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’. hospitality
The question guiding the reading of this particular poem concerns the extent to animals
which our ethical responsibility (as hosts) extends to non-human animals as well. Derrida
Derrida analyses this poem under the burden of Levinas’s uncomfortable hesita- D. H. Lawrence
tion to grant animals a ‘face’, and therefore to make humans ethically responsible Levinas
towards them. In Derrida’s reading of the poem, hospitality ceases to fall under the ethics
condition that the other must be a human. In the unexpected encounter between responsibility
the man-narrator and a snake in the poem, hospitality blurs the boundaries allow-
ing 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 bound-
ary 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.

243
Gerasimos Kakoliris

1. Derrida uses the In the summer of 2015, an ‘uninvited’ cat along with her three fearful
neologism ‘carno-
phallogocentric’ in
kittens moved into the storeroom of the staircase in the three-storey
order to refer to three building where I live. Suddenly, just like that, without an invitation
dominant aspects of and without submitting to us a request of hospitality in any language!
western thought and
culture: meat-eating, Without seemingly knowing that the abode in question was under our
virility and reason. ownership and that she had to respect that. It is well known that cats do
There is, according not read ownership contracts. But even if that were the case, it would
to him, an ‘affinity
between carnivorous not change the state of hostageship we were facing. The cat had put
sacrifice, at the basis us in a position of responsibility and we had no authority of decision
of our culture and
our law, and all the
on that. Nothing could change the fact that four little creatures had
cannibalisms, symbolic bestowed their existence upon us. No possible ‘no’ could ward off the
or not, that structure responsibility we had not chosen, namely a responsibility that comes
intersubjectivity in
nursing, love, mourning before any choice. No possibility of escaping the other, who, in this
and, in truth, in all case, was an animal.
symbolic or linguistic
appropriations’
(Derrida 1994: 43, What is the place occupied traditionally by animals in the practices of hospi-
2002a: 247). tality? 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 hegem-
onic 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 philosophi-
cal 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 2. Levinas’s hesitancy
to grant animals
human face is completely different and only afterwards do we discover a ‘face’ should be
the face of an animal. I don’t know if a snake has a face. I can’t answer comprehended within
that question. A more specific analysis is needed. the more general
context of his negative
(Levinas 1988: 171–72)2 view regarding the
non-human domain
Derrida starts his commentary on the poem by saying: (Plant 2011: 56–57).
Nevertheless, in his
partly autobiographical
One might wonder: OK, the snake has eyes, it has a tongue, it has a text ‘The name of a
dog, or natural rights’,
head to some extent, does it have the face? What about the snake’s Levinas praises a dog,
face? And it’s under the sign of this serious, poetic question (espe- Bobby, for its kindness
cially for Levinas’s ethics), that I wanted to read you this text by D. H. and hospitable feelings
towards him and
Lawrence, ‘Snake’. his fellow prisoners
(Derrida 2008a: 317, 2009: 237–38) during their captivity
by the Nazis – unlike
humans, who treated
One of the most interesting aspects of the poem has to do with the fact that it them mostly if not with
does not offer an idealized construction of non-human reality, but an encoun- hostility, certainly with
indifference. As Levinas
ter between a man and an animal (a snake in this case), not in a mythological notes:
context3 but in reality and all its complexity and ensuing problems and ques-
[A]bout halfway
tions.4 For Derrida, the poem raises in an exemplary manner the question to through our long
what extent ‘an ethics or a moral prescription obligate us only to those like captivity, for a few
us’, those similar to us, as implied by Levinas’s ethics, or whether ‘it obligate short weeks, before
the sentinels
us with respect to anyone at all, any living being at all, and therefore with chased him away,
respect to the animal?’ (Derrida 2008a: 326, 2009: 244). Importantly, Derrida a wandering dog
refers here to a responsibility which ‘obligates us with respect to anyone at all, entered our lives.
One day he came
any living being at all’ and not simply to humans or animals.5 to meet this rabble
This allows us to raise in passing the issue of ethical responsibility and as we returned
under guard from
hospitality towards plants.6 For example, bending to water one’s plants, one work. He survived
may discover an uninvited visitor: another plant, probably a weed that grew in some wild patch
next to his or her favourite gardenia. Full of love for his/her plant threatened in the region of
the camp. But we
by someone else’s unexpected arrival and existence, he or she will proba- called him Bobby,
bly uproot the ‘parasite’, hence restoring order in his or her garden but also an exotic name, as
allowing his or her plant to grow undisturbed. Nonetheless, the fact remains one does with a
cherished dog. He
that he or she has sacrificed a life, namely the life of an unexpected visitor, would appear at
even if that was in favour of another plant’s life or well-being. The question morning assembly
and was waiting for
raised here is to what extent we are also responsible for our uninvited visitor us as we returned,
when that visitor is not a human or an animal but a plant.7 Can we recognize jumping up and
in this case a plea of the kind ‘Thou shalt not kill’, as in the case of the human down and barking
in delight. For him,
face? The plant has neither face nor language. Yet, vulnerability does not need there was no doubt
a face or a language to become manifest. This does not concern humans or that we were men.
animals, but any form of life. Life is permanently determined by its relentless (1990: 153)

