The Gift of the Other Quotes

“The words of Hannah Arendt, written to describe her own sense of statelessness and exile in the turmoil of World War Two, ring as true in the supposedly new reality of the “global village” today as the day they were written. “Contemporary history,” Arendt wrote, “has created a new kind of human being—the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and internment camps by their friends.”22”
― Andrew Shepherd, The Gift of the Other: Levinas, Derrida, and a Theology of Hospitality

“In contrast to the conflictual and competitive logic of both capitalism and the discourses of “terror,” in which it is the unknown nature of the Other which provides the fertile soil for seeds of fear, Levinas and Derrida affirm and celebrate both the difference and the incomprehensibility of the Other. The Other, they argue, is not first and foremost one to be understood, but rather one whose ethical plight we are called to respond to. Drawing upon the Abrahamic religions which shape their own intellectual and cultural identity, Levinas and Derrida point to the practice of hospitality, the welcoming of the stranger, as the constitutive element of what it means to be human.”
― Andrew Shepherd, The Gift of the Other: Levinas, Derrida, and a Theology of Hospitality

“Referring to the already existing portion of this fence in California as part of the American’s “myths of arrival,” Moorehead writes: The fence is part of the myth. It is about a poor country looking across the border and seeing money and opportunities, all the lures that enticed the first settlers, and wanting to have a share in them. It is about the way that, ever since anyone can remember, poor Mexicans have migrated north in search of the American dream, which for them has meant jobs in agriculture, factories, the building and service industries, and the way they have been welcomed and discouraged by turn, and have simply kept on coming, even during times of determined and brutal rejection, and the way that the Americans have feared being swamped and losing their own identities and livelihoods. It is the old and simple story of exclusion.21”
― Andrew Shepherd, The Gift of the Other: Levinas, Derrida, and a Theology of Hospitality