12/20/2023 0 Comments Nostalgia meaningThis notion, André Bolzinger reminds us, appeared for the first time in 1688 in a medical thesis, where the word was used to translate the effects related to the ‘pain’ felt by an individual whose country is far away. Moreover, if nostalgia could well be constitutive of utopia in its different forms (RICŒUR, 1984), including as a ‘pathology of Utopia’ (RICŒUR, 1986), does all nostalgia contain a utopian ferment?ĦThe works on nostalgia that have pondered its links with utopia are few and far between. And it is perhaps the particular tone that the sense of loss confers on the utopian experience that baffles the analyst. It is also the point of connection where they meet and create histories and stories: sometimes critiques of the present, sometimes projections of an elsewhere (temporal and spatial) which are rooted in an idealization of the past. No doubt this pejorative meaning is due to the fact that both are linked to the sense of loss lying behind the gesture of revolt against the present which gives its momentum to the projected ideal. As Marina Chauliac points out in her contribution, ‘the present place and moment are, in a way, the negative of what has or is yet to come to pass.’ĥ What is the meaning of the individual and collective experiences that connect these notions? What tools should we use to apprehend them? Utopia as well as nostalgia have one thing in common: their pejorative meaning often prevails, in the usual interpretation as (often) in scientific language, over their use as analytical categories and/or as historical objects. Yet they both come together through their central reference to an elsewhere that does not exist or has ceased to exist, anchored in a dimension of either protest against, or escape from, current society. The second, utopia, is polysemic (RIOT-SARCEY, 2001, 5), forming part of the collective and social spheres and characterized by a non-linear history – sometimes as a formal ‘totality’ (a closed system), sometimes as an ‘ élan’ or impulse contained in heterogeneous and scattered fragments or hidden within the folds of daily life, or as a ‘nightmare’, a dystopia whose definitive realization must be prevented (Huxley, 1932). Outside literary studies, little work has explicitly addressed these connections from a theoretical point of view, in terms of their practical expressions – which are themselves conditioned by the social and historical context in which they unfold.ĤHow are we to conceptualize the link between these two notions and the social phenomena on which they rely? The former, nostalgia, is often defined in a relatively narrow way, usually in the context of individual experience – nostalgia as a moral malady whose somatic repercussions can lead to death (BOLZINGER, 2007), and then as a concept designating a cultural practice whose forms, content, meanings and effects change with the present context (STEWART, 1988). Here, we will not try to circumscribe these notions, but will leave their potential definitions open as they involve spaces and temporalities of infinite diversity, and this is precisely what enables connections to be forged between them. On the one hand, such research has focused on practices which testify to an abstract feeling of belonging to a human community, through heritage and commemorations 1 on the other hand, it has investigated symbols, imaginaries and even political projects, particularly in terms of utopia and nostalgia (RIOT-SARCEY, 1998 LACHENAL and MOBDJ-POUYE, 2014).ģIt is to the connection between these two last notions, often perceived as opposites on the basis of a priori well-established splits (between progress and reaction, modernism and passéisme, etc.), that this issue is devoted. Some of this research has analyzed the links with different pasts and different spaces, whether these links are projected, maintained or broken and it has taken two directions that are not mutually exclusive. 1 The notions of memory and heritage have been widely studied in the social sciences for the last thi (.)ĢFor many years now, research on the relation to time, memory and the uses of the past in contemporary societies and, more marginally, research on ancient societies, has continued to develop, overlapping with a trend in the public sphere sustained by those people who are active, for example, in politics, community life, the media and culture.
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