Hospitality, Volume I

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

Hospitality, Volume I reproduces a seminar delivered by Jacques Derrida at the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales in Paris between November 1995 and June 1996. 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 hospitality with its many conditions and our idea of hospitality as something offered unconditionally to the stranger.