Heaven is Yesterday: On the Quest for a Grammar for Life Together in the Age of Nostalgia

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay explores how a major shift in temporality directing our focus toward the past can threaten (global) society's quest for a frame of reference for discussions about a shared future by eliciting forms of nostalgia that are unable to host complexity or difference. By revisiting the relationship between temporality and discourse in the thought of Paul Ricoeur, the authors argue that a renewed emphasis on memory need not have nostalgic discourses as their end, but can be productively employed in service of hope and a grammar of life together that is hospitable to the other who may not share my nostalgic dreams. In the age of nostalgia, in which heaven is yesterday, hope can be found in the possibility of building cultures of discourse that remember judiciously and are capable of making and keeping promises in the present as a time of initiative.