On Nostalgia, Nostalgics and the Curing of Sentimental Recollection

The 20th century began with utopia and ended with nostalgia. Optimistic belief in the future became outmoded, while nostalgia, for better or worse, never went out of fashion, remaining uncannily contemporary. The word “nostalgia” comes from two Greek roots, nostos meaning “to return home” and algia “longing.” 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’s own fantasy. 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 — of home and abroad, of past and present, of dream and everyday life. The moment one tries to force it into a single image, it breaks the frame or burns the surface.

The word “nostalgia,” in spite of its Greek roots, did not originate in ancient Greece. “Nostalgia” is only pseudo-Greek, or nostalgically Greek. The word was coined by the ambitious Swiss student Johannes Hofer in his medical dissertation in 1688. (Hofer also suggested nosomania and philopatridomania to describe the same symptoms; luckily, these failed to enter common parlance.) Contrary to our intuition, “nostalgia” came from medicine, not from poetry or politics. It would not occur to us to demand a prescription for nostalgia. Yet in the seventeenth 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. Among the first victims of the newly diagnosed disease were various displaced people of the seventeenth century: freedom-loving students from the Republic of Berne studying in Basel, domestic help and servants working in France and Germany, and Swiss soldiers fighting abroad. The epidemic of nostalgia was accompanied by an even more dangerous epidemic of “feigned nostalgia,” particularly among soldiers tired of serving abroad.

Agnosia

It seems undignified, says John, to accept congratulations for the past, as if that from the past, which is not subject to a time shortcut, was totally irrelevant. This is not a criticism of heroism, but a criticism of the need to place heroism out for adulation, as if every heroism was necessarily admirable – and not some other one. Isn’t this the conventional exchange of the act of socially defined heroism for an act of heroism which is highly individual, and thus socially undefinable? Where is the boundary between the need of a heroic act of a socially defined hero and the need of a heroic act of a hero, who is defined by this act itself into the position of a partaker of a heroic deed, who doesn’t feel the need of a social proclamation of this fact? John asks. John is the hero of an invisible terror. Every opportunity for uprising is punished. And because each uprising gets already punished in the state of opportunity, it never runs into the acute state in any other way but wounded.

A circle is always one-sided and this, always according to its direction of spinning. Multiplying its spins means, in practice, that the vision of its end naturally blends with the vision of its beginning. To push oneself off from any point of a circle is possible, however, it’s not entirely random. All one has to do is understand the rules of these banalities and by how much they help one move forward. Because only a cynic can claim that it doesn’t matter at all which leg we get off the bed with first. To swallow the acidity of a smile with the awareness of the acidity and the smile. And so on. Transformation of a form through content is not a linguistic game. It has to do with the inevitability to sustain form and thus display the content. The same as in music, even here it’s not about thoughts, but about the permanent tension due to the need to think, about belonging to the content to a point of its acceptance in the form of parasitism. And because the scalpel of intellect is not able to adequately discern between an operation and autopsy, the object of its cut is first abstract and then during the act itself it comes out from the fog of unconsciousness into the sphere of understanding to gradually acquire the face of conscious reality. A reality whose being is deadened by the autopsy, but is not dead, because it still exists.