Derrida and Hospitality : Theory and Practice

The first full-length study of hospitality in the writings of Jacques Derrida.

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. Hospitality to animals is taken as a limit case in defining what it is to be human.