This chapter attempts to examine nostalgia as both a mood or disposition in general, and as a mood or disposition that is characteristic of philosophical reflection. Nostalgia is a combination of the Greek nostos, meaning home or the return home, with algos, meaning pain, so that its literal meaning is a pain associated with the return home. Part of this inquiry will involve a rethinking of the mood of nostalgia and what that mood encompasses. Rather than understand (...) the nostalgic as characterized solely by the desire to return to a halcyon past, it is explored through the connotations suggested by its Greek etymology as precisely a longing for the return home—a return that cannot be achieved—a form of homesickness, and so as unsettling rather than comfortable, as bringing with it a sense of the essential questionability of our own being in the world. (shrink)

In Nostalgia and Political Theory, Lawrence Quill advocates the central importance of nostalgia as a theoretical response to the 'historic' past and a vertiginous present. He does so by offering detailed analyses of diverse theoretical approaches, from the ancient world to the modern day, in order to reassess the relation between nostalgia and politics. Quill proposes nostalgia as an organizing concept, silently (and not so silently) influencing theorists as they construct critiques of the present or visions (...) of the political future. Nostalgia and Political Theory surveys key contributions to nostalgic and anti-nostalgic thinking from across the political spectrum. Assessing the influence of photography, radio, television, and personal computing on changing conceptions of the past, Quill also considers the relation between populism, nationalism, and nostalgia. By challenging those who would dismiss nostalgia as irrational or a symptom of cultural malaise, Quill concludes by advancing the case for a liberal theory of nostalgia. Nostalgia and Political Theory will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of political theory, social theory, sociology, philosophy, political science, memory studies, and nostalgia studies. (shrink)

Introduction: original questions -- Nostalgia's early modern origins: cultural backgrounds -- Dr. Thomas Willis and the science of nervous sensibility -- Nostalgia's original theories: implications and effects -- The ranz-des-vaches -- "Medical" nostalgia and its uses in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe -- Critics of nostalgia: Kant, Schopenhauer, and the question of time -- Nostalgia's modern translations -- Uncanny acts of violence -- Postmodern reencounters -- Conclusion: the end of nostalgia.

The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia serves as a guide to the complex and often contradictory concept of nostalgia, as well as the field of "nostalgia studies" more broadly. Nostalgia is an area of intense interest across several disciplines as well as within society and culture more generally. This handbook brings together an international, interdisciplinary team of researchers to survey the current landscape and identify common trends, achievements and gaps in existing literature. Comprising forty-five chapters, the volume (...) covers the following topics: Disciplinary perspectives of nostalgias including philosophy, history, literature, and psychology. Conceptual aspects of nostalgia including homesickness, temporality, affectivity, and memory. Historical and political dimensions such as afro-nostalgia, populism, feminism, and queer nostalgia. Spatial and material aspects of nostalgia including ruins, regionalism, and objects. Media related nostalgia such as analogue and digital nostalgia, reboots, revivals, gaming, and graphic novels. Essential reading for students and researchers working in nostalgia studies, this book will also be beneficial to related disciplines such as philosophy, anthropology, geography, history and literature; cultural, media, heritage, museum and film studies courses; and more generally for readers interested in how the past is represented and used in the present. (shrink)

Este texto se propone responder a la pregunta acerca de la relación entre estética y filosofía de la historia a partir del examen de las teorías estéticas de Winckelmann (mediados del s. XVIII) frente a las reflexiones acerca de la historia de Burckhardt (finales del s. XIX), atravesadas ambas por el significado que adquiere en cada una de ellas el concepto de lo clásico. La idea es mostrar cómo una historia del arte como la de Winckelmann, cuyo criterio es el (...) arte griego como canon, trae necesariamente consigo una filosofía de la historia que la sustenta y la hace posible; a la vez que una reflexión sobre la historia como La de Burckhardt, que se presenta a sí misma como una respuesta a la tradición neoclásica y romántica que la precede, refleja tras de sí un pensamiento estético propio. (shrink)

The study to follow is concerned with the structure of romance in the ancient and Renaissance periods from the perspective of nostalgia, to be defined here as one of the most deeply engrained features of the human psyche. The argument in brief is that of all the literary genres of the early modern era, romance tells the story of homecoming with the greatest sense of imperative, constituting a tropism in the form of a literary motif that originates in the (...) evolutionary engineering of the species. But first to the genre itself. Invariably, these are tales not only of outbound adventure, whether by choice or destiny, but of the return to a place or community that constitutes refuge, family, origins, reunion .. (shrink)

