Of Hospitality - (Cultural Memory in the Present) by Jacques Derrida & Anne Dufourmantelle (Paperback)

About the Book

Consisting of two texts on facing pages, the form of this presentation of two 1996 lectures on hospitality by Jacques Derrida is a self-conscious enactment of its content. Invitation by Anne Dufourmantelle appears on the left (an invitation that of course originates a response), clarifying and inflecting Derrida's "response" on the right.

Book Synopsis

These two lectures by Jacques Derrida, "Foreigner Question" and "Step of Hospitality/No Hospitality," derive from a series of seminars on "hospitality" conducted by Derrida in Paris, January 1996. His seminars, in France and in America, have become something of an institution over the years, the place where he presents the ongoing evolution of his thought in a remarkable combination of thoroughly mapped-out positions, sketches of new material, and exchanges with students and interlocutors.

As has become a pattern in Derrida's recent work, the form of this presentation is a self-conscious enactment of its content. The book consists of two texts on facing pages. "Invitation" by Anne Dufourmantelle appears on the left (an invitation that of course originates in a response), clarifying and inflecting Derrida's "response" on the right. The interaction between them not only enacts the "hospitality" under discussion, but preserves something of the rhythms of teaching.

The volume also characteristically combines careful readings of canonical texts and philosophical topics with attention to the most salient events in the contemporary world, using "hospitality" as a means of rethinking a range of political and ethical situations. "Hospitality" is viewed as a question of what arrives at the borders, in the initial surprise of contact with an other, a stranger, a foreigner. For example, Antigone is revisited in light of the question of impossible mourning; Oedipus at Colonus is read via concerns that also apply to teletechnology; the trial of Socrates is brought into conjunction with the televised funeral of François Mitterrand.

From the Back Cover

"Of Hospitality provides us with a glimpse of Jacques Derrida as not only the brilliant thinker and writer readers have long admired but as the masterful lecturer and pedagogue his students have long known. . . . Of Hospitality should find a welcome audience not only among faithful readers of Derrida but among all those who are open enough to hear the knock at their borders or their doors."--L'Esprit Créateur
"Both lectures [in the book] deserve credit not only for representing a significant step in Derrida's reflection on ethics and politics but also for prompting us to begin our own deconstructive work and rethink our identity."--Symploke

Review Quotes

"The book clearly shows the political and ethical seriousness of Derrida's philosophical thought, and it is an important work for anyone who is working with those notions in light of thought about 'the other.'"--Religious Studies Review

"Of Hospitality provides us with a glimpse of Jacques Derrida as not only the brilliant thinker and writer readers have long admired but as the masterful lecturer and pedagogue his students have long known. . . . Of Hospitality should find a welcome audience not only among faithful readers of Derrida but among all those who are open enough to hear the knock at their borders or their doors."--L'Esprit Créateur

"Both lectures [in the book] deserve credit not only for representing a significant step in Derrida's reflection on ethics and politics but also for prompting us to begin our own deconstructive work and rethink our identity."--Symploke

About the Author

Jacques Derrida was Director of Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. Stanford has published eight of his books, most recently a joint publication of The Instant of My Death (Maurice Blanchot) and Demeure: Fiction and Testimony (Derrida). Anne Dufourmantelle is a philosopher and psychoanalyst in Paris and the author of La vocation prophétique de la philosophie.