Nostalgia Between Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis
Abstracts and Biographies
Georg Stenger: Phenomenological Forays into Nostalgia - with a Few Intercultural Side Glances
After an introductory reflection on my understanding of “critical phenomenology”, I would like to show how pain, suffering and grief are related to one another, even if they address different levels. With recourse to phenomenological approaches - here E. Levinas, among others, will play an important role - these attributions are to be examined in terms of their phenomenologically relevant fields. It should be shown that these two “moods” of melancholy and above all of nostalgia are at work as “sensation spaces” and “centers of experience” in order to come to the fore themselves.
All of this will be done on the one hand with recourse to psychoanalysis (Freud et al.) and on the other hand with reference to related Japanese approaches (Kimura Bin et al.). I would also like to use the “visual language” as an opportunity to address this range of topics more adequately, also with a view to the intercultural perspective.
Since 2011, Georg Stenger holds the Professorship for “Philosophy in a Global World” at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna and was appointed as Head of the Department of Philosophy (2014-2016) and Vicedean of the Faculty of Philosophy and Education (2016-2020). Moreover, from 2017-2019 he was President of the German Society of Phenomenology Research (DGFP) and from 2009-2019 he was President of the Society of Intercultural Philosophy (GIP), since 2019 he is Vice-President of this Society (GIP). He has held several Visiting Professorships: University of Tübingen, (“Forum Scientiarum”), (WS 2008/09); Gakushuin-University, Tokyo/Japan (SS 2015); Several Universities in Iran (Teheran-University, Tabatabaei-University, Behesti-University, and others), (February 2016); Beijing-University in Beijing (China), 1.-30. Sept. 2018. His latest publications include the second edition of Philosophie der Interkulturalität – Erfahrung und Welten. Eine phänomenologische Studie (Alber, 2020), Faktum – Faktizität – Wirklichkeit. Phänomenologische Perspektiven (Meiner, 2021) and Jenseits der Identitäten. François Jullien – Eine Herausforderung für das Denken im Zwischen von China und Europa (Metzler/Springer, 2012).
Philippe Van Haute: Melancholia and Sexual Theory: Identification and Drive in Freud’s Later Works
Freudian psychoanalysis is a pathoanalysis. It takes psychopathology as a starting point to understand human existence. The different psychopathologies are nothing but exaggerations and magnifications of elements and tendencies that structure the life of all of us. Freuds sexual theory as we find it in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality takes hysteria and perversions as a model to understand human sexuality as the cornerstone of human existence. However, this theory leads to an impasse especially when it comes to nostalgia and melancholia. Indeed, in Three Essays Freud considers the object of the drive both contingent and extremely variable. But how then can we understand nostalgia, mourning and melancholia? In trying to understand melancholia Freud starts developing a theory of identification that itself contradicts some basic assumptions of his sexual theory. It is only the development of a new theory of the drives in 1920 that allows Freud to give a sufficient account of identification and thus of melancholia.
Philippe Van Haute is professor of philosophical Anthropology at Radboud University (The Netherlands) and extra-ordinary professor of philosophy at the University of Pretoria (South Africa). He is a member of the Belgian School for Psychoanalysis of which he was president from 2006-2009. He published mainly on the relation between psychoanalysis and philosophy. In the last years he focused his research on the work of Sigmund Freud. He recently published (with Herman Westerink) Reading Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. From Pleasure to Object (History of Psychoanalysis series, Routledge, 2021).
Delia Popa: Nostalgia between Narcissism and Melancholia
Is nostalgia an expression of a primary narcissism that brings us back to our earliest modes of attachments or is it rather a special form of melancholia? What is the role played by introjection and incorporation in nostalgia? What is lost and what is maintained in nostalgic experiences? How do nostalgic bodies revisit their past and how do they inhabit their present? Drawing on Freud’s theories of narcissism and of mourning and melancholia and on their interpretations by Lou Andreas Salomé, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Török, my aim is to question the importance of ideals and idealizations in the experience of nostalgia. What are we longing for when we are nostalgic? Is it simply an objective something/someone/somewhere we lost and introjected? Is it an ideal other that we have incorporated in order to keep it alive forever within ourselves? What does it mean for the nostalgic body to be alive – for itself and for what it is fighting to maintain alive?
Delia Popa is Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at Villanova University. Her first book was on Emmanuel Levinas: Les aventures de l’économie subjective et son ouverture à l’altérité (2007). She is also the author of Apparence et réalité. Phénoménologie et psychologie de l’imagination (2012) and co-editor of Person, Community and Identity (2003), La portée pratique de la phénoménologie. Normativité, critique sociale et psychopathologie (2014), Approches phénoménologiques de l’inconscient (2015) et Describing the Unconscious. Phenomenological Perspectives on the Subject of Psychoanalysis (2020). Her current research is about the problem of being stranger to a community, the relationship between imaginative creativity and political responsibility, and the phenomenology of gesture.
Line Ryberg Ingerslev: Refusing to mourn: Reflections on the Relation Between Nostalgia and Grief
According to Freud's theory of mourning, grief is a natural and healthy phenomenon, a process that at some point comes to an end and allows us to return to a form of normality. In his short text Vergänglichkeit (1915), Freud seems surprised by the refusal to mourn as a response to change. The influence of this refusal is experienced as pain with regard to the present, for instance, as an inability to enjoy pleasant moments in life. Jonathan Lear refers this kind of experience not only as an anxious disruption of the normal ways of the world, but also as a difficulty of reality (2018). In this paper, I question whether nostalgia can be understood as a refusal to mourn. I suggest that nostalgia has less to do with time travelling and longing for a past that cannot become present, nor is it merely a form of affective response, among many, to change. What is refused in nostalgia, if we understand it as a refusal to mourn, is the aspect of an afterlife, i.e., of survival that allow us to practice a form of world-building hope. This hope seems absent in nostalgic experiences of pain.
Line Ryberg Ingerslev is a postdoctoral fellow at the department of philosophy, Julius-Maximilian University, Würzburg, Germany. She works on the phenomenological roots of passivity, responsiveness, memory, and on aspects of emotional distress and trauma that play a role in weaker forms of agency.
Maren Wehrle: Going back to Normal – Nostalgia, a (Bad) Habit?
In times of individual or global crisis and change, long-held beliefs lose their self-evidence and daily habits break down. What we thought was normal to or commonly-shared by everyone is questioned; supposedly routine tasks lose their familiarity and need special attention. A common response to such a situation of disorientation and discomfort is the nostalgic call for a return to a (prior) normality. Although normality is rarely mentioned or spoken of when one is in possession of it, in times of crises, as we have seen in the current Corona crisis, it has turned into something precious – the primary goal: going back to normal. In this pandemic, political leaders of all parties promise a restitution of our ‘old’ ways – a ‘new’ normality to which we will return. A return to normality is also a popular cry among far-right populist groups in response to the climate crisis and/or to normative changes in contemporary Western debates relating to gender, ethnic/racial and sexual differences and equality (e.g., #metoo; black lives matter, cancel or woke culture, etc.). Indeed, the recent election campaign slogan of the German party AFD was “Germany, but normal”.
However, is normality a fixed place, state or order to which one can return or merely preserve? To what extent can this longing be described as nostalgia? In my paper, I seek to investigate this longing for normality as a phenomenon of nostalgia. I will do so by analysing the relation between (different levels) of habit and nostalgia. This approach will endeavour to show (1) that nostalgia is an immediate affective response to a breakdown of habits (as a lost normality in terms of concordance), and (2) that nostalgia can be interpreted as a bad habit (that retreats from the challenges of a changing world).
Nostalgia can be defined as the longing for “reintegration of familiarity and spatial-temporal continuity” (Trigg 2018, 49). This is in line with what Edmund Husserl defined as one central aspect of normal experience, namely, concordance. To experience normally, every present experience (of the world) has to be in concordance with what we (and others) have experienced before. Whenever there is a discordance, there are basically two possibilities: either this was merely a temporary deviation to an overall concordance; or, the deviation is permanent and transforms into a new regularity/normality. Concretely, such a (temporal, practical and personal) concordance is achieved and maintained through repeated interactions with one’s environment and with others that result in (perceptual, bodily and personal) habits or a style of experience.
