Lecture
LCCP Colloquium "What Tolerance Could Henceforth Be"
- Date
- Thursday 23 April 2026
- Time
- Location
-
Herta Mohr
Witte Singel 27A
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- 0.06
The Leiden Centre of Continental Philosophy is pleased to announce a lecture by Marie Chabbert, Assistant Professor in Modern European Philosophy at Utrecht University.
Abstract
In 1994, Derrida opened the Capri conference by naming the “problem of tolerance” as one of the most urgent challenges of our time. If Voltaire rightly underscored the transformative role of the ideal of tolerance in ending the religious conflicts of early modern Europe, the resurgence of religiously motivated violence at the turn of the century led Derrida to question its capacity to secure peaceful coexistence. His critique is well known: as a conditional permission granted by a sovereign host to a vulnerable guest, tolerance is not merely a virtue but a structure of power – one that reproduces exclusion and thus harbors its own form of intolerance. Hence Derrida’s 1994 invitation to think “another tolerance” beyond the logic of sovereign inclusion, so that the pursuit of peaceful coexistence might be guided by an ideal that does not, from the outset, replicate the very exclusions it seeks to overcome. This paper argues that Derrida’s later elaboration of “unconditional hospitality” does not, by itself, fulfill that injunction – at least not with respect to peaceful coexistence under religious pluralism. Hospitality is conceptually attuned to the arrival of foreigners and powerfully exposes the violence of borders and asylum regimes. Religious alterity, however, is not reducible to unfamiliarity: it is often a difference “within,” structured by competing truth claims that authorize judgment about error, deviation, and the limits of the tolerable. The challenge, then, is not simply to welcome the stranger but to sustain a shared world with others whose deepest convictions may differ – or even conflict with – one’s own. To “think what tolerance could henceforth be”, in Derrida’s own words, therefore requires confronting the epistemic authority through which religious difference has historically been encountered and understood – a task that remains open within Derrida’s own account of unconditional hospitality.
About
Marie Chabbert is Assistant Professor in Modern European Philosophy at Utrecht University. Her research examines how French philosophers from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – particularly Georges Bataille, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-Luc Nancy – contribute to the question of peaceful coexistence amid a global rise in violence committed in the name of God. She is currently working on her first monograph, provisionally entitled What Comes After Tolerance? A French Theory of Religious Diversity. In line with her research commitments, Marie has long been involved in – and presided over – peace-building initiatives that tackle the rise in extreme beliefs and religious hate crimes. In 2021, she was named “Young Interfaith Leader” by the United Nations Office of Counter Terrorism and the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations. She is a regular contributor to the newspaper Le Monde and the intellectual magazine Esprit.