Home as a Metaphor in Thought
Home as a Metaphor in Thought is a collection of essays based on a lecture series held at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. The book seeks to reexamine one of the most charged, fundamental, and elusive concepts of human existence: home. Home is an object of profound longing; a place of security, belonging, and intimacy, the space in which we are meant to be “at home with ourselves” and find repose. Yet, the essays collected here – engaging with the thought and writings of Friedrich Hegel, Heinrich Heine, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Edward Said, and Judith Butler – demonstrate that home also harbors a dark and perilous dimension. The desire for homeliness and for a unified, sheltered identity may inevitably lead to exclusion, alienation, and even severe violence toward those perceived as outsiders or as threats to an imagined tranquility.
The contributors move between the metaphorical and the concrete, the philosophical and the political, offering a critical reading that challenges the romantic and conservative conception of home as an enclosed stronghold. They expose the persistent tension between the desire to feel at home and the ethics of exile and unhomeliness; between Hegel’s secure home and Benjamin’s dwelling on the threshold, or Said’s condition of exile.
The philosophical discussion presented in this book is not detached from the bleeding and painful reality in which we live – a reality in which so many are left homeless in the most literal sense, and in which questions of displacement, destruction, and loss have become urgent and existential. Precisely in such a moment, the book invites us to think of home not as an exclusive domain that sanctifies sovereignty and power, but as a space of shared vulnerability and interdependence. This is a courageous and necessary attempt to understand the heavy cost of yearning for home, and to ask whether a sense of belonging can be constituted without necessarily entailing the dispossession and devastation of others.
