Conclusion

Abstract

According to Huyssen, trauma, the uncanny and the abject are ‘master-signifiers’ of the late twentieth and — I would add — early twenty-first century, ‘all of which have to do with repression, specters, and a present repetitively haunted by the past’ (2003: 8). I would argue that memory, nostalgia and, more recently, empathy, also belong to this group of ‘master-signifiers’ which cluster around the modern conditions of alienation, dispossession and homelessness and the efforts to overcome them. What trauma and nostalgia have in common is that they are both reactions to spatio-temporal displacements and the recognition of loss. They speak of the desire or compulsion to return to the familiar which has become alienated. They converge in the conflicting desires for familiarity and individuation, in the urge to know and uncover, but equally to forget and repress, a conflict which Freud has identified as the uncanny. They are characterized by a compulsive spilling of the past into the present and therefore refute the concept of linear time in which past and present are contained and neatly separated.