From Anxiety to Nostalgia: A Heideggerian Analysis

Chapter 4 From Anxiety to Nostalgia: A Heideggerian Analysis AuQ26 Dylan Trigg As we grow older we feel an increasing nostalgia for our own deaths, through which we have already passed. — J. G. Ballard, “News from the Sun” 1. INTRODUCTION The preceding epigraph from J. G. Ballard’s story “News from the Sun” suggests a relationship between anxiety and nostalgia. In this chapter, this relationship is explored through the lens of Heidegger. Anxiety and nostalgia, an uneven and strange pair it might seem. If anxiety has tended to be regarded as the philosophical mood par excellence, venerated in equal measure by Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Heidegger, then nostalgia on the other hand has fallen by the wayside, at best as an impoverished concept and at worse a sentimental indulgence. In the canonical works of twentieth-century philosophy—much less twenty-first century—, very little attention is given to the issue of nostalgia. Part of this neglect perhaps stems in part from nostalgia’s apparently regressive characteristics. Unlike anxiety, which engenders a critical awareness of the gaps and discontinuities in existence—and thus carries with it the promise of engineering new insights—nostalgia presents itself as a mood that seeks to conceal those gaps, grounding itself in an idealized image of the past as fixated in time. Despite their apparent differences, however, anxiety and nostalgia are joined in at least one key respect: They are each governed by an affective concern with time. Anxiety’s temporality is in large futurally oriented and concerned in part with an anticipation of uncertainty. Indeed, anxiety’s force is rooted in an anticipatory awareness of the future as a source of 43 16028-0169d-1pass-r01.indd 43 15-01-2018 13:31:28 44 Chapter 4 irredeemable alterity. As Sartre would have it, “Anything, anything could happen” (Sartre 1998, 77). This hyper-vigilance over the future as a source of threat is a feature that appears time and again in both the conceptual and clinical literature on anxiety, and is best registered in experiential terms by the repetition of the phrase what if (Trigg 2016). What if my heart suddenly decides to give up? What if the metro stops between stations? What if the sun no longer rises in the morning? Questions such as this prey on anxious subjects though the same questions are often present, though in a less forceful way, for non-anxious subjects. In each case, the question of what if points toward the contingency in our knowledge of the world. An imperceptible limit cloaks our understanding of how things work, and confrontation with this limit tends to induce anxiety. We are, in a word, subjected to processes outside of ourselves and which lie ahead of us, and these processes nevertheless continue to constitute who we are. Both moods operate according to a certain efficacious pathology, in which an overproduction of meaning is imposed on the future in the case of anxiety and, in an inverse way, conferred upon the past in the case of nostalgia. In each direction, the spontaneity of the future and the indeterminacy of the past are augmented with an appeal to a fixed axis termed the I. Through this efficacious power, pastness and futurity gain the distinction of being subordinated to the sovereignty of selfhood. For the anxious subject, the future unfolds, not as an unmapped horizon shaped by the contingencies of history and the pathos of intersubjective relations—a future in which hope lives alongside failure, in which uncertainty accompanies certainty—but through a singular and unflinching lens, driven by an unceasing egology and shaped above all by one character alone: apprehension. In contradistinction to anxiety, nostalgia’s temporality is prima facie rooted firmly in the inexhaustible richness of the already lived past. As it is commonly thought, nostalgia involves less a turning toward the unmapped future and more a retreat from such uncertainty in favor of a landscape already wrought by experience. Such a terrain is charged with the pathos of a familiarity that is at once strange and intimate. This movement of turning back surrounds nostalgia’s divisive character, framed as it by a resistance to change and an inclination toward stasis. Yet nostalgia’s time is not simply an uncritical affirmation of the past in its generality and homogeneity. Nostalgia’s phenomenology is selective. Throughout, the mood gravitates in and around a time that impresses itself actively upon the construction of the self, and which continues to exert a presence upon the present (Trigg 2012). As with anxiety, nostalgia’s time is a living and dynamic one, haunting the present in both an ambiguous and uneasy way. If it reaches out from the past, then such a past is not one that is affixed to an objective date, but—again like anxiety—stems from a general atmosphere. For this reason, nostalgia’s 16028-0169d-1pass-r01.indd 44 15-01-2018 13:31:28 From Anxiety to Nostalgia 45 objects do not gain their power through the objective ordering of temporal data. Over a slow duration, phenomenal objects—buildings, streets, the faces of people we once knew but have since lost contact with, totems of a life once lived but no longer immediately accessible—assume a vital halo of meaning. Those same objects are not dormant in the background of the past, as representations of a history that now stands ready to be archived. Rather, through playing some elemental role in the crystallization of selfhood, they protrude through the past, announcing their presence as a form of lack, which the nostalgic subject grasps all too acutely as a specific kind of pleasurable longing. An uneven and strange pair, then. But is their commonality merely a contingent rapport with time in all its adumbrations or is there something more substantial to this relation? In this chapter, I would like to reflect on this pairing of apparent opposites. I propose here that what binds nostalgia and anxiety, alongside their temporal orientation, is a concern with the home. By “home,” we do not just mean that physical site implanted into the terrain of the Earth’s surface, which we return to after a day’s work. More than this, home is better understood less as a fixed noun and more as a dynamic verb, that is, as a sense of being-at-home. To be at home is, in one sense, to be integrated in a complex series of ways: spatially, temporally, subjectively, intersubjectively, and so forth. To be ill-at-home—or homesick—is precisely to have these taken-for-granted nodes of familiarity and directionality uprooted. One such way this interplay between homeliness and unhomeliness comes into play is in the dialogue between nostalgia and anxiety. Our plan for studying this liaison is to forge a collaboration with Heidegger. Heidegger belongs to a set of philosophers whose conceptual orientation is to some extent phrased as a recovery project. Indeed, accusations of Heidegger’s nostalgia, evidenced in his ontology as well as his aesthetics, are a standard trope in the secondary literature, such that we need only mention it in passing here. In the present reflection, we wish to bypass this subgenre of Heidegger studies and aim, instead, to elicit an unthought thought in his philosophy. The thought concerns whether or not we can formulate a theory of nostalgia from Heidegger’s phenomenology in order to understand its relation to anxiety and selfhood. Our method for this exploration consists of looking at the function of home in Heidegger’s early work. Our claim is that home acts as a pivot, upon which both anxiety and nostalgia gravitates, channeling each affect into the same orbit. We shall defend this thought in the following way. First, we will consider the function of anxiety in Heidegger, as it figures in Being and Time. As we do this, we will give particular attention to the role the home and an adjoining sense of unhomeliness play in motivating Heidegger’s analytic of anxiety. In the second movement, we will be led to the phenomenology of nostalgia. This move is predicated on the conviction that nostalgia 16028-0169d-1pass-r01.indd 45 15-01-2018 13:31:28 46 Chapter 4 aims at the reintegration of familiarity and spatial-temporal continuity—two aspects that are structurally and thematically undermined during anxiety, and which are central to a sense of being “at home.” Through situating anxiety and nostalgia in dialogue with one another, then, we will see that far from a strange alliance, each mood in fact works in tandem to safeguard against the destruction of home, anxiety through signaling an incipient threat, nostalgia through working to recover the damage invoked by an already-established threat. 2. HEIDEGGER’S ANXIETY Let us, then, begin with Heidegger’s anxiety. Heidegger joins both Freud and Lacan (alongside Kierkegaard and Sartre) in phrasing anxiety as a mood that has both an epistemic and transformative function. As is widely known, for Heidegger, anxiety is the philosophical mood par excellence insofar as it discloses the manner in which the world as a totality is revealed to us. To understand this, a prior understanding of Heidegger’s idea of moods is required. According to Heidegger, we are entities who are in the world insofar as our existence is shaped by the moods (Stimmungen) we find ourselves in (Heidegger 2008). Far from an ephemeral or psychological state, mood is the pre-reflective way in which the world is both disclosed and interpreted to us. If our moods are subject to variation and variability, then we are always in a mood, even if that mood is one of indifference. Mood is thus not an interior realm that shades an otherwise neutral world. Rather, things in the world assume a specific meaning according to the mood we find ourselves in. For this reason, different moods shed light on different attributes of the world. The mood of boredom reveals a world that is boring; a jubilant mood aligns with a jubilant world, and an anxious mood coincides with an anxious world. Things portend into my experience as both provoking anxiety and being objects of anxiety. As Heidegger sees it, certain moods carry with them a philosophical or foundational value. Anxiety is one such mood that carries with it both an experiential and conceptual significance. His justification for turning to anxiety is thus in the first respect a methodological one. The discussion appears in §40 of Being and Time and is prefaced by the question of how Dasein can gain understanding of the “totality of the structural whole” that is Being (Heidegger 1962, 229). Such a question is, of course, one that concerns Heidegger from the outset and is manifest in his privileging of Being over beings. How is it, so Heidegger will ask time and again, that Being can become an issue for beings? How, furthermore, can we grasp Being as a whole and not just the being which takes up that existence as a series of parts? So long as we 16028-0169d-1pass-r01.indd 46 15-01-2018 13:31:28 From