Abstract

In Hospitality, Volume I, Jacques Derrida continues a seminar series he inaugurated in 1991 under the general title of "Questions of Responsibility." Delivered at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris from November 1995 through June 1996, the seminar is guided by questions that focus on responsibility and "the foreigner": How is the foreigner welcomed and/or repressed? What does the notion of the foreigner reveal about kinship, ethnicity, the city, the state, and the nation? What are the stakes of the opposition between friend and enemy? How should we think of this in relation to borders, citizenship, displaced populations, immigration, exile, asylum, integration, assimilation, xenophobia, and racism? Derrida approaches these questions through readings of several classical texts as well as more modern texts from Heidegger, Arendt, and Camus, among others. Central to his project is a rigorous distinction between conventional hospitality (always finite and conditional) and the idea of a hospitality open unconditionally to the newcomer.