Approaching Nostalgia through Critical Theory

This contribution aims at proposing a critical theory of nostalgia from an ethical standpoint. The topic of nostalgia deserves to be investigated to the extent that nowadays we are witnessing a widespread “nostalgification”. Its pervasiveness is apparent even in the contemporary marketing strategies, or ways of life, but, an even more worrying aspect, the rhetoric of nostalgia has also spread in the public sphere and has become a common reference for neo-authoritarian regimes and for the so-called “illiberal democracies”. Such instrumentalization deserves a close investigation and an inquiry concerning the deep reasons and the roots of this overwhelming return. Upon a closer look, indeed, nostalgia can be traced back to processes of memory, history and our attitudes toward the past, and, more generally, to temporality. The Critical Theory of society is born with the intention of diagnosing the social pathologies of an epoch and of particular forms of life and to remedy them first of all by understanding, also at an interdisciplinary level, their causes and correlations with other phenomena and, if possible, to find a solution that reduces suffering and leads towards emancipated forms of life freed from oppression. For this methodological approach, Critical Theory can be useful in understanding the social phenomena, both individual and collective, that can be traced back to nostalgia, and in verifying whether within these phenomena there are exclusively regressive drives to be contained or whether it can contain the seeds for a rethinking of contemporary social ties, to eliminate suffering and imagine emancipated forms of life.