relation to the
mythological
representations of the
relationship between
humans and animals,
Derrida notes in The
Animal That Therefore I
Am:
Above all, it was
necessary to avoid
fables. We know
the history of
fabulization and
how it remains an
anthropomorphic
taming, a moralizing
subjugation, a
domestication.
Always a discourse
of man, on man,
indeed on the
animality of man,
but for and in man.
(2006: 60, 2008b: 37)
4. As Anna Barcz observes:
Despite the
acknowledged
tradition of
anthropomorphic
animals in fables,
which like in La
Fontaine’s stories
represent some
human qualities,
the situation
described in
Lawrence’s poem is
different be­cause it
is constructed as a
reference to a real,
wild creature that
comes suddenly to
drink some water.
(2013: 172)
5. A considerable amount
of work has been
published on Derrida
and animals in recent
years, something that
is very indicative of the
current interest in this
topic. See, for example,
Judith Still’s Derrida
246 Hospitality & Society
the relationship between humans and animals, that is, those expressions
allowing him to proceed to the crossing of the established barrier between
the dominant human and the animal. This suggests a hospitable thought
towards the Other(s), and in this case, the animal. Hence, Derrida will state
at the beginning of the seminar that the poem in question ‘concerns just
about everything we’ve approached directly or indirectly’ with regards to the
relationship ‘between what is called man and animal’ (Derrida 2008a: 316,
2009: 236).
According to the poem, which is written in the first person, when the
narrator goes to his water-trough to bring water with the pitcher, ‘On a
hot, hot day’ he meets a snake that has arrived before him to drink water.
Facing the view of an unexpected visitor, the man stands and waits ‘And
must wait, must stand and wait, for there he [the snake] was at the trough
before me’. Derrida’s reading plays upon the ambiguity of the phrase ‘he was
at the trough before me’, which may mean that the other was at the watertrough before me, that is, that he arrived at the water-trough first, but it
may also mean that he was there before me, looking at me, in a face to face
relation, something that forces us to consider the Levinasian ethical problematic of whether the snake has a face. The phrase ‘there he was […] before
me’ could also mean that he was there, in the world, before me, before the
human beings as the Bible says. Derrida construes this scene of encounter
as a scene of hospitality par excellence. The man waits out of respect for
the other, because the other was there first, but also because the other is
a guest:
He is therefore a guest: this is a classic scene, a classic biblical scene,
a classic Middle Eastern scene: it happens near a source of water, the
scene of hospitality takes place near a source of water, in an oasis or
near a well, and the question of hospitality is posed as to water, as to
the disposition of the water source.
(Derrida 2008a: 321, 2009: 240–41)
Offering drinking water is a fundamental act of hospitality. The first thing
usually offered to a guest is a glass of water. In the excerpt above, Derrida
alludes clearly to the source where Rebekah drew the water she offered to
Abraham’s envoy servant who had arrived in Mesopotamia to ask for a spouse
for Isaac following his father’s orders. When the unknown stranger pleads
for water, ‘Let me, I pray thee, drink a little water of thy pitcher’, Rebekah
responds positively:
‘Drink, my lord’ and she hasted, and let down her pitcher upon her
hand, and gave him drink. And when she had done giving him drink,
she said, I will draw water for thy camels also, until they have done
drinking.
(Genesis, 24: 18–19)
Rebekah did not only offer water to the stranger but she also watered the
camels, even though this was not requested by him. Not only the stranger
but also his camels needed to quench their thirst. As Judith Still comments:
‘This makes practical sense of course, and is of benefit to the travelling man.
However, in the absence of any indication in the Genesis text, we could
surmise that she shows hospitality to the animals as well’ (2010: 245).
