The Economics of Hospitality:

Madame de Dey ... had left the court at the beginning of the Emigration. As she possessed considerable property in the neighborhood of Carentan, she had taken refuge there, hoping that the influence of the Terror would be felt but little at that distance from Paris. That calculation, based upon a thorough knowledge of the province, proved to be just. The Revolution did little damage in Lower Normandie. Although Madame de Dey used to consort with none but the noble families of the province, when she came there to inspect her property, she had, as a matter of policy, thrown her house open to the principle bourgeois of the town and the newly constituted authorities, exerting herself to make them proud of their conquest of her, without arousing either jealousy or hatred in their hearts. Gracious and amiable, blessed with that indescribable sweetness of manner which has the art of pleasing without resorting to self-abasement or entreaty, she had succeeded in winning general esteem by an exquisite tact whose sage counsels enabled her to walk steadfastly on the narrow line where she could satisfy the demands of that conglomerate society, without humbling the sensitive self-esteem of the parvenus, or offending that of her former friends (Balzac, 76).

But despite the attempt to eliminate uncertainty and ambiguity, there is a curious uncanniness about this particular instance of hospitality, which arises from Madam de Dey's role as a hostess. If a hostess is someone who entertains guests in her own home, who allows strangers to partake of the comforts of her home, we cannot say for certain that Madame de Dey is the hostess of these soirées, at least in the conventional sense of the word. She cannot offer the comforts of her home, because she herself is not comfortable in her own home due to the constant threat of persecution. She is in no position to exact demands from her guests. Indeed, when she invites guests to her home, she is actually the newcomer, the stranger, and it is the guests who dictate her behavior rather than the other way around: with the Carentanians, she cannot be who she is, that is, she can neither act like a noble nor carry the presence of a noble. Careful to conceal her social status, she even decorates her house in a modest fashion and eschews an ostentatious display of her wealth: her salon "was almost as modestly furnished as the ordinary Carentanian salon; for, in order not to wound the narrow self-esteem of her guests, she denied herself the luxurious appointments to which she had been accustomed" (Balzac, 87). To comply with the implicit conditions of her bourgeois guests, she must divest herself of her nobility in order to avoid arousing suspicion. It is the guests who establish the rules of her house.

On the other hand, she cannot simply deny her nobility, or else she will lose the support of her noble friends. This puts Madame de Dey in a very compromising position: she must act as an obedient and "amiable" servant, always eager to please, without resorting to the servile qualities of "self-abasement or entreaty." To accommodate both her bourgeois and her noble friends, she must paradoxically exhibit the seemingly opposite qualities of nobility and humility, pride and modesty. Always cautious of not offending her guests and hoping to satisfy the demands of a "conglomerate" society, she must "walk steadfastly on the narrow line" which is the line between oppositions. Walking this line complicates her identity since we can no longer be sure that Madame de Dey is a noble; if so, she is a peculiar noble who is willing to serve, a noble who does not act typically noble, and indeed, a noble who hides and disguises her own nobility. The strange peculiarities of this event of hospitality include a hostess who cannot be identified either as the accommodating servant or the noble master of her house.

Along with the complications in the identity of the hostess, the status of her home also comes into question, for her home in Carentan is not a home in a proper sense, but only a "property" of hers, a piece of land, which one might properly call her home-away-from-home -- a home not characterized by nearness, proximity, or familiarity, but a distant and unfamiliar home. This home-away-from-home is distinguished from a home by its away-ness, resulting in a unhomely home in which she is an émigré. It is a home in which she does not quite feel at home, which she cannot call exclusively her own.

Her unhomely home adds more complications to her identity as a hostess, for how can a host be hospitable somewhere else beside one's home? How can an émigré, that is, a stranger, play the role of a hostess? In this instance, we have an unusual form of hospitality. At her home-away-from-home, Madame de Dey cannot be named, labeled, and classified with certainty as a hostess, for if she is a hostess, she is a hostess in a home where she does not feel at home, a home that is not quite her own. She is a stranger to her own home, because she is, in fact, a stranger to Carentan and her role as a hostess belies her true identity as a stranger. In order to make herself at home, she must act as if she were a true hostess entertaining the bourgeois of the town in order to ensure her safety. She is a homeless hostess, welcoming guests to a home in which she is also a guest. At the moment of her arrival, she plays the double role of hostess and guest. Needless to say, Madame de Dey is a strange hostess, an identity which walks the narrow line between host and guest.

