ABSTRACT
This chapter draws tentative lines, or maybe to weave fragile threads, between nostalgia and the possibility of dissensus, in order to contemplate the impossibilities of a counter-archive, of countering the archive or even an archival countering. It deals with a reflection on nostalgia, in particular the work by Svetlana Boym, paradoxically titled The Future of Nostalgia, after which South African writing on nostalgia, memory and archive is drawn in. Boym's observation on mapping as a specific modern obsession is important for a reflection on archive/counter-archive. Boym describes nostalgia as utopian, although not directed to the future or the past but rather 'sideways'. According to Boym, reflective nostalgia holds a certain ethics, it is this ethics that for me is crucial in linkages between nostalgia, memory, the archive and the constitution. Jacob Dlamini notes the criticism against nostalgia, that to be nostalgic is seen to be bad, to be called nostalgic is an 'affectionate insult'.
