Hospitality, Volume II - (Seminars of Jacques Derrida) by Jacques Derrida (Hardcover)

About the Book

"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? 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 second year of the seminar, which considers an Islamic problematic of hospitality, the relevance of forgiveness, and the work of Emmanuel Levinas."--

Book Synopsis

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? 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 second year of the seminar, which considers an Islamic problematic of hospitality, the relevance of forgiveness, and the work of Emmanuel Levinas.

Review Quotes

"[Derrida's seminars] constitute not only a record of his work as a teacher, but also an intellectual journal, preserving his responses to new developments in politics, philosophy and literature. . . . Derrida was probably the best-known philosopher of his generation, but the publication of his seminars reveals that he was also a conscientious, kind and industrious teacher. His classroom was, it would seem, his studio, his workshop, even his intellectual home."-- "London Review of Books"

"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 on volume I

About the Author

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.