The Geographic Imagination of Modernity: Geography, Literature, and Philosophy in German Romanticism (review)

ological,” “primal,” and “mythic” language with which Heidegger “defin[es]” housing (134–35), and rightly alert to the real housing problem, rather than mere “‘false’” or “‘bad reading,’” indicated by Heidegger’s remarkable (in his own words, nonfigural [“keine Übertagung”]) equation of “language” with “the house of Being” (a most non-Nietzschean extension of a phrase possibly borrowed from Zarathustra) (132–33), it is her discussion of Heidegger’s texts that remains in the main periphrastic, a cautiously conservative restatement rather than questioning of the inordinate, one might even say parodic, role of housing (as language’s own signified) in Heidegger’s identification, in discourse, of discourse with ontology. Still, these quibbles regarding intermittently classicizing theoretizations aside—after all, if it weren’t hard to do, and, moreover, hard to find, we wouldn’t call it walking on the wild side—not taking the walk on the “Martin Heidegger Rundweg” is not even an evasion of this kind, unless walking it were less like circling “a haunted house in the depths of the forest” (155) than avoiding a Schwarzwälder version of the theme scene from “The Sound of Music.” In Housing Problems, Bernstein demonstrates convincingly she knows these two scenarios can become one, that “actual” housing can not only constitute but, more “spookily,” “collapse” them (155), and that the relationship of writing to architecture both indicates that “suffocating” (155), truly Gothic possibility at every turn and, maintaining the difference between writing and architecture, as between housing and signification, keeps it in mind. For all it brings to mind, Housing Problems constitutes a significant work of reflection on a critical relationship too often occluded even when indicated, left unthought, and for that reason, for all its worries, a brave one.