Let us begin then, with this passage, which, properly speaking, does not simply describe one woman's display of her generous hospitality. There is, of course, hospitality, but who are the hosts and the guests? Who is welcoming whom? Such questions will inevitably lead us to examine the differences between hospitality offered from a true home, in which the master of the house is apparent and the roles of host and guest are fixed, and a home-away-from-home, in which these identities curiously mingle with their opposites. Which leads us to the inevitable question: how does one give hospitality from the home-away-from-home? Such a gift of hospitality must be taken into careful consideration, for the giver and receiver are not readily determined in such peculiar circumstances. One can never be sure in which direction the gift of hospitality is going in the confusing exchange between the hands of the giver and given-to. These two topics of the home and the exchange of hospitality become imperative concerns in our discussion of hospitality chez Madame de Dey.

I. Hospitality and the Home

Calling Madame de Dey "at home," chez-soi, in Carentan is not only inaccurate and imprecise, but misleading. It is misleading inasmuch as the word chez is attributed to the self-same, assumed homogeneity of home. It points to a certain, delimited area of space in which one has the possibility of being in, within, or at, a possibility of uncomplicated interiority. As we have seen, the house of Madame de Dey is not simply a home, and her hospitality is nor simply hospitality in the conventional sense of the word. Madame de Dey's residence, as a heterogeneous home-away-from-home, prevents the singular description of chez-soi. Being chez at a home-away-from-home carries on an entirely different meaning. By the same logic, Madame de Dey's residence cannot simply be pushed to the other extreme, chez-l'autre, as if she was in another's home, for she is, in the end, at home, at some kind of home of which she is the owner. If neither at one nor the other, then where can her home be located? The answer would seem to rely on a certain determination of topography. It depends on whether her neighbors accept or reject her, whether she is among friends or among strangers, chez-soi or chez-l'autre. The neighborhood is the critical factor on which the question reposes. Yet, to make matters worse, the question is not only concerned with one's neighbors nor does it revolve around the two poles of the soi and the autre; it also rests on a particular lack of linguistic stability in the word chez itself. The difficulty of the answer involves not only the problem of the neighborhood, but also the problem of what it means to be chez -- at, in, within, among. And the question, where is her home? not only depends on getting along with one's neighbors, but on the hermeneutics of the term chez. It is a question of both topos and language.

As Samuel Weber points out, the antecedents of the word chez arise out of the Latin word casa, which, surprisingly, does not signify house (Institutions, 90). Casa has no etymological relation to the Greek word dómos, dómus, and the root dem- and dom-, which are the proper origins of all the words that relate to the home (Benveniste, 242). "Far from constituting two distinct social units," Benveniste notes, "Dómus and oîkos signify practically the same thing, 'house'" (Benveniste, 240). Investigating further, we find that dómus is the proper root word for the Latin derivative dominus (lord, master) of which dominate (dominari: master, control) and domestic evolve from. Mastery and control are ineluctably intertwined with the definition of house, as if a house cannot exist without a master who owns it, without a master of the house. There is a crucial link between the figure of the master and the definition of the house. A house is a space which must be dominated, appropriated, and controlled by a master. The oîkos is something to be taken under one's dominion, to be partitioned off and claimed as one's own space, sealing it from the outside. Indeed, the power of the master is the power to draw the line: to distinguish his interior space from the exterior, the inside from the outside, building a wall between himself and his neighbors. The root -dem along with dómus and oîkos all contain this distinction between inside and outside, the inside ruled by a certain master (Weber cites the Latin term domi: foris). Certainly, a house cannot exist without an owner who claims it.

