Nostalgias, Critical Memories, Imaginative Fabulations

Nostalgia, like imagination, facilitates identitarian processes that aim to restore an origin by inventing it and an ethically committed future open to exposing past injustices and making a conscious effort to prevent suffering that is caused by the repetition of events, even when the traces are no longer present. Nostalgia for a redeemed world or imagining a better future is not an effort to artificially return to the past: it is an attempt to prefigure an achievable future, even if its origin is by definition beyond reach. Justice that serves to create a better future must be constructed rather than recovered.