L’hostipitalité des linguistes: Puech coincé entre Benveniste et Derrida

In their 1980 paper "Derrida lecteur de Saussure", Jean-Louis Chiss and Christian Puech criticised Jacques Derrida's own critique of Saussure, together with his less well-known one of Benveniste's linguistic analysis of Aristotle's categories. Derrida was in the audience, and in the discussion following the paper he replied forcefully to the charges levelled against him by Chiss and Puech, which were cast in academic-territorial terms -- whether a linguist is entitled to intervene in philosophical questions, and a philosopher in linguistic ones. This paper examines the ensuing debate between Puech and Derrida in the framework of Derrida's later concept of "hostipitality", which derived from his reading of Benveniste's discussion of the curious etymology of "hospitality": *hos- is an Indo-European root meaning host/guest but also enemy (as in "hostile"). The debate is particularly ironic given that Chiss and Puech were acting as a sort of Trojan Horse, bringing the ideas of Derrida and other post-structuralists to the awareness of linguists, and so making this encounter itself an episode of hostipitality.