Anxiety to Nostalgia 47 are tied up in the world, as though the world just existed in a habitual and constant sense, then such questions are for the most part lost on us. As Heidegger presents, it is anxiety that “might . . . perform some such function” of disclosing Being as a whole (230). Heidegger is careful from the outset of his analysis to distinguish anxiety from fear, and the distinction is notable. In contrast to anxiety, fear has a localizable object that is situated as a “detrimental entity within-the-world” (230). An object of fear—be it a precipice, a wolf hiding in the forest, or the smell of old furniture—can be avoided and thus managed. Anxiety assumes a more nebulous force. While there is an ambiguity between fear and anxiety, insofar as one can become anxious about the objects we fear, anxiety is not reducible to those objects; anxiety’s object, if we are to speak in paradoxical terms, is not specific things as such, but instead “Being-in-the-world” itself (230). Such an ontological anxiety may well take form in specific things (apparent not least in the production of phobias that seek to delimit and curtail anxiety), but anxiety in Heidegger’s sense is faceless in that it does not belong to a given entity. What we are anxious about is our very existence rather than the existence of the things themselves. Anxiety itself does not spring from those things, as though we could turn away from what threatens us. Instead, anxiety comes from “nowhere”—and we do not, as Heidegger has it, ultimately know what we are anxious about (231). For all that, anxiety’s evasive presence does not mean it is experientially absent. Because it is nowhere it is also everywhere, “so close that it is oppressive and stifles one’s breath” (231). Entities themselves, as Heidegger has it, fall by the wayside in their insignificance and deprivation of meaning. As things fall away, so the world presents itself to us as that which was there all along but only now figured through anxiety as a world. What Heidegger is describing here is a specific kind of nonconceptual groundlessness that is ordinarily masked in our habitual everyday existence. In and through anxiety, existence is revealed as being grounded in nothingness. As understood in this context, nothingness is not a negation of my world but a preclusion of myself as being a discernible thing. Heideggerian anxiety, then, is experientially grasped as a confrontation with the contingency of meaning that ordinarily constitutes the existence of things—both objects and relations—in such a way that for a brief moment, the world as a whole in its infinite contingency is revealed as a whole. In this vertiginous anxiety, I as a singular being am individuated from my dependency and complicity with others who might otherwise provide a buffer between myself and the world. As Heidegger will develop in his analysis of being-toward-death, anxiety’s “negativity” is thus only transitional. Far from bringing about the dissolution of Dasein, anxiety forges a space in which a confrontation with finitude and contingency brings about the possibility of rendering contingency and finitude one’s own. 16028-0169d-1pass-r01.indd 47 AuQ27 15-01-2018 13:31:28 48 Chapter 4 Up until that resolution, however, anxiety appears for us as signaling the advent of uncanniness. Heidegger uses the term unheimlich to describe the state of being uncanny, though he stresses that uncanniness also means “not-being-at-home” (233). Phenomenologically, our taken-for-granted existence consists of several key dimensions that enable us to proceed through the world without having to reflect in abstraction on how things work and assume the meaning they do. Think here of any given moment in the world. For the most part, we are at-home in the world insofar as the world presents itself to us a nexus of familiar pathways and pregiven meanings. When I leave my apartment, and take to the surrounding area, then I do so with an implicit confidence that the world will conform to a pattern that is habitually familiar to me. The world as a home-world is precisely given to me as a relational whole and is structured at all times in an intersubjective manner. It is a world in which things have their place, and from which I stand ready to make use of things. An atmosphere of familiar consistency thus envelops this world, rarely drawing attention to itself except for when it dissents from my expectations. In all this, home serves as a foundation, without which, not only would I be disoriented and displaced, but I would also be exposed to an unfamiliar and indeed unhomely world. Through anxiety, we are, so Heidegger suggests, confronted with precisely such a situation, in which our average taken-for-granted attitude is disrupted. The world, as such, no longer performs in the way we expect it to. Anxiety undermines this homely intimacy we have with the world, individuating us from our “absorption” in the world, and dislodging the complicity we have with others who share that world (233). “Everyday familiarity,” so Heidegger writes, “collapses” (233). What this means is not that the world suddenly dissolves, as though it were made of liquid; but instead that the roles one assumes and the meaning, action, and purpose one finds in things appear now as contingent constructs. In the face of this loss of familiarity and intrinsic meaning, we flee back into the state of being “at-home” of established patterns within a public sphere, such that “complete assurance” can coexist