The word hospitality is similarly founded on the notion of house and master. According to Benveniste, hospitality originated from the Latin hospes which can be broken down into its component elements, hostis and potis (Benveniste, 72). For the moment, I will delay the translation of the word hostis. The other component, potis, can be attributed to the Sanskrit pátih "master" and "husband" which was frequently employed in the composition dam pátih "master of the house" (Benveniste, 72). The Sanskrit term dam also has its roots in the Greek prefixes domu- and domo- and thus denotes the proper sense of the house (Benveniste, 242). In addition, Latin verbs derived from the prefix poti- signify the ability "to have power over something, have something at one's disposal" which "already marks the appearance of a sense of 'to be able to.' With this may be compared the Latin verb possidere, 'possess,' stemming from pot-sedere, which describes the 'possessor' as somebody who is established on something" (Benveniste, 74-75). The origins of the word hospitality are derived from the dam pátih and hospitality can only be offered by such a figure. Hospitality relies on an established master who has the potential to take full possession of his house, over which he exerts power and mastery. The house must be his own.

Casa, on the other hand, emerges from an entirely different lexical chain, which properly signifies "hut, cottage, or shepherd's cabin" (Institutions, 90). While the root dem- and dom- emphasize the distinction between inside and outside, casa resides in a more cozy notion of the interior of the home, cottage, and hearth (chez mes parents, for instance). Casa concentrates more on the interior of the home rather than stressing the distinction between interiority and exteriority. It defines the interior in terms other than its relation to exteriority. It is more concerned with what happens within the walls of a residence rather than what happens in the neighborhood and it is from this principle that casa carries a different meaning from house.

Examining further the etymological family of casa, Weber mentions that the term has four closely related cognates, two of which deal directly with home which I will mention here:

1. Casemate, which goes back to the sixteenth century and emerges from the Italian word casa-matta, which can be literally translated as "madhouse," or figuratively as "false or phony house" (Institutions, 90). Casemate was used to describe small compartments built at the base of the walls of the fortress from which defenders could thwart an enemy's attempt to cross the moat or scale the ramparts.
2. Another derivative is casino, which literally means in Italian "small house," employing the diminutive suffix -ino. As in the common usage of the word today, casino signifies a place of gambling, drinking, and other forbidden pleasures which are sought after without the watchful eye of the law. Sanctioning shady dealings, dubious liaisons, and risky games of chance, it is a place of the transgression of the law, a place in which the law does not exert its usual authority.

If the home depends on the existence of an identifiable master who can control and rule over it, then casino is precisely a home that has lost its master. As a master-less house, the casino is a place not where law and order predominate, but the very place that legitimizes the transgression of the law and the rejection of the authorizing power of the master. A casino represents a remove from the laws of the household and economy. Without the stabilizing laws of the household in the masterless home, everything turns mad: respect for the law is replaced by its transgression, certainty is replaced by chance, rules by randomness. The casino is a house which has revolted against its master, throwing him out of his own home.

As much as casemate and casino differ from each other, both retain the sense of the house without a master, resulting in a madhouse which is both uncontrollable and unclaimable. The lack of the master is what distinguishes casa from home: while the home is essentially defined by the power of the master, the casa has no proper proprietor. And if the master of the house has the ability to draw the definitive line distinguishing between inside and outside, host and guest, self and other, then casa represents the very disruption of that line: in the madhouse, alterity resides in the home, l'autre chez-soi. The house no longer remains in a homogenous relation with itself, in a specular, self-reflexive, affirming narcissism, chez-soi-soi-même, that reinforces its own singular identity. Rather, it steadfastly walks the narrow line between opposing entities resulting in the uncanny, unhomely cohabitation, chez-soi-chez-l'autre: at one's home in the home of the other (Derrida first coined this term in a series of lectures given at University of California, Irvine from 4/96-5/96). This opens up the radical possibility of a coexistence with an opposite in a manner in which alterity and identity are somehow contemporaneously maintained. Chez-soi-chez-l'autre represents the possibility of this impossible coexistence: at once in one's own home and the home of the other, simultaneously at home and a casa, a master chez-soi-chez-l'autre is the master of an unmasterable madhouse in which presumed opposites curiously trickle to the other side: an act which dispels the semantic lines of demarcation that set up secure barriers between opposing meanings and opposing functioning, be it that of interiority and exteriority, mastery and madness, certainty and chance, law and transgression, or home and casa. Resisting incorporation into any opposition, it foils ontological determination and linguistic certainty, opening a radically heterogeneous space where the law of the law, the law of order, and the order of the master, do not establish themselves without a certain madness, dislocation, and disarticulation of the very law it tries to set up at home.