As Husserl and contemporary psychology emphasise, one has the tendency either to ignore unfamiliar facts and beliefs that do not conform to one’s worldview or to treat them as mere exceptions and try to hold on to a former sense of concordance. However, normality is not only about (retaining) concordance, but also about optimalisation – achieving my optimal state as well as others. Even when a specific behaviour is familiar to us (e.g., domestic violence or a dependence on alcoholic drinking), it is not necessarily conceived as normal because it is not an optimal way of being. With this second aspect of normality, Husserl wants to underscore the intentional structure and future orientation that is necessary for experiencing in a normal way. Normal experience aims at being optimal. This makes normality a dynamic albeit fragile process of adaption and negotiation. A state or order cannot be deemed ‘normal’ only because one (individual normality) or most (intersubjective normality) are used to it (concordance). A proper normality must be optimal with regard to the needs and aims of an individual or intersubjective community. The conflict lies in the fact that because the environment/external conditions as well as the needs and aims of subjects change, normality can never be returned to or preserved in some original way. In this respect, I ultimately propose that nostalgia (alone) is neither able to restore nor establish a sustainable – future-oriented and intersubjective – sense of normality.
Maren Wehrle, is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Her areas of specializations are Phenomenology, Philosophical and Historical Anthropology, Feminist Philosophy and Cognitive Psychology. Wehrle has authored a monography on Attention in Phenomenology and Cognitive Psychology, ‘Horizonte der Aufmerksamkeit‘ (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag 2013), and edited a handbook on Edmund Husserl (together with S. Luft), ‘Husserl Handbuch. Leben-Werk-Wirkung’ (Metzler: Stuttgart 2018). She published many Journal articles and book chapters on the topics of embodiment, habit, normality, and normativity, see for example, ‘Being a body and having a body. The twofold temporality of embodied intentionality.’ Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 19 (2020): 499–521; or ’There’s a crack in anything.’ Fragile Normality: Husserl’s Account of Normality Revisited.’ Phainomenon: Journal of Phenomenological Philosophy 28 (2018): 4.
Luna Dolezal, Cathrin Fischer: Losing the Body-as-Home? Nostalgia, Embodiment and the Phenomenology of Illness
In this talk we will explore how nostalgia for the body-as-home has been posited in phenomenological accounts of illness, taking Havi Carel’s reflections on the experience of being an ill person and her theoretical framing of the phenomenology of illness as a central case study. We start by exploring the phenomenology of the body-as-home and how nostalgia can become part of the experience of the ‘lost body’, in the case of the ‘lost home’ of the mother’s body and one’s own body that is potentially ‘lost’ in illness. Drawing on Freud’s conception of the uncanny, we consider how losing the body-as-home manifests in lived experiences of illness, including in the contemporary experience of COVID-19. Through a phenomenological register, we explore how the disruptions of habit and the habitual body can manifest as a sense of loss and a turn towards nostalgia. However, we examine how the privileging of the experience of nostalgia in phenomenological accounts of illness can have worrying implications. We turn towards literature in disability studies where reflections on ableist assumptions about illness and the experiences of congenital illnesses problematize the idea of ‘loss’ as central to experiences of illness and disability. Whilst we do not aim to disregard the phenomenological and psychoanalytic significance of nostalgia in the experience of illness, we take a critical perspective on this phenomenon. Disability studies illuminates that the experiences of nostalgia, loss and suffering are not only located within the individual, but are also shaped by ableist attitudes, structures and perceptions towards illness, disability and ageing.
Luna Dolezal is Associate Professor in Philosophy and Medical Humanities at the University of Exeter where she leads the Shame and Medicine Project and the Scenes of Shame and Stigma in COVID-19 project. She is author of The Body and Shame: Phenomenology, Feminism and the Socially Shaped Body (Lexington Books, 2015) and co-editor of the books Body/Self/Other: The Phenomenology of Social Encounters (SUNY Press, 2017) and New Feminist Perspectives on Embodiment (Palgrave, 2018).
Cathrin Fischer is a PhD student in Philosophy at the University of Exeter, where she is researching the embodiment and imaginaries of disability and prosthesis through a queer-feminist phenomenological lens as part of the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures project. Her undergraduate (University of Exeter) and postgraduate (University College Dublin) theses have focused on the (inter-)subjective, bodily, and affective dimensions of eating disorders.
