Threshold Phenomena
Derrida and the Question of Hospitality
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Threshold Phenomena reexamines Jacques Derrida’s thinking of hospitality, from his well-known writings of the 1990s to his recently-published seminars on the same topic. The book follows Derrida’s rereading of several central figures and texts on hospitality (Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, Kant’s Perpetual Peace, Levinas’s Totality and Infinity) and his attempt to rethink questions surrounding not only private but also public hospitality in the form of immigration law, the contemporary treatment of migrants or stateless peoples, and the establishment of cities of asylum.
Naas develops many of the central themes of Derrida’s seminar—the relationship between hospitality and teletechnology (telephone, internet, cyberspace, etc.), the role of fatherlands and mother tongues in hospitality, questions of purity, immunity, and xenophobia, and the possibility of extending hospitality beyond the human—to animals, plants, gods, and clones. Reframing Derrida’s approach to ethics, Naas reconsiders the relationship between hospitality and deconstruction, concluding that hospitality is not merely a theme to be treated by deconstruction but one of the best ways of describing its work.
Naas’s book turns around a figure that Derrida himself returns to several times throughout the seminar: the threshold—a figure of hospitality par excellence, but also, in his seminars, another name for what Derrida in the 1960s began calling différance. Threshold Phenomena concludes that Derrida’s seminar on hospitality is one of the best introductions we have to Derrida’s work in general and one of the surest signs of its continuing relevance, a seminar that is at once fascinating and engaging in its own right and necessary for analyzing today’s increasingly nationalistic and xenophobic political climate.
Naas’s book accompanies and enlightens Derrida’s seminar with a particularly hospitable form of commentary whose relaxed ease is a real achievement.---Penelope Deutscher, Northwestern University
This is the fullest treatment of Derridean hospitality to date and the only one that builds upon the recently published versions of his Hospitality seminar. It is also a pedagogical tour de force, enabling engagements on different levels: with Derrida as a teacher and humorist, as a public intellectual, and as a champion of the undocumented.---Diane Rubenstein, Cornell University
An exceptional achievement. Highly recommended.---Choice Reviews
Abbreviations of Works by Jacques Derrida | ix
Introduction: Fist Bumps and Pandemic Bubbles | 1
I. Preliminaries: Questions on the Threshold
1. Hodos and Odos (Homeric Hospitality 1) | 17
2. Translating Hospitality | 23
3. Masters of the House: Hospitality and Sovereignty | 31
4. Xenos and Xenia (Homeric Hospitality 2) | 39
5. On Dying Abroad: Oedipus (on the Threshold) at Colonus | 44
6. Plato’s Xenoi | 53
II. The “Concept” of Hospitality
7. Stranger Things | 63
8. Conditional and Unconditional Hospitality | 67
9. Unconditional and Conditional Hospitality | 79
10. The Art or Poetics of Hospitality | 97
11. But Why So Much Kant? | 104
12. Xenos Paradox: Hospitality and Autoimmunity | 113
III. The Wall, the Door, the Threshold, the Hotspot
13. Dirty Foreigners: The Question of Purity | 127
14. Homing Devices: Teletechnology and the Question of Private Space | 133
15. Phantasms of Fatherlands and Mother Tongues | 145
16. Phantasms of Mother Tongues and Mobile Phones | 152
17. On Cosmopolitanism and Cities of Refuge | 164
18. Beyond Anthropo- Hospitality: Plants, Animals, Gods, and Clones | 177
Conclusion: From Threshold to Threshold— Derrida’s Démarche | 199
Acknowledgments | 207
Appendix: Two Regimes of Hospitality (Chart) | 209
Notes | 211
Index | 233
