Adam Philips, in a subtle discussion of the work of nostalgia: And psychoanalysis would call unconscious desire itself a form of memory. Our preoccupations are the way our pasts go in search of a future. Thus it is that the idiosyncratic past can oppose, or at least complicate, the consensual past, the official history, the meta-narrative. But it does so in irrepressibly idiosyncratic fashion: that is to say, unconsciously, unpredictably; one person, one encounter, at one moment in time. There is the past that can seem to be searching us out, while we go in search of other pasts. If the idiosyncratic past sponsors or opens up a space for freedom—vis-à-vis the more consensual past if not the past per se, no future yet conceived being entirely free of the past—then this freedom is best understood, according to Phillips, as our relative freedom to have our own thoughts and feelings about what is on offer. The freedom to dream rather than merely imitate or repeat.
Posted on: Mon, 19 May 2014 11:05:50 +0000
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