Manu Sharma: Troubling Nostalgia: Theorizing through Migration
In his poem, Muhajir-Nama, Munawwar Rana writes:
Nai duniya basa lene ki aek kamjor chahat me
Purane ghar ki dhalizon ko suna chhod aaye hain
In a weak desire to build ourselves a new world…
We left the thresholds of our old home deserted
Agar likhne pe aa jaaye to siyahee khatm ho jaaye
Ki tere paas aaye hain to kya kya chhod aaye hain
We will run out of ink, if we come to write of it…
…of all that we have left behind, as we came to you
This poem, one among a large body of literature produced on nostalgia experiences in India, articulates the identity and lived world of a muhajir[1] that translates vaguely as ‘migrant or the doer of migration’.
The aim of this talk is to explore how phenomenological research on nostalgia can be informed by the experiences lived and navigated by migrants. The migration experience itself is interesting to me for three reasons. One, as a first personal subject at the center of such an encounter. Two, as a phenomenon around which experiences of nostalgia gather most densely making it rich for such investigation. And three, as an examination of existing, often euro-centric conceptual frames to excavate new possibilities of thinking about nostalgia.
Going through mainstream discourses on nostalgia in phenomenology and psychoanalysis; one discovers the movement of nostalgia as sickness/pathology as in the case of the Swiss soldiers to a more romanticized Proustian view of the phenomenon. Within these, that which often goes unheard, is the suffering of nostalgia by a migrant which I take as my point of departure. It is a phenomenon that finds itself neither purely in pathological language, nor in the mere romance of an imagined past. It is rather lived through a sharp break in one’s material, cultural, habitual worlds and in one’s own (embodied) sense of who they are and how to be in the world. While this is already a rich subject matter for literature, anthropology and sociology etc., it is seldom attended to in philosophical thinking.
In conclusion, the task of this talk is to 1. bring to light these very abundant contemporary lived experiences that are the site of nostalgic suffering 2. place them in correspondence with phenomenological conceptual frames, and 3. to examine what can be learnt about both from such a conversation.
Manu Sharma is a Prae-Doc researcher with the Vienna Doctoral School of Philosophy. Their interest lies in investigating affective landscapes, especially those of suffering and pain through phenomenology with a focus on how historical, cultural situatedness can implicate the discourse.
Dorothée Legrand: Hoisted at the Hinge of Times – in Exile between Melancholia and Nostalgia
In this presentation, I would like to underline the contrast between, on the one hand, a past that doesn’t pass and which, as such, makes no future conceivable, and on the other hand, a past that doesn’t pass and yet can be inscribed into the present in view of the future. Tentatively, on the one hand, we may call melancholia a state of mind which involves a past which always fails to become presently alive again, thereby preventing any future to come anew; and on the other hand, we may call nostalgia a state of mind which involves the insistence of the past to always remain presently alive, thereby opening itself to the risk of being transformed by what’s yet to come. I will notably rely on Jacques Derrida’s views on historicity to consider different manifestations of melancholia and nostalgia. I will focus in particular on situations of exile. Exile will here be characterized by a temporal rupture, no future being conceivable from a present cut off from its past. To this rupture, I will argue, one may reply melancholically or nostalgically. I will consider how exile may be blocked out of time, caged into a present which is both at once ephemeral and eternal, knowing no past and no future, and will also consider how, contrastively, exile may be hoisted at the hinge of times – reopening the past towards what’s to come.
Dorothée Legrand is a researcher in philosophy (CNRS, Husserl Archives, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris Sciences et Lettres Research University). She is also a psychologist and psychoanalyst, affiliated to IHEP (Institut des Hautes Etudes en Psychanalyse). As a clinicial, she works in private practice, as well as for the association MigrENS (for students in exile). Since 2014, she organises a monthly seminar “Articulations philosophiques et psychanalytiques“ at Ecole normale supérieure in Paris. In 2019, she published the monograph Ecrire l'absence – Au bord de la nuit (Paris, Hermann).
[1] The word muhajir itself carries a long history of shifting meanings, religious, social and political lived worlds that it expresses in correspondence with the changing political landscapes in India.
