Synchronic Times

The seventh chapter retraces the encounter of the French philosopher Daniel Bensaid and the work of Walter Benjamin, that reveals a resonance between two crucial turns of the twentieth century—1940 and 1990—through a vision of history based on the idea of remembrance. After the fall of Berlin Wall, the survivors of the 1960s and 1970s met a vision of history engendered by the defeats of the 1930s. This encounter reveals the potentialities of a political reinterpretation of the tradition of melancholy Marxism.

Introduction

The introduction analyzes the historical context in which left-wing melancholy arises as a prismatic frame for rethinking the past: “presentism,” a dilated present that absorbs in itself both the past and the future. It corresponds to a neoliberal temporality that replaces twentieth century utopias with a spasmodic acceleration retreated into the boundaries of financial capitalism, deprived of any projection into the future.

Bohemia

The fourth chapter explores the melancholic relationship between Bohemia and Revolution, analyzing the works of different authors and creators, from Marx to Benjamin, from the socialist painter Gustave Courbet to Léon Trotsky exiled in Vienna. Bohemia is the realm in which the attempt of “winning the energies of intoxication for revolution” (Benjamin on Surrealism) merged in a peculiar osmosis with the despair of defeat and the pariah existence of aesthetic and political outsiders.

Marxism and Memory

The second chapter depicts the teleological conception of memory that shaped Marxism: the collective remembrance of the past struggles inscribed them into the future. It analyzes the exhaustion of this teleological memory by exploring the shift from the revolutionary iconography of the 1920s to the 1990s landscape of broken statues (communism as a field of ruins.

Marxism and the West

The fifth chapter starts by describing the Marxist vision of the West as world’s destiny, according to a Eurocentric conception of history inherited from Hegel. Then, it analyzes the missed dialogue between two major twentieth century Marxist thinkers: C. L. R. James and Theodor W. Adorno. Breaking away from this Eurocentric world vision, C. L. R. James looked at the signals of a growing revolt against colonialism, whereas Adorno stoically contemplated the ruins produced by the “self-destruction of reason.”

Melancholy Images

The third chapter analyzes left-wing melancholy in contemporary cinema, focusing on significant movies of the last decades (Ken Loach, Chris Marker, Carmen Castillo, Gillo Pontecorvo among other film-makers). Most of these movies transform the experience of revolution into a “realm of memory” (according to Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire).

Adorno and Benjamin

The sixth chapter interprets the correspondence between Adorno and Benjamin, one of the most poignant and interesting expressions of Marxist criticism in the first half of the twentieth century. It stresses the discrepancy between two different forms of intellectual and political melancholy: on the one hand, a messianic reinterpretation of Marxism (Benjamin); on the other hand, a contemplative posture of dialectical criticism resigned to the advent of universal reification (Adorno).

The Culture of Defeat

The first chapter defines left-wing melancholy as a culture of defeat, which constitutes a kind of red thread of its history. It depicts the teleological narrative that, from Marx to Hobsbawm, gave meaning to historical downfalls. There was a culture of death and martyrdom—symbolized by iconic figures of fallen leaders and fighters—that built a vision of the past connected to the struggles to come.