Nostalgia: When Are We Ever at Home?

"Nostalgia makes claims on us both as individuals and as members of a political community. In this short book, Barbara Cassin provides an eloquent and sophisticated treatment of exile and of desire for a homeland, while showing how it has been possible for many to reimagine home in terms of language rather than territory. Moving from Homer's and Virgil's foundational accounts of nostalgia to the exilic writings of Hannah Arendt, Cassin revisits the dangerous implications of nostalgia for land and homeland, thinking them anew through questions of exile and language. Ultimately, Cassin shows how contemporary philosophy opens up the political stakes of rootedness and uprootedness, belonging and foreignness, helping us to reimagine our relations to others in a global and plurilingual world"--
In Nostalgia: When Are We Ever At Home, Cassin explores with compelling force the question of nostalgia and the implications it has for us as both individuals and members of a political community. She provides an eloquent and sophisticated treatment of such universal themes as exile from one's native land, the desire or nostalgia for a homeland, and the possibility of rethinking the homeland in terms of language rather than territory. She does so by revisiting with great incisiveness some of the founding texts of Western culture: Homer's Odyssey and Virgil's Aeneid and then moves on to an engaging analysis of the work of German philosopher, Hannah Arendt, to show that the dangerous implications of a nostalgia for land and homeland need to be revisited and rethought through the questions of exile and language. Cassin attempts to show how contemporary philosophy, via Hannah Arendt, and, to a lesser extent, Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, opens up the classic representation of the themes of rootedness and uprootedness, of belonging and foreignness, of one's relationship to one's native language, to a discussion of the political stakes of such concepts, and how they might impact the current landscape of a global world.