Plato’s depiction of the first city in the Republic (Book II), the so-called ‘city of pigs’, is often read as expressing nostalgia for an earlier, simpler era in which moral norms were secure. This goes naturally with readings of other Platonic texts (including Republic I and the Gorgias) as expressing a sense of moral decline or crisis in Plato’s own time. This image of Plato as a spokesman for ‘moral nostalgia’ is here traced in various nineteenth- and twentieth-century (...) interpretations, and rejected. Plato’s pessimism about human nature in fact precludes any easy assumption that things, or people, were better in the old days. (shrink)

"These essays explore the thought of critic and philosopher Theodor Adorno, the aesthetics of critic Walter Benjamin, and various aspects of modern critical theory. Among the topics are: the autonomy of art; art in an age of mechanical reproduction; and, emancipation and anti-Semitism." H.W. Wilson, Inc.

Heidegger’s relationship with Nazism has been debated since the 1930s. In the late 1930s, Georges Bataille wrote an incomplete text that would have added to these debates, “Critique of Heidegger: Critique of a philosophy of fascism.” I draw on this fragment and Bataille’s writings from this era in order to develop a fuller critique of Heidegger and his relationship to fascism. This expanded critique completes the promise of Bataille’s original fragment, offering a full Bataillean criticism of Heidegger and displaying (...) the connections between his philosophy and Bataille’s understanding of fascism. This critique hinges on Heidegger’s concept of authenticity and community, as a Bataillean reading would interpret these ideas as mere inauthentic useful concepts in the name of a nostalgic vision of the ancient Greeks. Heidegger wanted to fight against modern technological alienation—exemplified by the modern sciences and founded on subject based modern metaphysics—by returning to a more originary relationship with Being, but, on Bataille’s reading, without the will to pervert modern ideology and the political system. This desire for a return renders his Destruktion of the history of metaphysics means to an end, further calcifying preexisting values. As a result of this inability to pervert, Heidegger’s return promotes the reconstitution of contemporary political structures with a strong centralized authority figure empowered to guide this nostalgic return. (shrink)

The authors present a materialist analysis of the effects of neoliberalism in education. Specifically, they contend that neoliberalism is a form of cultural invasion that begets necrophilia. Neoliberalism is necrophilous in promoting a cultural desire to fix fluid systems and processes. Such desire manufactures both individuals known and culturally felt experiences of alienation which are, it is argued, symptomatic of an imperialist nostalgia that permeates educational policy and practice. The authors point to ‘unschooling in schools’ as a mechanism for (...) resisting the necrophilous tendencies of contemporary formations of education. (shrink)

In Yesterday's Self, Andreea Ritivoi explores the philosophical and historical dimensions of nostalgia in the lives of immigrants, forging a connection between current trends in the philosophy of identity and intercultural studies. The book considers such questions as, Does attachment to one's native culture preclude or merely influence adaptation into a new culture? Do we fashion our identity in interdependence with others, or do we shape it in a non-contingent frame? Is it possible to assimilate in an unfamiliar (...) world without risking self-alienation? Ritivoi's response: nostalgia is both the poison and the cure in such situations. (shrink)

Este texto se propone responder a la pregunta acerca de la relación entre estética y filosofía de la historia a partir del examen de las teorías estéticas de Winckelmann (mediados del s. XVIII) frente a las reflexiones acerca de la historia de Burckhardt (finales del s. XIX), atravesadas ambas por el significado que adquiere en cada una de ellas el concepto de lo clásico. La idea es mostrar cómo una historia del arte como la de Winckelmann, cuyo criterio es el (...) arte griego como canon, trae necesariamente consigo una filosofía de la historia que la sustenta y la hace posible; a la vez que una reflexión sobre la historia como La de Burckhardt, que se presenta a sí misma como una respuesta a la tradición neoclásica y romántica que la precede, refleja tras de sí un pensamiento estético propio. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the politics of nostalgia’s history as a fatal disease between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, especially as it was applied to slaves in late eighteenth-century Cuba. I trace nostalgia’s medical history beginning with its inauguration in Swiss medicine in 1688, and then describe the contours of its transformation into a military disease primarily affecting white soldiers in France and the United States. Finally, I translate and analyze key elements of Francisco Barrera y Domingo’s work (...) on nostalgia as experienced by slaves in sugar mills in Havana. I show that Barrera uses his analysis of nostalgia and its treatment to describe the slaves’ harrowing conditions and homesickness. Nevertheless, in denying slaves the ability to return home and in failing to propose the abolition of the slave system in the wake of the Haitian Revolution, I argue, Barrera in fact deploys the diagnosis of nostalgia in order to medicalize and pathologize the slaves’ reactions and resistance to their captivity. Thus, despite his sympathy to the slaves, I conclude that for Barrera, nostalgia functions as a tool to better manage the slaves as laborers and as property. (shrink)

