Left-Wing Melancholia

Left-Wing Melancholia
Author :
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Total Pages : 312
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780231543019
ISBN-13 : 0231543018
Rating : 4/5 (19 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Left-Wing Melancholia by : Enzo Traverso

Download or read book Left-Wing Melancholia written by Enzo Traverso and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-10 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. 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. Throughout the twentieth century, argues Left-Wing Melancholia, 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. Drawing on a vast and diverse archive in theory, testimony, and image and on such thinkers as Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. 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. 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.


Left-Wing Melancholia Related Books

Left-Wing Melancholia
Language: en
Pages: 312
Authors: Enzo Traverso
Categories: Philosophy
Type: BOOK - Published: 2017-01-10 - Publisher: Columbia University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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. For the political left, t
Revolution
Language: en
Pages: 481
Authors: Enzo Traverso
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2024-04-30 - Publisher: Verso Books

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"Brilliant and beautiful. Now this book exists, it’s hard to know how we did without it." –China Miéville, author of October A cultural and intellectual ba
The New Faces of Fascism
Language: en
Pages: 209
Authors: Enzo Traverso
Categories: Political Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2019-01-29 - Publisher: Verso Books

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

What is fascism in the twenty first century? What does Fascism mean at the beginning of the twenty-first century? When we pronounce this word, our memory goes b
Remains of Socialism
Language: en
Pages: 153
Authors: Maya Nadkarni
Categories: Social Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2020-07-15 - Publisher: Cornell University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In Remains of Socialism, Maya Nadkarni investigates the changing fates of the socialist past in postsocialist Hungary. She introduces the concept of "remains"�
Revolution and Disenchantment
Language: en
Pages: 188
Authors: Fadi A. Bardawil
Categories: Social Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2020-04-10 - Publisher: Duke University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Arab Revolutions that began in 2011 reignited interest in the question of theory and practice, imbuing it with a burning political urgency. In Revolution an