Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond (Cultural Memory in the Present) - Softcover

Derrida, Jacques; Dufourmantelle, Anne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804734062 ISBN 13: 9780804734066

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

These two lectures by Jacques Derrida, "Foreigner Question" and "Step of Hospitality/No Hospitality," derive from a series of seminars on "hospitality" conducted by Derrida in Paris, January 1996. His seminars, in France and in America, have become something of an institution over the years, the place where he presents the ongoing evolution of his thought in a remarkable combination of thoroughly mapped-out positions, sketches of new material, and exchanges with students and interlocutors.

As has become a pattern in Derrida's recent work, the form of this presentation is a self-conscious enactment of its content. The book consists of two texts on facing pages. "Invitation" by Anne Dufourmantelle appears on the left (an invitation that of course originates in a response), clarifying and inflecting Derrida's "response" on the right. The interaction between them not only enacts the "hospitality" under discussion, but preserves something of the rhythms of teaching.

The volume also characteristically combines careful readings of canonical texts and philosophical topics with attention to the most salient events in the contemporary world, using "hospitality" as a means of rethinking a range of political and ethical situations. "Hospitality" is viewed as a question of what arrives at the borders, in the initial surprise of contact with an other, a stranger, a foreigner. For example, Antigone is revisited in light of the question of impossible mourning; Oedipus at Colonus is read via concerns that also apply to teletechnology; the trial of Socrates is brought into conjunction with the televised funeral of François Mitterrand.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jacques Derrida was Director of Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. Stanford has published eight of his books, most recently a joint publication of The Instant of My Death (Maurice Blanchot) and Demeure: Fiction and Testimony (Derrida). Anne Dufourmantelle is a philosopher and psychoanalyst in Paris and the author of La vocation prophétique de la philosophie.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

These two lectures by Jacques Derrida, “Foreigner Question” and “Step of Hospitality/No Hospitality,” derive from a series of seminars on “hospitality” conducted by Derrida in Paris, January 1996. His seminars, in France and in America, have become something of an institution over the years, the place where he presents the ongoing evolution of his thought in a remarkable combination of thoroughly mapped-out positions, sketches of new material, and exchanges with students and interlocutors.
As has become a pattern in Derrida's recent work, the form of this presentation is a self-conscious enactment of its content. The book consists of two texts on facing pages. “Invitation” by Anne Dufourmantelle appears on the left (an invitation that of course originates in a response), clarifying and inflecting Derrida’s “response” on the right. The interaction between them not only enacts the “hospitality” under discussion, but preserves something of the rhythms of teaching.
The volume also characteristically combines careful readings of canonical texts and philosophical topics with attention to the most salient events in the contemporary world, using “hospitality” as a means of rethinking a range of political and ethical situations. “Hospitality” is viewed as a question of what arrives at the borders, in the initial surprise of contact with an other, a stranger, a foreigner. For example, Antigone is revisited in light of the question of impossible mourning; Oedipus at Colonus is read via concerns that also apply to teletechnology; the trial of Socrates is brought into conjunction with the televised funeral of François Mitterrand.

Aus dem Klappentext

These two lectures by Jacques Derrida, Foreigner Question and Step of Hospitality/No Hospitality, derive from a series of seminars on hospitality conducted by Derrida in Paris, January 1996. His seminars, in France and in America, have become something of an institution over the years, the place where he presents the ongoing evolution of his thought in a remarkable combination of thoroughly mapped-out positions, sketches of new material, and exchanges with students and interlocutors.
As has become a pattern in Derrida's recent work, the form of this presentation is a self-conscious enactment of its content. The book consists of two texts on facing pages. Invitation by Anne Dufourmantelle appears on the left (an invitation that of course originates in a response), clarifying and inflecting Derrida s response on the right. The interaction between them not only enacts the hospitality under discussion, but preserves something of the rhythms of teaching.
The volume also characteristically combines careful readings of canonical texts and philosophical topics with attention to the most salient events in the contemporary world, using hospitality as a means of rethinking a range of political and ethical situations. Hospitality is viewed as a question of what arrives at the borders, in the initial surprise of contact with an other, a stranger, a foreigner. For example, Antigone is revisited in light of the question of impossible mourning; Oedipus at Colonus is read via concerns that also apply to teletechnology; the trial of Socrates is brought into conjunction with the televised funeral of François Mitterrand.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

OF HOSPITALITY

By Anne Dufourmantelle, Rachel Bowlby

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2000 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-3406-6

Contents

Translator's Note..........................................................
ix
INVITATION Anne Dufourmantelle............................................
2
FOREIGNER QUESTION Jacques Derrida........................................
3
STEP OF HOSPITALITY / NO HOSPITALITY Jacques Derrida......................
75
Notes......................................................................
157

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Invitation

Anne Dufourmantelle

"An act of hospitality can only be poetic."—Jacques Derrida

It is Derrida's poetic hospitality that I would like toinvoke in these pages, including the difficulty of givingits due to the night—to that which, within a philosophicalkind of thinking, does not belong to the orderof the day, the visible, and memory. This is to try tocome close to a silence around which discourse is ordered,and that a poem sometimes discovers, but alwayspulls itself back from unveiling in the very movementof speech or writing. If a part of night is inscribed inlanguage, this is also language's moment of effacement.

