Managing the Absent. On the Role of Nostalgia in Individual and Social Relations.

The study explores the phenomenology of nostalgia as well as the latter’s relationship with individual and collective memory. Its starting point is related to a particular definition of nostalgia as a pathology of memory and of imagination. The research hypothesis is that, far from only being a limit, the experiences of absence, loss, and oblivion are not contrary to memory, but are rather an integral part of its dynamics. This relationship with absence is constitutive for a phenomenology of nostalgia, which can work towards the construction of an ethically good memory or, on the contrary, act as an obstacle to the positive role of memory in building and enforcing personal and social relational environments.