Two short interventions from Derrida on liberal political nomenclature, and the issues it stirs up. 

In “On Cosmopolitanism,” he takes up asylum, refugees, immigration and the ancient idea of the city as a place of hospitality, asking what happens when the supposed right to refuge remains dependent upon the sovereignty of the state granting it. Hospitality becomes the central contradiction: to genuinely welcome the stranger would require an openness without conditions, while every actual political system immediately introduces borders, laws, identification and permission.

“On Forgiveness” performs a similar operation on reconciliation. Derrida distinguishes forgiveness from apology, amnesty, forgetting, political settlement and therapeutic closure, arguing—provocatively—that forgiveness only properly begins with what appears unforgivable. Once forgiveness becomes conditional upon repentance, compensation or reconciliation, it has already become something else. Written amid debates around truth commissions, crimes against humanity and public acts of apology, these essays refuse a comforting assumption that ethical concepts become more meaningful once converted into political procedure. Instead he sits exactly where ethics and politics fail to coincide.

Routledge, London/New York, 2001. First English edition, hardback. Translated from the French; translations by Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes. Light shelf wear and minor rubbing to edges and corners; otherwise very good, clean condition with a firm binding.