exposure to death. Above people and animals, the lack of hospitality towards Some years later,
plants equals their death most of the times. Kant’s maxim that a stranger Levinas similarly recalls
in an interview:
‘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 In this corner of
Germany, where
some cases, there is the possibility of uprooting an ‘unwanted’ plant from the walking through
garden and re-planting it somewhere else. Yet, this possibility concerns only a the village we
would be looked at
limited number of plants, only those for which re-plantation is possible. As is by the villagers as
well known, not all the plants can be re-planted. Juden, this dog
Derrida’s detailed reading avoids the formulation of ethical arguments evidently took us
for human beings.
and identifies those expressions in Lawrence’s poem (including important The villagers
metaphors) allowing him to undermine the anthropocentric view r­egarding certainly did not

www.intellectbooks.com   245
Gerasimos Kakoliris

injure us or do us the relationship between humans and animals, that is, those expressions
any harm, but their
expressions were
allowing him to proceed to the crossing of the established barrier between
clear. We were the the dominant human and the animal. This suggests a hospitable thought
condemned and towards the Other(s), and in this case, the animal. Hence, Derrida will state
the contaminated
carriers of germs. at the beginning of the seminar that the poem in question ‘concerns just
And this little dog about everything we’ve approached directly or indirectly’ with regards to the
welcomed us at the relationship ‘between what is called man and animal’ (Derrida 2008a: 316,
entrance of the
camp, barking 2009: 236).
happily and jumping According to the poem, which is written in the first person, when the
up and down
amicably around us.
narrator goes to his water-trough to bring water with the pitcher, ‘On a
(2001: 41) hot, hot day’ he meets a snake that has arrived before him to drink water.
3. In relation to the
Facing the view of an unexpected visitor, the man stands and waits ‘And
mythological must wait, must stand and wait, for there he [the snake] was at the trough
representations of the before me’. Derrida’s reading plays upon the ambiguity of the phrase ‘he was
relationship between
humans and animals, at the trough before me’, which may mean that the other was at the water-
Derrida notes in The trough before me, that is, that he arrived at the water-trough first, but it
Animal That Therefore I may also mean that he was there before me, looking at me, in a face to face
Am:
relation, something that forces us to consider the Levinasian ethical prob-
Above all, it was lematic of whether the snake has a face. The phrase ‘there he was […] before
necessary to avoid
fables. We know me’ could also mean that he was there, in the world, before me, before the
the history of human beings as the Bible says. Derrida construes this scene of encounter
fabulization and
how it remains an
as a scene of hospitality par excellence. The man waits out of respect for
anthropomorphic the other, because the other was there first, but also because the other is
taming, a moralizing a guest:
subjugation, a
domestication.
Always a discourse He is therefore a guest: this is a classic scene, a classic biblical scene,
of man, on man, a classic Middle Eastern scene: it happens near a source of water, the
indeed on the
animality of man, scene of hospitality takes place near a source of water, in an oasis or
but for and in man. near a well, and the question of hospitality is posed as to water, as to
(2006: 60, 2008b: 37)
the disposition of the water source.
4. As Anna Barcz observes: (Derrida 2008a: 321, 2009: 240–41)
Despite the
acknowledged Offering drinking water is a fundamental act of hospitality. The first thing
tradition of
anthropomorphic
usually offered to a guest is a glass of water. In the excerpt above, Derrida
animals in fables, alludes clearly to the source where Rebekah drew the water she offered to
which like in La Abraham’s envoy servant who had arrived in Mesopotamia to ask for a spouse
Fontaine’s stories
represent some for Isaac following his father’s orders. When the unknown stranger pleads
human qualities, for water, ‘Let me, I pray thee, drink a little water of thy pitcher’, Rebekah
the situation responds positively:
described in
Lawrence’s poem is
different be­cause it ‘Drink, my lord’ and she hasted, and let down her pitcher upon her
is constructed as a
reference to a real,
hand, and gave him drink. And when she had done giving him drink,
wild creature that she said, I will draw water for thy camels also, until they have done
comes suddenly to drinking.
drink some water.
(2013: 172) (Genesis, 24: 18–19)
5. A considerable amount
of work has been Rebekah did not only offer water to the stranger but she also watered the
published on Derrida camels, even though this was not requested by him. Not only the stranger
and animals in recent but also his camels needed to quench their thirst. As Judith Still comments:
years, something that
is very indicative of the ‘This makes practical sense of course, and is of benefit to the travelling man.
current interest in this However, in the absence of any indication in the Genesis text, we could
topic. See, for example,
Judith Still’s Derrida
surmise that she shows hospitality to the animals as well’ (2010: 245).

