![]() ![]() Yet this does not lead to acceptance of the established order - quite the opposite. ![]() The history of socialism over the last two centuries has been a constellation of tragic and often bloody defeats. Traverso forcefully - and counter-intuitively - reveals the full subversive, emancipatory charge of revolutionary mourning. In the depths of resignation, this left-wing melancholia is a red thread that crosses revolutionary culture, from Auguste Blanqui to critical cinema, passing by way of Gustave Courbet, Rosa Luxemburg, and Walter Benjamin. ![]() Nonetheless, the memory of these defeats - from June 1848 to May 1871, January 1919 and September 1973 - and solidarity with the defeated nourish revolutionary history like an invisible underground river. This brilliant essay is an attempt to recover a hidden and rather discreet tradition: the tradition of "left-wing melancholia." This state of mind does not make up part of the Left’s canonical narrative: the Left is more given to celebrating glorious triumphs than tragic defeats. ![]()
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