alongside the “threat” of the uncanniness that haunts Dasein from the outset (234). Heidegger’s anxiety, then, is not marked by a paroxysm of panic (he even goes so far as to dismiss “physiological” anxiety as being the same as the rarer “real” anxiety) (234). Rather, it sits there quietly and perhaps even innocuously, forming an atmosphere of subtle disquiet in our everyday existence, which, from time to time, flares up as an ecstatic realization that paralyses us into inaction and on occasion into action. For the most part, however, Heidegger thinks that we are creatures who flee anxiety through cultivating a series of fears that take the place of anxiety. Fear is not a flight away from the objects that engender fear, but instead 16028-0169d-1pass-r01.indd 48 15-01-2018 13:31:28 From Anxiety to Nostalgia 49 a flight precisely toward those things (233). What Dasein is in flight from, then, are not those objects of fear that are common to many—and thus shared in a complicit and familiar compact between oneself and others. Such objects merely defer and detain an anxiety greater than that of anxiety itself, as he has it: “Fear is anxiety, fallen into the ‘world,’ inauthentic, and, as such, hidden from itself” (234). As such, the very motive to flee is a movement that registers what we are fleeing from, that is, the “not-at-home” which “must be conceived as the more primordial phenomenon” (234). As primordial, anxiety is not unfortunate disintegration of an otherwise-unified existence to be redeemed through the cultivation of a “heroic” facade, but instead an encounter with the infrastructure that propels us to construct such a facade in the first place. In this respect, Heidegger radicalizes the primordiality of homelessness as an ontological rather than existential given. Homesickness is, as it were, the beginning point for any genuine creation of being at-home. 3. FROM ANXIETY TO NOSTALGIA Heidegger’s analysis of anxiety is striking in several respects. But how does this analysis lead to nostalgia? In response to this question, three points are worth bearing in mind. First, in contradistinction to the Freudian model, which posits anxiety as the result of repressed drives, for Heidegger, anxiety is primary in the structure of subjectivity (to use language that is distinctly un-Heideggerian). Anxiety is not reducible to an affective mood, much less one that can be placed within the tradition of a humanism. Rather, the affective—or ontic—dimension of anxiety springs from its ontological status as signaling the indefinite and contingent ground of existence. In the second case, because of its elemental place, for Heidegger, the status at-homeness is not a given of perceptual experience, but an achievement that we secure through fleeing from anxiety. In the final case, then, anxiety engenders a movement of taking flight. Taking flight means proscribing anxiety, drawing a limit on it, and otherwise putting it in a place. Perhaps it is through cultivating a fear or a phobia that can be managed or perhaps it is through fostering complicity with the public world of the they; in each case, the motive is to quieten anxiety’s capacity to render us ill-at-home in the world. To move from anxiety to nostalgia, I want to suggest the following hypothesis: The emergence of nostalgia is motivated (but not caused) by the onset of anxiety, such that nostalgia aims toward the reintegration of familiarity and spatial-temporal continuity—that is, the sense of being at-home—without ever realizing that homecoming. Let us say, in a Heideggerian sense, that nostalgia is anxiety in the mode of taking flight. Of course, the phrase takes flight sounds like a rapid, indeed flighty, movement. Nostalgia is precisely 16028-0169d-1pass-r01.indd 49 AuQ28 15-01-2018 13:31:29 50 Chapter 4 at odds with such velocity; this is why it is not a “response” in the sense of being provoked by stimuli. Rather, it is analogous to an atmosphere that accumulates over a given timescale. The remainder of the chapter proceeds in three ways to unpack this claim. First, I outline a brief phenomenology of nostalgia; second, I reflect on the function of nostalgia; finally, I situate nostalgia in relation to Heideggerian anxiety. 4. A BRIEF PHENOMENOLOGY OF NOSTALGIA AuQ29 The story of nostalgia, to phrase it hyperbolically, is a story of impossible returns (Boym 2001). The term nostalgia itself was coined in the seventeenth century by a Swiss medical student, Johannes Hofer, to describe the pain experienced by Swiss mercenaries when separated from their home (Hofer 1934; Trigg 2006). The word, a composite of nóstos (homecoming) and algos (pain), reflects this tension. The pain of the Swiss mercenaries descending their mountainous home in order to fight was so intense that the soldiers were advised to avoid the sound of cowbells in case of being reminded of the homeland (Illbruck 2012). Through time, nostalgia has been reconceived as less concerning algos and more tied up with the sentimentality of nostos. Its quality as an ambiguous emotion—pleasurable and painful, familiar and unfamiliar, homely and unhomely—has to some extent been diminished, reflected above all in the appropriation of nostalgia as a consumable entity. Contemporary psychological research on nostalgia reflects this trend and tends to accent its positive function as generating meaning and “well-being” (Routledge et al. 2010; Routledge 2015). Despite this rich history, the nature of nostalgia has proved elusive, and a series of questions