In fact, there is a tradition of critical reflection on the modern condition that incorporates nostalgia. The nostalgic feels stifled within the conventional confines of time and space. Sometimes it is not directed toward the past either, but rather sideways. While futuristic utopias might be out of fashion, nostalgia itself has a utopian dimension, only it is no longer directed toward the future. Unlike melancholia, which confines itself to the planes of individual consciousness, nostalgia is about the relationship between individual biography and the biography of groups or nations, between personal and collective memory. Considering the future makes us take responsibility for our nostalgic tales. The fantasies of the past determined by the needs of the present have a direct impact on the realities of the future. Thirdly, nostalgia, in my view, is not always retrospective it can be prospective as well. Time out of time, not encumbered by appointment books. Hence the “past of nostalgia,” to paraphrase Faulkner, is not “even the past.” It could merely be another time, or slower time. The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into private or collective mythology, to revisit time as space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition. In a broader sense, nostalgia is a rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress. Secondly, nostalgia appears to be a longing for a place but is actually a yearning for a different time-the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams. Nostalgia is not merely an expression of local longing, but the result of a new understanding of time and space that made the division into “local” and “universal” possible. Nostalgia and progress are like Jekyll and Hyde: doubles and mirror images of one another. First, nostalgia in my diagnosis is not “antimodern.” It is not necessarily opposed to modernity but coeval with it. The nostalgia that interests me here is not merely an individual sickness but a symptom of our age, a historical emotion. A provincial ailment, a maladie du pays, turned into a disease of the modern age, a mal du siècle. From a treatable sickness, nostalgia turned into an incurable disease. One doctor claimed that nostalgia was a “hypochondria of the heart,” which thrives on its symptoms. Just as today genetic researchers hope to identify genes coding for medical conditions, social behavior, and even sexual orientation, so the doctors in the 18th and 19th centuries looked for a single cause, for one “pathological bone.” Yet they failed to find the locus of nostalgia in their patient’s mind or body. By the end of the 18th century, doctors discovered that a return home did not always cure the nostalgics-sometimes it killed them (especially when patriotic doctors misdiagnosed tuberculosis as nostalgia).

Swiss doctors believed that opium, leeches, and a journey to the Swiss Alps would take care of nostalgic symptoms.

Yet in the 17th century, nostalgia was considered to be a curable disease, akin to a severe common cold. 1 (Hofer also suggested monomania and philopatridomania to describe the same symptoms luckily, the latter failed to enter common parlance.) It would not occur to us to demand a prescription for nostalgia. The word was coined by the ambitious Swiss student Johannes Hofer in his medical dissertation in 1688. “Nostalgia” is only pseudo-Greek, or nostalgically Greek.

In spite of its Greek roots, the word “nostalgia” did not originate in ancient Greece. The moment we try to force it into a single image, it breaks the frame or burns the surface. A cinematic image of nostalgia is a double exposure, or a superimposition of two images-of home and abroad, of past and present, of dream and everyday life. Nostalgic love can only survive in a long-distance relationship. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own phantasy. I would define it as a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. The word “nostalgia” comes from two Greek roots: νόστος, nóstos (“return home”) and ἄλγος, álgos (“longing”).

Future of nostalgia