Hospitality, Volume I

“[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 *
"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 *
“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