Nostalgia ─ When Are We Ever at Home?

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.

Barbara Cassin is Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. She is the editor ofDictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (Princeton, 2014) and author ofSophistical Practice: Toward a Consistent Relativism (Fordham, 2014). HerNostalgia: When Are We Ever at Home is forthcoming from Fordham in Spring 2016 and was the recipient of the 2015 French Voices grand prize. Translations of two books she wrote with Alain Badiou will be published by Columbia later this year.

Pascale-Anne Brault is Professor of French at DePaul University. She is the co-translator of several works of Jacques Derrida, includingThe Work of Mourning and Learning to Live Finally, and of Jean-Luc Nancy'sNoli Me Tangere: On the Raising of the Body (Fordham).