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    Nostalgia: When Are We Ever at Home?
    Nostalgia: When Are We Ever at Home?
    Nostalgia: When Are We Ever at Home?
    Ebook112 pages2 hours

    Nostalgia: When Are We Ever at Home?

    By Barbara Cassin and Souleymane Bachir Diagne

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    About this ebook

    Winner, French Voices Grand Prize

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFordham University Press
    Release dateMar 1, 2016
    ISBN9780823269525
    Nostalgia: When Are We Ever at Home?
    Author

    Barbara Cassin

    Barbara Cassin is Director of Research at the CNRS in Paris and a member of the Académie Française. Her widely discussed Dictionary of Untranslatables has been translated into seven languages, and her Nostalgia: When Are we Ever at Home? won the 2015 French Voices Grand Prize. Her most recent books to appear in English are Google Me: One-Click Democracy and, with Alain Badiou, There’s No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship.

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      Book preview

      Nostalgia - Barbara Cassin

      NOSTALGIA

      Nostalgia

      WHEN ARE WE EVER AT HOME?

      Barbara Cassin

      Translated by

      PASCALE-ANNE BRAULT

      Copyright © 2016 Fordham University Press

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

      Nostalgia was first published in French under the title La nostalgie: Quand donc est-on chez soi? Ulysse, Énée, Arendt by Éditions Autrement, Collection Les Grands Mots, © Autrement, Paris, 2013.

      This work, published as part of a program providing publication assistance, received financial support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States and FACE (French American Cultural Exchange). French Voices Logo designed by Serge Bloch.

      Ouvrage publié avec le concours du Ministère français chargé de la Culture–Centre National du Livre.

      This work has been published with the assistance of the French Ministry of Culture–National Center for the Book.

      Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

      Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

      Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Cassin, Barbara.

      [Nostalgie. English]

      Nostalgia : when are we ever at home? / Barbara Cassin ; translated by Pascale-Anne Brault ; foreword by Souleymane Bachir Diagne.

      pages cm

      Includes bibliographical references.

      ISBN 978-0-8232-6950-1 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-8232-6951-8 (paper)

      1. Homesickness in literature. 2. Nostalgia—Philosophy. 3. Homesickness. 4. Odysseus (Greek mythology) 5. Aeneas (Legendary character) 6. Arendt, Hannah, 1906–1975. I. Brault, Pascale-Anne. II. Title.

      PN56.H563C3713 2016

      809'.93353—dc23

      2015028081

      18 17 16 5 4 3 2 1

      First edition

      Staying as I am,

      One foot in one country and the other in another,

      I find my condition to be very happy, in that it is free.

      —René Descartes, Letter to Elisabeth of Bohemia, July 1648

      CONTENTS

      Foreword by Souleymane Bachir Diagne

      Translator’s Note

      Of Corsican Hospitality

      Odysseus and the Day of Return

      Aeneas: From Nostalgia to Exile

      Arendt: To Have One’s Language for a Homeland

      Notes

      FOREWORD

      Souleymane Bachir Diagne

      To the question When are we ever at home? Barbara Cassin offers here three answers represented by three figures, the first two mythical and the last one real: Odysseus, Aeneas, and Hannah Arendt. The first character, Odysseus, who is characterized as divine, answers the question by continuously deferring his being back home: even when he finally gets there and joins his wife Penelope in the very bed he sculpted himself out of a living tree, making sure it would thus remain rooted and unmovable, he is again driven away after only three days by his very incapacity to inhabit a home. What his Odyssey teaches him—and us—is that home is the Mediterranean, meaning the open, the cosmic, the infinite . . .

      The journey of the second figure, Aeneas, known as the pious, apparently is the opposite of Odysseus’s: he leaves his native city of Troy in flames, taking with him what he can of his homeland, symbolized primarily by his father, whom he carries on his back. But he is not so much leaving a destroyed home as traveling toward the foundation of a new city, which is to become the center of the known world. And the most important aspect of that journey toward foundation, we discover with him, is that home is the new language, Latin, that he now adopts: instead of performing the colonial and imperial gesture of imposing new names and his Greek language on the natives, he melts into the local language and inhabits it as his home.

