No Foreigners

Immanuel Kant​ was against revolutions. In 1793 he described them as the work of ‘political criminals’ and ‘injustice in the highest degree’. He accepted, on the other hand, that they sometimes turned out well: the Dutch had been lucky with theirs in 1579, for example, and so had the British in 1688. As for the French in 1789, it was too soon to say; but in one respect their revolution was already a glorious success: the wave of sympathy it had generated in the rest of the world showed that humanity was ready to move on from the old politics of unprincipled personal intrigue to a new politics of ‘lawful constitutions’ and ‘natural right’ – from the murderous madness of Richard III, you might say, to the enlightened benevolence of Nathan the Wise. Whatever might come of it in France, the French Revolution had ‘revealed in human nature … a capacity for improvement that no politician could have conjured up’ and, according to Kant, ‘a phenomenon of this kind … can never be forgotten.’

The new politics was going to be grounded in rational principles, starting with the revolutionary buzzwords liberté, égalité, fraternité, but it would also have to face up to an issue that they tend to obscure: the problem of territorial boundaries, and a cluster of supplementary questions about nationality and internationality, migration and asylum, invasion, colonialism and war. In his essay ‘Towards Perpetual Peace’, written in 1795, Kant invoked ‘cosmopolitanism’ or, in other words, a ‘right to world citizenship’ (Weltbürgerrecht) derived from the principle that everyone has a ‘right to the earth’s surface, which the human race shares in common’ and that, therefore, ‘no one originally has any more right to occupy a particular portion of the earth than anyone else.’ But the ideal of ‘communal possession’ was hobbled by geographical reality: the brute fact that the earth is round, which means that human beings ‘cannot spread themselves out over an infinite area’ and must therefore learn to live ‘alongside each other’. Hence the ominous conundrum of the Fremdling – the outsider, stranger or foreigner – which threatens interminable conflict and a permanent possibility of war.

For Kant, war was part of the ‘state of nature’, but humanity could rise above it by adding the homely virtue of ‘hospitality’ to the abstractions of ‘cosmopolitan right’, so as to pursue a policy of ‘universal hospitality’ (allgemeine Hospitalität). But universal hospitality isn’t quite as generous as it sounds: it means, as Kant construed it, that we should all have a ‘right of visitation’ (Besuchsrecht), entitling us to enter foreign countries without encountering ‘hostility’; but it does not give us the ‘right of a guest’ (Gastrecht), which would allow us to stay as long as we like. Conversely, universal hospitality exposes the ‘appalling injustice’ of colonisation, which Kant put down to ‘the inhospitable [inhospitale] behaviour of … trading states’ that abuse their ‘visitation right’ and escalate it into ‘conquest’. He was confident, however, that when humanity commits itself to a ‘right to hospitality’, it will start moving ‘closer and closer to a cosmopolitan constitution’ and thus ‘towards perpetual peace’.

Kant prefaced his essay with a self-deprecating joke, suggesting that ‘Towards Perpetual Peace’ could have been the name of an inn, with a sign depicting a deserted churchyard – a resting place, perhaps, for ‘philosophers who dream a sweet dream of perpetual peace’. The joke wasn’t particularly funny, but it betrays a certain unease: Kant, who was in his seventies, must have realised that his essay lacks the preternatural sharpness of his earlier works, and he was perhaps trying to head off possible ridicule. Two hundred years later, however, his embarrassment was turned to advantage by Jacques Derrida, who made it the starting point for a wide-ranging seminar on ‘Hospitality’, conducted in Paris from the winter of 1995 to the summer of 1997.