continue to remain critical for ongoing debates in the field. How is nostalgic remembering different from non-nostalgic remembering? Is nostalgia a “positive” affect? What role does nostalgia play in consolidating meaning? And does culture produce the conditions for nostalgia? Such questions are beyond the purview of the current investigation, but any inquiry into nostalgia first has to address what constitutes the mood. To proceed, at least three points need to be remarked on, namely, the intentional (or noetic) structure of nostalgia, the thematic (or noematic) content of nostalgia, and the broader existential function of nostalgia. We begin with the first point. Nostalgia is often thought of as a variant of remembering. More specifically, a variant of remembering imbued with a particular kind of affective sensation, most typically a sensation of bittersweet yearning. Already this seems problematic, however. To phrase nostalgia as content plus affect seems both misleading and reductive. After all, it is quite possible to recall a given experience at one moment without there being an affective content while on 16028-0169d-1pass-r01.indd 50 15-01-2018 13:31:29 From Anxiety to Nostalgia 51 another moment the same content is imbued with deep emotional resonance. Likewise, that a memory has an affective content is by no means a guarantee of it constituting a nostalgic experience. Moreover, there is an additional and compelling sense in which all intentionality is affective in varying degrees. Our orientation in the world is not led by a series of abstract calculations but is instead mediated by a set of meanings that govern our existence more generally. In a word, things matter to us. As such, the presently topical phrase affective intentionality, prima facie a suitable candidate for nostalgia, is thus too vague to capture the specificity of nostalgia’s intentionality. If volitional memory alone does not ensure the affective thickness of nostalgia, then what is the role of memory’s counterpart, namely, imagination? Such is the approach phenomenological thinkers such as Gaston Bachelard and Edward Casey have provided when accounting for the intentionality of nostalgia; as Bachelard has it, “Every great image has an unfathomable oneiric depth to which the personal past adds special color” (Bachelard 2014, 53; Casey 1987). For Bachelard, nostalgic intentionality concerns a past that is anterior to personal experience, marked with both a “history and a prehistory” (53). As a result, the significance of the nostalgic object does not reside in its factual and objective status as a thing located in the past. Rather, the object in question is reinvented and augmented with an appeal to the present, a process that seems especially suited to the work of imagination. On a corresponding note, Edward Casey writes: “What recollection cannot accomplish by the mere assembling of particular memories, productive imagination achieves in forging a unity in which their affinity is expressed” (Casey 1987, 367). As Casey makes clear, far from aimless, the work of imagination is productive in scope, bordered at all times by the horizons of the past, which anchors nostalgia in a partly dissolved mixture of past and present. Here, Proust offers us a clue on how to proceed. Of the confusion of temporal poles, he writes how “the past was made to encroach upon the present and I was made to doubt whether I was in the one or the other” (Proust 1970, 133). Neither memory nor imagination, nostalgia’s intentional structure, unfolds, to follow Proust, as that of a reverie. The notion of reverie captures nostalgia’s peculiar orientation. Rather than unfolding in the manner of a subject correlating with an object, as, for example, in the case of a nightmare, reverie’s aim is neither the recollection of data nor an attention on a localised object, which remains fixed. Rather, reverie spreads its intentional force across a series of horizons, which, if beginning in one point, nevertheless is cast afar from its origins, as Bachelard writes: AuQ30 Reverie is entirely different from the dream by the very fact that it is always more or less centered upon one object. The dream proceeds on its own way in a linear fashion, forgetting its original path as it hastens along. The reverie works 16028-0169d-1pass-r01.indd 51 15-01-2018 13:31:29 52 Chapter 4 in a star pattern. It returns to its center to shoot out new beams. (Bachelard 1987, 14) To think in dialogue with Bachelard, nostalgic reverie takes it strength from a point of inception in the past, be it a childhood home or a city at dusk. Yet the reverie is not bound by these objects; rather, the objects appear for us as a beacon, which emits a signal beyond its own materiality. Faraway cities and remote corners of the Earth are all one possible expression of a much broader relation, which is already formed in advance of their expression. Objects such as these can vary in scope and scale, from the microcosmic to the macrocosmic, and they emerge as origins, which, if returning to themselves, also recede into the background in order to propel the nostalgic reverie further afield. 