This nocturnal side of speech could be called obsession.A forger can imitate a painter's brush stroke or awriter's style and make the difference between themimperceptible, but he will never be able to make hisown their obsession, what forces them to be alwaysgoing back toward that silence where the first imprintsare sealed. Derrida's obsession, in this philosophicalnarrative woven around that fine theme of hospitality,takes its time in drawing the contours of an impossible,illicit geography of proximity. A proximity that wouldnot be the opposite of an elsewhere come from outsideand surrounding it, but "close to the close," that unbearableorb of intimacy that melts into hate. If we cansay that murder and hate designate everything that excludescloseness, it is insofar as they ravage from withinan original relationship to alterity. The hostis respondsto hospitality in the way that the ghost recalls himself tothe living, not letting them forget. To the pacified reasonof Kant, Derrida opposes the primary haunting ofa subject prevented by alterity from closing itself off inits peacefulness.

When Derrida reads Sophocles, Joyce, Kant,Heidegger, Celan, Levinas, Blanchot, or Kafka, he notonly accompanies their texts, giving them a second echo,he "obsesses" them with the theme he is working on, andwhich thus acts like a photographic developer. Witnessthat moment where, in a seminar commentary on thefinal scenes of Oedipus at Colonus based on the ideaof the hospitality given to death and the dead, Derridastresses its absolute contemporaneity, while the necessityof that strange "visitation" of Sophocles' tragedy is imposedon his listeners. The summons he addresses todead or living authors to roam around with him on theedges of a theme doesn't make him turn his back on"the matters of urgency that assail us at this end-of-millennium,"as he puts it himself. On the contrary, hesupports confronting them.

There is in this seminar a precision that can beheard. And that comes, I think, from the intimateagreement of thought and speech—their rhythmicagreement—and from the thematic analysis which isthe obsession of philosophical reflection; but also fromDerrida's taking it to the limit when he works over aconcept up to the point of its turning back toward theenigma that bears it.

That is why it seemed important to us to convey afragment of the seminars without altering anything.In them you hear that singular rhythm of Derrida'sspoken reflecting; so different from the writing, ofwhich he is a patient artisan. And we thought it feasibleto single out two seminars because the whole problematicof hospitality was already present in that "enclave"(as a work is included in each of its fragments),as was also the spacing of measured violence and friendshipthat gives this thinking its uniqueness, its particulargenius.

Derrida has himself spoken of the difficulty of takingaccount of the open speech of the seminar as it relatesto hospitality. "What I don't want to say or cannot,the unsaid, the forbidden, what is passed over insilence, what is separated off ... —all these should beinterpreted," he stressed. "In these regions we rediscoverthe open question of the relationship between hospitalityand the question, in other words of a hospitality beginningwith the name, the question of the name, orelse opening up without question...." And also: "Onecould dream about what would be the lesson of someonewho didn't have the keys to his own knowledge,who didn't arrogate it to himself. He would give placeto the place, leaving the keys with the other to unlockthe words from their enclosure."

It is this "giving place to the place" that, I think, isthe promise kept by these words. They also make us understandthe question of place as being a fundamentalquestion, founding the history of our culture and unthoughtin it. It would be consenting to exile, in otherwords, to being in a relationship to place, to thedwelling, that is both native (I would say almost maternal),and yet in transit, if thinking occurred to thehuman. Derrida's meditations on burial, the name,memory, the madness that inhabits language, exile andthe threshold, are so many signs addressed to this questionof place, inviting the subject to recognize that he isfirst of all a guest.

Foreigner Question:Coming from Abroad / from the Foreigner

Question d'étranger: venue de l'étrangerFourth seminar (January 10, 1996)

Jacques Derrida

Isn't the question of the foreigner [l'étranger] aforeigner's question? Coming from the foreigner,from abroad [l'étranger]?

Before saying the question of the foreigner, perhapswe should also specify: question of the foreigner.How should we understand this difference ofaccent?

There is, we were saying, a question of the foreigner.It is urgent to embark on it—as such.

Of course. But before being a question to be dealtwith, before designating a concept, a theme, a problem,a program, the question of the foreigner is aquestion of the foreigner, addressed to the foreigner.As though the foreigner were first of all the one whoputs the first question or the one to whom you addressthe first question. As though the foreigner werebeing-in-question, the very question of being-in-question,the question-being or being-in-question ofthe question. But also the one who, putting the firstquestion, puts me in question. One thinks of thesituation of the third person and of justice, whichLevinas analyzes as "the birth of the question."

Before reopening this question of the questionfrom the place of the foreigner, and of its Greek situation,as we had said we would, let us limit ourselvesto a few remarks or a few readings by way ofepigraph.

Back to places we think are familiar: in many ofPlato's dialogues, it is often the Foreigner (xenos)who questions. He carries and puts the question.We think first of the Sophist. It is the Foreignerwho, by putting forward the unbearable question,the parricide question, contests the thesis of Parmenides,puts in question the logos of our fatherParmenides, ton tou...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2000
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804734062
• ISBN 13: 9780804734066
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 176
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland