Phenomenology of Reflexive Nostalgia: On the Cultivation of the “Lost” and the Fan of Memory

Abstract

In Modern European culture, nostalgia is not just a literary motif or affect, but a peculiar technique of subjectivization. The popularity of nostalgia was first provided by medical discourse (at the end of the eighteenth century, nostalgy was considered a deadly disease), and then by the romantic poetics as an irresistible craving for one’s land. Considered as a fundamental mood (Grundstimmung), nostalgia acquires a special meaning in Martin Heidegger precisely as a preoccupation with philosophical questioning, proceeding from a specific situation of being “not at home everywhere,” which philosophy seeks to overcome. The article proposes to critically revise the concept of nostalgia, highlighting the main aspects of nostalgic consciousness and identifying the specifics of nostalgia’s temporal synthesis by using the concept of “memory fan," which is rooted in the expression by Walter Benjamin. Suggested phenomenological analysis makes it possible to identify a special type of reflexive nostalgia,which, consciously appealing to some specific emotional experience of the “native” and “homeland,” universalizes the nostalgic motive and at the same time claims to be an affective component of the motivation of theoretical inquiry. The research is based on the arguments of Immanuel Kant, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Jean Starobinsky, Paul Ricoeur, and Svetlana Boym. It also refers to fragments of philosophical essays by Jean Amery and Oxana Timofeeva, as well as Vladimir Nabokov's short story “Cloud, Lake, Tower”—these texts were used as phenomenological descriptions of the experience of “nostalgia in the first person” as examples of texts combining theoretical reflection with the explication of autobiographical experience. It seems that clarifying the technique of cultivating a “nostalgic subject” allows not only to distinguish between pathological and non-pathological, "true" and "imaginary" forms of nostalgia but also to outline possible ways to rethink the cult of nostalgia itself.