Derrida had led seminars in Paris every year since 1960, so the routine was well established: meetings took place once a week and lasted two hours or more, and they were intended for students preparing for a masters-level exam in philosophy, though others could attend with permission. Some sessions were given over to general discussions, some to student papers, but most of them – ten a year as a rule – were devoted to lengthy presentations by Derrida himself, usually written out in full a few days in advance. He completed his last series in 2003 (he died the following year at the age of 74) and the typescripts he left behind – some thirty pages for each session, often amended by hand and sometimes supplemented by tape recordings, which include interjections, asides and frequent laughter – constitute not only a record of his work as a teacher, but also an intellectual journal, preserving his responses to new developments in politics, philosophy and literature. Several of them have now been published in magnificent editions, followed up by meticulous English translations, including, most recently, the seminar on hospitality.

The first session took place on 15 November 1995. Derrida opened it by reading out the ‘famous passage’ that was to serve as the ‘matrix’ for the entire series: Kant’s attempt to link hospitality to cosmopolitanism in a prescription for perpetual peace; and he proceeded as he would expect his students to, weighing every word, and comparing standard French translations to the original German. He then suggested that any oddities and obscurities that came to light should be attributed not to some infirmity in Kant, but to a slipperiness or duplicity affecting all the issues which are ‘magnetised’, as he put it, ‘by the simple word hospitality’.

Consider the classic scene of welcome, in which a host invites you in with greetings, smiles and open arms. The gestures may be a sincere expression of friendship, but they are also, unavoidably, a sly assertion of privilege: this is my place, they say, and even if I tell you to ‘make yourself at home,’ you must remember that you are here on my sufferance. The double-edged truth of hospitality manifests itself in words as well as deeds. As Derrida points out, the French hôte means ‘guest’ as well as ‘host’, while historical dictionaries trace it to the Latin hospes, which is allied with hostis, which can also mean ‘stranger’, ‘foreigner’ or ‘enemy’. He then turns to the prodigious Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes by the semiotician Émile Benveniste, which pursues the word ‘hospitality’ back through Greek, Sanskrit and dozens of other languages to link it to hotels, hospitals and hospices; also, plausibly enough, to hostages and despotism; and finally to ‘ipseity’ (meaning personal selfhood) and thus to command, authority and control. Hospitality, it seems, is a nest of paradoxes: not so much hospitality, Derrida suggests, as hostipitality.

Derrida’s next move might seem a bit of a stretch: tracking the theme of hospitality (or hostipitality) – together with gifts, invitations, welcomes and being at home – through works of literature. He starts in the 20th century with Roberte ce Soir, a very odd novella by Pierre Klossowski which features a host who is so absolute in his hospitality that he swaps places with his guests, while his wife betrays him in a bed above which he has hung a framed text in his own handwriting called ‘The Laws of Hospitality’. Later, Derrida wonders what hospitality might mean in a home that has ‘become a brothel’; but the topic is ‘immense’, and – following a suggestion from one of the students – he turns instead to a tale by the 17th-century moralist La Bruyère, in which a genial old gentleman calls on a neighbour but becomes convinced that he is still in his own home, and ends up wondering why his guest (in fact his host) fails to take a hint and leave. ‘I sympathise enormously,’ Derrida remarks (‘[Laughter]’). Sexual difference then rears its head, and La Bruyère’s absent-minded hero ‘pays a visit to a lady, and imagines that she is visiting him’, eventually inviting her to stay for supper.

The apparent link between hospitality and patriarchy takes Derrida back to the story of Lot, as related in the book of Genesis. Lot is a stranger living in the city of Sodom who upsets his neighbours by providing hospitality to two passing travellers, whereupon his house is besieged by ‘men of the city’ who demand that he hand his guests over. Lot refuses, of course, but offers them a consolation prize. ‘I have two daughters which have not known man,’ he says, ‘and do ye to them as is good in your eyes: only unto these men do nothing; for therefore came they under the shadow of my roof.’ (In the event the two guests – actually angels in disguise – save the two girls as well as Lot and the rest of his family, while the ‘men of Sodom’ are destroyed together with their sinful city.) Lot’s uncle Abraham is another hospitable wanderer, but more fortunate in his neighbours. When his wife, Sarah, succumbs to old age he appeals to them, saying, ‘I am a stranger and a sojourner with you: give me a possession of a burying place with you.’ They offer him a choice of sepulchres, but he prefers a cave, which is then ‘made sure unto Abraham for a possession’, so that he ‘buried his wife … in the land of Canaan’, and was satisfied. The idea that the dead deserve hospitality as much as the living is echoed, as Derrida notes, by Sophocles, whose ‘wandering Oedipus’ arrives exhausted at Colonus, where his daughter Antigone secures a grave that enables him to do ‘as he wanted most’: to die ‘on foreign soil’, where ‘he has his bed for ever.’