5. THE ROLE OF HOME If nostalgia unfolds in the manner of a reverie, does this mean that it lacks a discernible correlating noematic object? In reply to this question, much depends here on what we mean by noematic object, and quite obviously now is not the time or place to assume a Husserlian detour. Nevertheless, if we are to advance in this task of understanding the relation between anxiety and nostalgia we must consider what is it that we are nostalgic for. Nostalgic intentionality, even if ambiguous and vague, is registered as nostalgia in and through its affective content, and there is, to be sure, a phenomenology peculiar to nostalgia, which I have addressed elsewhere (Trigg 2012). While it is true that nostalgia differs from reproductive memory and outright phantasy, the mood nevertheless has a root in the past, even if the past that nostalgia draws its inspiration and lifeblood from is subject to a series of ongoing transformations. Here, I would propose that the history of nostalgia as once being inseparable from homesickness is both telling and incisive; in a word, its thematic content remains that precisely of home. Home can be understood here in at least two senses. In the first case, home can be thought of as in its historic sense as a physical site or region that serves as a locus of familiarity and orientation. Such a home is manifest as a series of relations be it to a community, to a neighborhood, to a culture, and so forth. Here, the formulation of nostalgia as a mode of homesickness remains intact. Nostalgia is provoked by distance and is registered experientially as a yearning for reunification. As understood in this way, the seventeenth-century “cure” for nostalgia was grounded in the conviction that an actual return to the homeland would cure sufferers—classically, Swiss soldiers—of their longing before rehabilitating them for their next voyage. However, as both 16028-0169d-1pass-r01.indd 52 15-01-2018 13:31:29 From Anxiety to Nostalgia 53 history and experience attest, such a mythical return is often met with failure and disappointment. As we know from returning to one’s childhood haunts, if we can return to the place of our origin, then we can never return to the time of that origin (cf. Trigg 2012). In the second case, we can think of the home, less in terms of a set of spatial references, and more in phenomenological terms as a general atmosphere that encompasses, embodies, and expresses a specific era. As understood in this way, what we are nostalgic for is not a definite place or time, but more to a certain atmosphere that is characterized by plenitude, integration, unity, and perhaps above all, an innocence marked by the complete absence of nostalgia itself. It is within an atmosphere that specific objects—houses, people, a petite Madeline—gain their importance as indexing and articulating a more global sense of at-homeness. Critically, these two concepts of home—alongside no doubt a series of other formulations of home—operate and unfold in an ambiguous relation to one another, such that home as a localized thing and home as an atmosphere meld into the same zone. What is at stake in each variation of home is not the individual status of objects themselves, but rather the role these objects serve as magnetic forces that point toward the quality of at-homeness more generally (and in this respect, the word atmosphere is thus accurate). In effect, objects—be it the home, a neighborhood, or a particular place—become emblems of at-homeness. 6. THE THREAT OF ANXIETY With the intentional and thematic orientation of nostalgia provisionally established, let us turn to the critical issue at stake in our present investigation: nostalgia’s relation to anxiety. Whether or not nostalgia involves an orientation toward home as a fixed locale or toward a general atmosphere of homeliness, nostalgia is predicated on the idea that at least two different states come into contact with one another. Emblematically, these two states are played out in terms of a tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar; an already-lived past that is familiar in terms of being a locus of unity and, moreover, returnable in the sense of still being reachable, but unfamiliar enough to merit the urge toward nostalgia in the first place. More than this, the relation between these two states must involve a return of sorts, be it actual or otherwise, successful or not. Such a disparity does not concern the temporal difference between different ages—old age wistfully recollecting youth—but instead between the lived duration of temporal distance, such that in principle one could be nostalgic for a time that is objectively speaking still proximate to the present. 16028-0169d-1pass-r01.indd 53 15-01-2018 13:31:29 54 AuQ31 AuQ32 Chapter 4 One way we can think about these different states is in terms of being-athome and not-being-at-home. We recall that for Heidegger, being-at-home means several things. In its earlier incarnation—that is, in Building, Dwelling, Thinking—he famously makes a distinction between having a shelter and being at home. The trucker driver is at home on the highway, but he cannot be said to dwell there. As understood in this way, at home refers to a certain taken-for-granted relationship to our surrounding environment, such that we have an implicit knowledge of how that environment works, be it the interior of a truck or the domesticity of a kitchen. We also know, however, that Heidegger’s account of being at home is not a materialist account. Indeed, his principal question in the early works is whether buildings hold any guarantee of dwelling. Dwelling for him marks a particular kind of relation to the world. It is worth narrowing this focus on at-homeness to the account Heidegger develops in Being and Time. In this context, at-home refers to how the world presents itself to us