Hospitality and non-human beings
Moreover, drinking water could entail ‘the difference between life and
death in a desert’ – and even if the Biblical context to which Derrida refers to
is the one of an ancient story, water resources, water scarcity and water safety
are contemporary problems of global significance (Still 2010: 246). The watertrough is not an ordinary place but an object of desire, and as such it could
become a field of domination and consequently a field of conflict between
men over the eco-system.8
The use of the personal pronoun ‘he’ instead of ‘it’ to refer to the snake
seems to constitute a kind of invitation as it is opposed to the distance people
usually keep from that specific reptile because of fear or repulsion upon its
sight. The relationship between people and snakes is entirely different from
the one people maintain with domestic animals, or with species of animals
they are more familiar with. The snake appears in the poem as ‘someone’, as a
person, as a distinct being, and as such, he has his own view about things, his
own way of seeing the man, whist all this remains unknown and inaccessible
to the man-narrator. What may the snake be thinking before raising his head
to look at him? Aside from its physical traits (his colour, his length etc.), the
only thing that the man knows pertains to snakes in general, as a particular
animal species (e.g., that some snakes are poisonous, etc.). He knows absolutely nothing, though, about that particular, singular snake (e.g., he knows
absolutely nothing about the way the snake feels before him, or about the
snake’s intentions, etc.). The snake is, and remains wholly Other.
‘Someone was before me at my water-trough, / And I, like a second comer, waiting’. The expression ‘second comer’ does not relate, according to Derrida as
explained above, only with the later arrival of the other (namely, the arrival of
the man who reached the water-trough after the snake), but also with the fact
that in my ethical relationship with the Other, the Other comes first, whilst
I ‘follow’ (‘Je viens après’), as well as with the fact that my responsibility
towards the Other does not emanate from myself, but from the Other himself
or herself. In my relationship with the Other, I am but a ‘second comer’.
Within this context, Derrida recalls Levinas’s assertion that ethics starts with
an ‘After you!’ (‘Après vous!’):9
and Other Animals:
The Boundaries of the
Human (2015), Anne
E. Berger’s and Marta
Segarra’s (eds), Thinking
(of) Animals After
Derrida (2011), Matthew
Calarco’s, Zoographies:
The Question of the
Animal from Heidegger
to Derrida (2008) and
Leonard Lawlor’s This
is not Sufficient: An
Essay on Animality
and Human Nature in
Derrida (2007).
6. From the perspective
of the ‘hyper-ethics’ of
‘unconditional
hospitality’, hospitality
should be offered,
according to Derrida,
unconditionally to
anyone, whether human,
animal or plant, without
any identification,
differentiation or
discrimination. As he
claims, for example, in
‘The deconstruction of
actuality’ (1993):
[…] a ‘come’ must be
open and addressed
to someone, to
someone else
whom I cannot and
must not determine
in advance-not as
subject, self,
consciousness, or
even as animal,
God or person, man
or woman, living or
nonliving […]. The
one, whoever it is
to whom ‘come’ is
said, cannot let
him/herself be
determined in
advance. For
absolute
hospitality, he/she
is the stranger, the
one who arrives.
(Derrida 2002b: 94–95,
original emphasis)
The first sign of respect for the other is ‘after you’. This doesn’t just
mean something like ‘go ahead’ at the elevator, etc., it means ‘I come
after you,’ and I come to myself, to my responsibility as an ego, in some
sense, only from the other. The other is there before me, and I receive
the order from the other who precedes me. That is the situation when
faced with the other, and he not only goes ahead of me, must go ahead
of me, but is there before me. So I say ‘After you,’ and it’s my first
address to the other as other.
(Derrida 2008a: 318–19, 2009: 238–39)
Derrida then explains that our ethical responsibility towards the other cannot
depend on who the other is and whether s/he is a human or an animal:
[…] morality, ethics, the relation to the other, is not only coming after
the other, helping oneself after the other, but after the other whoever it
be, before even knowing who he is or what is his dignity, his price, his
social standing, in other words, the first comer. I must respect the first
comer, whoever it be.
(Derrida 2008a: 319, 2009: 239, original emphasis)
For an overall account
of Derrida’s views
on hospitality, see
Kakoliris (2015). For a
critical engagement
with Derrida’s
philosophical
treatment of plants,
see Jeffrey T. Nealon’s,
‘Animal and plant, life
and world in Derrida;
or, the plant and the
sovereign’ (2016).
