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Roberto Bolaño's 2666, a sprawling book of voyages which steals toward a body of disappearances and murders resembling the real life events of Ciudad Juárez (a Mexican town on the border of Texas) begins enticingly with the hunt for a mysterious author named Benno von Archimboldi by four European literary critics. The novel soon becomes estranged from itself and devolves, breaking off into numerous travel narratives. These narratives are interconnected but not entirely parts of the whole; instead, each section gathers to itself more displacements and hostilities of travel. Archimboldi is revealed in the final section of the book as a former Second World War soldier, drafted by the Third Reich. Yet this is not quite the kernel of the novel. The horror is not contained or containable to one single period of history or one narrative; it bleeds, ranges over time and space, and mutates biologically, physically, and politically. Unmoored, the reader must come to terms with a traveling sovereignty that brings about her potential and necessary catastrophe, for 2666 maintains its sovereignty by deploying the dual logic of hospitality and by violently destabilizing the event of reading so that the reader is deposited on another bank, not knowing if she is arriving or leaving. This undecidability preternaturally conjures Derrida's deconstructive practice, but especially his late project to think the plight of the Other and "sovereign without sovereignty"(Philosophy 191n.14). Through the metaphor and concept of travel, Derrida advances the possibility of an existence without power, an existence that opens itself up to the dissymmetry of the Other. In particular, Derrida's collaboration with Catherine Malabou in Counterpath movingly grafts together the idea of hospitality and travel to test the deformation of the self, because only through the ruination of the sovereign self can the question of the Other be conceived. For Derrida, to think "as if " death and ruin of self-knowing and self-construction can surface with an encounter with an Other brings about the shape of the future to come. Chasing these strange counter-journeys, this paper attempts a double mapping of, on the one hand, Derrida's ethical framing of hospitality and sovereignty in relation to the circumlocution of 2666; and, on the other, of the confrontation between readers and texts mobilized by Bolaño's traveling...