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. (2) This is one of the pillars of the author’s stunning, painful and vivid Left-Wing Melancholia. 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. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism along with the neoliberal turn and the rise of post-modernism, Enzo Traverso writes, broke the dialectic of the 20th century. Throughout the twentieth century, argues Left-Wing Melancholy, 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.ĭrawing on a vast and diverse archive 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. His books have been translated into numerous languages.

1 He is the author of several books on critical theory, the Holocaust, Marxism, memory, totalitarianism, revolution, and contemporary historiography. Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory.

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. Enzo Traverso (born 14 October 1957) is an Italian scholar of European intellectual history.

Enzo traverso left wing melancholia