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Gerasimos Kakoliris
7. In his article ‘Is it
ethical to eat plants?’,
Michael Marder
identifies hospitality
towards plants with
simply letting them
be, ‘regardless of
whether we consider
them useful, useless, or
harmful, be they fruit
trees or weeds’ (2013:
34).
8. The management of
water resources today
does not concern
humans only, but it is
an issue for the ecosystem in toto.
9. In his exchange with
Philippe Nemo under
the title Ethics and
Infinity (1981), Levinas
makes the following
observation:
[…] the analysis of
the face such as
I have just made,
with the mastery
of the Other and
his poverty, with
my submission
and my wealth,
is primary. It is
the presupposed
in all human
relationships. If it
were not that, we
would not even
say, before an open
door, ‘After you,
sir!’ It is an original
‘After you, sir!’
that I have tried to
describe.
(1985: 89)
10. For Anna Barcz, ‘The
word “cattle” also
has associations with
vulnerability – they
are slaughtered for
food at man’s whim
and there is no sense
of guilt or moral
responsibility’ (2013:
173). We cannot fail to
remember here Sergei
Eisenstein’s film, Strike
(1925), in which the
scenes of the army’s
final attack against the
strikers are juxtaposed
to the scenes of the
cattle slaughter in the
slaughterhouse, where
sharp knives cut open
the cattle’s carotids
that watch anguished
248 Hospitality & Society
Lawrence’s description of the way the snake lifted its head ‘He lifted his head
from his drinking, as cattle do, / And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do’,
uses a metaphor to make a connection which also reminds us the regularly perceived difference between, on the one hand, peaceful, domesticated
cattle, bred for consumption, pertaining to the law of the oikos (economy)
and, hence, allowed to drink their water, and on the other hand, the animal
outside the economy, which does not fall under the authority of the host,
which is not part of the oikos, which is a foreign intruder and a potentially
dangerous enemy (e.g. the snake, or the ‘annoying’ insects), and which can,
therefore, be killed at any point. From a different perspective, the way the
snake looks at the man, ‘as drinking cattle do’ seems to reflect the same kind
of naivety found in the domesticated cattle’s gaze10 in front of a human being,
unable to grasp the threat of death lurking in the gesture of the stretched arm,
that same gesture offering food to the animal. As Anna Barcz observes: ‘His
look is devoid of hidden meaning because this is what animals look like when
they do not anticipate what awaits them’ (2013: 173). Thus, the snake did not
attempt to escape but it ‘stooped and drank a little more’. The poem’s description
of the way the snake looked at the man (‘And looked at me vaguely’), opposes
the systematic silence of philosophical discourse in relation to the gaze of the
animal. In The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida observes that for intellectuals, such as Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Lacan or Levinas, ‘[t]he experience
of the seeing animal, of the animal that looks at them, has not been taken
into account in the philosophical or theoretical architecture of their discourse’
(Derrida 2006: 32, 2008b: 14). Philosophy forgets that it is not only humans
who can stare at the animals but animals can stare back. The animal, like the
snake in Lawrence’s poem, ‘has its point of view regarding me. The point of
view of the absolute other’ (Derrida 2006: 28, 2008b: 11).
Nevertheless, in the poem, the man-narrator is tormented by the voice of
his education which tells him to kill the snake because of its golden colour;
golden snakes in Sicily are poisonous, whereas the black ones are harmless (an
inversion of the western cliché): ‘The voice of my education said to me / He must
be killed, / For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous’.
As a source of violence, the voice of education encourages him to kill the snake
despite the fact that he is not in immediate danger. Education reproduces the
moralistic and utilitarian taxonomic subordination of animals (e.g. in ‘benign’
and ‘malignant’11 or in useful and useless), regulates and controls the flow of
violence against the animals, always through the prism of human superiority
and domination. Besides, human hospitality towards animals is governed by the
same model (for instance, domestic vs non-domesticated animals, parasites).