a nexus of familiar pathways and pregiven meanings. We are caught up in the world of being-at-home insofar as the world serves as an expression of our being-in-the-world. As Husserl would have it, the homeworld may in turn become impregnated with an alien quality, but it nevertheless remains alien from the standpoint of an already-established home (cf. Steinbock 1995). We have also seen how anxiety threatens the sense of being-at-home. How does it do this? One overreaching way anxiety achieves this is through a process of defamiliarization. The world ceases to conform to my expectations, and in revealing itself as irreducible to me, it undermines the meaning I invest within it. Ontically speaking, it becomes strange and alien. Fragments of familiarity exist alongside unfamiliar dimensions, establishing a world that is both uncanny and unhomely. Heidegger does not expand upon the implications defamiliarization has upon selfhood—indeed, such language is distinctly un-Heideggerian. In response to this lacuna, however, we propose here that anxiety threatens the sense of being at-home through a breakage in both spatial-temporal continuity and familiarization. This is evident in at least two respects. First, the onset of anxiety marks not only two ways in how the world presents itself to us, but it also marks a rupture in the temporal continuity of selfhood. The point can be expressed by considering the temporality of mood. Each mood that we embody is in some way exclusive. The mood of sorrow leaves no space for that of joy, and the sorrowful world is absolute in the sense that each and every aspect of the world is laden with a quality of sorrowfulness. When the mood passes, then it becomes difficult to again adopt the mood of sorrow as if by volition. There is thus a discontinuity here such that sorrow and joy do not neatly segue into one another, but instead form a sharp discord. The same is true of anxious and non-anxious states; there is no 16028-0169d-1pass-r01.indd 54 15-01-2018 13:31:29 From Anxiety to Nostalgia 55 consolidation between them, and they each inhabit entirely opposed worlds. Temporally, the implication is that different modalities of the subjective existence fail to reconcile. This is reinforced from a clinical perspective, where many patients of spatial phobias consider their phobic episodes as interruptions in an otherwise-functioning and “normal” existence (Trigg 2016). In the second case, the breakage in temporal continuity leads to a rupture in our familiar grasp on things. Anxiety’s presence is impersonal, and we register it less in terms of its positive attributes and more in terms of what it deprives us of. As we have seen from Heidegger, anxiety deprives us of the implicit meaning we ordinarily take for granted. The world ceases to be a nexus of interrelated meanings and instead becomes a site of anonymity and fragmentation. 7. REFAMILIARIZATION AND SPATIAL-TEMPORAL CONTINUITY Together, the breakage in spatial-temporal continuity and the rupture of familiarization invoked by anxiety leads to a more global sense of defamiliarization. Given this movement of defamiliarization, it may be countenanced that nostalgia assumes a decisive role in engineering the resumption of spatial-temporal continuity coupled with a process of refamiliarization. Refamiliarization and spatial-temporal continuity are two components of being at-home, where we understand “home” in the sense of either a discernible set of relations or an atmosphere of integrated unity. How, then, does nostalgia contribute to the work of home restoration? The clues are in nostalgia’s intentional and affective structure. In the first case, nostalgia engenders spatial-temporal continuity through the act of reverie. As we have seen, the intentional structure of nostalgia is different from that of reproductive memory. Its concern is not recollection but re-invention. As such, nostalgia’s temporal structure does not resemble an arrow pointing backwards. Rather, its intentional structure is, as we have said, that of a reverie. Think here of how the intentionality of a reverie unfolds. When we are in a state of reverie, then we do not aim at one particular source, nor do we confine ourselves to a singular timescale. Rather, our attention is contextualized and framed by the mood we are presently in. The movement between times and places is porous and indivisible, such that there is a confusion of aspects. For this reason, in the mood of nostalgia, it is not strictly accurate to say we inhabit the past, as though the past were a static site; rather, we inhabit a borderline between times. In fact, the borderline we inhabit is that of an atmosphere, which, if taking its inspiration from the past, nevertheless extends itself in and through time. 16028-0169d-1pass-r01.indd 55 15-01-2018 13:31:29 56 AuQ33 Chapter 4 In this respect, nostalgic intentionality is transformative; it disregards the objective standing of things and subsumes those things within a more opaque atmosphere. The upshot of this intentional structure is evidently the establishment of continuity across time—what James Hart rightly calls in his critical analysis of nostalgia, “aeonic time” (Hart 1973). The past is not an archaic and archived reserve, but instead an active and dynamic presence that continues to exert an influence upon the present. And the present is not the immediate now point of Husserl, but a present laden with the retention of a partly familiar undercurrent. If time is regained, as Proust