Démocratie et hospitalité

Bernhard Waldenfels deals intellectually with the question of foreignness in a manner that is radically at odds with the way political theory has traditionally treated this question. Rather than considering that the fundamental issue at stake is the type of welcoming the foreigners, that is the migrants presenting themselves at the borders of a political community, should receive from the latter, Waldenfels wonders whether it is possible to account for a collective hospitality to foreignness as such. Can we justify a principled opening of the political community to the experience of foreignness associated with the meeting of foreigners? What response should the political community provide to the foreigner that confronts it with a disconcerting, surprising and unforeseeable experience? Starting from this bundle of questions, this article contends that Waldenfels’ political phenomenology shares several conceptual features with democracy understood as the historical regime par excellence conceptualized by Claude Lefort. According to this political understanding of Waldenfels’ work, the “politics of the foreigner” cannot only be conceived as a responsiveness to the sting of the experience of foreignness but also lays the political foundations of a democratic and hospitable migration policy.