Similar taxonomic models control hospitality between people (e.g., the useful
tourist or Gastarbeiter in contrast with the uninvited immigrant or the refugee).
The ‘voice of education’ knows, via this taxonomic subordination, when to tell
us: ‘He must be killed’ – even if that is purely for preventive reasons, as for the
kind of education fostering prudence ‘no risk is allowed!’. But taxonomy also
entails generalization: ‘The voice of my education said to me / He must be killed, / For
in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous’. Golden snakes
are poisonous, therefore, dangerous. But is it possible for a generalization to
be fair for that specific snake, in its absolute singularity, for that snake which
had lifted its head to look vaguely to the man and continue drinking? What
were the intentions of that ‘wholly other’, whom the voice of education had
already rendered guilty, hence, facilitating its death? Are we obliged to respect
his singularity (a singularity about which we know close to nothing), even if
Hospitality and non-human beings
we know on a general level that we cannot eliminate the possibility that he is a
dangerous visitor? What is he not? Does not respect for the other’s singularity
entail abandoning generality, even if it necessitates a transaction between the
two in the last instance? Moreover, can we close the door to the other because
of the vague possibility of him/her being dangerous? Besides, do not crime and
violent acts happen between people who know each other as well?
Other voices tell him that, if he were a man, he would grab a stick and
crush the snake: ‘And voices in me said, If you were a man / You would take a stick
and break him now, and finish him off’. These voices encourage him to prove his
virility: ‘If you were a man’. His encounter with an unexpected visitor is overshadowed by voices telling him to behave like a ‘man’, like the true master of
the house. It should not go unnoticed that the encounter is between a man
and a snake, denoted by the personal pronoun ‘he’, which forces us to face
the issue of gender difference. What would happen if a woman were in the
position of the man, who would not have to prove her ‘virility’? Equally, what
would happen if the snake were a ‘she’? Interestingly, Derrida concludes the
seminar with the following phrase: ‘And there is no woman here, no woman,
just a man and a snake’ (Derrida 2008a: 246, 2009: 329). This way, Derrida
seems to notice the absence of woman from yet another scene of hospitality, since the scene evolves exclusively between a man and a snake, who is
defined, as already stated, by the male personal pronoun ‘he’. Anna Barcz
comments on Derrida’s sibyllic observation offering a different version:
and terrified their end
approaching.
11. ‘Now the serpent
was more subtil than
any beast of the field
which the LORD God
had made’, as Genesis
writes (3:1).
Derrida’s words may also prove that the male perspective and the
accompanying ideology of man’s mastery over nature are too dominant
in our culture and what is needed is to introduce the feminine, as a
missing part, into the way in which we respond to violence in particular.
Culture, in general, does not require a woman to kill, but to give birth.
The role of killing has been incumbent on the man for a long time. It is
he, according to tradition, who hunts and kills.
(2013: 176)
The poem continues describing the man-narrator feeling honoured by his
guest: ‘But must I confess how I liked him,/How glad I was he had come like a guest
in quiet, to drink at my water-trough’. As Derrida writes:
[…] here the host feels honored by the guest, by the one who comes,
who is the first comer. He is honored, that’s the first experience, the
first affect. He is there, he is there with me, before me, ahead of me,
and I am grateful to him for that. That he exists for me makes me feel
honored.
(Derrida 2008a: 241, 2009: 322)
But as the snake leaves, before he disappears ‘into that dreadful hole’, the narrator puts his pitcher down on the ground, lifts ‘a clumsy log’ and then throws
it towards the snake, probably without killing him: ‘I think it did not hit him’.
