Primordial Home, Elusive Home

Thesis Eleven 59 (1):1-16 (1999)
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Abstract

This article builds on a developing interdisciplinary discussion of home. It studies two 20th-century texts in counterpoint: political philosopher Agnes Heller's essay, `Where Are We at Home,' and novelist Melpo Axioti's My Home, a nostalgic recollection of life on Mykonos. Heller contrasts the elusive, self-appointed geography of postmodern living with a traditional view of primordial dwelling, a non-transient way of dwelling that gave to Earth a commitment stretching from ancestral past to a distant future. That experience is all but lost today, Heller muses as she surveys the horizon for space-bound alternatives to today's geographic promiscuity. The closing paragraph of her essay, which settles inconclusively on a Mediterranean landscape, opens a portal to My Home, the work of another political exile deprived of nationality and citizenship during the Cold War. Axioti's postmodern novel juxtaposes native stories of a transient life on Mykonos with the modern developer's efforts to discover firm foundations for building and an exile's wish to recover solid memories of home. Between those perspectives, Mykonos comes alive as a different type of home, in which obligation forms a bridge between presence and absence. The article closes by inquiring whether a thoughtful look at fragile Mediterranean worlds might reintroduce the idea of obligation to postmodern conceptions of home

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References found in this work

A philosophy of history in fragments.Agnes Heller - 1993 - Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell.
Where Are we at Home?Agnes Heller - 1995 - Thesis Eleven 41 (1):1-18.
At Home in the World.Michael Jackson - 1995 - Duke University Press.
Home a place in the world.Eric Hobsbawm & Arlen Mack - 1991 - Social Research: An International Quarterly 58:65-68.

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