Lars von Trier's film Dogville (2003) stages the paradoxical possibilities and impossibilities of hospitality and forgiveness. A young woman, fleeing gangsters, seeks refuge in a small town. Concerned about the risks involved, the townsfolk reluctantly agree to offer her refuge or hospitality. A time limit is set and she offsets the risk by giving something in return: her initial ‘helping out’ turns into arduous labour and finally sexual exploitation as the town places increasing conditions on their welcome.

Jacques Derrida, elaborating Emmanuel Levinas's theory of the feminine hospitable welcome of the home, traces the relation between a conditional welcome that in the end would be no welcome at all and an unconditional hospitality that has no limits. Extending Levinas's ethics of the face-to-face relation and his image of the welcome of the home (both founded on love, as we saw in Chapter 4), Derrida investigates the limitations of the hospitality offered to the guest, the refugee, the migrant, and the guest worker. While love is implicit here it is bought closer to the surface in Derrida's articulation of friendship and democracy. Rejecting the idea of fraternal friendship as the foundation of the democratic relation, Derrida nonetheless formulates a non-fraternal friendship that would include the sister and the cousin – the woman and the racial other – within democratic politics.

While Derrida's politics recognises ethical and friendship love, his friend and colleague, French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy more explicitly identifies the significance of love in the formation of subjectivity, community and culture.