Chez-soi-chez-l'autre: it fundamentally differs from the definition of the home ruled by a certain master of the house and represents an accurate description of what happens in a home-away-from-home. Madame de Dey chez-soi-chez-l'autre is what confounds the definition of her place as a guest or a host by subverting her presumed authority over her home. Her guests establish the laws of the house which illustrates an odd situation where the guests, as the other, begin to make themselves comfortable at home to the extent that they claim it as their own, and hold the hostess hostage. And it furthermore introduces a perplexing multiplicity in the identity of Madame de Dey, where the apparent unity of her signature is replaced by ambivalence. Madame de dé (as the French prefix of negation, like the dis- in English): the master of a house whose rules of the house are disjointed, disarticulated, and dislodged. Or Madman de dé (French for die, singular of dice): the deranged proprietor of a property where infractions of the law are sanctioned and chance is the name of the game. She runs a casino out of her own home.

II. The Exchange of Hospitality

A casino would be the ideal place for entertaining one's guest, an ideal place to show off one's talents as a host. Indeed, Madame de Dey's home is often the place where Carentanians go to seek amusement. Her house is full of games: "boston," "reversi," "whist," and lotto (Balzac, 89). Yet the owner of the house and the proprietor of a casino do not set up the same house rules for their establishments. One must take into consideration that the casino functions on the basis of exchange and circulation of money, that is, on the principle of economy: a word which can be broken down into its semantic predicates which include the values of the home (oîkos) and the law (nomós, nómos, and némo). Yet these are not simply the laws of the master of the home. In the Greek, nomós does not simply signify law, but designates a law that "goes back to 'legal apportionment.' The meaning of nómos is defined in Greek as 'to divide legally' and also 'to acquire legally by the way of apportionment'" (Benveniste, 69). Derrida asserts that the term refers to "the law of distribution (nemein), the law of sharing or partition, the law as partition (moira), the given or the assigned part, participation" (Given Time, 6). The term economy, then, combines the ideas of exchange and circulation of goods in conjunction with the home, as if the home was the proper place for business transactions and deals in a circle of commercial exchange. The figure of the circle is crucial for Derrida because the law of circular economy implies a "return to the point of departure, to the origin, also to the home" (Given Time, 7). Thus, by law, the mass transactions of money and goods are evenly exchanged and fairly reciprocated: what one gives, one receives back. The symmetry of exchange guarantees that a gift always returns to the origin.

An émigré always returns home.

