Two names already invoked on this here blog: Terry Eagleton reviews Slavoj Žižek's latest book of tenuously linked paragraphs, In Defense of Lost Causes. I haven't read it yet. But seems like it might contain some interesting arguments on the 'usefulness' of communism today. Which might have something to say about the nature of some nostalgia.
Žižek's already rehearsed some of these arguments, if not in full then at least by implication: the redemptive potentialities of communism's ideological edifice, which is not the same as the system which delivered the purges and the prisons and the phone tapping and the.... In the Parallax View, for instance, the 'eternal return of the same' invoked by Nietzsche is re-interpreted by Žižek: not the one-dimensional 'past as it was' (objective history), but the past with all redemptive potentialities intact. And in his review of The Lives of Others, he suggests that this is why there is more nostalgia for communism than there is for Nazism: communism had a much more positive set of politico-ethical ideas than Nazism -- and it's this program which people yearn for, not the grey totality of really-existing socialism.
This is all, of course, open to dispute. But I'll get the book and read the thing first.
(pic via Flickr, thanks to Andrew for Eagleton link)
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