Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory

Enzo Traverso

Published by Columbia University Press 2017

Left-Wing Melancholia

Marxism, History, and Memory

Enzo Traverso

Volume 17 in the series New Directions in Critical Theory

https://doi.org/10.7312/trav17942

Overview
Contents

About this book

Uncovering the melancholic tradition of the global left.

Author / Editor information

Enzo Traverso is Susan and Barton Winokur Professor of the Humanities at Cornell University. His books include The End of Jewish Modernity (2016); Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914–1945 (2015); The Origins of Nazi Violence (2003); and Understanding the Nazi Genocide: Marxism After Auschwitz (1999).

Reviews

Moishe Postone, University of Chicago:
In this wide-ranging, conceptually rich, nuanced and thoughtful meditation, Enzo Traverso takes stock of the current historical moment as marking a fundamental historical and cultural crisis for the Left. The overarching trajectory of struggles oriented toward an emancipatory future that characterized and motivated movements in the past two centuries has been fundamentally broken, resulting in a profound melancholia. Taking inspiration from heterodox critical responses to the darkness enveloping Europe in 1940, Traverso seeks to uncover trace elements of a new utopian imaginary, as a leap without guarantees, a melancholy wager.

Richard Wolin, author of Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption:
With Left-Wing Melancholia, Enzo Traverso provides us with a timely and learned meditation on the politics of grief, mourning, and historical loss. Yet, in the tradition of Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch, Traverso also instructs us on how the experience of loss can simultaneously generate heretofore untapped repositories of social hope. Left-Wing Melancholia is both an exhilarating work of intellectual synthesis as well as a pathbreaking study in cultural history.

Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley:
According to Freud, mourning is differentiated from melancholia in its working through grief by acknowledging the irreparable loss of a love object. 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.

Alan Wald, H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor of English Literature and American Culture, University of Michigan:
Marvelously learned and gorgeously poetic, Left-Wing Melancholia is a transcendent masterpiece of the Marxist imagination. Each engrossing chapter provides a tour-de-force of trenchant observations and lucid argumentation about the melancholic landscape of socialist memory. 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.

Federico Finchelstein, The New School for Social Research:
Left-Wing Melancholia is a path breaking work that combines history and political theory with a concise, richly analytical, exciting narrative. 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. In other words, this book is a gem.

Eli Zaretsky, The New School for Social Research:
Left-Wing Melancholia is well-written, timely and original.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
List of Illustrations Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xi
Preface Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xiii
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xvii
Introduction Haunting Pasts without Utopias Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. The Culture of Defeat Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	22
2. Marxism and Memory Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	54
3. Melancholy Images Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	85
4. Bohemia Between Melancholy and Revolution Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	120
5. Marxism and the West Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	151
6. Adorno and Benjamin Letters at Midnight in the Century Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	178
7. Synchronic Times Walter Benjamin and Daniel Bensaïd Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	204
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	235
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	275

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 312
Illustrations
- Other: 50 b&w photographs

eBook

Published: December 19, 2016
ISBN: 9780231543019