In certain respects, contemporary thought treats the politics of revenge with disdain while celebrating and employing a politics that is decidedly nostalgic. And yet, following Nietzsche’s work regarding the inherent vengefulness of nostalgic political programs, one is led to an impasse. This article attempts to make plain for politics what is at stake in Nietzsche’s account of revenge, and how political and social action might navigate the distance between revenge and nostalgia. The article brings the thought of Nietzsche and (...) Heidegger together in a new way by asking whether and how Heidegger’s thought could suffer from a hidden vengefulness by adopting a nostalgic pose, one that haunts Nietzsche’s own drive for overcoming. Through an elucidation of the difference between nostalgia and revenge, the article gestures towards the nostalgic and vengeful possibilities that politics holds. (shrink)

The article centres on Italian Neorealist cinema and its crucial role in negotiating the positioning of Italy in the transnational post-war scenario. Recent scholarship on the topic has come to challenge many deeply rooted assumptions about Neorealism, claiming that the disproportioned attention paid to this particular filmic trend has proven in the long term to be an hindrance to a full comprehension of the Italian visual culture of the period. I seek to contribute to such a renewed understanding of the (...) ideological and aesthetical issues at stake in the definition of Neorealism. It is indeed very important to underscore that the innovations brought about by Neorealist films (connected in particular to the diffusion of location shooting practices) must always be framed in the context of a lively relationship with popular genre cinema. The article thus focuses on the close reading of one specific filmic text, Sotto il sole di Roma (1948). Castellani’s film proposes an original blending of Neorealist techniques, melodramatic structures and comedic tones: an hybridization of genres representing in itself a most apt correlate to the moment of flux Italy and Italian cinema were experiencing at the time. The film’s use of Rome’s ‘Non-synchronous’ and ‘Heterotopic’ spaces can be read as an attempt to come to terms and overcome fascism’s agendas about history, community, and, last but not least, masculinity. While offering a very ironic interpretation of Italy’s deeply conflicted route to modernity, Castellani’s film also reflects on (personal as well as national) identity as the result of a performance: a performance in which loss and nostalgia play a major role. (shrink)

What do we mean when we say time passes? How do contingency and anachronism and other philosophical concepts bearing on time affect the more concrete realities of our political and cultural lives? In ways small and great, personal and cultural, we all experience the mutability of time. We feel it expand and contract, speed up and slow down, as it bends to the imperatives of memory, money, and the media. In our own time we have witnessed a disengagement with the (...) past even as technological advances have allowed us to capture and reproduce past time as never before. How are we to make sense of this paradox? In this wide-ranging meditation on the meaning of time, Sylvaine Agacinski weaves together discussions of Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Freud, Heidegger, Baudelaire, Barthes, and especially Walter Benjamin -- her model for the modern "passer of time" -- as she traces a time line of the philosophy of time. After examining how shifting attitudes toward the passage of time have affected everything from art criticism to the development of photography to the rise of modernism itself, Agacinski concludes by proposing a rethinking of democracy that emphasizes patience in the face of our current temporal frenzy. (shrink)

I draw upon Edmund Husserl’s classic text, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, in order to reframe some of his insight regarding the structures of inner time-consciousness and lay the groundwork for a few claims of my own. First, I show how musical expression is constituted in relation to the flowing movement of absolute subjectivity. Moreover, by carefully distinguishing between retention and recollection, I clarify, on the one hand, music’s ability to support access to memory proper and, (...) on the other hand, its ability to keep the past “in play,” so to speak. In this way, we come to understand how music offers a unique memorial capacity—it makes possible the life of the past, as the vital movement of absolute subjectivity. Throughout the essay, I refer to Josquin’s motet Ave Maria…virgo serena in order to clarify the specific temporal structures that are at issue. (shrink)

Political theorists have increasingly adopted the psychoanalytic language of ‘mourning’ to characterize experiences of loss and injury, and to legitimate these as claims about a past political or cultural order. Mourning would seek to work through these experiences while opening persons to their shared vulnerabilities. With this article, I return to Freud’s original distinction between mourning and melancholia, along with its development through the work of Donald Winnicott and the relational school of psychoanalysis. Although psychoanalytic mourning balances a coming-to-terms with (...) loss against investment in new social relations, when it is extrapolated to a broader community it risks over-determining the social field. The cost is a foreclosure of other modalities for articulating claims about injury and political order, and in particular those that might draw on anger as a resource for political action and solidarity. (shrink)

