ABOUT THIS BOOK

Jacques Derrida explores the ramifications of what we owe to others.

Hospitality reproduces a two-year seminar series delivered by Jacques Derrida at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris between 1995 and 1997. In these lectures, Derrida asks a series of related questions about responsibility and “the foreigner”: How do we welcome or turn away the foreigner? What does the idea of the foreigner reveal about kinship and the state, particularly in relation to friendship, citizenship, migration, asylum, assimilation, and xenophobia? Derrida approaches these questions through readings of several classical texts as well as modern texts by Heidegger, Arendt, Camus, and others. Central to his project is a rigorous distinction between conventional, finite hospitality, with its many conditions, and the aspirational idea of hospitality as something offered unconditionally to the stranger. This volume collects the first year of the seminar.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) was director of studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, and professor of humanities at the University of California, Irvine. Several of his books have been published in translation by the University of Chicago Press. Pascale-Anne Brault is professor of French at DePaul University. Peggy Kamuf is professor emerita of French and comparative literature at the University of Southern California. E. S. Burt is professor emerita of French and English at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of two books, including Regard for the Other: Autothanatography in Rousseau, De Quincey, Baudelaire, and Wilde.

REVIEWS

“Brilliantly edited and documented, this book is a teaching text, a reading lesson. Hospitality includes, among many other themes, the theme of granting entry to the foreigner, a theme for our time. Derrida takes us from the history of ancient philosophy into empirical detail, undoing difficulties word by word.”

— Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Columbia University

“Along with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida . . . will be remembered as one of the three most important philosophers of the twentieth century. No thinker in the last one hundred years had a greater impact than he did on people in more fields and different disciplines.”

— New York Times, on Jacques Derrida

“In America, Derrida, who died in 2004, left as big a mark on humanities departments as any single thinker in the past forty years—according to a recent survey, only works by Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu are cited more often.”

— New York Review of Books, on Jacques Derrida

"A generously ambiguous approach to thinking about paradox, power, and borders during a time of global emergency. . . . Hospitality reminds us, especially in its bristling footnotes, that the Jewish Algerian Derrida had long been involved in very precise and personally exposing political campaigns and movements, including, in the 1990s, his support of undocumented migrants in France. How might such activities align with his philosophical thinking? What might the latter offer today in times of global emergency concerning neighbors, guests, and thresholds? Hospitality is one of the most urgent and still-relevant places where those questions may be answered. . . . The Derrida of these seminars sounds much like the author of his books and essays, which is to say, despite what you might have read before reading him, like an extraordinarily generous, encouraging teacher."

— 4Columns

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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