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Are progressives more melancholic than conservatives? For the historian Enzo Traverso the answer is positive, but only because melancholy itself includes a revolutionary, utopian core. By analyzing melancholy as a political trope one can not only see it as a particular quality of progressive thought - making possible an innovative critical history of the left - but do so with an eye to a utopian hope for a better, egalitarian, future.
This heightened sense of melancholy among left-wing thinkers comes from the same source as their ethical compass: ‘we rediscover a melancholic vision of history as remembrance of the vanquished - Walter Benjamin was its most significant interpreter - that belongs to a hidden Marxist tradition’ (p. xiv). By exposing the melancholic view of history, one also engages with this hidden aspect of Marxism. What does this melancholic view look like? ‘This melancholia […] is a constellation of emotions and feelings that envelop a historical transition, the only way the search for new ideas and projects can coexist with the sorrow and mourning for a lost realm of revolutionary experience’ (p. xiv). According to Traverso, no revolution is devoid of melancholy, and no melancholy lacks a revolutionary horizon.
This future-oriented worldview is supported by concrete analyses and lessons of recent political change. For Traverso, the collapse of communism in 1989 and the triumph of liberalism rendered a feeling of helplessness and passivity among leftists that the philosopher Wendy Brown (1999) criticized in a short essay about left-wing melancholy: ‘Left-wing melancholy is Benjamin’s unambivalent epithet for the revolutionary hack who is, finally, attached more to a particular political analysis or idea - even to the failure of that idea - than to seizing possibilities for radical change in the present’ (p. 3). For Traverso, who is a touch more utopian than Brown, hope for change is not limited to overcoming the internal obstructions of the left; rathe