Derrida had a marvellous literary range, and a sharp eye for details that might elude the rest of us. (Reading him reminds me of taking a walk with a friend who will spot a ghost orchid, a heath fritillary and an alpine swift while I am just enjoying a companionable stroll.) He notices references to hospitality all over the place: ghosts, for example, the worst kind of uninvited guest, in Joyce’s Ulysses; hauntings that make homes unhomely (unheimlich) in Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’; and the dream of a perfectly safe home in Kafka’s ‘The Burrow’. This kind of solipsism finds an echo in Hannah Arendt’s attachment to her ‘mother tongue’ (‘there is no substitute,’ she said), and Rousseau’s yearning for ‘maternal solicitude’ (which he called ‘irreplaceable’), while the saint’s embrace of a leper in Flaubert’s ‘Julian the Hospitaller’ takes hospitality to another extreme. Meanwhile Molière’s Dom Juan plays host to a stone guest, the statue of a man he slaughtered, who returns the invitation; which may remind us of the way Hamlet follows the ghost of his murdered father as it ‘beckons’ and ‘wafts’ him to ‘removed ground’, asking his companions to treat it with courtesy (‘as a stranger bid it welcome’) and inviting it to make itself at home (‘Rest, rest, perturbed spirit’) – though in this case a further ‘visitation’ brings him to his senses. Shakespeare is, according to Derrida, ‘the richest and most powerful resource both for the thinking and for the vocabulary of hospitality’ – but ‘the seminar would take a hundred years,’ and ‘I will not even attempt it.’

Derrida seems to have been surprised by his findings: when we survey ‘literature in the broad sense’, he wrote, ‘it is hard to find any work that is not fitted either to illustrate … or to enact … what we call hospitality’; and when he turns his attention to philosophy, he gets the same result. Plato’s Sophist opens, Derrida notes, with Socrates extending his welcome to a character known only as ‘the Stranger’ (Xenos). (‘Is he not rather a God,’ Socrates asks, ‘come to us in the guise of a stranger?’) But the Stranger is not an easy guest: he undertakes to ‘challenge the argument of our father Parmenides’ and adds, rather menacingly, that he has no intention of ‘becoming a parricide’. But Socrates is not fazed, and when he pleads for his life before a jury of fellow Athenians in The Apology, he claims he is at a disadvantage: he is fluent in ordinary Greek – the language of the marketplace – but, he says, ‘this is the first time I have come before the court,’ and ‘I am therefore an utter stranger to the kind of language used here.’ He suspects he would be treated more indulgently if he were ‘really from another country’ and could not speak Greek; and his plea is indeed unsuccessful.

When he observes that a unified language such as Greek may contain languages that are strangers to one another, Socrates puts the very idea of a native language (or ‘mother tongue’) into a spin; and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra – himself a stranger in a foreign land – runs into a similar problem. Returning to his cave one evening, he finds that he has a gaggle of unexpected visitors, including a pope, a sorcerer, a shadow and a couple of kings. He greets them as a gracious host must: ‘This is my realm and my domain,’ he says. ‘Whatever is mine shall for this evening and this night be yours … be welcome, my dear guests, be welcome.’ Once they have made themselves comfortable, they make a request: to ‘learn from you, O Zarathustra, the great hope’. He undertakes to expound his exotic wisdom in plain German (‘deutsch und deutlich’), informing them that he had indeed been expecting a visit, but not from them. One of the kings takes umbrage and complains that the ‘wise man from the East’ does not understand the ‘dear Germans’ to whom he is playing host, and that his German is coarse and unclear (‘deutsch und derb’). Zarathustra the wanderer pleads again with his guests, and falls silent.

The philosopher​ who got most coverage in the seminar was Emmanuel Levinas – an old friend of Derrida’s, and an outstanding example of the philosopher-as-stranger. He was born into a Jewish family in Lithuania in 1905 and grew up speaking Russian and Lithuanian; he then learned German and biblical Hebrew, and after a few years in Ukraine added French to his repertoire, took a degree in philosophy at the University of Strasbourg, and moved briefly to Germany, where he studied under Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. In 1931 he obtained French citizenship and began teaching at a Jewish college in Paris – the École Normale Israélite Orientale – while writing books and articles introducing French readers to contemporary German philosophy, including an essay which denounced the ‘philosophy of Hitlerism’ for treating biological existence ‘not as an object of spiritual life, but as its heart’. In 1939 he joined the French army; he was captured a few months later and spent the next five years as a prisoner of war, mostly in a camp near Hanover where he lived in a well-established Jewish section and worked as a forester, before returning to the Jewish college in Paris in 1945. Looking back, he would say that his entire life was dominated by ‘presentiment and memory of Nazi horror’, but after the war his work as a writer was focused elsewhere – partly on Talmudic commentary, but mainly on ethics. Later he took up university teaching and became a father figure to several young thinkers, including Derrida.

Derrida mentioned Levinas in the opening session of his seminar, drawing attention to his work on the origin of ‘pity, compassion, forgiveness and closeness’, and to a tantalising remark about selfhood: ‘The word “I” answers for everything and everyone’ (‘Le mot “je” répondrait de tout et de tous’). What Levinas meant, according to Derrida, was that I cannot ‘belong to myself’ unless I am already ‘delivered over to the other’ – and hence that we are all members of one another, and constitutionally incapable of being wholly self-centred, self-sufficient or self-contained. Shortly afterwards, in December 1995, Levinas died, and Derrida delivered the graveside eulogy, eloquent with grief. He went on to devote four sessions of the seminar to Levinas as ‘a great thinker of hospitality’, elaborating on his suggestion that accueil – ‘welcome’, or perhaps ‘openness’ or ‘receptivity’ – is fundamental to human existence, or in Derrida’s paraphrase, ‘If I want to seek refuge within myself, and thus come to rest inside myself, I will find that the other is already there, and I am the guest of the other.’

Hospitality is usually regarded as what happens when you invite people into a place – a room, a house, a garden – that you consider to be yours, but Levinas was uneasy about treating places as possessions. You may own the food and drink, the table, the plates and the glasses, even the windows, doors and walls, but the place itself cannot belong to you, or not in the same way: ‘It is owned,’ Levinas suggested, ‘because it is already hospitable (hospitalière) to its owner.’ Moreover, if you extend an invitation to friends in the belief that their company will give you pleasure, you are engaging in a banal transactional exchange; genuine hospitality would mean opening your place to a ‘stranger’ of whom you know nothing, or to an enemy you cannot forgive. Hence, for Levinas, the obligation to ‘shelter the other in one’s own land or home, to tolerate the presence of the landless and homeless even on “ancestral soil” – even on soil that is loved with a jealous, wicked love’. He was referring to Israel, but his point was much larger: where Kant regarded war as a natural condition that might be interrupted, perhaps indefinitely, by peace, Levinas saw peace as a direct consequence of the primordial mutuality of human existence – of the ‘friendship’, as he called it, that precedes egoism and reaches out ‘to the other, in desire and goodness’. For Levinas, peace arises from the eternal ‘welcome’ that inhabits every place even when it is not inhabited, and which, he went on to claim, is essentially feminine: ‘the welcoming one par excellence, the welcoming one in itself – feminine being’.

