Derridean Hospitalities: Hugo’s Les Misérables and Camus’s L’Hôte

This essay reads hospitality in Derrida as an aporia and examines how this aporia is staged in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and Camus’s L’Hôte. By framing hospitality as both an ethical imperative and a site of structural contradiction, the study explores how Derrida’s concept of hospitality animates two contrasting but interconnected literary instances: the bishop’s seemingly unconditional welcome of the ex-convict Valjean and the schoolmaster Daru’s ambivalent reception of an Arab prisoner in a colonial context. By showing how these two hosts navigate the aporetic tension between the conditional and the unconditional, the paper highlights hospitality as a profoundly ethical act.