The History of Political Melancholy as an Alternative History of Zionism

Bibliographic Data

ID12162003
AuthorsNitzan Lebovic (0000-0002-7412-5370, corresponding author)
Year2018
Volume30
Issue3
Pages462-483
Publication date2018-07-03
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueRethinking Marxism (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0893-5696 • E-ISSN: 1475-8059
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/08935696.2018.1525970
OpenAlexW2901994631
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited41

Understanding political melancholy as central to the crisis of modernity and democracy implies a growing realization that melancholy teaches us something essential about different forms of political crisis and their affective modes. This essay contends that the relationship between political melancholy in Weimar Germany and its repurposing by German Jews for Zionist thought reveals how political melancholy was and remains at the heart of Zionism. The essay offers both a historical and theoretical consideration of political melancholy. Its purpose is to question how a political affect of melancholy helps us grasp Zionism, offering a new way to think through its failures. More specifically, the growing attention, both critical and affirmative, paid to “left-wing melancholy” is used to examine a general sense of loss and crisis in the West and the more concrete expression of this sense in the history of Zionism

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Democracy · Epistemology · German · Modernity · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Zionism · Critical Theory and Philosophy · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Philosophy · Walter Benjamin Studies Compilation

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