Save 40% plus free shipping during our Summer Sale! Browse books.
Homeless Hospitality
Derrida, Kant, Kafka, Lispector
This book can be opened with
“Hospitality is poetic or is not at all,” Jacques Derrida claimed in a parenthetical comment to which he never returned. Homeless Hospitality takes up the challenge of thinking poetic or literary hospitality in relation to Derrida’s influential analysis of hospitality’s aporetic concept. Hospitality has to be at once conditional and unconditional—a conditional welcoming of a stranger into a home under the control of a host, but also an unconditional welcoming, without mastery, of an unimaginable other. This book argues that poetic or literary hospitality is unconditional hospitality as a linguistic event. Unconditional hospitality is unrepresentable, but literary texts can decommission mimetic and instrumental language and perform a radically passive poetic welcome.
Homeless Hospitality begins with Kant, who reimagined hospitality for modernity as a cosmopolitan right. “There is no unconditional hospitality in Kant,” Derrida claims; but a close reading of Toward Eternal Peace discloses a poetic hospitality flickering in Kant’s treatise, as the text briefly departs from its juridical and representational idiom and covertly welcomes a homeless hospitality unassimilable to the Kantian postulate of a right to property. From Kant, the book turns to Franz Kafka, Clarice Lispector, and Paul Celan to show how literary writing performs the possibility that “hospitality is poetic or is not at all.”
“Marc Redfield has provided a probing and pellucid set of reflections on the resonant topic of hospitality, via a series of extremely attentive readings of his well-chosen literary and theoretical texts. There is uncommon and common sense on every page and many surprises even for texts one imagined one knew. Redfield’s study expands the recent flurry of attention to hospitality especially by a painstaking concern for the poetics of hospitality with results that are far-reaching and profound.”—Ian Balfour, York University
“Homeless Hospitality makes the claim for literature, or literary language, as the setting in which hospitality, with all its constituent paradoxes, first becomes possible. The sensitively written book shows the possibilities and promises of literary language in an age of increasing inhospitableness, paranoia, and exclusion.”—Erica Weitzman, Northwestern University