Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley
If so, should the contemporary Left finally concede the failure of its dreams of revolutionary redemption? Or, and this is the gamble of Enzo Traverso's provocative new book, is it better to remain defiantly melancholic in the hope that those dreams may still be realized? Drawing on a lifetime of immersion in the history of modern European culture and politics, he provides future progressive movements a glimmer of hope that the dialectic of defeat may not yet be history's final word. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor of English Literature and American Culture, University of MichiganĪccording to Freud, mourning is differentiated from melancholia in its working through grief by acknowledging the irreparable loss of a love object. Intricately constructed with acrobatic prose, electric compressions, and magisterial assuredness, Traverso's scholarly milestone synthesizes an ambitious spectrum of interventions into the revolutionary aspirations and defeats of the twentieth century that is historically engaging, eminently readable, and pressingly pertinent. Each engrossing chapter provides a tour-de-force of trenchant observations and lucid argumentation about the melancholic landscape of socialist memory. Marvelously learned and gorgeously poetic, Left-Wing Melancholia is a transcendent masterpiece of the Marxist imagination. Federico Finchelstein, The New School for Social Research Enzo Traverso redefines our understanding of the current regimes of temporality-a sorrowful transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century-and challenges historians and critical theorists alike to think beyond the standard binaries between history and memory, revolution and defeat, and melancholy and politics.
3:AM Magazine Left-Wing Melancholia is a path breaking work that combines history and political theory with a concise, richly analytical, exciting narrative. call for the left to challenge this narrative and rethink its past. Marx and Philosophy Review of BooksĪ stirring.
Spirited, engaging, and almost panoramic. wide-ranging study is triumphant in plumbing the depths of socialist despair. This brilliant book seeks to recover a hidden, discreet tradition: that of 'left-wing melancholia.' Against the Current Sean Cashbaugh, Stevens Institute of Technology, H-Net Socialisms, H-Net Reviews American Historical Review Left-Wing Melancholia’s breadth is impressive, almost intimidating. Eli Zaretsky, The New School for Social ResearchĪn exciting, original, and illuminating discussion, which sets the contemporary Left's feeling of disorientation and loss into a rich and varied landscape of memory practices and emotional states. Peter Gordon, Boston Review Left-Wing Melancholia is well-written, timely and original. The perfect meditation for our melancholy age.
Yet hidden within this melancholic tradition are the resources for a renewed challenge to prevailing regimes of historicity, a passion that has the power to reignite the dialectic of revolutionary thought. Adorno, and others, the intellectual historian Enzo Traverso explores the varying nature of left melancholy as it has manifested in a feeling of guilt for not sufficiently challenging authority, in a fear of surrendering in disarray and resignation, in mourning the human costs of the past, and in a sense of failure for not realizing utopian aspirations.
Fanning and traverso archive#
Drawing on a vast and diverse archive in theory, testimony, and image and on such thinkers as Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Throughout the twentieth century, argues Left-Wing Melancholia, from classical Marxism to psychoanalysis to the advent of critical theory, a culture of defeat and its emotional overlay of melancholy have characterized the leftist understanding of the political in history and in theoretical critique. For the political left, the cause lost was communism, and this trauma determined how leftists wrote the next chapter in their political struggle and how they have thought about their past since.
Fanning and traverso series#
The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the Cold War but also the rise of a melancholic vision of history as a series of losses.
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