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Book Reviews imagination. In contrast, Candide's detention arises from his drifting between different, constraining political regimes and social contexts. In Voltaire's conte, imprisonment takes the form of exclusions, such as those from "Utopian" spaces and from kingdoms, best exemplified by a series of deposed kings celebrating the carnival in Venice. In his analysis of Diderot's novel, Berchtold poses the question of the prison as a predestination of the protagonist. Jacques's incarceration (and potential execution) only seems predetermined in light of a retrospective examination of episodic clues, linguistic play, and intertextual allusions to Diderot's own imprisonment in Vincennes. The prison thus serves as one term in a philosophical equation inviting questions concerning destiny and narrative organization. This precis proves that Berchtold's encyclopedic work is an invaluable contribution to studies of the picaresque in Spain and France, the seventeenth-century histoires comiques and memoirs , the elusive genre of pseudo-autobiography, and the eighteenth-century novel. Despite its overall theoretical mutism, its abundance of intertextual references provides ample background for the comprehensive coverage of the prison theme, and suggests further routes of thematic study of the novel with the goal of unveiling its development. Leonard Hinds Indiana University Jacques Derrida. Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle invites Jacques Derrida to Respond. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000. Pp.160. $14.95. Of Hospitality provides us with a glimpse of Jacques Derrida as not only the brilliant thinker and writer readers have long admired but as the masterful lecturer and pedagogue his students have long known. This extremely provocative little volume (with an informative running commentary by Anne Dufourmantelle) reproduces two of Derrida's seminar presentations on the theme of hospitality (entitled "Foreigner Question" and "Step of Hospitality/No Hospitality") from January 1996 at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris. Derrida's language here is thus slightly less formal and more accessible than in other written texts, even if his thinking is just as challenging. Of Hospitality adds a new dimension to the growing body of work Derrida has produced in recent years on the ethical implications of such gestures or practices as gift-giving, forgiveness , and the promise. Drawing on a series of texts ranging from Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus and Plato's Apology to Kant's Perpetual Peace, Derrida builds a case for hospitality as always having to negotiate between two equally imperative laws. Continuing a line of thought developed in Adieu: To Emmanuel Levinas, Derrida argues that hospitality must, on the one hand, always be unconditional , that it must always involve welcoming an other of whom I must know, ask, and expect nothing—the completely other. Yet in order for this welcome to be effective, in order for hospitality to be offered to someone in particular, conditions and limits must be set, whether by an individual, family, community, or state, even if these conditions risk betraying the very hospitality they make possible. Moving between these two imperatives of unconditional and conditional hospitality, Derrida causes his seminar participants and, now, us to reflect upon our own relationships to those strangers, refugees, or immigrants who ask to be welcomed into our homes, communities, and states. There are also some fascinating pages here on the historical relationship between France, Derrida's home for the last half century, and his native Algeria, as well as interesting reflections on the way modem communication technologies such as the Internet have changed our relationship to the public and private spheres and, thus, our understanding of hospitality . As with Derrida's recent works on the gift and forgiveness, there is a decidedly political and ethical tone and urgency to this work, even while Derrida vigorously rejects the idea of simply deducing from these ideas a political program to be carried out or an ethical imperative to be obeyed. If political programs and ethical injunctions requiring immigrants or refugees to be Vol. XLII, No. 1 139 L'Esprit Créateur more justly treated must be made, the injunction to unconditional hospitality prevents us from ever being complacent about them. In the course of these reflections on hospitality, Derrida opens up our thought once again to new and unexpected ideas and relations—that is, to...

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