Beginning with Jacques Derrida’s declaration, “I would say there is no politics […] without an open hospitality to the guest as ghost” (Aporias 61), this paper is an attempt to think the politics of this ghostpitality. If, as Derrida points out in Aporias, the French word hôte means both host and guest, ghostpitality names the return of the hôte as hôte, as something that will have been hôte, no longer and not yet host and/or guest. What will have been ghostpitality, therefore? When will it have been? This paper’s pressing concern is with the time and timeliness of the politics of ghostpitality, particularly as it relates to Derrida’s concept of the democracy to come.
Time permitting, these questions will be explored in the context of Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon. If, as Derrida states in Rogues, “democracy perhaps has an essential affinity with this turn or trope that we call the ellipsis” (1), what part do the 11 days elided from the English calendar in 1752 as a result of the Calendar (New Style) Act 1750 play in the story of these two men who plotted the Mason-Dixon line a decade before the American War of Independence? What part does the calculation of a time out of joint play in the later revolution, or in democracy in America, or democracy and America, which is Derrida’s theme?