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J. M. Fritzman
The Future of Nostalgia and the Time of the Sublime
Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.(1)
Having noted that the characterization of "Hegelianism as an event of thought arising from the finite condition of the self-understanding of the historical consciousness does not constitute an argument against Hegel," but instead "simply testifies to the fact that we no longer think in the same way Hegel did, but after Hegel," Paul Ricoeur concludes with a question and a wish: "For what readers of Hegel, once they have been seduced by the power of Hegel's thought as
have, do not feel the abandoning of this philosophy as a wound,
wound that, unlike those that affect the absolute Spirit, will not be healed? For such readers, if they are not to give into the weakness of nostalgia, we must wish the courage of the work of mourning."(2) In thus opposing the work of mourning's courage to nostalgia's weakness, Ricoeur fails to recognize that nostalgia possesses another, more radical and originary, sense. It is the weakness of nostalgia that makes possible the courage of the work of mourning. The work of mourning always is an exercise in nostalgia. There can be no question of arguing that nostalgia is weak only in appearance, and actually is strong. Rather, nostalgia's weakness is its strength.
Nostalgia comes from the Greeks. It marks their discovery, simultaneously their invention, of a link between a desire to return home (nostos) and a sensation of pain (algia). Home is not so much a place as a time. Pain has many modalities. So it should occasion no surprise that the original sense of nostalgia later permutates, as dictionaries have it, to a "form of melancholy caused by prolonged absence from one's home or country," or a "wistful or excessive sentimental sometimes abnormal yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition." Nevertheless, behind these notions there is another, forgotten idea. Not only has this idea been forgotten, but the act of forgetting itself is remembered no longer. Nor have these two forgettings happened by chance. As Friedrich Nietzsche reminds his readers, "forgetting is no mere vis inertiae as the superficial imagine; it is rather an...