Abstract
The art of the threshold and the welcome. Welcome : that's the word lining airports in ten languages or more. A feminine noun, it seems, but don't we remember the verb bienvenir, symptomatically perhaps, qualified as unusual. Does this absence of use mean that the verb, a verb of action, has lost its meaning and reality ? What remains, then, is bienvenu, which is what we so nicely call a participle that can be singled out in both the feminine and masculine genders. It was while thinking about this bienvenir that I returned to Derrida's abundant seminar on hospitality, which seemed so tempted by a hyperbolization of the unconditional welcome that I became interested in what the conditions of a true welcome are, and perhaps should be. For me, it's not a question of constructing an absolutist concept that would be associated with the definition of all political life, since hospitality would then require the political construction that would consequently be welcoming. Unconditional hospitality ultimately appears to be conditional. On the contrary, starting from a very concrete anthropological example, I would make it the model of a construction in which the space and places of welcome bear the mark of a radical break with inhospitality. It's a question of thinking about welcome in terms of the sensitive lexicon of bodies, places, gaps and sharing. To come well is to enter into spaces of reception and those of the regulation of gaps.