This article proposes a phenomenological interpretation of nostalgia for communism, a collective feeling expressed typically in most Eastern European countries after the official fall of the communist regimes. While nostalgia for communism may seem like a paradoxical feeling, a sort of Stockholm syndrome at a collective level, this article proposes a different angle of interpretation: nostalgia for communism has nothing to do with communism as such, it is not essentially a political statement, nor the signal of a (...) deep value tension between governance and the people. Rather, I propose to understand this collective feeling as the symptom of a deeper need at a national level for solidarity and ultimately about recapturing a common feeling of identity in solidarity. This hypothesis would be in line with a phenomenological approach to memory as a process of establishing shared codes by rewriting the past in such a way as to strengthen social bonds and make possible a reimagining of a common future. Nostalgia for communism does not need to be ultimately an uncritical stance as it has been depicted, instead one could interpret it as a form of critical reflexion about our current forms of life. Instead of seeing communism nostalgia as a specific form of being stuck in the past, one could explore its potential for pointing at the things that are still not working in the current neo-liberal regime. (shrink)

While nostalgia has been the subject of some philosophical treatment (especially in the phenomenological tradition), I think new findings in the psychological literature and new historical investigations call for a re-interrogation of this phenomenon. My argument is that philosophical reflection, as well as findings from empirical psychology, gives us strong reasons to think that: (1) Nostalgic experiences can be divided between typical nostalgic experiences that are positive and strengthen our sense of narrative identity by connecting us to an idealized (...) past that we have a sense that we have lived. These typical nostalgia experiences are affectively bittersweet (though more sweet than bitter) and, as psychological literature attests, seem to arise in the wake of a crisis—and from this crisis, nostalgia attempts to make us feel at home in the world again. (2) In contrast to typical forms of nostalgia, there are what I call atypical forms of nostalgia; in these cases, the experiences are often negative, and they connect us not to a past that we have lived but to one that we wished to have lived. This form of nostalgia leads not to a strengthening of narrative identity but a weakening of it, and a feeling of grief for the world in which we could not belong. (shrink)

Medical educators invoke professionalism as a core competency in curricula. This paper criticizes classic definitions. It also identifies some negative traits of medicine as a profession. The call to professionalism is naive nostalgia. Straightforward didactics in professionalism cannot do the desired work in medical education. The most we can say is that students should adopt the good aspects of professionalism and the profession should stop being some of what it has been. This is a platitude. If the notion is (...) to be more than shallow, each student and practitioner will have to engage in much dialogue, reflection and refinement over many years. (shrink)

Sylviane Agacinski, Time Passing: Modernity and Nostalgia Trans. Jody Gladding European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism Ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman New York: Columbia UP, 2003 ISBN 0-231-12514-3.

Background In a previous paper in Philos Ethics Humanit Med, the 1937 Swedish novel Sömnlös (Swedish for sleepless) by Vilhelm Moberg was used as background for a thought experiment, in which last century’s progresses concerning the safety of sleeping pills were projected into the future. This gave rise to a theoretical discussion about broad medico-philosophical questions such as (among other things) the concept of pharmaceuticalisation. Methods In this follow-up paper, the theme of insomnia in Sömnlös is complemented by a discussion (...) of the concept of nostalgia. The core of the paper is a theoretical discussion about the benefits and risks of nostalgia, bringing together some aspects of recent psychological research about the construct of nostalgia with the main story line of the novel. Results and Conclusion Nostalgia is portrayed as being, in some sense at least, ultimately beneficial for the protagonist of Sömnlös. This is congruent with recent psychological research. However, the story also shows that nostalgia may lead to problematic behaviours, at least when viewed from a virtue ethics perspective. Hence, nostalgia is both what leads the protagonist into ethically problematic behaviour and that which (paradoxically) ultimately saves him from his initial lack of courage, justice, temperance and practical wisdom. Moreover, the protagonist does not only “grow” ethically but also existentially. Hence, the novel opens up the possibility that insomnia and nostalgia might be viewed as bearers of important existential information (cf. sociologist of religion Peter L. Berger and his concept of “signals of transcendence”). (shrink)

Nostalgic, socially privileged ideals of childhood have actively contributed to the formation of Australian national identity, as well as modern subject-formations more broadly. This paper argues that, while such nostalgia has been drawn on for normative ends—in the service of the management of the modern individual—nostalgia also has the power to disrupt our conceptions of the normal. In the context of the contemporary “crisis” of childhood particularly, opportunities to reconstitute ideals of “childhood” and “family” differently have become available (...) to communities such as Aboriginal Australians, who previously have been denied access to these nostalgic forms. (shrink)

