Derrida and Hospitality

Winner of the R. H. Gapper Book Prize 2011 This impressive book expertly welcomes the reader into the difficulties of the question of hospitality. While interpreting work on this topic by Derrida and Levinas, Cixous and Irigaray, Still also opens new doors onto issues in feminism and post-colonialism. She refers to telling examples in contemporary politics, and unfailingly reflects on the way her own work is performatively implicated in the structures of hospitality she is drawing out, Geoffrey Bennington, Asa G. Candler Professor of Modern French Thought, Emory University This book sets Derrida's work in a series of contexts including the socio-political history of France, especially in relation to Algeria, and the writing on hospitality of other key thinkers. Hospitality is critically important in Derrida's writings, and his work in this field has been influential across a range of disciplines from geography, politics and sociology to literary studies and philosophy. While it is part of everyday experience, and every society has a code of hospitality by which behaviour is judged, Derrida also argues for the impossibility of true hospitality. Judith Still shows how this functions as a way of thinking about relations between individuals, and also as a way of analysing the (often inhospitable) reception of outsiders, such as refugees or migrants, by the community or state. She also follows the thread of sexual difference in Derrida's writing in order to shed light on his exploration of the complex and delicate, strange yet familiar, political and ethical dilemmas of how to be those impossible things, a good host and a good guest. Judith Still holds a Chair of French and Critical Theory, at the University of Nottingham.