6/2/2023 0 Comments Enzo traverso![]() Nonetheless, Traverso’s attention to the left’s ways of living in time illuminates the emancipatory aspects of its temporal imagination. This article interrogates Traverso’s central argument regarding melancholy’s possibilities as a revolutionary resource, challenges his conceptualisation of a post-1989 ‘present’, and argues that in Traverso’s analysis melancholy operates more directly as a protective stance after the eclipse of utopias than as a potent resource for revolutionary revival. ![]() This post-1989 memorial gaze, Traverso suggests, continues to define the left’s sense of the present. With great insight, Traverso interprets how the traumas of 1989 produced a fundamental transformation of the left’s state of consciousness, altering even such basic perceptions as the left’s sense of time – as the left traded future-imaginative hope for past-nostalgic memory. Melancholy, Traverso suggests, was always a hidden dimension of the left’s consciousness, a dimension that surfaced after the political defeats at the twentieth century’s end. ![]() A Review of Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory by Enzo Traversoĭepartment of History, Princeton up Walter Benjamin’s idea of ‘left-wing melancholy’, yet investing the concept with redemptive qualities, Enzo Traverso argues that melancholy offers the left a resource for mobilising a return to revolutionary politics.
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