Left-Wing Melancholia

• The power of a hidden tradition (XIX - XX century)
• Enzo Traverso

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Since the nineteenth century, revolutions have always displayed a memorial prescription: to preserve the memory of past experiences in order to bequeath them to the future. It was a "strategic" memory, nourished by hope. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, this dialectic between past and future has broken and the world has locked itself into the present. The fall of communism not only buried, once and for all, the naive teleology of the "better days", it also buried, for a long time, the promises of emancipation that it had incarnated. But this new relationship between history and memory offers us the opportunity to rediscover a "hidden tradition", that of the left-wing melancholy that crosses the revolutionary history, from Auguste Blanqui to Walter Benjamin, from Louise Michel to Rosa Luxemburg. It is neither a brake nor a resignation, but a way of accessing the memory of the vanquished, with the unfinished hopes of the past that are waiting to be reactivated.

At the antipodes of the nostalgic manifesto Left-Wing Melancholia - nourished by a rich iconography: paintings of Courbet Soviet posters of the 1920s, films by Eisenstein to those of Theo Angelopoulos, Chris Marker or Ken Loach - establishes a fruitful dialogue with the currents of critical thinking and current alternative political movements. It reveals with vigor and in a counter-intuitive way all the subversive and liberating charge of the revolutionary mourning.

• ISBN: 978-953-8075-42-1
• Dimensions: 120x190 mm
• Number of pages: 240
• Cover: paperback
• Year of the edition: 2018
• Original title: Mélancolie de gauche. La force d’une tradition cachée (XIXe-XXIe siècle)
• Original language: French
• Translation: Rade Kalanj