The Aesthetics of Nostalgia

This article argues that nostalgia, understood properly, functions as an orientation through which one engages with aesthetic experiences, and in turn, our own existence. Beginning with Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000) as an artistic example and by drawing on Svetlana Boym’s distinction between ‘reflective’ and ‘restorative’ nostalgia, it observes that reflective nostalgia can serve as a hermeneutical lens that transforms absence into aesthetic possibility. This challenges us to creatively engage with fragmented memory and its accompanying affective burdens. Subsequently, the article critically examines Mark Fisher’s application of hauntology in cultural production, suggesting that today’s creative landscape is trapped in a metastatic cycle of self-referentiality that paradoxically moves rapidly while remaining static, what the author terms ‘the eternalisation of present’, linking our crisis of beauty to the contemporaneous crisis of temporality. Finally, the article proposes an alternative mode of aesthetic engagement found in Walter Benjamin’s character of the flaneur, whose meditative, purposeless meandering resists the homogenisation of culture and the acceleration of solipsistic reproduction of artwork by engaging deeply with fragmented historical images that disclose to us a salvific path forward.