      For the real historical figure too, Hannah Arendt, home is the language that she lives in against all opposition. Unlike Aeneas, who gave consent to his new home, Latin, the philosopher kept inhabiting her native tongue in spite of her exile: the German language was what remained of a homeland, or rather, what remained as a homeland. In so doing she taught us that there is a difference between the mother tongue and the land of the fathers. Commenting on Arendt on that point, Barbara Cassin proposes here an important distinction between the language that we put into work as energeia, in which we allow ourselves to make radically new possibilities happen because we feel that we contribute to its continuous creation, and the language that we use, no matter how well we master it, as a static totality, which we perceive as already constituted outside of us, as an ergon.

      But even if the mother tongue stands apart because of the unique way in which we inhabit it, it is still one language among others. That phrase, the experience of discovering that our language is one language among others, is at the core of Barbara Cassin’s philosophy of language (or rather languages), to which this book constitutes an excellent introduction. Although the topic of language does not appear explicitly in Barbara Cassin’s reading of the Odyssey, it is implicitly present, as the subsequent chapters on Aeneas and Arendt make clear in retrospect. In fact, this precise and beautifully written exploration of the meaning of nostalgia (well served by the translation) is, throughout, as is the whole work of Barbara Cassin, a meditation on languages in their plurality and their equivalence, and on translation. When we fully understand that we do not speak the logos, and when we authentically experience that our language is just one language among others, then we are ready to philosophize otherwise, to philosophize between languages, or, in Cassin’s words, to philosophize in tongues. That is the program of research around which this leading figure of contemporary French philosophy has now gathered many scholars from all over the world. As an invitation to a voyage.

      TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

      I would like to thank Veronica Lalov for her invaluable work tracking down references and express my gratitude to the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at DePaul University for their support of this project. Finally, this translation owes much to the excellent suggestions provided by Michael Naas and Elizabeth Rottenberg.

      Whenever possible, I have used published translations for the citations. I have, however, made occasional changes to follow more closely Cassin’s language and argument.

      NOSTALGIA

      Of Corsican Hospitality

      It has been found again. What has?—Eternity. It is the sea gone off with the sun.

      —ARTHUR RIMBAUD¹

      An Island, at Home, Not at Home

      It looks like I’m going home, but it’s not home. Maybe it’s because I have no home. Or maybe it’s because it’s when I’m not home that I feel most at home, in a place that feels like home. When are we ever at home?

      I get off the plane and pick up the car in the airport parking lot. They tell me where to find my trusty old white Peugeot, with the Paris license plates still on it, which drives like a truck. I get on the road. It’s summer, so I take the road that runs along the lagoon, among the fruits and vegetables, the large lemons, cantaloupes, watermelons, apricots, and the early figs, the beefsteak tomatoes, the purple-veined eggplants, the small thick zucchinis. Tunnels, rotaries, speed bumps, and turns, one after the other. The road moves in and out. The turns have become one with my hands, which are so easily distracted, one with the steering wheel itself. Beyond the exhaust fumes, the seasons bring smells of the maquis (the faintest hint of pines, a touch of tarragon, says the prisoner in Asterix who has just escaped),² mimosa, oleander, fire, and sea. I notice the expansion of the industrial zone, new and restored houses; there are fewer changes as soon as one is on the cape road. Like a horse on the way to its stables, I’m going home.

      It is with this experience that I wish to begin: the feeling I inwardly qualify as an irrepressible nostalgia and that I experience every time I’m back in Corsica. A strange feeling, since my ancestors are not from this island; I wasn’t born there, and I didn’t spend either my childhood or my youth there. I’m not Corsican. I was born in Paris; that’s where I live and work. I had my children there and brought them up in a charming

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