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.

Barbara Cassin is Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. She is the editor of Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (Princeton, 2014) and author of Sophistical Practice: Toward a Consistent Relativism (Fordham, 2014). Her Nostalgia: 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, including The Work of Mourning and Learning to Live Finally, and of Jean-Luc Nancy's Noli Me Tangere: On the Raising of the Body (Fordham).