Nostalgia - by Barbara Cassin (Paperback)

About the Book

Through a subtle reading of the writings of Homer, Virgil, and Hannah Arendt, Barbara Cassin produces an in-depth analysis, at once scholarly and personal, of nostalgia. Where does nostalgia come from? Where do we truly feel at home? Cassin explores the notion that nostalgia has less to do with place and more to do with language.

Book Synopsis

Through a subtle reading of the writings of Homer, Virgil, and Hannah Arendt, Barbara Cassin produces an in-depth analysis, at once scholarly and personal, of nostalgia. Where does nostalgia come from? Where do we truly feel at home? Cassin explores the notion that nostalgia has less to do with place and more to do with language.

Review Quotes

This precise and beautifully written exploration of the meaning of nostalgia (well served by the translation) is throughout, like all of Barbara Cassin's work, 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.'----- from Souleymane Bachir Diagne's foreword

"[La Nostalgie is] an erudite work in which [Cassin] incites us to make good use of this ambiguous, delightful and sometimes dangerous feeling."-- "--L'Express"

"A rich and moving account of home and homelessness by one of the most important and distinctively original French thinkers of our time."-----Simon Critchley, The New School for Social Research

About the Author

Barbara Cassin is Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris and president of the board of the Collège International de Philosophie. She is the editor of Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon and author of Sophistical Practice: Toward a Consistent Relativism (Fordham). Forthcoming works include translations of two books co-written with Alain Badiou.

Pascale-Anne Brault is Professor of French at DePaul University. She is the co-translator of several works of Jacques Derrida's, most recently For Strasbourg: Conversations of Friendship and Philosophy (Fordham).

Souleymane Bachir Diagne is Professor of French and Philosophy at Columbia University. He is the author of African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson, and the Idea of Negritude.