Georg Stenger: Phenomenological Forays into Nostalgia - with a Few Intercultural Side Glances
After an introductory reflection on my understanding of “critical phenomenology”, I would like to show how pain, suffering and grief are related to one another, even if they address different levels. With recourse to phenomenological approaches - here E. Levinas, among others, will play an important role - these attributions are to be examined in terms of their phenomenologically relevant fields. It should be shown that these two “moods” of melancholy and above all of nostalgia are at work as “sensation spaces” and “centers of experience” in order to come to the fore themselves.
All of this will be done on the one hand with recourse to psychoanalysis (Freud et al.) and on the other hand with reference to related Japanese approaches (Kimura Bin et al.). I would also like to use the “visual language” as an opportunity to address this range of topics more adequately, also with a view to the intercultural perspective.
Since 2011, Georg Stenger holds the Professorship for “Philosophy in a Global World” at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna and was appointed as Head of the Department of Philosophy (2014-2016) and Vicedean of the Faculty of Philosophy and Education (2016-2020). Moreover, from 2017-2019 he was President of the German Society of Phenomenology Research (DGFP) and from 2009-2019 he was President of the Society of Intercultural Philosophy (GIP), since 2019 he is Vice-President of this Society (GIP). He has held several Visiting Professorships: University of Tübingen, (“Forum Scientiarum”), (WS 2008/09); Gakushuin-University, Tokyo/Japan (SS 2015); Several Universities in Iran (Teheran-University, Tabatabaei-University, Behesti-University, and others), (February 2016); Beijing-University in Beijing (China), 1.-30. Sept. 2018. His latest publications include the second edition of Philosophie der Interkulturalität – Erfahrung und Welten. Eine phänomenologische Studie (Alber, 2020), Faktum – Faktizität – Wirklichkeit. Phänomenologische Perspektiven (Meiner, 2021) and Jenseits der Identitäten. François Jullien – Eine Herausforderung für das Denken im Zwischen von China und Europa (Metzler/Springer, 2012).
Philippe Van Haute: Melancholia and Sexual Theory: Identification and Drive in Freud’s Later Works
Freudian psychoanalysis is a pathoanalysis. It takes psychopathology as a starting point to understand human existence. The different psychopathologies are nothing but exaggerations and magnifications of elements and tendencies that structure the life of all of us. Freuds sexual theory as we find it in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality takes hysteria and perversions as a model to understand human sexuality as the cornerstone of human existence. However, this theory leads to an impasse especially when it comes to nostalgia and melancholia. Indeed, in Three Essays Freud considers the object of the drive both contingent and extremely variable. But how then can we understand nostalgia, mourning and melancholia? In trying to understand melancholia Freud starts developing a theory of identification that itself contradicts some basic assumptions of his sexual theory. It is only the development of a new theory of the drives in 1920 that allows Freud to give a sufficient account of identification and thus of melancholia.
Philippe Van Haute is professor of philosophical Anthropology at Radboud University (The Netherlands) and extra-ordinary professor of philosophy at the University of Pretoria (South Africa). He is a member of the Belgian School for Psychoanalysis of which he was president from 2006-2009. He published mainly on the relation between psychoanalysis and philosophy. In the last years he focused his research on the work of Sigmund Freud. He recently published (with Herman Westerink) Reading Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. From Pleasure to Object (History of Psychoanalysis series, Routledge, 2021).
Delia Popa: Nostalgia between Narcissism and Melancholia
Is nostalgia an expression of a primary narcissism that brings us back to our earliest modes of attachments or is it rather a special form of melancholia? What is the role played by introjection and incorporation in nostalgia? What is lost and what is maintained in nostalgic experiences? How do nostalgic bodies revisit their past and how do they inhabit their present? Drawing on Freud’s theories of narcissism and of mourning and melancholia and on their interpretations by Lou Andreas Salomé, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Török, my aim is to question the importance of ideals and idealizations in the experience of nostalgia. What are we longing for when we are nostalgic? Is it simply an objective something/someone/somewhere we lost and introjected? Is it an ideal other that we have incorporated in order to keep it alive forever within ourselves? What does it mean for the nostalgic body to be alive – for itself and for what it is fighting to maintain alive?
