Anti-nostalgia in Citroën’s Advertising Campaign

Abstract

According to Vladimir Jankélévitch, nostalgia is triggered by the regret of a subjective event, place or time. The fact that time is intrinsically both semelfactive¹ and irreversible would cause our melancholic longing for the fugitive past. Thus, he explains: ‘It is not what is to be regretted that is regretted (because maybe there is nothing to regret), it is the arbitrary, unreasonable and even irrational fact of the pastness in itself (1974, p. 353). What he calls the pastness, the fact of being past, would be the ineffable cause of nostalgia. From this perspective, every object of the past, even the most useless, would have the ability to evoke an entire epoch. Day-to-day life objects such as clothes, furniture or cultural items serve as triggering factors for nostalgia, maintaining a link to the lost past that continuously perpetuates its relevance. They give the illusion of touching it again through a kind of materiality.