On Fri, 2003-11-21 at 09:12, Rebecca Seiferle wrote:
> But the more serious issues of the pastoral
> do continue to preoccupy some modern and contemporary poets,
One of the elements of pastoral forgotten, eclipsed, elided, is
nostalgia. Repeated in recent criticism as if it were a crime, a guilt
of which the pastoral would also be too quickly judged as guilty is the
badness of nostalgia. Nostalgia is a bad thing, so we are told. Marx is
criticised for his nostalgia which is beyond redemption, for example.
Nostalgia is bad we are again told by the selected hermeneutic masters
and they would say it, wouldn't they? Of course nostalgia is bad. It is
bad that we wish for a safe home, a homesick melancholia which we will
forever lack within the limited bourgeois horizon of capitalist
ideology. Nostalgia is bad if we yearn for a safe home free from hostile
attack. In the dying age of imperialist wars not even the imperial home
is safe. It is bad that we are nostalgic for a nature being wantonly
destroyed with clear felling of native forests for woodchip and
expanding markets. It is bad that we are nostalgic for a world that
could have been when many animal and plant species become extinct and
that is becoming less and less safe for human habitation while being
told to follow a marketing logic of suicide by selected hermeneuts
acting as glorified public relations officials.
The pastoral can look to a landscape no longer sliced up, divided and
threatened with suicidal destruction with nostalgia. We can still speak
and hope for a nostalgia of pleasure. To stick with Marx and take up
Derrida's celebration of the messianic in Marx and to celebrate the
nostalgia of Marx. A nostalgia of pleasure which marks with the "of" a
separation from pleasure as an essential force of life. Pleasure is an
emotion which makes life. Nostalgia becomes a struggle for the forces of
life and we can join Marx with his nostalgia in joyous laughter as
Derrida joins Marx and laughs with messianic joy.
If it is not too obscure, can Jean Genet have said all that needs to be
done when he left these words lying on top of the final proofs of that
great book of nostalgia _Prisoner of Love_:
'Put all the images in language in a place of
safety and make use of them, for they are in the
desert, and it's in the desert we must go
and look for them.'
best wishes
--
Chris Jones <[log in to unmask]>