Delia Popa is Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at Villanova University. Her first book was on Emmanuel Levinas: Les aventures de l’économie subjective et son ouverture à l’altérité (2007). She is also the author of Apparence et réalité. Phénoménologie et psychologie de l’imagination (2012) and co-editor of Person, Community and Identity (2003), La portée pratique de la phénoménologie. Normativité, critique sociale et psychopathologie (2014), Approches phénoménologiques de l’inconscient (2015) et Describing the Unconscious. Phenomenological Perspectives on the Subject of Psychoanalysis (2020). Her current research is about the problem of being stranger to a community, the relationship between imaginative creativity and political responsibility, and the phenomenology of gesture.
Line Ryberg Ingerslev: Refusing to mourn: Reflections on the Relation Between Nostalgia and Grief
According to Freud's theory of mourning, grief is a natural and healthy phenomenon, a process that at some point comes to an end and allows us to return to a form of normality. In his short text Vergänglichkeit (1915), Freud seems surprised by the refusal to mourn as a response to change. The influence of this refusal is experienced as pain with regard to the present, for instance, as an inability to enjoy pleasant moments in life. Jonathan Lear refers this kind of experience not only as an anxious disruption of the normal ways of the world, but also as a difficulty of reality (2018). In this paper, I question whether nostalgia can be understood as a refusal to mourn. I suggest that nostalgia has less to do with time travelling and longing for a past that cannot become present, nor is it merely a form of affective response, among many, to change. What is refused in nostalgia, if we understand it as a refusal to mourn, is the aspect of an afterlife, i.e., of survival that allow us to practice a form of world-building hope. This hope seems absent in nostalgic experiences of pain.
Line Ryberg Ingerslev is a postdoctoral fellow at the department of philosophy, Julius-Maximilian University, Würzburg, Germany. She works on the phenomenological roots of passivity, responsiveness, memory, and on aspects of emotional distress and trauma that play a role in weaker forms of agency.
Luna Dolezal, Cathrin Fischer: Losing the Body-as-Home? Nostalgia, Embodiment and the Phenomenology of Illness
In this talk we will explore how nostalgia for the body-as-home has been posited in phenomenological accounts of illness, taking Havi Carel’s reflections on the experience of being an ill person and her theoretical framing of the phenomenology of illness as a central case study. We start by exploring the phenomenology of the body-as-home and how nostalgia can become part of the experience of the ‘lost body’, in the case of the ‘lost home’ of the mother’s body and one’s own body that is potentially ‘lost’ in illness. Drawing on Freud’s conception of the uncanny, we consider how losing the body-as-home manifests in lived experiences of illness, including in the contemporary experience of COVID-19. Through a phenomenological register, we explore how the disruptions of habit and the habitual body can manifest as a sense of loss and a turn towards nostalgia. However, we examine how the privileging of the experience of nostalgia in phenomenological accounts of illness can have worrying implications. We turn towards literature in disability studies where reflections on ableist assumptions about illness and the experiences of congenital illnesses problematize the idea of ‘loss’ as central to experiences of illness and disability. Whilst we do not aim to disregard the phenomenological and psychoanalytic significance of nostalgia in the experience of illness, we take a critical perspective on this phenomenon. Disability studies illuminates that the experiences of nostalgia, loss and suffering are not only located within the individual, but are also shaped by ableist attitudes, structures and perceptions towards illness, disability and ageing.
Luna Dolezal is Associate Professor in Philosophy and Medical Humanities at the University of Exeter where she leads the Shame and Medicine Project and the Scenes of Shame and Stigma in COVID-19 project. She is author of The Body and Shame: Phenomenology, Feminism and the Socially Shaped Body (Lexington Books, 2015) and co-editor of the books Body/Self/Other: The Phenomenology of Social Encounters (SUNY Press, 2017) and New Feminist Perspectives on Embodiment (Palgrave, 2018).
Cathrin Fischer is a PhD student in Philosophy at the University of Exeter, where she is researching the embodiment and imaginaries of disability and prosthesis through a queer-feminist phenomenological lens as part of the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures project. Her undergraduate (University of Exeter) and postgraduate (University College Dublin) theses have focused on the (inter-)subjective, bodily, and affective dimensions of eating disorders.
