Awards

• Winner of Grand Prize Winner of the French Voices Translation Award 2015

Overview

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.

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9780823269501

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Reviews

GCGBP[La Nostalgie is] an erudite work in which [Cassin] incites us to make good use of this ambiguous, delightful and sometimes dangerous feeling.GC[yen] GCoLGCOExpress This is a rich and moving account of home and homelessness by one of the most important and distinctively original French thinkers of our time. Cassin allows us to reinhabit the concept of nostalgia in a way at once utterly compelling and strange. She performs what it means to think not just in language, but in languages. --Simon Critchley, The New School for Social Research

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 *

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 [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 * 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

This is a rich and moving account of home and homelessness by one of the most important and distinctively original French thinkers of our time. Cassin allows us to reinhabit the concept of nostalgia in a way at once utterly compelling and strange. She performs what it means to think not just in language, but in languages. --Simon Critchley, The New School for Social Research

Author Information

Barbara Cassin has served as the Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and as the President of the College International de Philosophie. A recipient of the CNRS Gold Medal, she is a member of the Academie Francaise and an exhibit curator. Her recent books in English translation include Jacques the Sophist: Lacan, Logos, and Psychoanalysis (Fordham University Press, 2019), Google Me: One-Click Democracy (Fordham University Press, 2017), and Nostalgia: When Are We Ever at Home? (Fordham University Press, 2016). Her editorial work includes the seminal Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (Princeton University Press, 2014). A translator herself (notably of Hannah Arendt and Peter Szondi), she is the editor of several book series including L’Ordre philosophique. 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 and Director of the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University. His areas of research and publication include history of philosophy, history of logic and mathematics, Islamic philosophy, and African philosophy and literature. His latest publications in English include Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with Western Tradition (Columbia University Press, 2018); Postcolonial Bergson (Fordham University Press, 2019); In Search of Africa(s): Universalism and Decolonial Thought (with Jean-Loup Amselle, Polity, 2020); African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson, and the Idea of Negritude (Other Press, 2023).

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