would have it, then it is not the specificity of a time, but rather the felt quality of pastness generally. The second point concerns the establishment of a discernible set of relations. Here, too, we are concerned with spatial-temporal continuity; now our concern is only with continuity in a thematic sense. How does nostalgia achieve its aim on a thematic level? The answer must involve a response to the defamiliarization peculiar to anxiety, that is, to say, through nostalgia’s capacity to enact refamiliarization. This capacity is best understood in the context of nostalgia’s bittersweet tonality, which involves less the whimsy of imagination as a free and spontaneous movement, and more the construction of a past to mimetically resemble the present and likewise a present that resembles the past. Cinematic and literary treatments of nostalgia—to think of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia, or Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and indeed many motifs in David Lynch—often involve precisely this interplay of disparate temporal figures entering the same orbit, with a view of morphing the present into the shape of a partly memorized, partly imagined past. Invariably, of course, the attempt fails, and it is on the borderline between an idealized past and an actual present that anxiety appears. Anxiety appears within this movement of home restoration not only through an expression in particular things but rather as an impersonal cloud that is experientially received as a force of defamiliarization. As Heidegger would have it, anxiety’s presence is revelatory; it uncoils the anonymous existence that underpins our personal life, drawing attention to the radical contingency structuring the genesis of meaning itself. By contrast, nostalgia enters into a dialogue with this movement through the restoration of that which is irreducibly the most personal and the most ineffable of things—namely, our own history, imagined or otherwise, personal or collective, private or political, upon which we ascribe a sense of homeliness. 8. CONCLUSION Today, perhaps more than ever in recent times, the relation between anxiety and nostalgia has assumed a critical tone. Brexit, Trump, to name but a few 16028-0169d-1pass-r01.indd 56 15-01-2018 13:31:29 From Anxiety to Nostalgia 57 recent tokens of our own time marked by the collision of, on the one hand, a nostalgic urge to reclaim a past that was, in a strict sense, never truly present, and, on the other hand, by an anxiety to ensure that the value imbued in this narrative is immunized from further threat, whether that threat is marked by terrorism, the loss of national identity, movements of immigration, or otherwise. Be it personal or political, the story we tell ourselves of who we are and what the world is like is seized through anxiety. Anxiety, in no uncertain terms, undermines the meaning we ascribe to these plotlines, not only dissolving a given narrative but also calling into question the nature of temporal and spatial narrativity more generally. Against this backdrop, nostalgia appears prima facie as an atmospheric “safe space”—to use a current phrase—which insulates the subject from a broader state of peril, which is both uncontainable and impersonal. In this respect, the current psychological treatment of nostalgia is correct; nostalgia serves as a form of “terror management,” assuaging the anxieties that emerge when our taken-for-granted relationship to the world is undermined (cf. Routledge et al., 2010). As we have seen, being-at-home not only means invoking the restoration of home as a localized site, but it also means generating a more atmospheric concept of home that is dispersed through the world. Nostalgia, as we have also seen, is able to do this through the confusion of times, led throughout by the act of reverie. In the final act of consolidation, nostalgia aims to restore familiarity and continuity through seizing the world in and through an already-formed lens, which is then mapped over the present. Yet does this movement of taking flight invoke an actual homecoming? It is notable that much of the current treatment of nostalgia overlooks the radical discordance between the nostalgic vision of the world and the nonnostalgic world that serves as a foundation for that vision. If time is reshaped, slowed down, and wholly augment, then it is never transformed to the point where homecoming is itself possible. As Kant demonstrated in his lecture on anthropology, to return home would be to see nostalgia for what it is—an affective force that is incapable of seizing time in place. Literature and cinema is also especially rich in drawing attention to the gaps and ruptures that are situated at the heart of nostalgia’s movement from familiarity to a temporality that not only offsets the familiar but also destroys it (cf. Trigg 2017). In this respect, nostalgia’s “value” does not reside in its capacity to invoke an actual homecoming, but rather in a protracted homelessness that underscores the contingency of home itself. To follow a Heideggerian route, the response to anxiety is not to quieten it much less to remove it, but to live alongside it. The same is true of nostalgia; its purpose resides less in the sanctuary of home, and more in the ambiguity of an impossible homecoming, which amplifies and problematizes rather than subdues and assuages our capacity to call our temporal and spatial existence into question. 16028-0169d-1pass-r01.indd 57 AuQ34 15-01-2018 13:31:29