Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was director of studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, and professor of humanities at the University of California, Irvine. Several of his books have been published in translation by the University of Chicago Press. Pascale-Anne Brault is professor of French at DePaul University. Peggy Kamuf is professor emerita of French and comparative literature at the University of Southern California.

"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? 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 second year of the seminar, which considers an Islamic problematic of hospitality, the relevance of forgiveness, and the work of Emmanuel Levinas."--