Scenes of Hospitality in Rousseau

For Peggy Kamuf, with thanks

Peggy Kamuf has been a friend and admired colleague so long I cannot find a single memory to pay honor to her illustrious career and to some part of our friendship. I've ended with a hodgepodge—some personal memories, part of a paper—around an ability of Peggy's on the threshold between private and public. I want to salute Peggy's hospitality.

I met Peggy in 1978 while teaching as an ABD at Cornell, where Jacques Derrida had come to give a lecture. And as everywhere but especially at Cornell, with its Hotel School, Derrida's arrival was a signal for parties. During my year in Ithaca, not a weekend passed without at least one invitation to a gathering. But when Derrida was in town, the parties heated up, and people came from farther off. Peggy, then at Miami of Ohio, chose the moment to return to her alma mater. That's how I found myself a few seats away from her at a crowded table at Phil and Cathy Lewis's house. I'd read and admired Peggy's first book on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, so I studied her. The mood was jovial, and the talk roved. But there came a silence. Despite Derrida's great politeness, when he was at table a pall sometimes came over the conversation. Perhaps the other guests would stop to listen for pearls to drop from his lips. Or maybe it was Derrida who would fall silent under the weight of their expectation. In any event, in leapt Peggy, who started a

With Jacques Derrida and Ellen Burt at UC Irvine (courtesy of UC Irvine's Special Collections)

conversation about the farm that she and Jim Creech had bought where they were raising various farm animals, including goats and sheep, I think. Chickens anyway. Peggy's talk of the farm renewed the conversation and added brightness to a lagging dinner party. The next night at the home of Neil and Louise Hertz, there was Peggy again, this time at the edge of a big melee in deep conversation with Derrida about his lecture. So, Peggy as a young faculty member: a guest who could enliven a convivial evening or commandeer a corner at a loud party for an intellectual tête-à-tête.

As anyone who has attended a dinner party at her house will understand, Peggy knows how to host. She is terrific at holding public events. Every summer she is the primary convoker of the Derrida Seminars Translation Project meetings, where she does an incomparable job welcoming the eight younger scholars—junior faculty and graduate students—and the eight older scholars and weaving one group into the other. Peggy's savoir faire with the Institut mémoires de l'édition contemporaine's (Institute for Contemporary Publishing Archives) rules of hospitality is tremendous. When I tell you that—beyond the hard work she puts into the editing and translating of those seminars—every year for the past eleven she has planned the week from start to finish (including work, rooms, finances, keys, transportation, and planning sessions for the future) and has set up an excursion for an afternoon out, complete with a visit to some farm making Calvados or Pont l'Évêque cheese and a new restaurant on another beach to finish, you will agree that Peggy must have secretly taken a second degree at Cornell from its famous Hotel School.

In 2017–2018, the first year of her "retirement," Peggy turned her genius to running a nomadic reading group on Derrida's 1995–1996 Hostipitality Seminar for ten weeks at UC Irvine's Langson Library in its Special Collections and then for another six weeks at the University of Southern California (USC). A big group followed her from USC to join others at UC Irvine, and she cajoled the library into making the session available virtually to people in Chile, Atlanta, New York, and elsewhere. With typical thoughtfulness, she gave those listening in a half hour at the end to make...