1. Madame de Dey's singular events of hospitality form only part of a chain of hospitable acts which constitute a circle of economic exchange. These events cannot be thought of as a series of definite, delimited points each with its own independent beginning and end in its intentions, but it is only so far as they comprise the circle and the movement around the circle do they have meaning. It is only through a continuous exchange and interchange with the other, continuously maintained in a circular return, that hospitality can regenerate itself indefinitely, the end indefinitely reproducing itself in the beginning. Hospitality has no final purpose other than maintaining itself as a two-way return. Returning to Benveniste, the etymological root of hospitality comprises the term hostis, as we know. Let us take a closer look at just what this term means. In ancient Rome, hostis signified "he who stands in a compensatory relationship" which was "precisely the foundation of the institution of hospitality" (Benveniste, 77). Hospitality formed a communal bonding "by the obligation to compensate a gift or service from which [one] has benefited" leading to the final conclusion that "hostis always involves the notion of reciprocity" (Benveniste, 77, my emphasis). According to Benveniste, hospitality forges the friendly bond between neighbors through the very principle of exchange, the structure of the two-way return of the hostis. It is this very structure of exchange and return that constitutes every relation to the other which, in turn, makes a communal bond possible. Whenever this reciprocal circulatory process is broken or interrupted, the communal bond between host and guest dissolves. Oddly, The Conscript opens with such a break; it opens with Madame de Dey closing her doors: "Two days earlier, Madame de Dey had closed her doors to her circle of intimates, whom she had excused herself from receiving on the day before" (Balzac, 75). The door-closing, which simultaneously shuts out her friends and interrupts her habits of hospitality, casts her out of the community of her "circle of intimates." The breaking of the circle is the breaking of hospitality, which dissolves the communal bond. Therefore:
2. Madame de Dey's hospitality towards the Carentanians, her welcoming of them into her own home, is based on the hope that the Carentanians will reciprocate her hospitality by letting Madame de Dey feel at home in Carentan. The dealings between the Carentanians and Madame de Dey is an exchangist circle in which hospitality is reciprocated in hopes of making both parties feel at home, Madame de Dey in Carentan, and the Carentanians at Madame de Dey's. The circle of hospitality forges the communal bond which serves as the neighborly link.

This debt, of course, is not an ordinary debt which can be paid off. It must always be left outstanding, and it is the very impossibility of paying off this debt and settling the account of hospitality that sustains the dynamic structure of the hostis and the relation to the other by the imposition of a responsibility.

The principle of the sustainable debt is the foundation of each hospitable event. If the aim of hospitality is to make the guest feel at home, chez-soi, chez-l'autre, then the goal of hospitality is to make the guest comfortable as if he or she were at their home, as if he or she were no longer a guest in another's home. Hospitality seeks to dispel the strangeness or foreignness of the guest by making the guest a familiar member of the household. Once this happens, however, there is no longer a guest to which the hospitality event can be addressed. Paradoxically, it is precisely at this point when hospitality must necessarily disappear. If the aim of hospitality is to subsume the guest into the home, then hospitality seeks out its own effacement by seeking to eliminate the foreignness of the guest upon which every hospitable event must rely. It is a self-limiting process: once hospitality presents itself, it no longer presents itself and it is only through this disappearance that we can verify if a true hospitality event has taken place (The phenomenological trick is that of the Heideggerian type described in Being and Time, in which Heidegger discusses the ontological peculiarities involved in the process of revealing. To apply the logic to the case at hand, hospitality, in order for there to be a truly hospitable event, must never be "present-at-hand" -- in the temporal and spatial present in the here and now. Rather than revealing itself as present-at-hand, it only manifests itself as an appearance of simulacra and traces:

The emergence [Auftreten] of such occurrences, their showing-themselves, goes together with the Being-present-at-hand of disturbances which do not show themselves. Thus appearance, as the appearance "of something," does not mean showing-itself; it means rather the announcing-itself by [von] something which does not show itself, but which announces itself through something which does show itself. Appearing is a not-showing-itself [Heidegger, 52].

Hospitality would seem to be marked by this form of a generalized absence of itself. Therefore, in order to maintain a continuous exchange of hospitality like that described by the hostis, hospitality must never attain its goal of dispelling the strangeness of the stranger. At every encounter with the guest, it must fail to bring the guest home. Thus, each hospitable event is based not on the intent of making the guest at home, but on the intent of making the guest feel as if they were at home, without truly being at home. As if, but not really: the guest is always in the process of coming home without ever quite arriving. In this manner, hospitality can be thought of in the process of coming around or bringing itself forth, without ever fully doing so, and it is this bringing forth that constitutes its being. Hospitality is its potentiality, not its actualization.