Via the use of violence, the man affirms his position as the lord and master of
nature against the non-domesticated, untamed reptile who intruded his territory (his garden or his estate/fields) and who continued to drink water despite
his presence, defying in that way the man’s biblical power over the creatures
of the world, reptiles included. Let us remember here the way Genesis makes
man dominant over every living being ‘on earth’:
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Gerasimos Kakoliris
12. According to Émille
Benveniste, the
Latin word hostis
initially signified the
«stranger», whilst
consequently it
acquired the meaning
of enemy or hostile
stranger (hostilis) (1969:
87–101).
13. In a short reference
to Lawrence’s poem
in Rogues, Derrida
observes that: ‘Deep
within the voice of the
poet, it is no doubt a
woman who says “I”
in order to call for its
return: “And I wished
he would come back,
my snake”’ (Derrida
2003: 23, 2005: 5).
This way, Derrida
seems to agree with
Anna Barcz’s above
mentioned comments,
i.e. that the entry of
women subverts the
‘male perspective’,
which is dominated
by ‘the accompanying
ideology of man’s
mastery’ and the
ensuing violence.
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and
let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of
the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own
image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he
them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them. Be fruitful and
multiply, and replenish the earth, over the fish of the sea, and over the
fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
(Genesis, 1: 26–28, original emphasis)
Nevertheless, the man has recourse to an act of violence against his guest only
when the snake’s head disappears into that dreadful hole and his back starts
to fade slowly:
And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,/And as he slowly drew up,
snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,/A sort of horror, a sort of
protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,/Deliberately
going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,/Overcame me now
his back was turned.
It is only when the unexpected visitor’s head and body become invisible that
the host treats him like a hostis.12 But why does the man wait for the snake to
disappear before he attacks him? Why does the disappearance make him fearful? I dare to submit the following interpretation: ‘Visibility is a trap’, as Michel
Foucault says (1991: 200). As long as the other remains visible, our gaze keeps
him or her hostage, under its control. The fear of the other’s presence, that
other whom we perceive as harmful, that dangerous intruder, becomes bigger
when that other remains lost in the dark, unperceivable to our senses (or the
surveillance apparatuses of the state!). The narrator attacks the snake at the
moment he loses his last handle, his last possibility of control over his uninvited, unpredictable and perhaps dangerous stranger. Namely, just before the
stranger disappears to that inaccessible to the host territory, reminding him in
that way the impossibility of absolute sovereignty over his house.
He immediately regrets his act and curses himself and his education: ‘And
immediately I regretted it/I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!/I
despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education’. He curses those
voices that tell him, as Derrida observes, ‘to kill, or to try to kill a guest, a first
comer, one who had not yet, as it were, attacked. Out of fear he kills the other,
the guest’ (Derrida 2008a: 324, 2009: 243). The narrator curses his education
inculcating virile ideals which are those of violence and death: ‘If you were a
man/You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off’. Besides, are not
these ‘ideals of aggressive masculinity’ those displayed by most far-right, neoNazi political parties in Europe today which turn against the ‘criminal’ foreigners, the ‘corrupted’ politicians, the ‘impudent’ gays, the ‘presumptuous’ women,
and all those who deserve a ‘good beating’? (see Avdela and Psarra 2012).
In the next verse, the narrator expresses his deep wish for the snake to
return: ‘And I wished he would come back, my snake’.13 As Derrida writes:
‘My’ snake: it becomes his snake from this moment on, precisely because
of the scene of the murder, that at least virtual or aborted murder. He
couldn’t resist the drive to kill, he carried out the gesture of killing and
is immediately submerged by remorse, of course, but also by the desire
250 Hospitality & Society
Hospitality and non-human beings
for the snake to return. His snake, ‘my snake’: his love for the snake is
declared, made manifest, after the guilty act of murder.
(Derrida 2008a: 325, 2009: 243)
14. Cited in English in Still
(2010: 246).
Love for the snake! Let us not forget that Levinas describes responsibility
towards the unique other as ‘love’:
The other is unique, unique to such an extent that in speaking of the
responsibility for the unique, responsibility in relation to the unique, I
use the word ‘love’. That which I call responsibility is a love, because
love is the only attitude where there is encounter with the unique. What
is a loved one? He is unique in the world.
