Derrida and Hospitality: Theory and Practice - Hardcover

Judith Still

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0748640274 ISBN 13: 9780748640270

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press, 2010

Synopsis

This book is the first full-length study of hospitality in the writings of Jacques Derrida. Hospitality is critically important in Derrida's writings, and his insights in this have been influential across a range of disciplines from geography, politics and sociology to literary studies and philosophy. It functions as a way of both thinking about relations between individuals, and analysing the (often inhospitable) reception of outsiders, such as refugees or migrants, by the community or state. Still 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. 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, most importantly Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Emmanuel Levinas.

About this title

Review:

An important, intelligent book on the context of Derrida's thinking about hospitality ... This indispensable volume enhances understanding of the French cultural and political context of Derrida's thinking. Summing Up: Highly Recommended. --N. Lukacher, University of Illinois at Chicago, Choice

Still succeeds admirably, in my view, in exploring the traditional model of hospitality with reference to the Odyssey and the Old Testament (chapter 2); and in response to that, the implications of a maternal model of hospitality, first for friendship, which is traditionally viewed as existing only between men (chapter 3); then for naming as an issue of hospitality in the colonial context (chapter 4); thereafter for the welcoming to Europe of migrants with their Gods (chapter 5); and last, for our relation to non-human animals (chapter 6). In each instance, Still convincingly shows the link with hospitality, which may not be immediately obvious to the reader. There are many gems in this book. --Jacques de Ville, University of the Western Cape, Oxford Literary Review

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

About the Author:

Judith Still is Chair of French and Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham.

About this edition

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0748640274
• ISBN 13: 9780748640270
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304