Scattered Remarks on the Ideology of Home

Richard Daniels Scattered Remarks on the Ideology of Home My return to the Frankfurt School thinkers, especially to Theodor Adorno's work and to the continuing relevance for our troubled times of his critique of German existentialism, is a project that grows, like so much else of value, out of my long friendship and myriad conversations with Michael Sprinker; and this first fruit of that renewed study—bits and pieces that make a kind of dialectical image, if I may so use Benjamin's and Adorno's term—is for Michael, of whom I thought constantly during its composition, and whose work and memory are a continuing inspiration. The word "home" (see the OED) exists in some form throughout the Germanic languages and has a common Teutonic origin, deriving ultimately from a Sanskrit noun meaning "safe dwelling" and a related verb meaning "to dwell secure." In modern English, as in German, "home" has several related meanings, among them "a dwelling-place, house, abode; the fixed residence of a family or household; the seat of domestic life and its interests; one's own house; the dwelling in which one habitually lives . . . Sometimes including the members of a family collectively; the home-circle . . .," what Georg Lukács calls, in the book whose argument he years later abjured, "the archetypal home: love, the family, the state" (33). The word "home" can also refer to the "place of one's dwelling or nurturing, with the conditions, circumstances, and feelings which . . . are associated with it." Historian John Lukacs writes that "Domesticity, privacy, comfort, the concept of the home and of the family: these are, literally, principal achievements of the Bourgeois Age" (qtd. in Rybczynski 51). Home is not merely a "place," but also a state of being, like "youth" or "health." It can also signify "a place, region, or state to which one properly belongs, in which one's affections centre, or where one finds refuge, rest, or satisfaction"—important words here, in connection with what I've called "the ideology of home": refuge, rest, and satisfaction. "Home" can mean one's own country, one's native land, or an institution for the afflicted or criminal—Theodor Adorno writes at one point of "concern for the institution, a concern that reaches its ailmination in prisons, [and] takes precedence, as in a clinic, over that for the subject, who is administered as an object" (Minima Moralia 117)—or, in games, "home" means the place where one is "free from attack" (a timely meaning), or the point one wants to reach, the goal. According to Freud, "the dwelling-house was a substitute for the mother's womb, the first lodging, for which . . . man still longs, and in which he was safe and felt at ease" (38). Perhaps woman, too, still longs for this first lodging. Home can also mean the grave, one's "long home" or "last home." 188 the minnesota review "Homeless," on the other hand, means having no home or permanent abode; it is usually used of persons, hence of their condition. A nameless Palestinian voice, 12 June 2002 (internet excerpt, spelling and usage as in original): "As you all know, the villages in The West Bank are under strict closure for a long time now. There is not enough food or other needs. We are not aloud to leave the village to bring food from near by town or other villages, and cars are not aloud into the village to bring anything. Once in a while we get basic aid from . . . charity organizations but it is not enough . . . One day, early morning I lefthomeplanning to walk to a near by town to get some food. I knew it can be dangerous if the Israeli soldiers will catch me, but I felt that I have to take the risk." According to a biographer, St. Augustine used the word peregrinus, meaning resident alien, or pilgrim, to name the Christian in this world longing for his native home, heaven, the heavenly city of Jerusalem: "A sensitive peregrinus [i.e., resident alien] would . . . feel homesick, almost a 'captive' sighing for release, like the Jews in Babylon. He would feel uprooted, a passing stranger in the comfortable , settled life...