246   Hospitality & Society

 Hospitality and non-human beings

Moreover, drinking water could entail ‘the difference between life and and Other Animals:
The Boundaries of the
death in a desert’ – and even if the Biblical context to which Derrida refers to Human (2015), Anne
is the one of an ancient story, water resources, water scarcity and water safety E. Berger’s and Marta
are contemporary problems of global significance (Still 2010: 246). The water- Segarra’s (eds), Thinking
(of) Animals After
trough is not an ordinary place but an object of desire, and as such it could Derrida (2011), Matthew
become a field of domination and consequently a field of conflict between Calarco’s, Zoographies:
men over the eco-system.8 The Question of the
Animal from Heidegger
The use of the personal pronoun ‘he’ instead of ‘it’ to refer to the snake to Derrida (2008) and
seems to constitute a kind of invitation as it is opposed to the distance people Leonard Lawlor’s This
is not Sufficient: An
usually keep from that specific reptile because of fear or repulsion upon its Essay on Animality
sight. The relationship between people and snakes is entirely different from and Human Nature in
the one people maintain with domestic animals, or with species of animals Derrida (2007).
they are more familiar with. The snake appears in the poem as ‘someone’, as a 6. From the perspective
person, as a distinct being, and as such, he has his own view about things, his of the ‘hyper-ethics’ of
‘unconditional
own way of seeing the man, whist all this remains unknown and inaccessible hospitality’, hospitality
to the man-narrator. What may the snake be thinking before raising his head should be offered,
to look at him? Aside from its physical traits (his colour, his length etc.), the according to Derrida,
unconditionally to
only thing that the man knows pertains to snakes in general, as a particular anyone, whether human,
animal species (e.g., that some snakes are poisonous, etc.). He knows abso- animal or plant, without
any identification,
lutely nothing, though, about that particular, singular snake (e.g., he knows differentiation or
absolutely nothing about the way the snake feels before him, or about the discrimination. As he
snake’s intentions, etc.). The snake is, and remains wholly Other. claims, for example, in
‘The deconstruction of
‘Someone was before me at my water-trough, / And I, like a second comer, wait- actuality’ (1993):
ing’. The expression ‘second comer’ does not relate, according to Derrida as
[…] a ‘come’ must be
explained above, only with the later arrival of the other (namely, the arrival of open and addressed
the man who reached the water-trough after the snake), but also with the fact to someone, to
that in my ethical relationship with the Other, the Other comes first, whilst someone else
whom I cannot and
I ‘follow’ (‘Je viens après’), as well as with the fact that my responsibility must not determine
towards the Other does not emanate from myself, but from the Other himself in advance-not as
subject, self,
or herself. In my relationship with the Other, I am but a ‘second comer’. consciousness, or
Within this context, Derrida recalls Levinas’s assertion that ethics starts with even as animal,
an ‘After you!’ (‘Après vous!’):9 God or person, man
or woman, living or
nonliving […]. The
The first sign of respect for the other is ‘after you’. This doesn’t just one, whoever it is
mean something like ‘go ahead’ at the elevator, etc., it means ‘I come to whom ‘come’ is
said, cannot let
after you,’ and I come to myself, to my responsibility as an ego, in some him/herself be
sense, only from the other. The other is there before me, and I receive determined in
advance. For
the order from the other who precedes me. That is the situation when absolute
faced with the other, and he not only goes ahead of me, must go ahead hospitality, he/she
of me, but is there before me. So I say ‘After you,’ and it’s my first is the stranger, the
one who arrives.
address to the other as other. (Derrida 2002b: 94–95,
(Derrida 2008a: 318–19, 2009: 238–39) original emphasis)