Derrida commended his late friend to his students, claiming – rather extravagantly – that Levinas had overthrown the ‘common tradition’ which defines selfhood as the ‘kernel’ or ‘core’ of individual existence, and that he had thus discredited Kant’s idea that ethics depends on the ‘autonomy’ of a ‘free subject’. But he also advised them to be wary: Levinas’s appeal to ‘feminine being’ could perhaps be annexed to a ‘feminist manifesto’, but it was also an act of ‘classic androcentrism’, and deserved to be met with ‘classic … protest’. Moreover he suggested that Levinas’s notion of elemental interdependence points not to a sunny world of peace and friendship, but to a tragic double bind, a point he illustrated with an old joke about two Jews, parties to a long-standing feud, who meet at synagogue on Yom Kippur – the Day of Atonement, dedicated to repentance and forgiveness. After the service, one of them apologises to the other, saying, ‘I wish for you what you wish for me,’ only to be met with the retort: ‘So you want to start it up again already?’ An ‘unfathomable story’, Derrida says, and one which seems to consign the prospect of peace to ‘the abyss of the impossible’.

The trouble arises, according to Derrida, from Kant, and from the fact that he is still ‘the thinker of our epoch … of the problem of international law today’. Kant’s idea of a community of nations committed to ‘cosmopolitan right’ and ‘universal hospitality’ is part of the conceptual architecture of our time, in which the entire habitable surface of the earth is supposed to be parcelled out between autonomous nation-states, and every one of us is expected to belong to some particular nation or other. (Animals are exempt, as Derrida notes: a further turn of the speciesist screw.) State borders may be arbitrary, mutable and irrational, but we like to invest them with a splendid sanctity, like that attributed to the Kantian sovereign self; and then we find ourselves channelling enormous political energy into the ‘insatiable problem’, as Derrida called it, of ‘controlling immigration’.

Kant’s approach to international law has left us, Derrida claims, with a choice between two kinds of madness. On one side there is the ‘unconditional ethic of hospitality’, which would require nations to ‘let every newcomer in’ – but while we may applaud the sentiment, we know that ‘no one will take it seriously.’ Hospitality then shrinks to ‘a utopia, a dream’, before being transformed into ‘a place … where love turns into hatred’. Affable xenophobes will profess their fondness for foreigners – with the exception, naturally, of those whose presence infringes the ‘laws of hospitality’, who must be removed immediately. Politics then gets swept up in a ‘phantasmatics of reappropriation’ – a senseless biologistic fantasy in which nations try to make themselves immaculate again, flushing out suspected impurities in a process that was coming to be known as ‘ethnic cleansing’.

The madness dates back, Derrida suggests, to the French Revolution, where an initial declaration of ‘love of the foreigner’ flipped, as he put it, into ‘hatred of the foreigner … in the name of revolutionary purity’. He illustrated the point with the case of a Prussian aristocrat called Anacharsis Cloots, who, alongside Thomas Paine, became a foreign member of the National Convention in 1792. In April 1793 Cloots gave a euphoric address to the Convention, arguing that the word ‘foreigner’ (étranger) was a ‘barbarism’ that had no place in a civilised lexicon: ‘Liberated humanity,’ Cloots said, ‘will … emulate nature, for which there are no foreigners … and wisdom will reign throughout the world.’ But expulsion of words soon morphed into expulsion of people: the Convention called for foreigners to be removed unless they could obtain an official ‘certificate of hospitality’ permitting them to stay a while, provided they wear an armband embroidered with the word hospitalité. Six months later the Convention decreed that ‘individuals born in a foreign country are excluded from the right of representing the French people.’ Paine escaped but Cloots was guillotined in March 1794. For Derrida, this sequence of events says ‘almost everything’ about the French Revolution.

