Based on archival research, this article analyses the pedagogical gestures in Derrida's (largely unpublished) lectures on hospitality (1995/96), with particular attention to the enactment of hospitality in these gestures. The motivation for this analysis is twofold. First, since the large-group university lecture has been widely critiqued as a pedagogical model, the article seeks to retrieve what may be of worth in the form of the lecture. Second, it is relevant to analyse the pedagogy of lectures that address the topic of hospitality, as there would be a performative contradiction in teaching inhospitably about hospitality.