Screened history: nostalgia as defensive formation

This article reconsiders the much-lauded transformative potential of nostalgia and proposes that an adequately psychological engagement with nostalgia is necessary if the critical capacities of this phenomenon are to be adequately assessed. To do this, the article identifies parallels between the concept of nostalgia and a series of psychoanalytic concepts (the imaginary, fetishism, fantasy, affect, screen-memories, and retroaction). Such a comparative analysis allows both for a critique of sociological notions of nostalgia and a series of speculations on how nostalgia as a defensive formation may aid rather than overcome types of structured forgetting. The use of psychoanalytic concepts enables us to grasp how nostalgia may operate: 1) in the economy of the ego, 2) in the mode of the fetish, 3) in the service of fantasy, 4) as an affect concealing anxiety, 5) as screen-memory, and 6) as means of reifying the past or present rather than attending to relations of causation obtaining between past, present, and future. One should thus investigate each of these possible defensive functions within any given instance of nostalgia before proclaiming its transformative potential.