Enzo Traverso. Left-Wing Melancholia

The collapse of Soviet-bloc communism at the opening of the 1990s drew a curtain on what Eric Hobsbawm famously called the short twentieth century. Even as millions celebrated the prospect of Eastern European nations joining the community of liberal-democratic, capitalist regimes, others, on the left, slipped into melancholic reflections on the defeat of the animating spirit of revolutionary struggle. The 1990s and the opening of the new millennium form the point of departure for Enzo Traverso’s exploration of the Left’s culture of memory, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory. Whereas earlier “revolutions [had] been factories of utopias” (3), forging new imaginaries and arousing hopes and expectations, the revolutions of the late 1980s and early 1990s set aside earlier dreams of emancipation and sought mainly to merge with the neoliberal West. Building on the work of François Hartog, Traverso argues that the 1990s ushered in a new historicity marked by presentism, which on the one hand is a “reified” past dominated by the “culture industry” and “on the other hand ... is the future abolished by the time of neoliberalism ... ‘presentism’ becomes a suspended time between an unmasterable past and a denied future, between a ‘past that won’t go away’ and a future that cannot be invented or predicted (except in terms of catastrophe)” (8). Instead of nurturing utopian visions, the twenty-first-century Left, like Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, faces backward as it moves toward the future, its eyes on the wreckage of revolutionary defeats accumulating in history’s wake.

Aesthetics · Art · Capitalism · Communism · Emancipation · Left-wing politics · Modernity · Political science · Politics · Presentism · Sociology · Vision · Anthropology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies