"Ethics, Hospitality, and Radical Atheism," a Dialogue between Derek Attridge and Martin Hägglund, University of Oxford, March 4, 2010.

5.15 pm, Thursday March 4, 2010 New Seminar Room, Wadham College, University of Oxford. Hägglund’s recent book, Radical Atheism, offers a novel and provocative account of Derrida’s thinking on life and death, good and evil, self and other. The book has already been the subject of a special issue of CR: The New Centennial Review and has prompted enthusiastic critical responses from thinkers like Ernesto Laclau and Derek Attridge. Attridge, eminent literary critic and theorist, is responding to Hägglund in his forthcoming book Reading and Responsibility, where he further develops his influential notion of the relation between deconstruction, ethics, and literature. In his response, Attridge raises the question of what difference deconstruction makes for the way we live our lives and opens the stakes of the debate through the question of hospitality. This dialogue will stage a wide-ranging discussion between these distinguished interlocutors before opening the debate to the floor. Places are limited. Please register interest with Ankhi Mukherjee (ankhi.mukherjee@wadh.ox.ac.uk) and Sarah Senk (sfs28@cornell.edu).