Derrida​ was always thoroughly up to date. He took the anecdote about Cloots, for example, from a book by Sophie Wahnich, L’Impossible Citoyen, which had come out only a few days before. He also liked to refer to current newspaper reports, sometimes about the deportation of immigrants with HIV, but more often about the murderous ramifications of nationalism in former Yugoslavia, Chechnya, Rwanda, the Spanish Basque country and elsewhere. When François Mitterrand died, Derrida recalled his efforts to secure votes for foreigners in municipal elections; later, he wondered whether the cloning of Dolly the sheep was going to alter conceptions of ethnic purity, whether mobile phones would transform the etiquette of domestic hospitality, and whether the ‘democratisation of information’ through digital technology was liable to be hijacked by ‘police and politicisation’.

The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, which occurred just before the seminar got under way, led Derrida to reflect on the horrors of introjected nationalism: ‘Jews unleashing … unheard-of hatred against Jews, hatred … directed against the absolutely foreign foreigner, against the nearest and dearest’. Subsequently, he was shocked when the Israeli High Court struck down an injunction against torture, and appalled by plans to ‘install new settlers in the Palestinian territories’. Levinas would not have been so worried: for him, Zionism had always been the kindest of nationalisms – the only nationalism, he said, which ‘demands … care for the stranger, the widow and the orphan, a preoccupation with others’. Derrida was unpersuaded, noting that nationalists make a habit of claiming that their particular nationalism ‘incorporates a universal responsibility for humanity’ and is therefore ‘not … like the others’. He also tried to fill a gap left by Levinas by exploring – despite a profound sense of his own linguistic limitations – ‘the question of hospitality according to Islam’, which, perhaps because it arises from a ‘nomadic tradition’, appears to assign a different meaning to the notion of ‘being at home’. Meanwhile, the tide of hatred continued to rise: ‘I worry,’ Derrida said, ‘about what may be happening in Israel today.’

He was equally worried about what was happening in France. Freedom of movement within the European Union had been bought at the cost of ‘still stricter sealing of the external borders’, and it was open to exploitation by the racist right under Jean-Marie Le Pen. Meanwhile police had begun to make arrests for ‘crimes of hospitality’ (délits d’hospitalité) – in other words, providing shelter for undocumented foreigners. At the same time the government was preparing a bill to put further restrictions on migrant rights, and the president, Jacques Chirac, was accusing his critics of ‘angelism’: by advocating a ‘utopian’ world of ‘open borders’, he said, they were playing into the hands of Le Pen. For Derrida, however, Chirac’s argument was a kind of ‘blackmail’, designed to compel anti-racists to acquiesce – for fear of provoking more racism – in ‘any immigration policy whatsoever’.

Derrida was a political activist, of a kind, and kept his students informed of demonstrations they could take part in or petitions they might want to sign. On one occasion he commended an organisation supporting migrant workers, for which he had written an article on délits d’hospitalité. On another he read extracts from a speech for a conference of the International Parliament of Writers, due to take place the following day. It was called ‘Cosmopolitans of all countries, one more effort!’ and proposed the formation of a network of cities of asylum, committed to welcoming persecuted writers and artists even in defiance of government decrees. The idea went back to the Hebrew Bible, which speaks of ‘cities of refuge … both for the children of Israel, and for the stranger, and for the sojourner among them’, and Derrida acknowledged that his attempt to revive it in a world that makes a fetish of ‘sovereignty’ would seem ‘completely crazy’; but still, he allowed himself to hope that ‘putting the state to the test’ might ‘herald a genuine innovation’, opening up ‘new possibilities’ and perhaps offering a glimpse of ‘a democracy to come’.

