Nostalgia: When Are We Ever at Home?

This is a beautiful text. It touched my soul, provoked me to rethink familiar classical texts, drove me to inquire less familiar ones, and made it, once again, absolutely clear, how, through a masterful reading, the classic world can be made contemporary, and how urgently needed today are some of its wisdom and insights. Cassin's attempt to speak about language in the plural, to denationalize language and de-naturalize the way one is at home in one's own language, and to show how and explain why one is never fully at home there could be read as a concise introduction to her masterful, ambitious project "Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon."

Although I speak my mother tongue - Portuguese - I preferred to express my thanks to the translator and to Barbara Cassin, in the language that gave me extreme pleasure for the beautiful text I read (I reread it, for some). Thanks a lot.

Fascinating. Dense and challenging, this slim little book is full of interesting arguments and explores the notion of 'home' from a new, interesting angle with unusual examples.

There were jewels of ideas in the book but ultimately I had to constantly fight the text to get at them. It’s not ideal for anyone who is unused to reading dense academic texts which are infamous for not keeping readability in mind. It still gave me a lot to think about. 63/100