The failure of hospitality to actualize itself, however, does not constitute a mere absence, but denotes a special kind of lack which is hospitality's very manner of existence -- a condition of existence which Heidegger calls Schuldigsein, which, not surprisingly, can be translated as a debt or guilt. Both debt and guilt do convey a certain sense of loss or absence, as if there was something missing that needed to be either paid back or redeemed, but Schuldigsein differs from this kind of payable debt in the sense that it is characterized by a certain Nichtigkeit -- a nullity, not-ness, or a negation. While it can accurately describe a debt as an outstanding sum of money which is not paid back, Nichtigkeit as not-ness or nullity goes one step further beyond this convention. Unlike a debt, a monetary debt for example, this Heideggarian nullity does not envision an absence or lack of something that marks an imperfection or flaw, but it is a lack which constitutes the very basis of being. As Heidegger writes, "Being-the-basis of a nullity" introduces

the idea of the "not" which lies in the concept of guilt as understood existentially [and] excludes relatedness to anything present-at-hand which is possible or which may have been required ... so any possibility that, with regard to Being-the-basis for a lack, the entity which is itself such a basis might be reckoned up as "lacking in some manner," is a possibility which drops out (BT, 329).

is not a question of proposing that we think otherwise, if this means to think some other thing. Rather, it is thinking that which could not have been, nor thought, otherwise. There is produced in the thought of the impossibility of the otherwise, in this not otherwise, a certain difference, a certain trembling, a certain decentering that is not the position of another center .... this displacement would not envisage an absence, that is an other presence: it would replace nothing" (Margins, 38).

Debts, however, always have the unusual ability to initiate economic transactions through the process of borrowing. Everything begins by borrowing. "To borrow is the law," Derrida writes,

Without borrowing, nothing begins, there is no proper fund/foundation [fonds]. Everything begins with the transference of funds, and there is interest in borrowing, this is even its initial interest. To borrow yields, brings back, produces surplus value, is the prime mover of every investment. Thereby, one begins by speculating, by betting on a value to be produced as if from nothing (The Post Card, 384).

III. Hospitality and The Conscript

Examining the definition of hospitality yields the notions of potis, which establishes the role of the master of the house, and the hostis, the economics of exchange upon which hospitality reposes. Madame de Dey chez-soi-chez-l'autre both questions her role as the master of the house by subverting her authoritative power over her home and complicates the exchange of hospitality by introducing an unredeemable debt upon which all hospitality is based. This debt simultaneously introduces a concept of hospitality as a debt which cannot be paid off but nevertheless takes an active part in the cycle of exchange and renders impossible its hypothetical counterpart: a debtless, aneconomic hospitality. Hospitality would seem to engage these two very different poles, asserting one while refuting the other.

With such a revolving debt, it is no surprise when The Conscript begins with a debt of Madame de Dey as a condition of originary Schuldigsein. Let us take a closer look at the opening of the text. Madame de Dey is not only at a loss by having lost her home in Paris; she is emotionally deprived. Previously married to a "jealous old soldier" in her youth, her late husband took away her "charms and vivacity of love" replacing it with a "veil of serious melancholy" (Balzac, 77). This melancholy, which is a mourning for the loss of love and youth, becomes the source of her desire to replace what her jealous and greedy husband took away, an impulsive yearning: "her principle attraction was due to the youthful innocence which her features betrayed at times, and which gave to her thoughts an ingenious expression of desire. Her appearance enjoined respect, but there was always in her hearing, in her voice, the yearning impulse toward an unknown future" (Balzac, 77). Her debt is that of an emotional lack, which she hopes to fulfill by focusing her attention on another love object through the process of substitution, similar to the manner in which one ventures on another investment in hopes of receiving favorable returns. This new love object turns out to be her son, which is motivated by nothing other than a privation: "The happiness and the enjoyment of which her life as a wife had been deprived, she soon found herself in her passionate love for her son" (Balzac, 78, my emphasis). She hopes to relieve her debts incurred as a wife by turning to her role as a mother.

