Practicing hospitality is central to building a civil society, not to mention living a Christian life. It can be enriching and joy-filled, but it can also be profoundly demanding and sometimes even dangerous. In The Limits of Hospitality, Jessica Wrobleski explores the ethical questions surrounding the practice of hospitality, particularly hospitality that is informed by Christian theological commitments. While there is no algorithm that distinguishes between ethically "legitimate: " and "llegitimate" boundaries, the variety of circumstances in which hospitality is relevant and the nature of hospitality itself make advocating firm and fixed boundaries difficult. How much more so for Christians, for whom the practice of hospitality should be a manifestation of agape, a participation in God's eschatological welcome extended to all people through Jesus Christ! Are limits to hospitality, then, merely a regrettable concession to our finite and fallen condition? Wrobleski offers a rich theological reflection that will interest anyone who has a role in the practice of hospitality in community? Whether such communities are families, households, churches, educational institutions, or nation-states.

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the study of hospitality as a social phenomenon. This interest has tended to arrive from two communities. The first comprises hospitality academics interested in exploring the wider meanings of hospitality as a way of better understanding guest and host relations and its implications for commercial settings. The second comprises social scientists using hosts and guests as a metaphor for understanding the relationship between host communities and guests as people from outside the community – migrants, asylum seekers and illegal immigrants. The Routledge Handbook of Hospitality Studies encourages both the study of hospitality as a human phenomenon and the study for hospitality as an industrial activity embracing the service of food, drink and accommodation. Developed from specifically commissioned original contributions from recognised authors in the field, it is the most up-to-date and definitive resource on the subject. The volume is divided into four parts: the first looks at ways of seeing hospitality from an array of social science disciplines; the second highlights the experiences of hospitality from different guest perspectives; the third explores the need to be hospitable through various time periods and social structures, and across the globe; while the final section deals with the notions of sustainability and hospitality. This handbook is interdisciplinary in coverage and is also international in scope through authorship and content. The ‘state-of-the-art’ orientation of the book is achieved through a critical view of current debates and controversies in the field as well as future research issues and trends. It is designed to be a benchmark for any future assessment of the field and its development. This handbook offers the reader a comprehensive synthesis of this discipline, conveying the latest thinking, issues and research. It will be an invaluable resource for all those with an interest in hospitality, encouraging dialogue across disciplinary boundaries and areas of study. Chapters: Chapter 4 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Drawing on postcolonial and gender studies, as well as affect theory, the book interrogates cosmopolitan philosophies. Through analysis of J.M. Coetzee's later fiction, Hallemeier invites the re-imagining of cosmopolitanism, particularly as it is performed through the reading of literature.

Although much has been written on autobiography, the same cannot be said of autothanatography, the writing of one's death. This study starts from the deconstructive premise that autobiography is aporetic, not or not only a matter of a subject strategizing with language to produce an exemplary identity but a matter also of its responding to an exorbitant call to write its death. The I-dominated representations of particular others and of the privileged other to whom a work is addressed, must therefore be set against an alterity plaguing the I from within or shadowing it from without. This alterity makes itself known in writing as the potential of the text to carry messages that remain secret to the confessing subject. Anticipation of the potential for the confessional text to say what Augustine calls "the secret I do not know," the secret of death, engages the autothanatographical subject in a dynamic, inventive, and open-ended process of identification. The subject presented in these texts is not one that has already evolved an interior life that it seeks to reveal to others, but one that speaks to us as still in process. Through its exorbitant response, it gives intimations of an interiority and an ethical existence to come. Baudelaire emerges as a central figure for this understanding of autobiography as autothanatography through his critique of the narcissism of a certain Rousseau, his translation of De Quincey's confessions, with their vertiginously ungrounded subject-in-construction, his artistic practice of self-conscious, thorough-going doubleness, and his service to Wilde as model for an aporetic secrecy. The author discusses the interruption of narrative that must be central to the writing of one's death and addresses the I's dealings with the aporias of such structuring principles as secrecy, Levinasian hospitality, or interiorization as translation. The book makes a strong intervention in the debate over one of the most-read genres of our time.

Michel Houellebecq is a French author whose profile in the English speaking world is unusually high. He is an author who has put the humour back into the Absurd, without losing any of the awareness of the bleakness of the human condition. Undoubtedly one of the most trenchant satirists of our time, he deflates the projected utopias that we imagine to protect us from the ills that beset us. He faces the reader with the incipit totalitarianism that lies in our secular and religious faiths when they promise to secure the future in this world or the next – while at the same time showing the limits of our attempts to forge an all-encompassing view of the world. More than many other novelists, his work is a reflection of the social and economic reality of life in a post-industrial society.

At once rigorous, insightful, and accessible.. the most thorough study yet available on the phenomenological treatment of God as gift in Marion and Derrida. Invaluable reading for those concerned with the theological promise of contemporary Continental philosophy.-Thomas A. Carlson, University of California, Santa Barbara

The present era of economic devastation, legacies of colonization and imperialism, climate change and habitat loss, calls for a new understanding of ethics. These essays on otherness, responsibility and hospitality raise urgent questions. Contributors range from the prominent--including Levinas, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben--to recent theorists such as Judith Butler, Enrique Dussell and Rosi Braidotti. The essays emphasize the always vulnerable status of a radically different Other, even as they question what responsibility to that Other might mean.

'No democracy without deconstruction': Deconstruction and Democracy evaluates and substantiates Derrida's provocative claim, assessing the importance of this influential and controversial contemporary philosopher's work for political thought. Derrida addressed political questions more and more explicitly in his writing, yet there is still confusion over the politics of deconstruction. Alex Thomson argues for a fresh understanding of Derrida's work, which acknowledges both the political dimension of deconstruction and its potential contribution to our thinking about politics. The book provides cogent analysis and exegesis of Derrida's political writings; explores the implications for political theory and practice of Derrida's work; and brings Derrida's work into dialogue with other major strands of contemporary political thought. Deconstruction and Democracy is the clearest and most detailed engagement available with the politics of deconstruction, and is a major contribution to scholarship on the later works of Jacques Derrida, most notably his Politics of Friendship.

• Coverage: this book looks at all the essentials of developing hospitality properties, providing an introductory overview of the subject area. • Approach: illustrates the technical aspects of the subject in a cohesive, practical way, treating the reader as if they were a hospitality manager seeking assistance from various industry experts. • Authorship: compiled of contributions from over 20 industry experts, ensuring a strong knowledge base and a robust real-world dimension for the book. • Structure: the tried-and-tested logical manner in which the book is split into the 5 parts follows an industry approach to the topic of hospitality facility development and lends itself to being used as a set text in universities, as well as by industry professionals as a teaching tool.