Maren Wehrle: Going back to Normal – Nostalgia, a (Bad) Habit?
In times of individual or global crisis and change, long-held beliefs lose their self-evidence and daily habits break down. What we thought was normal to or commonly-shared by everyone is questioned; supposedly routine tasks lose their familiarity and need special attention. A common response to such a situation of disorientation and discomfort is the nostalgic call for a return to a (prior) normality. Although normality is rarely mentioned or spoken of when one is in possession of it, in times of crises, as we have seen in the current Corona crisis, it has turned into something precious – the primary goal: going back to normal. In this pandemic, political leaders of all parties promise a restitution of our ‘old’ ways – a ‘new’ normality to which we will return. A return to normality is also a popular cry among far-right populist groups in response to the climate crisis and/or to normative changes in contemporary Western debates relating to gender, ethnic/racial and sexual differences and equality (e.g., #metoo; black lives matter, cancel or woke culture, etc.). Indeed, the recent election campaign slogan of the German party AFD was “Germany, but normal”.
However, is normality a fixed place, state or order to which one can return or merely preserve? To what extent can this longing be described as nostalgia? In my paper, I seek to investigate this longing for normality as a phenomenon of nostalgia. I will do so by analysing the relation between (different levels) of habit and nostalgia. This approach will endeavour to show (1) that nostalgia is an immediate affective response to a breakdown of habits (as a lost normality in terms of concordance), and (2) that nostalgia can be interpreted as a bad habit (that retreats from the challenges of a changing world).
Nostalgia can be defined as the longing for “reintegration of familiarity and spatial-temporal continuity” (Trigg 2018, 49). This is in line with what Edmund Husserl defined as one central aspect of normal experience, namely, concordance. To experience normally, every present experience (of the world) has to be in concordance with what we (and others) have experienced before. Whenever there is a discordance, there are basically two possibilities: either this was merely a temporary deviation to an overall concordance; or, the deviation is permanent and transforms into a new regularity/normality. Concretely, such a (temporal, practical and personal) concordance is achieved and maintained through repeated interactions with one’s environment and with others that result in (perceptual, bodily and personal) habits or a style of experience.
As Husserl and contemporary psychology emphasise, one has the tendency either to ignore unfamiliar facts and beliefs that do not conform to one’s worldview or to treat them as mere exceptions and try to hold on to a former sense of concordance. However, normality is not only about (retaining) concordance, but also about optimalisation – achieving my optimal state as well as others. Even when a specific behaviour is familiar to us (e.g., domestic violence or a dependence on alcoholic drinking), it is not necessarily conceived as normal because it is not an optimal way of being. With this second aspect of normality, Husserl wants to underscore the intentional structure and future orientation that is necessary for experiencing in a normal way. Normal experience aims at being optimal. This makes normality a dynamic albeit fragile process of adaption and negotiation. A state or order cannot be deemed ‘normal’ only because one (individual normality) or most (intersubjective normality) are used to it (concordance). A proper normality must be optimal with regard to the needs and aims of an individual or intersubjective community. The conflict lies in the fact that because the environment/external conditions as well as the needs and aims of subjects change, normality can never be returned to or preserved in some original way. In this respect, I ultimately propose that nostalgia (alone) is neither able to restore nor establish a sustainable – future-oriented and intersubjective – sense of normality.
Maren Wehrle, is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Her areas of specializations are Phenomenology, Philosophical and Historical Anthropology, Feminist Philosophy and Cognitive Psychology. Wehrle has authored a monography on Attention in Phenomenology and Cognitive Psychology, ‘Horizonte der Aufmerksamkeit‘ (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag 2013), and edited a handbook on Edmund Husserl (together with S. Luft), ‘Husserl Handbuch. Leben-Werk-Wirkung’ (Metzler: Stuttgart 2018). She published many Journal articles and book chapters on the topics of embodiment, habit, normality, and normativity, see for example, ‘Being a body and having a body. The twofold temporality of embodied intentionality.’ Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 19 (2020): 499–521; or ’There’s a crack in anything.’ Fragile Normality: Husserl’s Account of Normality Revisited.’ Phainomenon: Journal of Phenomenological Philosophy 28 (2018): 4.
