Mémoire, nostalgie et « la fin de l’utopie » à l’âge du « présentisme »

Abstract

"Less than a decade after the proclamation of “the end of history”, the anxieties about “the end of utopia” are gaining ground in the intellectual field all over the world, in the context of both “the crisis of the future” and the haunting of the present by the painful pasts. The latter two are the main consequences of the fracture in the contemporary temporal order – occurred in the ‘70s and deepened after the fall of the Iron Curtain – which defines the “presentist regime of historicity”. These dynamics are counterbalanced, in the same period, by a “global epidemic of nostalgia”, including the commodified forms of “retromania”, that reveals the presentist “faces of utopianism”, from the non-instrumental “retrospective utopias” – as poles of “existential” types of reflective nostalgic practices – to the instrumental “retrotopias” based on the “restorative nostalgia”, which were mobillized in the contemporary memory wars, starting from the ‘80s. Reflecting the tensions between the fixation on the traumatic legacy of the “age of extremes” and the apprehensions about “the future of nostalgia”, the presentist dynamics of multidirectional memory discloses conflictual landscapes (social, cultural, and political), from the mnemonic turn of the ’70s and the ‘80s – which has arisen against the background of the decline of both welfare state and the nation-states, and of the global economic crisis – to the post–Cold War contests around “the divised memories” of “Europe’s Europes”, coexisting with the clashes of contradictory “faces” of nostalgia and utopia. Keywords: presentism, multidirectional memory, nostalgia, retrospective utopia, retrotopia"