For an overall account

Derrida then explains that our ethical responsibility towards the other cannot of Derrida’s views
depend on who the other is and whether s/he is a human or an animal: on hospitality, see
Kakoliris (2015). For a
critical engagement
[…] morality, ethics, the relation to the other, is not only coming after with Derrida’s
philosophical
the other, helping oneself after the other, but after the other whoever it treatment of plants,
be, before even knowing who he is or what is his dignity, his price, his see Jeffrey T. Nealon’s,
social standing, in other words, the first comer. I must respect the first ‘Animal and plant, life
and world in Derrida;
comer, whoever it be. or, the plant and the
(Derrida 2008a: 319, 2009: 239, original emphasis) sovereign’ (2016).

www.intellectbooks.com   247
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 eco-
system 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 regu-
larly 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 intellec-
tuals, 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 and terrified their end
approaching.
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 11. ‘Now the serpent
was more subtil than
two in the last instance? Moreover, can we close the door to the other because any beast of the field
of the vague possibility of him/her being dangerous? Besides, do not crime and which the LORD God
violent acts happen between people who know each other as well? had made’, as Genesis
writes (3:1).
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 over-
shadowed 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 hospital-
ity, 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:

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 narra-
tor 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 terri-
tory (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’:

www.intellectbooks.com   249
Gerasimos Kakoliris

12. According to Émille And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and
Benveniste, the
Latin word hostis
let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of
initially signified the the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creep-
«stranger», whilst ing thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own
consequently it
acquired the meaning image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he
of enemy or hostile them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them. Be fruitful and
stranger (hostilis) (1969: multiply, and replenish the earth, over the fish of the sea, and over the
87–101).
fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
13. In a short reference (Genesis, 1: 26–28, original emphasis)
to Lawrence’s poem
in Rogues, Derrida
observes that: ‘Deep Nevertheless, the man has recourse to an act of violence against his guest only
within the voice of the
poet, it is no doubt a
when the snake’s head disappears into that dreadful hole and his back starts
woman who says “I” to fade slowly:
in order to call for its
return: “And I wished
he would come back, And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,/And as he slowly drew up,
my snake”’ (Derrida snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,/A sort of horror, a sort of
2003: 23, 2005: 5). protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,/Deliberately
This way, Derrida
seems to agree with going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,/Overcame me now
Anna Barcz’s above his back was turned.
mentioned comments,
i.e. that the entry of
women subverts the It is only when the unexpected visitor’s head and body become invisible that
‘male perspective’, the host treats him like a hostis.12 But why does the man wait for the snake to
which is dominated
by ‘the accompanying disappear before he attacks him? Why does the disappearance make him fear-
ideology of man’s ful? I dare to submit the following interpretation: ‘Visibility is a trap’, as Michel
mastery’ and the Foucault says (1991: 200). As long as the other remains visible, our gaze keeps
ensuing violence.
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 unin-
vited, 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, neo-
Nazi political parties in Europe today which turn against the ‘criminal’ foreign-
ers, 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 14. Cited in English in Still
(2010: 246).
declared, made manifest, after the guilty act of murder.
(Derrida 2008a: 325, 2009: 243)