Apart from​ such flashes of utopianism, Derrida’s conception of politics was quite old-fashioned, perhaps pre-Kantian: for him, politics was concerned not with designing a new society but with responding to random conflicts thrown up by the ordinary chaos of social existence. When politics works, according to Derrida, it provides a place where hostilities come up for negotiation, and when it breaks down, ‘hostility is replaced by hatred,’ which ‘explodes absolutely without limits’. The idea of basing politics on ‘principles’ – hospitality, for example, or liberty, equality and fraternity, or moral righteousness – has an obvious attraction, but principles easily morph into dogmas, and then into pretexts for chauvinism, violence and genocide. For Derrida, the enemies of politics aren’t so much venality or malevolence as intellectual narrowness, stupid self-assurance, and a refusal to reflect philosophically and think things through.

In philosophy, too, Derrida was a traditionalist: he saw it as an ancient discipline defined by an established canon of texts running from Plato and Aristotle to Kant, Heidegger and Levinas; and his aim as a teacher was to get his students to love the classics. On occasion he would offer useful summaries, saying for example that Levinas saw time not as ‘a succession of instants … but the response to … hope in the midst of despair’, that Heidegger treated selfhood as ‘a movement of temporalisation and not an agency external to temporalisation’, and that Kant regarded the French Revolution as ‘a sign of possible progress in the history of humanity’. But he was not prepared to yield to the ‘crude pedagogy’, as he called it, that reduces the ‘subtle movement’ of philosophical prose to a ‘sequence of steps or arguments’. He preferred to proceed slantwise, meandering ‘from one digression to another’ – or even ‘from transgression to transgression … [Laughter]’ – in the hope of getting students to appreciate points they might have overlooked. He would read out passages, writing key phrases on a blackboard, commenting word by word, and reminding students to keep an eye on chronology, to mistrust translations, consult dictionaries, and look for parallels outside philosophy. Above all he urged them to carry on reading the classics, ‘taking all the time necessary’.

If Derrida was a philosophical traditionalist, however, he was also an innovator. He encouraged his students to approach the canon not as awestruck conservators, shielding old treasures from the light of criticism, nor as show-offs trying to impress, nor yet as asset-strippers extracting a few propositions and repurposing them either as objects of mockery or as maxims for their own use. He wanted them to become creative inheritors, keeping the classics vivid – in the manner, perhaps, of theatre directors who take old staples to new places, presenting Shylock as a woman, say, or Tannhäuser as gay. He hoped they would train themselves to pick up small conceptual tremors and slight verbal dislocations so that – like cattle detecting an imminent earthquake – they could be on their guard against impending catastrophes.

Derrida was probably the best-known philosopher of his generation, but the publication of his seminars reveals that he was also a conscientious, kind and industrious teacher. His classroom was, it would seem, his studio, his workshop, even his intellectual home, and many of his publications were spin-offs from the seminars: his implied reader was familiar with the philosophical canon, and with all the other works he mentioned, and keen to read them again. Derrida was not one of those celebrity professors who neglect their students in order to prepare for prestigious performances elsewhere: on the contrary, he flouted the laws of academic hospitality by presenting his international hosts with lectures taken from his current seminar, including his habitual ‘deviations, diversions and digressions’; and sometimes he went on for two or three hours, leaving his audience rather bemused.

In his seminars, Derrida referred to a vast range of writers and works, but hardly ever to himself or his own back catalogue. On one occasion, however, he did allow himself to reminisce. He was describing the paradoxes of nationality as they played out in French Algeria, where Muslims were classified as French nationals but not citizens of France, and recalled that he himself – as a Jew born in El Biar, a suburb of Algiers, in 1930 – lost his citizenship under Vichy rule, and with it his right to go to school. He managed to get into a Paris lycée in 1949, and underwent a punishing training in philosophy before emerging, with some encouragement from Levinas, as a teacher in his own right. He used his seminar to pass on what he had learned, inviting his students to join him, ‘as philosophers’, in revisiting the great tradition in the hope, as he put it, that the ‘singular things … taking place in our world’ will ‘become more thinkable for us, if not clearer and more familiar’.