(1988: 174)
According to Derrida, the poem concludes by asserting the biblical commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ in this face to face encounter of the man with a
real ‘beast’. Causing shame and remorse, the snake did not allow the man to
remain emotionally and ethically indifferent. Contrary to Levinas for whom
the commandment refers only to humans, the poem extends the commandment to include the snake as well. To Levinas’s puzzled answer ‘I don’t know
if a snake has a face’, the poem responds positively. Derrida regards the
encounter between the human and the animal as ethics, as a source of ethical
responsibility ‘in a scene of hospitality, before the first comer’:
Here, visibly, the poet, the signatory, Lawrence if you will, the one to
whom this thing happens in some sense awakens to ethics, to the ‘Thou
shalt not kill,’ in a scene of hospitality, before the first comer, the snake,
who can perhaps be threatening (it doesn’t say that he was perhaps
threatening, he could always be threatening, always be murderous). So
his ethics is announced or awakened in this scene of hospitality before
a first comer whoever it be, and this ethics was formalized, confirmed
[...]. He becomes aware..., he truly thinks what duty would have obligated
him toward the living creature in general, in the figure of the snake, the
snake’s head, this snake that is a nonhuman living creature, who becomes
in some sense the sovereign as other, as guest [hôte]; it is the guest [hôte]
that commands, the other as guest [l’autre comme hôte] who commands.
(Derrida 2008a: 326, 2009: 244)
In this ethical encounter, one wonders who the host is, who the master is,
who the sovereign is, and who the guest is. Because in this case, it is not the
man-host who commands, but the snake-guest. Before the presence of the
other, the host is made responsible for him, for his subject; the host is taken
hostage by the guest. In Sur Parole, Derrida reflects and summarizes Levinas’s
thought on hospitality as follows:
We set off from thinking about welcome as the primary attitude of the
self before the other, from thinking about welcome to thinking about
the hostage. I am in a certain way the hostage of the other, and that
hostage situation where I am already the other’s guest as I welcome the
other into my home, where I am the other’s guest in my own home,
that hostage situation defines my own responsibility.
(Derrida 1999: 66)14
www.intellectbooks.com 251
Gerasimos Kakoliris
15. Freud explains the
exact process of
generation of that
‘sense of guilt’ as
follows:
[…] the tumultuous
mob of brothers […]
hated their father,
who presented
such a formidable
obstacle to their
craving for power
and their sexual
desires; but they
loved and admired
him too. After they
had got rid of him,
had satisfied their
hatred and had put
into effect their
wish to identify
themselves with
him, the affection
which had all this
time been pushed
under was bound
to make itself felt.
It did so in the form
of remorse. A sense
of guilt made its
appearance, which
in this instance
coincided with the
remorse felt by the
whole group.
(1983: 143)
The snake is made sovereign, king, just after this act of hate: ‘For he seemed to
me again like a king,/Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,/Now due to
be crowned again’. However, from the moment the host becomes the Other’s
subject, so as the sovereign is the Other and not I, is not there a danger ‘to
reconstitute a logic of sovereignty, a scene of sovereignty, by simply displacing
sovereignty from me to the other’? And Derrida asks, ‘should the deconstruction of sovereignty limit itself to deconstructing sovereignty as my sovereignty’, namely, is it enough to transfer it to the other, ‘or should the idea of
sovereignty in general be contested here?’ (Derrida 2008a: 326, 2009: 244–45).
Given that the ethical awakening of the narrator occurs after the fact of
the attempted murder, after he has tried to kill the snake-visitor, Derrida
raises the question to what extent ‘the origin of the moral law is linked or not
to a murder or to remorse’ (Derrida 2008a: 327, 2009: 245). For instance, for
Sigmund Freud in Totem and Taboo, morality is born when sons or brothers
feel guilty after the murder of their father. Namely, moral law emanates from
a ‘sense of guilt for an action’ (Freud 1983: 158):
The earliest moral precepts and restrictions in primitive society have
been explained by us as reactions to a deed which gave those who
performed it the con­cept of ‘crime’. They felt remorse for the deed and
decided that it should never be repeated and that its performance should
bring no advantage. This creative sense of guilt still persists among us.
