L'irréversible et la nostalgie (Irreversibility and nostalgia)

Citation

Bazin, Y. (2013), "L'irréversible et la nostalgie (Irreversibility and nostalgia)", Society and Business Review, Vol. 8 No. 1, pp. 90-92. https://doi.org/10.1108/17465681311297766

Echoing Simon Reynold's Retromania (see book review in the previous issue), the concept of nostalgia appears to be omnipresent both in civil society and in the marketing literature. This painful yearning for the past seems to be haunting our experiences of the present. Being at the intersection of societal trends, business and academic, the Society and Business Review ought to explore further this tendency. Therefore, Jankélévitch's work on temporality imposes itself as an indispensable reference in order to get a better grasp on the concept of nostalgia.

The book opens without introduction, directly on a chapter called “Irreversibility and temporality”. In the very first sentence, Jankélévitch presents the nature of his philosophical project. To him, the irreversible is not a characteristic of time but rather its fundamental nature: “the irreversible […] is the very temporality of time” (p. 1). Moreover, temporality only exists through its irreversibility, and it is from this assertion that Jankélévitch's whole analysis will derive. In this context, man incarnates the irreversible since “all his being consists in becoming” (p. 8). He can only become, and never come back, because a reversible time would cease to be temporal. Thus, time remains wild, untamed, escaping from our control. Aging is for humans the most direct experience of this irreversibility. Indeed, one would like to move in time as easily as one travels in space. However, it will always be impossible to go back and forth in history. The chapter concludes on the question of repetition and, for Jankélévitch, its impossibility. According to him, since iteration is never rigorously repetitive, there is a fundamental impossibility in “literally redoing something” (p. 57). “The second time is in itself new, both first and last” (p. 57). The second time echoes the first, but is always done in a novel manner.

The three following chapters examine different relationships with the irreversible: resistance, indulgence and consent. The concept of irreversibility brings Jankélévitch to examine the question of reversion, and the desire to reverse time. According to him, “the becoming seals and records irrevocably the effectiveness of the have‐been” (p. 71). The attempt of reversion can only be a failure, sanctioned by the “bitterness of disappointment” (p. 78). Therefore, youth is the fundamental object of nostalgia, a hope of instantaneous and radical returning that would give some kind of primitive innocence. For Jankélévitch, “the chimera of resurrection” links this “nostalgia of youth” to the “anxiety of death” (p. 89). Finally, the hypothesis of a perpetual return would only be “a detour, a temporary extension” (p. 100) that would not abolish temporality, but only inscribe it in a longer one. Temporality will forever be out of reach, uncontrollable and unmanageable, impossible to accelerate or slow, fundamentally “uncompressible” (p. 139). Therefore, man is inscribed in time, in a temporality and thus in an irreversibility. In this have‐been, man leaves trails, relics of his past. It is this trail that will make him nostalgic; “this trail is our misery and our torture” (p. 152).

The last chapter of the book is about nostalgia per se, which Jankélévitch defines as “homesickness” (p. 340). By indicating its object (home), it seems to also indicate its remedy (return). Since it is a pathos of exile, “to heal, one simply has to go home” (p. 340). Nostalgia only exists because we do not live in the abstract, geometrical space of mathematicians, but in a geography where nostalgia builds holy sites and enchanted areas. In their uprooting, men are tormented and torn but they also sense the solution. And it is because of this sense that return would be the solution that they recognize nostalgia. However, Jankélévitch announces a difficulty that will arise, “we have the intuition that the closure of nostalgia will lead to an open nostalgia” (p. 345). The nostalgic is both here and there, physically present and absent in his mind. Lost in these “far‐off voices” (p. 346), he is sleepwalking, a ghost lost in a dream with very little concern for the constraints of daily life. The idea of closing nostalgia is based on the assumption that “repatriation would cancel ‘without rest’ (restlos) expatriation” (p. 349); using the Odysseus to illustrate, Jankélévitch quotes Penelope and Ulysses last phrase in Faure's opera: “Now we will live” (p. 351). However, yet fulfilled, Ulysses is going to realize that closed nostalgia is an illusion. Nostalgia is irrational in the sense that it has no cause; it is both the cause and its effect. “The nostalgic dreams of his village: not that it is a remarkable village, but this village is his” (p. 353). Nostalgia loops on itself, with passion and without reason; and its justifications are given retrospectively. The memories it is linked to are slowly magnified and lose their details, becoming “a disappearing apparition, a blinking light” (p. 355). One is not nostalgic because of a glorious past, one is nostalgic simply because he has been. “The object of nostalgia is the misery of the irreversible” (p. 357).

