The word \u201cnostalgia\u201d comes from two Greek roots: \u03bd\u03cc\u03c3\u03c4\u03bf\u03c2, n\u00f3stos (\u201creturn home\u201d) and \u1f04\u03bb\u03b3\u03bf\u03c2, \u00e1lgos (\u201clonging\u201d). I would define it as a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one\u2019s own phantasy. Nostalgic love can only survive in a long-distance relationship. A cinematic image of nostalgia is a double exposure, or a superimposition of two images\u2014of home and abroad, of past and present, of dream and everyday life. The moment we try to force it into a single image, it breaks the frame or burns the surface.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In spite of its Greek roots, the word \u201cnostalgia\u201d did not originate in ancient Greece. \u201cNostalgia\u201d is only pseudo-Greek, or nostalgically Greek. The word was coined by the ambitious Swiss student Johannes Hofer in his medical dissertation in 1688.1 (Hofer also suggested monomania and philopatridomania to describe the same symptoms; luckily, the latter failed to enter common parlance.) It would not occur to us to demand a prescription for nostalgia. Yet in the 17th century, nostalgia was considered to be a curable disease, akin to a severe common cold. Swiss doctors believed that opium, leeches, and a journey to the Swiss Alps would take care of nostalgic symptoms. By the end of the 18th century, doctors discovered that a return home did not always cure the nostalgics\u2014sometimes it killed them (especially when patriotic doctors misdiagnosed tuberculosis as nostalgia). Just as today genetic researchers hope to identify genes coding for medical conditions, social behavior, and even sexual orientation, so the doctors in the 18th and 19th centuries looked for a single cause, for one \u201cpathological bone.\u201d Yet they failed to find the locus of nostalgia in their patient\u2019s mind or body. One doctor claimed that nostalgia was a \u201chypochondria of the heart,\u201d which thrives on its symptoms. From a treatable sickness, nostalgia turned into an incurable disease. A provincial ailment, a maladie du pays, turned into a disease of the modern age, a mal du si\u00e8cle.
(…) Modern nostalgia is paradoxical in the sense that the universality of longing can make us more empathetic toward fellow humans, yet the moment we try to repair \u201clonging\u201d with a particular \u201cbelonging\u201d\u2014the apprehension of loss with a rediscovery of identity and especially of a national community and a unique and pure homeland\u2014we often part ways and put an end to mutual understanding. \u00c1lgos (longing) is what we share, yet n\u00f3stos (the return home) is what divides us. It is the promise to rebuild the ideal home that lies at the core of many powerful ideologies of today, tempting us to relinquish critical thinking for emotional bonding. The danger of nostalgia is that it tends to confuse the actual home with an imaginary one. In extreme cases, it can create a phantom homeland, for the sake of which one is ready to die or kill. Unelected nostalgia breeds monsters. Yet the sentiment itself, the mourning of displacement and temporal irreversibility, is at the very core of the modern condition.
(…) Instead of a magic cure for nostalgia, I will offer a tentative typology and distinguish between two main types of nostalgia: the restorative and the reflective. Restorative nostalgia stresses n\u00f3stos (home) and attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home. Reflective nostalgia thrives in \u00e1lgos, the longing itself, and delays the homecoming\u2014wistfully, ironically, desperately. These distinctions are not absolute binaries, and one can surely make a more refined mapping of the gray areas on the outskirts of imaginary homelands. Restorative nostalgia does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition. Reflective nostalgia dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity. Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt.
Restorative nostalgia is at the core of recent national and religious revivals. It knows two main plots\u2014the return to origins and the conspiracy. Reflective nostalgia does not follow a single plot but explores ways of inhabiting many places at once and imagining different time zones. It loves details, not symbols. At best, it can present an ethical and creative challenge, not merely a pretext for midnight melancholies. If restorative nostalgia ends up reconstructing emblems and rituals of home and homeland in an attempt to conquer and specialize time, reflective nostalgia cherishes shattered fragments of memory and demoralizes space. Restorative nostalgia takes itself dead seriously. Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, can be ironic and humorous. It reveals that longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another, just as affective memories do not absolve one from compassion, judgement, or critical reflection.
The 20th century began with a futuristic utopia and ended with nostalgia. The optimistic belief in the future has become outmoded while nostalgia, for better or for worse, never went out of fashion, remaining uncannily contemporary. Contrary to what the great actress Simone Signore\u2014who entitled her autobiography Nostalgia Is Not What It Used to Be\u2014thought, the structure of nostalgia is in many respects what it used to be, in spite of changing fashions and advances in digital technology. In the end, the only antidote for the dictatorship of nostalgia might be nostalgic dissidence.
Nostalgia can be a poetic creation, an individual mechanism of survival, a countercultural practice, a poison, and a cure. It is up to us to take responsibility of our nostalgia and not let others \u201cprefabricate\u201d it for us. The prepackaged \u201cusable past\u201d may be of no use to us if we want to cocreate our future. Perhaps dreams of imagined homelands cannot and should not come to life. Sometimes it is preferable (at least in the view of this nostalgic author) to leave dreams alone, let them be no more and no less than dreams, not guidelines for the future. While restorative nostalgia returns and rebuilds one\u2019s homeland with paranoid determination, reflective nostalgia fears return with the same passion. Home, after all, is not a gated community. Paradise on earth might turn out to be another Potemkin village with no exit. The imperative of a contemporary nostalgic: to be homesick and to be sick of being at home\u2014occasionally at the same time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The word \u201cnostalgia\u201d comes from two Greek roots: \u03bd\u03cc\u03c3\u03c4\u03bf\u03c2, n\u00f3stos (\u201creturn home\u201d) and \u1f04\u03bb\u03b3\u03bf\u03c2, \u00e1lgos (\u201clonging\u201d). I would define it as a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one\u2019s own phantasy. Nostalgic love can only survive in a long-distance […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":8808,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[94],"tags":[157,103,190],"class_list":["post-8395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-design-en","tag-case-en","tag-design-2","tag-fanzine-2"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n