Manu Sharma: Troubling Nostalgia: Theorizing through Migration
In his poem, Muhajir-Nama, Munawwar Rana writes:
Nai duniya basa lene ki aek kamjor chahat me
Purane ghar ki dhalizon ko suna chhod aaye hain
In a weak desire to build ourselves a new world …
We left the thresholds of our old home deserted
Agar likhne pe aa jaaye to siyahee khatm ho jaaye
Ki tere paas aaye hain to kya kya chhod aaye hain
We will run out of ink, if we come to write of it …
… of all that we have left behind, as we came to you
This poem, one among a large body of literature produced on nostalgia experiences in India, articulates the identity and lived world of a muhajir[1] that translates vaguely as ‘migrant or the doer of migration’.
The aim of this talk is to explore how phenomenological research on nostalgia can be informed by the experiences lived and navigated by migrants. The migration experience itself is interesting to me for three reasons. One, as a first personal subject at the center of such an encounter. Two, as a phenomenon around which experiences of nostalgia gather most densely making it rich for such investigation. And three, as an examination of existing, often euro-centric conceptual frames to excavate new possibilities of thinking about nostalgia.
Going through mainstream discourses on nostalgia in phenomenology and psychoanalysis; one discovers the movement of nostalgia as sickness/pathology as in the case of the Swiss soldiers to a more romanticized Proustian view of the phenomenon. Within these, that which often goes unheard, is the suffering of nostalgia by a migrant which I take as my point of departure. It is a phenomenon that finds itself neither purely in pathological language, nor in the mere romance of an imagined past. It is rather lived through a sharp break in one’s material, cultural, habitual worlds and in one’s own (embodied) sense of who they are and how to be in the world. While this is already a rich subject matter for literature, anthropology and sociology etc., it is seldom attended to in philosophical thinking.
In conclusion, the task of this talk is to 1. bring to light these very abundant contemporary lived experiences that are the site of nostalgic suffering 2. place them in correspondence with phenomenological conceptual frames, and 3. to examine what can be learnt about both from such a conversation.
Manu Sharma is a Prae-Doc researcher with the Vienna Doctoral School of Philosophy. Their interest lies in investigating affective landscapes, especially those of suffering and pain through phenomenology with a focus on how historical, cultural situatedness can implicate the discourse.
[1] The word muhajir itself carries a long history of shifting meanings, religious, social and political lived worlds that it expresses in correspondence with the changing political landscapes in India.
Dorothée Legrand: Hoisted at the Hinge of Times – in Exile between Melancholia and Nostalgia
In this presentation, I would like to underline the contrast between, on the one hand, a past that doesn’t pass and which, as such, makes no future conceivable, and on the other hand, a past that doesn’t pass and yet can be inscribed into the present in view of the future. Tentatively, on the one hand, we may call melancholia a state of mind which involves a past which always fails to become presently alive again, thereby preventing any future to come anew; and on the other hand, we may call nostalgia a state of mind which involves the insistence of the past to always remain presently alive, thereby opening itself to the risk of being transformed by what’s yet to come. I will notably rely on Jacques Derrida’s views on historicity to consider different manifestations of melancholia and nostalgia. I will focus in particular on situations of exile. Exile will here be characterized by a temporal rupture, no future being conceivable from a present cut off from its past. To this rupture, I will argue, one may reply melancholically or nostalgically. I will consider how exile may be blocked out of time, caged into a present which is both at once ephemeral and eternal, knowing no past and no future, and will also consider how, contrastively, exile may be hoisted at the hinge of times – reopening the past towards what’s to come.
Dorothée Legrand is a researcher in philosophy (CNRS, Husserl Archives, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris Sciences et Lettres Research University). She is also a psychologist and psychoanalyst, affiliated to IHEP (Institut des Hautes Etudes en Psychanalyse). As a clinicial, she works in private practice, as well as for the association MigrENS (for students in exile). Since 2014, she organises a monthly seminar “Articulations philosophiques et psychanalytiques“ at Ecole normale supérieure in Paris. In 2019, she published the monograph Ecrire l'absence – Au bord de la nuit (Paris, Hermann).
