![]() Adorno and others, 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. ![]() In his new book, “ Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory,” intellectual historian Enzo Traverso roams from classical Marxism to psychoanalysis to the advent of critical theory to examine this culture of defeat and its emotional overlay of melancholy.ĭrawing on vast and diverse archives in theory, testimony and image and on such thinkers as Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. 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. The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of real socialism and the Cold War, but also the rise of a melancholic vision of history as a series of losses. ![]()
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