A melancholic joy: On the role habits play in nostalgia

The aim of this chapter is to consider the role habits play in nostalgia. Generally speaking, habits form a tacit backdrop to everyday existence, which is generative of a sense of familiarity and coherence. In this respect, habits are also co-constituted by our relationship with others as well as our relationship with space and time. The aim of this chapter is to analyse precisely how temporality informs and shapes habits by turning to the case of nostalgia. The chapter proceeds from the hypothesis that nostalgia involves the orchestration of habits, often on a passive level, to retain a felt sense of pastness as being constitutive of the present. To explicate this claim, the chapter unfolds in three stages. First, consideration is given to the notion of the habitual body. Second, the chapter analyses the relationship between habit and embodiment by framing nostalgia as an affective state predicated on the desire to reduce the alterity of the world into a zone of sameness. Finally, the chapter considers how nostalgic desynchronisation from common time is related to the sense of suffering accompanying nostalgia—a point that is also taken up in the theme of ageing.