Requiring constant attention because of his fragile health, the investment in her son, Auguste, was considerable. As a mother, she offered the "most infinite care" (Balzac, 78). Yet one should keep in mind that this motherly care was "unremitting" that is, unidirectional, unreciprocated, not paid back ["Thanks to unremitting care, this son had grown apace ..." (Balzac, 79, my emphasis)]. The care of her son does not follow the economy of exchange, yet it is this very care and concern which puts the economy described in The Conscript into motion. After Madame de Dey's son joins a battalion of soldiers, Madame de Dey moves to Carentan for nothing other than economic reasons, that of preserving her fortune: "impelled by no other desire that of preserving a great fortune intact for her son, she had renounced the happiness of accompanying him .... Was she not caring for her son's treasure at the risk of her own life?" (Balzac, 79). Her love for her son, which is not to be exchanged, compels her to move to Carentan, thereby initiating the exchange of hospitality with the inhabitants of the town. Thus, the love for her son, which itself does not obey the laws of exchangist economy, actually puts the economy into motion and initiates the mutual exchange of hospitality between Madame de Dey and the Carentanians.

In Carentan, every giving counteracts a taking. The most prominent figure in the town, the public accuser, is delegated with the power to give or take life and represents the "life and death in the district" (Balzac, 80). This accuser is essentially a pure form of exchange, never offering without getting something in return. It happens that he takes a romantic interest in Madame de Dey and

tried to win her affection by conduct marked by self-sacrificing generosity; perilous cunning! He was the most formidable of all aspirants. He alone was thoroughly acquainted with the condition of his former client's considerable fortune. His passion was naturally heightened by all cravings of an avaricious nature .... He was still a young man, and his actions were marked by such apparent generosity that Madame de Dey had not as yet been able to make up her mind concerning him (Balzac, 81).

The public accuser is the master of the town and establishes and enforces this exchangist economy as the law of Carentan to the extent that any transgression of the law is punishable as a crime. For instance, the act of Madame de Dey closing her doors and shutting out her guests is utterly scandalous. Everyone suspects that she is up to some sort of wrongdoing: 1) the public accuser speculates that her son, who was captured and put into prison, will escape and visit her during the night; 2) the mayor believes that a priest, who did not take the oath, had come from LaVendée (curiously similar to vendre "to sell" and venduer "a seller or shopkeeper") seeking refuge in Madame de Dey's house; 3) the president of the court maintains that the leader of the Chouans or the Vendens (another odd similarity), currently being pursued, sought protection under Madame de Dey's roof; 4) some suggest other nobles in Paris wanted by the law. All the crimes are of the hospitality type, an illegal hospitality which is a gratuitous, unreciprocated hospitality for criminals, outcasts, or outlaws who would not be able to pay back. "In a word, one and all suspected the countess of being guilty of one of those generous acts which the laws of the period called crimes" (Balzac, 83, my emphasis). Generously offering to house a guest underneath one's roof is a crime, since it does not follow the laws of economy.

The public accuser turns out to be correct. Madame de Dey's son hopes to escape prison and join her in three days, arriving in town alongside a battalion of soldiers who will each be assigned to lodge in a home overnight. Madame de Dey shuts her doors and prepares to receive her son, but we must keep in mind that her transactions with her son are unremitted and this goes for hospitality as well. It is not an exchange with someone who is other in the complete sense of the term. Indeed, this peculiar circumstance of hospitality is not directed at a stranger or guest, but aimed at a family member who is already a member of a household. No longer functioning between the oppositions of host and guest, sameness and difference, self and other, familial hospitality of this sort implies that the other is already the self. The guest is a member of the household. Since there is no exchange with the other, this form of familial hospitality is an exchange with the self, between the members of a household in a circle of self-recognition which reinforces the homogeneity of the home. The gift of hospitality, "sends itself back the gratifying image of goodness or generosity, of the giving-being who, knowing itself to be as such, recognizes itself in a circular, specular fashion, in a sort of auto-recognition, self-approval, narcissic gratitude" (Given Time, 23). The return of the son reinforces a self-identity within the home, chez-soi-soi-même par excellence. With the expulsion of the other, the casa or casino becomes a true home, a home of uncomplicated interiority, a home at home with itself. With this possibility of familial hospitality, a tension emerges between the economics of hospitality based on exchange and the familial, aneconomic, gratuitous hospitality -- a tension which can be resolved with the arrival of the son. The critical juncture which comprises the climax of The Conscript as well as an important point in our discussion of hospitality reposes on this coming of the prophetic son.