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 command-

ment ‘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 command-
ment 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 The snake is made sovereign, king, just after this act of hate: ‘For he seemed to
exact process of
generation of that
me again like a king,/Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,/Now due to
‘sense of guilt’ as be crowned again’. However, from the moment the host becomes the Other’s
follows: subject, so as the sovereign is the Other and not I, is not there a danger ‘to
[…] the tumultuous reconstitute a logic of sovereignty, a scene of sovereignty, by simply displacing
mob of brothers […] sovereignty from me to the other’? And Derrida asks, ‘should the deconstruc-
hated their father,
who presented tion of sovereignty limit itself to deconstructing sovereignty as my sover-
such a formidable eignty’, namely, is it enough to transfer it to the other, ‘or should the idea of
obstacle to their sovereignty in general be contested here?’ (Derrida 2008a: 326, 2009: 244–45).
craving for power
and their sexual Given that the ethical awakening of the narrator occurs after the fact of
desires; but they the attempted murder, after he has tried to kill the snake-visitor, Derrida
loved and admired
him too. After they
raises the question to what extent ‘the origin of the moral law is linked or not
had got rid of him, to a murder or to remorse’ (Derrida 2008a: 327, 2009: 245). For instance, for
had satisfied their Sigmund Freud in Totem and Taboo, morality is born when sons or brothers
hatred and had put
into effect their feel guilty after the murder of their father. Namely, moral law emanates from
wish to identify a ‘sense of guilt for an action’ (Freud 1983: 158):
themselves with
him, the affection
which had all this The earliest moral precepts and restrictions in primitive society have
time been pushed been explained by us as reactions to a deed which gave those who
under was bound
to make itself felt.
performed it the con­cept of ‘crime’. They felt remorse for the deed and
It did so in the form decided that it should never be repeated and that its performance should
of remorse. A sense bring no advantage. This creative sense of guilt still persists among us.
of guilt made its
appearance, which (Freud 1983: 159)15
in this instance
coincided with the Nevertheless, this hypothesis is contradictory, according to Derrida, since ‘For
remorse felt by the
whole group. there to be remorse, the moral law had already to be there’. On the contrary,
(1983: 143) from his point of view, Derrida discerns two moments in relation to the emer-
gence 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 responsi-
bility of the former. In this unexpected encounter, hospitality blurs the bound-
aries 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 renego-
tiates 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


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 soft-
bellied 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.
Hospitality and non-human beings
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.

REFERENCES
Avdela, E. and Psarra, A. (2012), ‘Arcane aspects of the far right vote’,
Contemporary Issues, 117, April–June, pp. 4–5.
Barcz, A. (2013), ‘On D. H. Lawrence’s Snake that slips out of the text:
Derrida’s reading of the poem’, Brno Studies in English, 39: 1, pp. 167–82.
Benveniste, É. (1969), Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes I, Paris:
Minuit.
Berger, A. E. and Segarra, M. (2011), Thinking (of) Animals After Derrida,
Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.
Calarco, M. (2008), Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to
Derrida, New York: Columbia University Press.
Derrida, J. (1992), ‘“Il faut bien manger” ou le calcul du sujet’, Points de suspen-
sion: Entretiens, choisis et présentés par Elisabeth Weber, Paris: Galilée,
pp. 269–301.
—— (1994), Force de loi: Le ‘Fondement mystique de l’autorité’, Paris: Galilée.
—— (1995), ‘“Eating Well,” or the Calculation of the Subject’, in E. Weber
(ed.), Points: Interviews, 1974–1994 (trans. P. Connor and A. Ronell),
Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 255–87.
—— (1999), Sur Parole: Instantanés philosophiques, La Tour d’Aigues: Éditions
de l’Aube («poche essai»).
—— (2002a), ‘Force of Law. The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”’ (trans.
M. Quaintance), in G. Anidjar (ed. and intro.), Acts of Religion, New York
& London: Routledge, pp. 230–98.
—— (2002b), ‘The Deconstruction of Actuality’, in E. Rottenberg (ed. trans.
and intro.), Negotiations. Interventions and Interviews 1971–2001, Stanford:
Stanford University Press, pp. 85–116.
—— (2003), Voyous, Paris: Galilée.
—— (2005), Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (trans. P.-A. Brault and M. Naas),
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
—— (2006), L’animal que donc je suis, Paris: Galilée.
—— (2008a), Séminaire La bête et le souverain. Volume I (2001-2002), édition établie
par Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet et Ginette Michaud, Paris: Galilée.
—— (2008b), ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’, in M.-L.
Mallet (ed.), The Animal That Therefore I Am (trans. D. Wills), New York:
Fordham University Press, pp. 1–51.
—— (2009), The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. I (trans. G. Bennington), Chicago
and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Foucault, M. (1991), Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison (trans. A.
Sheridan), London: Penguin Books.
Freud, S. (1983), Totem and Taboo, London, Melbourne and Henley: Ark
Paperbacks.
Kakoliris, G. (2015), ‘Jacques Derrida on the ethics of hospitality’, in E.
Imafidon (ed.), The Ethics of Subjectivity: Perspectives since the Dawn of
Modernity, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 144–56.
Kant, I. (1989), ‘Perpetual peace: A philosophical sketch’, in H. S. Reiss (ed.
and trans.), Political Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
pp. 93–130.