(Freud 1983: 159)15
Nevertheless, this hypothesis is contradictory, according to Derrida, since ‘For
there to be remorse, the moral law had already to be there’. On the contrary,
from his point of view, Derrida discerns two moments in relation to the emergence of moral law:
[…] there is a first moment in which the moral law is there, already
there but virtual, potential, always already there, then, and then it is
actualized as such, it appears as such after the murder.
(2008a: 327–28, 2009: 245)
If the moral law were not already there, the narrator would have killed the snake
with no remorse: ‘For there to be remorse, the moral law had already to be there.
But it is in the moment of expiation, or remorse, the moment of guilty conscience,
that the moral law appears as such’ (Derrida 2008a: 327–28, 2009: 245).
Summarizing, we could note that in the poem, hospitality ceases to fall
under the condition that the other must be a human, that is, hospitality is not
any more defined negatively, based on the otherness of the host as the limit
between humans and animals, and hence as the limit of the ethical responsibility of the former. In this unexpected encounter, hospitality blurs the boundaries allowing the Other to appear in non-anthropocentric terms, claiming
a place within the human ethical responsibility. If ‘hospitality’ means the
crossing of boundaries, then it requires allowing the other of the human, the
animal, to cross the boundary traditionally fixed between the two, yet without
having to prove first that the animal is ‘like the human’, namely without
assimilating the otherness of the animal into the human. Hospitality renegotiates the issue of crossing the limits-boundaries between species. Because,
as we know only too well, the definition of boundaries between the human
and the animal (e.g. reason, speech, laugher, promise) haunts to an important
degree the way philosophy defines the proper of the human.
252 Hospitality & Society
Hospitality and non-human beings
Snake
D. H. Lawrence
A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.
In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great
dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he
was at the trough before me.
He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall
in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness softbellied down, over the edge of the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in
a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his
slack long body,
Silently.
Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second comer, waiting.
He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips,
and mused a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning
bowels of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.
The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent,
the gold are venomous.
And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and
finish him off.
But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet,
to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?
Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? Was it
perversity, that I longed to talk to him? Was it
humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.
And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!
And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But
even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.
He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has
drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on
the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the
air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.
And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his
shoulders, and entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his
withdrawing into that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly
drawing himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.
I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.
I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind
convulsed in undignified haste.
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the
wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with
fascination.
And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean
act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed
human education.
And I thought of the albatross
And I wished he would come back, my snake.
For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the
underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.
And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.
Taormina, 1923
www.intellectbooks.com 253
Gerasimos Kakoliris
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Professor Apostolos Lampropoulos and Dr Rosa Vasilaki,
as well as the three peer reviewers for their invaluable help.
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SUGGESTED CITATION
Kakoliris, G. (2016), ‘Hospitality and non-human beings: Jacques Derrida’s
reading of D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Snake”’, Hospitality & Society, 6: 3,
pp. 243–55, doi: 10.1386/hosp.6.3.243_1
CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Gerasimos Kakoliris studied philosophy at Essex University (BA [hon.], Ph.D.)
and Warwick University (MA), UK. He is Lecturer in the Department of
Philosophy, Pedagogy & Psychology at the National and Kapodistrian University
of Athens, Greece. He has published a book on Derrida and Deconstructive
Reading in Greek as well as various papers on this topic and more generally on
language, theories of reading, Foucault, Levinas, Nietzsche and Heidegger. He
is currently writing a monograph on Derrida and hospitality.
Contact: Sector of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, Pedagogy &
Psychology, School of Philosophy, National and Kapodistrian University of
Athens, Greece.
E-mail: [email protected]
Gerasimos Kakoliris has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that
was submitted to Intellect Ltd.
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