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Jacques Derrida on Hospitality to the Singular Artwork

This essay focuses on Derrida’s ethics of art interpretation. He contends that a genuine response to a work of art avoids applying pregiven interpretive norms, such as established norms of a genre. The aim is to do justice to the otherness of an artwork when it suspends the norms of artistic practice. Overlooking this, an inhospitable interpretation subsumes the work under one’s own categories and norms, subjecting its alterity to habitual interpretive frameworks. By contrast, Derrida conceives of a hospitable relationship as an openness to the experience of that which lies beyond one’s horizon. This requires refraining from imposing established modalities of interpretation on the other and instead attending to the work’s inventive and unprecedented singularity. As Derrida explores in “The Law of Genre,” this singularity consists in the artwork’s singular law, a law that defines only a particular artwork’s inventions. In this context, hospitality lies in interpreting the artwork’s singular inventions and subversions of norms, which exceed all modalities of interpretation. Apart from a few side remarks, this link between the singularity of and hospitality to the artwork has not been clarified in Derrida scholarship, possibly because his seminars on hospitality do not substantially address art. Drawing on his reflections in “Color to the Letter” on the hospitality of and to Jean-Michel Atlan’s singular paintings, I will attempt to reconstruct this link, without which Derrida’s ethics of art interpretation cannot be properly understood.