254    Hospitality & Society

 Hospitality and non-human beings

Lawlor, L. (2007), This Is Not Sufficient: An Essay on Animality and Human

Nature in Derrida, New York: Columbia University Press.
Levinas, E. (1985), Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo (trans.
R. A. Cohen), Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
—— (1988), ‘The Paradox of Morality: an Interview with Emmanuel Levinas’
(trans. A. Benjamin and T. Wright), in R. Bernasconi and D. Wood (eds),
The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, London & New York:
Routledge, pp. 168–80.
—— (1990), ‘The name of a dog or natural rights’, in Difficult Freedom: Essays
on Judaism (trans. S. Hand), Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
pp. 151–53.
—— (2001), ‘Interview with François Poirié’, in J. Robbins (ed.), Is it Righteous
to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, Stanford: Stanford University
Press, pp. 23–84.
Marder, M. (2013), ‘Is it ethical to eat plants?’, Parallax, 19: 1, pp. 29–37.
Nealon, J. T. (2016), ‘Animal and plant, life and world in Derrida; or, the plant
and the sovereign’, in Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life, Stanford:
Stanford University Press, pp. 49–81.
Plant, B. (2011), ‘Welcoming dogs: Levinas and “the animal” question’,
Philosophy and Social Criticism, 37: 1, pp. 49–71.
Still, J. (2010), Derrida and Hospitality: Theory and Practice, Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
—— (2015), Derrida and Other Animals: The Boundaries of the Human,
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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: gkakoliris@ppp.uoa.gr

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.

www.intellectbooks.com    255
 intellect
www.intellectbooks.com

publishers
Journal of Urban of original
thinking
Cultural Studies
ISSN 20509-790 | Online ISSN 20509804
2 issues per volume | Volume 1, 2014

In recent years, cities have been increasingly at the forefront of debate in both Executive Editor
humanities and social science disciplines, but there has been relatively little Benjamin Fraser
real dialogue across these disciplinary boundaries. On the one hand, journals The College of Charleston
in social science fields that use urban studies methods to look at life in cities urbanculturalstudies@gmail.com
rarely explore the cultural aspects of urban life in any depth or delve into close-
readings of the representation of cities in individual novels, music albums/ Associate Editors
songs, graphic novels, films, videogames, online ‘virtual’ spaces, or other artistic Araceli Masterson-Algar
and cultural products. On the other hand, while there is increasing discussion of Augustana College
urban topics and themes in the humanities, broadly considered, there are very
few journal publications that are open to these new interdisciplinary directions Stephen Vilaseca
of scholarship. This means that scholars in Language and Literature fields are Northern Illinois University
forced to submit their innovative work to journals that, in general, do not yet
admit the link between humanities studies of the representations of cities and
more social-science focused urban studies approaches.

The Journal of Urban Cultural Studies is thus open to scholarship from any and
all linguistic, cultural and geographical traditions—provided that English trans-
lations are provided for all primary and secondary sources citations. Articles
published in the journal cross the humanities and the social sciences while
giving priority to the urban phenomenon, in order to better understand the
culture(s) of cities. Although the journal is open to many specific methodologies
that blend humanities research with social-science perspectives on the city,
the central methodological premise of the journal is perhaps best summed up
by cultural studies-pioneer Raymond Williams—who emphasized giving equal
weight to the “project (art)” and the “formation (society).” We are particularly
interested in essays that achieve some balance between discussing an individ-
ual (or multiple) cultural/artistic product(s) in depth and also using one of many
social-science (geographical, anthropological, sociological…) urban approaches
to investigate a given city. Essays will ideally address both an individual city
itself and also its cultural representation.

Intellect is an independent academic publisher of books and journals, to view our catalogue or order our titles visit
www.intellectbooks.com or E-mail: journals@intellectbooks.com. Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, UK, BS16 3JG.