Temporality is the keystone of nostalgia; and consequently, irreversibility is to. Therefore, returning home will never be the solution: the expatriate would not find the place of origin he comes from, definitely lost in the past. After his return:

Ulysses a the family table doesn't eat; he is distracted, dreaming, he is looking elsewhere, his mind is elsewhere […] He was dreaming of homebird existence and familial happiness; back home, he especially regrets lost occasions! (p. 359).

Nostalgia can never be closed and is fundamentally disappointing. It is a migratory pain and the nostalgic will always be looking elsewhere and in the past. Once home, the motherland will appear to be foreign and nostalgia will be opened toward something else. “It appears that the homeland is not a terminus, but the starting point of a new adventure” (p. 363).

What makes the nostalgic incurable is the very irreversibility of time. Everything that has been, can only happen once and, consequently, every attempt to return has no sense. Nostalgia is a reaction against this irreversibility, an irrational attachment that refuses it:

The true object of nostalgia isn't the absence, as opposed to the presence, but the past in comparison with the present; the true remedy for nostalgia isn't going backward in space, but the devolution in time toward the past (p. 368).

However, if space can be travelled indefinitely, circulation in time is not an option. Therefore, “this temporal irreversibility forbids the spatial return to truly refolds on its starting point” (p. 369). For this reason, going back home cannot be the remedy for nostalgia; the homeland has, by the very nature of time, disappeared forever. And this is the reason why the past is carrying this melancholic charm, it is an absent that will never be present again. “The past has to be reanimated, called back in memories, or one has to go toward him, evocate its absence and meet it” (p. 372). Nostalgia allows the nostalgic to incarnate his souvenir, to avoid their disappearance. “The past is the object of nostalgia because, as mediocre as it is, it is our past […] its charm is inherent to its past nature” (p. 373). Jankélévitch sees music as the perfect expression of nostalgia since “music is indirectly nostalgic” (p. 376). By the end, nostalgia is homesickness, but not from one specific home; it is a pain of everywhere and nowhere that “escapes from any geographical localization” (p. 377). The ambiguity of nostalgia lies in the impossibility of a return in time that generates the illusion of the solution in the return in space. And Jankélévitch to conclude on this last assertion: “the aged man who returns to his roots, to his origin, to his innocence, comes back where he has never been; sees again what he has never seen before” (p. 386).

Jankélévitch offers, with this book, a dense and rich analysis of the system formed by temporality, irreversibility and nostalgia. Yet complex and sometimes difficult to read, this truly philosophical perspective enriches our understanding of nostalgia. Rather than limiting it to a societal phenomenon linked to a frustration in our societies, Jankélévitch deeply entangles nostalgia with our own temporal nature. There is nostalgia because there is a past, because we have been. Moreover, trying to close this nostalgia is irrelevant. Therefore, this Retromania is not a simple trend; it is deeply rooted in our experience of time. However, there seem to be an emerging tendency in marketing practices. Nostalgia becomes, not only a target, but also something that advertisement tries to stimulate, if not to create. Indeed, the past that is regretted is often a past that has not been lived by younger generations. The understanding of this societal phenomenon could very much benefit from Jankélévitch's philosophical perspective.