Before this can happen though, the laws of economy once again interject in the laws of familial hospitality. Addressing Madame de Dey as "Citizeness" to remind her of her duty to the law, the public accuser declares "I am sent here to see that the laws of the Republic are enforced" and announces "I cannot doubt that you expect your son" (Balzac, 94). The public accuser reminds Madame de Dey that she is still a subject of the law which will not tolerate such a breach in economy. "Tomorrow, at dawn of day," he asserts, "I shall come here, armed with a denunciation which I shall lodge myself" in the dual sense of the word "lodge" meaning a formal accusation that he himself will submit before the law, or in the sense of lodging himself in Madame de Dey's home, for he implies the option of saving her son only if she marries him in exchange. Offering an unremitting, familial hospitality to her son is only possible first through a contract and agreement of exchange within the cycle of economy itself. Familial hospitality then, is once again rendered impossible by the very principle that it must already participate in the exchange that it seeks to denounce.

It is no surprise then, that the prophetic return of the son turns out to be a hopeless narcissic fantasy, for the soldier who arrives under Madame de Dey's roof is not her son, but only an uncanny lookalike. During a climatic recognition scene in which she bursts into the room with her servant, which is actually a scene of misrecognition, Madame de Dey realizes that the guest is only another stranger:

She opened the door to her bedroom, saw her son, and threw herself into his arms, almost lifeless. "Oh! my child, my child!" she cried, sobbing, and frantically covering him with kisses. "Madame-" said the stranger. "Ah! it is not he!" she cried, recoiling in terror, and standing in front of the conscript, at whom she gazed with haggard features. "O Blessed God, what a resemblance!" exclaimed Bridgette (Balzac, 96).

On the other hand, this hospitality cannot merely be called an exchange with "the Other" as if it was completely other. We must remember that this other with which the exchange takes place is not entirely foreign and inaccessible, but the conscript who arrives at Madame de Dey's door is an other who looks familiar and consoling. It is this semblance of the self in otherness, chez-soi-chez-l'autre, which constitutes the uncanny experience. No longer based on an exchange with the other, or even with the self, this form of hospitality is a transaction with the other masquerading as the self. And what is unsettling is not the fact that the son never arrives, but the uncanny notion that what sleeps underneath Madame de Dey's roof that evening manifests the appearance of her son, while simultaneously being unfamiliar. He does not represent the tension between the other and the self, but reveals the tension of the other as the self. Neither the self nor the other, it is this uncomfortable proximity of the other evinced in her son that kills her:

"What, madame!" cried the housekeeper, leading her mistress to a seat, "that man sleep in Monsieur Auguste's bed, wear Monsieur Auguste's slippers, eat the pie I made for Monsieur Auguste! If I was to be guillotined for it, I--" "Brigitte!" cried Madame de Dey. Brigitte held her peace. "Hold your tongue, chatterer," said her husband in an undertone; "do you want to kill madame?" (Balzac, 97)

REFERENCES

• Balzac, H. de. "The Conscript," in Honoré de Balzac: Philosophic and Analytic Studies. Vol. VI, Trans. by G. Burnham Ives, Philadelphia: George Barrue & Son, 1899.
• Benveniste, E. Indo-European Language and Society. Trans. by Elizabeth Palmer, London: Faber & Faber, Ltd, 1973.
• Derrida, J. Given Time. Trans. by Peggy Kamuf, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
• -. "Ousia and Gramme: Note on a Note from Being and Time," in Margins of Philosophy. Trans. by Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
• -. The Post Card. Trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
• -. "Questions of Responsibility: Hostility/Hospitality," series of lectures at University of California, Irvine, April - May 1996.
• Heidegger, M. Being and Time. Trans. by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, New York: Harper & Row, 1962.
• Weber, S. "The Debts of Deconstruction and Other, Related Assumptions," in Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis and Literature. Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan, eds., The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, 1984.
• -. "Reading and Writing -- chez Derrida," in Institution and Interpretation. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1987.

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This hydra 1996 © Peter Krapp

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