Anticipating nostalgia. Account for language shift and capital

“What does nostalgia have to do with a sci-fi movie?” So Ursula K. asked. Le Guin, disgusted by Star Wars. This article revisits the history of nostalgia, examining how this “Swissness” has crept into imaginings of the future: for example, into eighteenth-century revolutionary texts, nineteenth-century economic forecasts, twentieth-century philosophy, and twenty-first-century science fiction films.The book seeks to answer the question of whether nostalgia is truly reactionary, as talk of retrophobia suggests, or whether there is also a fruitful perspective of the future in this idealized, selective view of other times.Nostalgia is not memory. Those who feel nostalgia for the past are specifically characterized by not remembering accurately, but rather by falsifying, modifying and glorifying the past. Therefore, nostalgia has a complex relationship with the concept of the past, because it is fundamentally different from the indeterminate “true past” and “true memory,” yet it clings to them only to distort them.