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8 Philosophy’s Nostalgia . . . weeping, his eyes never dry, his sweet life flowing away / with the tears he wept for his foiled journey home [nostos] / . . . all his days he’d sit on the rocks and beaches / Wrenching his heart with sobs and groans and anguish [algos]. —Homer, Odyssey What is wrong with nostalgia? How and why has it come to be the case, as it surely has, that to say of a philosophical position that it is “nostalgic” is already to indicate its inadequacy?1 In this chapter I want to examine nostalgia both as a mood or disposition in general, and as a mood or disposition that is characteristic of philosophical reflection. 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, I will explore the nostalgic 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 discomfiting rather than comfortable, as bringing with it a sense of the essential questionability of our own being in the world. The origins of nostalgia or, at least, of the term itself, lie in the seventeenth century and its use to refer to a form of melancholia most often found among soldiers serving away from their homelands.2 Nostalgia combines the Greek nostos, meaning home or the return home, with algos, meaning pain, so the literal meaning of the term is a pain associated with the return home—a pain originally taken to arise as a consequence of the unfulfilled desire or longing for such return. “Nostalgia” thus appears at a particular point in history and within a particular technical discourse—it is an invented term, a technical neologism, belonging to the vocabulary of medical diagnosis—even though the experience of loss and estrangement that lies at its heart is ancient. 162 Chapter 8 From its origins in the eighteenth century to its usage today, the meaning of “nostalgia” appears to have shifted. Part of that shift involves the disappearance of the term, along with other terms like “melancholia” itself, from the language of medicine. Nostalgia, like melancholia, is no longer recognized as an illness to be medically diagnosed and treated. But a more significant, although associated shift, is in the way the term is seen as related to the spatial and the temporal. Understood precisely as a pain associated with desire for home—and as home is neither a space nor a time, but a place that holds a space and time within it—so nostalgia can never be understood as spatial or temporal alone (this is a point to which I shall return in the discussion below).3 Yet having originally referred to a condition resulting primarily from spatial displacement (the soldier serving in a foreign land),4 “nostalgia” has come instead to signify a condition usually taken to involve, first and foremost, temporal dislocation (our estrangement from our past, and especially our childhood),5 so that even the migrant who reflects “nostalgically” on her homeland is typically reflecting back on memories of a place that, while perhaps spatially removed, is also more significantly and specifically temporally distant. One might say, then, that understood as a form of homesickness, nostalgia is that particular form of longing for home that arises in circumstances in which the return home is somehow made impossible. In the contemporary world, in which, as the advertisements often tells us, the “home” that is spatially distant is nevertheless only a flight or a phone call away, the only home that is rendered truly inaccessible is the home that lies in the past. In addition to the shift from the technical to the commonplace and from the spatial to the temporal, nostalgia has also come to be viewed in contemporary terms in a way that effectively shifts the emphasis of nostalgia away from algos and toward nostos. Nostalgia is thus often associated not with suffering and estrangement, but with familiarity and comfort. In terms of the history of the term, it seems that what “nostalgia” now refers to is not the pain that comes with the separation from home, but instead that which was, in the past, often taken as its immediate cause, namely, the experience of familiar sounds, smells, sights that invoke the presence of home...

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