Abstract

In my paper, I analyse the aspects of nostalgia as a form of lived bodily memory and show how the spatiotemporality of the present is ‘haunted’ by the superimposed appearance of the past. Nostalgia is a movement of seeping returns. We find ourselves overwhelmed by the desire of a place that is imprinted in our bodies. To become acquainted with a place takes time. And later on, it is this time that comes back to us when we desire this particular place. In our desire for a place, we also desire a certain time, and we become familiar with both, time and place. An essential part of the structure of nostalgia is the distinctive fixation, qualitatively positive or negative, of an image that binds the self to a place and time. The past transpires into the present, and nostalgia shows how we experience time through our lived bodies