Humanistic Response To Nostalgi

When Roland Barthes casts his bone into the Rue Servadoni, he is performing the symbolic act of act of letting go. When Boltanski builds shrines to his past self, he too is trying to cast something away from himself, in a process of mourning and of consolidating. Whether we feel the need to dispose of them or hold on to them, there is no denying the ceremony around these objects- the agency they hold and importance they play for us. Our urge to collect, forever juxtaposed with our urge to be free of objects which cast their agency over us. There is always a tension between keeping and letting go, between presence and absence; perhaps collecting is a metaphor for this. The domestic space, our shelter from the outside world where we keep our personal shrines or collected objects, is at the heart of comfort- home. Home which can mean so many things to us, home where we dwell, our country of origin, the place of nostalgic longing. …show more content…
There is something in the poetry of melancholy that has driven us forwards through art and through history, the humanistic response to loss which is at once motivating and demotivating, both binding and