Nostalgic pasts serve as fantasies where duty and enjoyment coincide
Evidence
The ‘past’ here is not an actual historical period so much as a fantasmatic past, a Time that can only ever be retrospectively - retrospectrally - posited. The ‘haunted ballroom’ functions in Jack’s libidinal echonomy (to borrow a neologism from Irigaray) as the place of belonging in which, impossibly, the demands of both the paternal and the maternal superegos can be met, the honeyed, dreamy utopia where doing his duty would be equivalent to enjoying himself… — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 269
Categorization
- DEFINE: Introduces ‘fantasmatic past’ / ‘retrospectrally posited’ time as distinct from actual history.
- XREF: connects to: Pervasive cultural nostalgia signals an inability to make new memories — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 249; Bringing functional background culture into the foreground paradoxically destroys its original function — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 325; Nostalgia supplies warm shared feeling without requiring present-day mutual obligation — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 910 (+2 more)
Broader Connections
- Nostalgia supplies warm shared feeling without requiring present-day mutual obligation
#expands(0.85) — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics, 910 - Fantasy ideology smuggles feudal nostalgia into imagined other worlds
#exemplifies(0.80) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1104 - Caste functions as a system of control over enjoyment
#complicates(0.75) — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 95