It’s hard not to give in to nostalgia; Do not lean into a genuflection that holds back much of the secularized spiritual and beg, as if we were long-standing pedigrees, to return to the precise moment when we had not yet experienced this crisis of meaning, before the arrival of a blatant and alone authoritarianism before which there seems to be no barrier. Kast’s victory in Chile, Trump’s joking acknowledgment when New York’s mayor-elect called him a fascist, and the warlike drift of the world — with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte warning us that we must prepare for a war similar to that waged by our aggressors — gives us the chance to see a future blessed by anyone who scares us as a result. Little by little, according to the cramped certainties of this Spanish oasis that was the progressive government, it collapsed, because the cases of corruption and the machismo that women fight against us like a sword locked in memory – duel from the womb of my abuela to my mother, to the dactilial huellas of the girls to come -, and the faith is more and more fragmented, attacking its neighbors and not the bearers of hatred, it seems to take root in a large part of the population and the ephemeral refuge of looking behind; the idealists claim, on the basis of what he was, the bell of the moment when it was possible to imagine what he would be.
The thinker Svetlana Boym distinguishes between a totalizing nostalgia, which captures the past and transforms it into an impregnable monolith, and a series of reflexive nostalgias for which it is possible to recover what was worth something, always variable and resounding, in a reassuring way. Part of the current malaise comes from a disappointment with historical struggles for emancipation that eventually disintegrated into particles of identity that sometimes act as stagnant compartments. Some theorists have analyzed the phenomenon as establishing insoluble divisions, although I am of the opinion that diversity contributes to well-being as long as there are communicating vessels. The one who never aspired to emancipate himself, because he was born in privileged places, also disrupts any perspective of the future: this explains the demand for Francoist real estate which, ultimately, was not neoliberal, but third according to its natural laws (of the jerarquía, but also of the sun and water). For example, it is significant that in the defense of the field against the installation of biogas macroplants, the picking of century-old olives to install photovoltaic panels or the opening of new mines, sometimes the ultraconservatives and the grassroots ecologists coincide.
What they have in common, in my opinion, is nostalgia: but each time there is something in Boym’s classification. On the one hand, those who cling to it through critical thinking demand the public health of before, the absolute consensus on human rights (which we still do not seek to update), the carbon tint contained before industrial accelerationism, even with the recently won gender freedoms. On the other hand, many people’s retrograde nostalgia also harkens back to earlier times when water and basic foodstuffs were sold on the stock exchange, factories were relocated, and the price of each was much less affordable if one had to resort to unpayable bank charges. It is necessary to recognize the fact that at every point of the ideological spectrum there are citizens yearning for an imaginary return to the past, which might include a deserving discriminatory desire of certain collectives (feminists, homosexuals, racialized people), but asymism is a justified terror of progress in its structurally material aspects. How we manage this hope and the critical selection of your situation will depend on the annihilation of what has been acquired in terms of rights; However, dismissing it completely is an error that only fuels misunderstanding and a fall into the abyss.
We conceived it this way: if for Walter Benjamin the Angel of History escaped, but with his eyes open to the destruction that this teleology left behind him, for a large majority of citizens, this Angel returns to his past and brings together the precious foundations of the great black tide that is the world. In its gentlest version, it would not be about moving forward, but rather going backwards in search of the used precious stone that constitutes the new art, as Vik Muniz teaches us in the documentary Wasteland (2009). On the more careless side, we had lost our ability to imagine and among the rubble we would rejoice in repeated residue or hallucinatory compilation (which is what makes artificial intelligence). Liza’s generational divide is symptomatic of this paradigm, although some use it to attack pensions and others want to emphasize that the disadvantages of young people can be transformed into strong alliances with our mayors. But nostalgia is not going to disappear, because we are missing so many things, so many promises… that to circumvent them would constitute a disdain of immense intellectual magnitude and an unforgivable lack of respect for collective feeling.
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