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

Hospitality reproduces a two-year seminar series delivered by Jacques Derrida at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris between 1995 and 1997. 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, finite hospitality, with its many conditions, and the aspirational idea of hospitality as something offered unconditionally to the stranger. This volume collects the first year of the seminar.

"A generously ambiguous approach to thinking about paradox, power, and borders during a time of global emergency. . . . Hospitality reminds us, especially in its bristling footnotes, that the Jewish Algerian Derrida had long been involved in very precise and personally exposing political campaigns and movements, including, in the 1990s, his support of undocumented migrants in France. How might such activities align with his philosophical thinking? What might the latter offer today in times of global emergency concerning neighbors, guests, and thresholds? Hospitality is one of the most urgent and still-relevant places where those questions may be answered. . . . The Derrida of these seminars sounds much like the author of his books and essays, which is to say, despite what you might have read before reading him, like an extraordinarily generous, encouraging teacher." - 4Columns