Name: Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory (New Directions in Critical Theory, 17)
Price: 34.42 EUR
Availability: InStock
Author: Enzo Traverso
ISBN: 9780231179430

portada Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory (New Directions in Critical Theory, 17)

Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory (New Directions in Critical Theory, 17)

Type

Physical Book

Author

Enzo Traverso

Publisher

Columbia Univ Pr

Format

Paperback

ISBN13

9780231179430

Synopsis "Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory (New Directions in Critical Theory, 17)"

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.

Enzo Traverso

(Author)

View Author's Page

Born in Italy, Enzo Traverso completed his PhD in France, where he was a professor at the University of Picardy for many years. Since 2013, he is Professor in the Humanities at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. An internationally renowned author, he currently holds the place of historiographical preeminence once occupied by E. P. Thompson or Eric Hobsbawm. His latest publications, in Spanish, are El totalitarismo. Historia de un debate (2001), La violencia nazi. Una genealogía europea (2002), El pasado, instrucciones de uso. Historia, memoria, política (2007), ¿Qué fue de los intelectuales? (2009), A sangre y fuego. De la guerra civil europea (1914-1945) (2009), La historia desgarrada. Ensayo sobre Auschwitz y los intelectuales (2011), La historia como campo de batalla. Interpretar las violencias del siglo xx (2012), El final de la modernidad judía. Historia de un giro conservador (2013), Las nuevas caras de la derecha (2018), Melancolía de la izquierda. Después de las utopías (2019), Pasados singulares: El «yo» en la escritura de la Historia (2022) and La cuestión judía. Historia de un debate marxista (2023). At Akal, he published Revolución. Una historia intelectual (2022)

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