ArgumentThis text is a reflection on the fate of a special kind of scientific object - anatomy collections - and their place in contemporary times. Though the phenomenon of keeping and displaying such collections is generally dying out, those specimens which survive continue to puzzle and fascinate us. To understand the current status of such collections, and the nostalgia evoked by the specimens within them, I argue, we should approach them as modern ruins. This allows us to think of (...) them as places of absence, pointing to unfinished lives and unfinished scientific projects. The paper begins with the story of a preserved human face from the Francis I. Rainer anatomical-anthropological collection (Bucharest), and continues by discussing the fate of that collection, and of anatomy collections more widely. Ultimately, the paper asks, what is it that we want to preserve: specimens, practices, or research philosophies? (shrink)

This paper discusses the educational significance of the national museum as a reminder of the nature of home and its relation to nostalgia. I contextualise the sense of home in various ways. First, the national museum materialises the nostalgic claim of ‘our’ history, the collective memory and identity, which is in some way or other mixed up with the personal memory. Second, it problematises the relation to home. Barbara Cassin’s question, ‘when are we ever at home?’, subtitle to her (...) book Nostalgia, expresses a puzzle that may be apparent both to those who have never left home and to those who have to leave their home for personal, social, or political reasons. In the light of Cassin’s book, the national museum comes to be seen in a contradictory way: it provides the ground and materialisation for the collective identity of a people, and it leaves open to something more disturbing. Yet this disturbance, if welcomed and embraced, is crucial to realising the educative importance of the museum in its contribution to the understanding of the human condition. (shrink)

To balance radical changes in the built environment that accompany urban renewal, many cities deploy historical design elements to provoke a sense of physical and temporal continuity. By examining the theory and practice of nostalgia in renewal projects, I argue that this strategic deployment of historical signifiers is more complex and normatively problematic than it first appears. Analysing the design and construction of Baltimore’s Oriole Park at Camden Yards through Walter Benjamin’s theories of cultural production and historical succession, I (...) show the problematic political effect of such image-led regeneration projects. The stadium exemplifies a system of urban and historical design and construction that uses material artifice to make totalizing political claims, deploying specific historical signifiers as a means to silence others. Drawing from Benjamin’s materialist historiography, I conclude with a survey of the resources that remain for the practice of an architecture of memory in light of my critique. (shrink)

This article addresses the activation of aesthetics through the examination of an acute sensitivity to melancholy and time permeating the literary and pictorial arts of Japan. In medieval court circles, this sensitivity was activated through a pervasive sense of aware, a poignant reflection on the pathos of things. This sensibility became the motivating force for court verse, and through this medium, for the mature projects of the ukiyo-e ‘floating world picture’ artist Katsushika Hokusai. Hokusai reached back to aware sensibilities, subjects (...) and conventions in celebrations of the poetic that sustained cultural memories resonating classical lyric and pastoral themes. This paper examines how this elegiac sensibility activated Hokusai’s preoccupations with poetic allusion in his late representations of scholar-poets and the unfinished series of Hyakunin isshu uba-ga etoki, ‘One hundred poems, by one hundred poets, explained by the nurse’. It examines four works to explain how their synthesis of the visual and poetic could sustain aware themes and tropes over time to maintain a distinctive sense of this aesthetic sensibility in Japan. (shrink)

Today childhood takes place within amultimedia context where education, marketingand entertainment operate together in one bigmelting pot. Childhood is commodified, asituation not everybody seems happy with. Dueto increasing exposure with violence and sexualactivities, for example in children's games,children seem to lose the chance to be realchildren. In the discussions about thiscommodified childhood, innocence and nostalgiaseem omnipresent concepts. In this article wefirst analyse the discourse about the innocenceof childhood as presented by Neil Postman inhis bestseller ``The Disappearance ofChildhood.'' Here, childhood is (...) seen as a periodwhich can mainly be characterised in terms of a``not yet.'' However, Postman's view on childhoodpresents only one side of the romanticcontinuum. The other side – in which the childappears as having a nature of her own – can beillustrated by ``On naïve and sentimentalpoetry,'' an essay written by Friedrich Schillerin 1795. Both opposing views on childhood canlead to a different interpretation of theinnocence of childhood. Finally, Schiller'sdichotomy – the naïve versus thesentimental poet – can be seen as a useful legup to the clarification of nostalgia whichseems to go hand in hand with the feeling ofthe loss of childhood. (shrink)