Philosophies of Nostalgia

[Max Klinger, "Adam." 1880]

Philosophy’s treatment of nostalgia remains curiously overlooked. To my mind, there have been only three substantial papers dealing with the topic head on. First, we have Edward Casey’s 1987 article “The World of Nostalgia” in what used to be called Man and World but now comes under the more prosaic title Continental Philosophy Review. Before this, James Hart wrote an exemplary paper in 1973, also in Man and World, “Toward a Phenomenology of Nostalgia.” More recently, Steven Crowell contributed to the topic in his “Spectral History: Narrative, Nostalgia, and the Time of the I,” published in 1999 in Research in Phenomenology. We can now add to these three papers Jeff Malpas’s recent treatment of the topic, “Philosophy’s Nostalgia,” to be found in Contributions To Phenomenology (thanks to AnySpaceWhatever for providing access to the Malpas article).

Maplas’s paper is important in several respects. One, he takes issue the common presentation of nostalgia as a pernicious term, especially as it is employed with respect to a philosophical position. Two, he takes issue with the temporal-centric perspective of nostalgia, as it is given in the mood of nostalgia (and includes my earlier work [The Aesthetics of Decay] in this trend).

Crucial to his argument is the centrality of the home in the nostalgic’s worldview, as he writes: “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” (88). Against his position, “‘nostalgia’ has come instead to signify a condition usually taken to involve, first and foremost, temporal dislocation” (Ibid.). This temporal dislocation is set in a cultural and historical context, in which the “cure” for nostalgia was originally thought of as simply returning to the homeland. Post-Freud, (and to some extent, post-Kant), this spatial emphasis has been supplanted with a concern with lost time. All of which is easily demonstrated by returning to a place from one’s past. The accompanying sense of derealization is due to breakage in the temporality of self rather than in the materiality of place.

This, I realise, is to some extent a false division, and Malpas is largely correct to assign “place” as that which binds space and time. I agree. But nevertheless, it seems to me that one can quite easily accent certain structural and affective dimensions of the mood of nostalgia over other aspects. That indeed, seems the point Malpas makes in the following comment: “Although Dylan Trigg argues that nostalgia and homesickness are essentially temporal in character (Trigg 2006: 54–55). The apparent shift here is presumably, on this account, a shift only in how nostalgia and homesickness are viewed, and not a shift in the character of nostalgia as such” (Ibid). If there is a shift in view, then it is perhaps a question of placing onus on the spatial or temporal aspects of the character of nostalgia itself. Along with home, nostalgia is a consolidation of spatio-temporal aspects of the lifeworld. Time is not, after, at the expensive of place.

Malpas also remarks notably on the affective emphasis of nostalgia, arguing that the history of nostalgia has moved from “suffering and estrangement” to “familiarity and comfort” (Ibid.). For him, the polemical stance against nostalgia is rooted in this over emphasis on nostalgia as a mode of retreat from the world, characterised by the absence of critical thinking and a reactionary response to change. In this way, nostalgia takes place against a broader backdrop of insecurity and instability. Philosophically, as Malpas argues, Heidegger is often presented as the central figure in this line of thought. In a footnote, Malpas writes:

Dylan Trigg is especially critical of what he terms “Heidegger’s spatial-centrism” (Trigg 2006: xvi), claiming that “Heidegger’s musings on homelessness persistently reference the geometrical spatial field, and so revert to the pre-reflective diagnosis of nostalgia as geographical displacement, and that alone. His failure to grasp homesickness in temporal terms is especially striking given the attention time receives in Being and Time. The omission is further heightened, since temporality is at the structural core of nostalgia” (Trigg 2006: 54), although Trigg’s criticisms sit rather oddly with some of his discussion of Heidegger elsewhere in the book, especially in chapter 15, 199–207, where the issue of ‘spatial-centrism’ disappears, and there is instead a stronger appreciation (or so it seems) of the centrality of place in Heidegger’s account. (91).

I suspect Malpas is right about the inconsistency in my treatment of Heidegger (I would certainly never devalue him as a philosopher of place. My criticism was pointed at the notion of place as a static and stabilizing category in his account, for example, of dwelling). I think the bigger worry is whether or not Heidegger is emblematic of philosophical inquiry as a mode of recovering the past or a mood confronting loss. Elsewhere in the paper, Malpas points to a more spectral reading of Heidegger: “In Heideggerian terms, this means that the remembrance of being always has the character of nostalgia in that it remains a return that is never completed, but is essentially disjoint, spectral even. The homecoming that Heidegger so often evokes is thus a homecoming that is never completed, and that cannot be so completed. It is a homecoming that returns us to a questionability that is at the very heart of our being-in-the-world” (98-99). I am sympathetic to Malpas’s reading of Heidegger, and it seems to me that a broader characterization of the role of estrangement in Heidegger’s thinking on materiality and memory would be of benefit (Robert Mugerauer may have already achieved that with his recent book on the topic).

Malpas’s other contribution to this debate is to emphasis a point made in Casey’s 1987 book on remembering: that memory always involve an appeal to the worldhood of place, Malpas writes: “Since nostalgia is itself a certain form of autobiographical memory – or, at least, incorporates autobiographical memory within it – so nostalgia takes the form of a remembrance of, and a longing for, a certain being-in-place that is also, of course, a certain being-at home” (94). I would be interested to hear more on Malpas’s idea of home more broadly. Is home reducible to place, or is it a relational way of being-in-the-world or to one’s own self? Inversely, is the absence of home understandable as a discontinuity between self and world?

Re-engaging with my own treatment of nostalgia from reminds me that while I agree with the basic stance outlined in The Aesthetics of Decay, the account is lacking in several respects. Above all else, nothing is done with the body of nostalgia (Having said that, around the time of the book’s publication, I was working on the rough basis of a more bodily account of nostalgia in the idea of spatial morphology). In The Memory of Place, a far more extensive and body centred account of nostalgia is given, in both its spatial and temporal forms. There, the notion of spatial (and bodily) morphology forms a central theme. Morphology simply refers to the way the world is augmented in order to retain the unity of the I - it thus forms an extension of Merleau-Ponty's "intentional arc." My argument in The Memory of Place is that in the nostalgic world, this augmentation is pathologised to the extent that two different worlds are engineered simultaneously. The result of this is a doubling of experience - spatial, temporal, and fundamentally, corporeally. Between space and time, it is the body, especially when experienced through the uncanny, the spectral, and in the figure of the doppelgänger, that acts as the mediator and the manifestation of the past in both its presence and absence.

(For an indication of how this train of thought is developed, see my paper, “The Body of a Ghost.”)