looking memory that disappeared at the end of the Theodor Adorno and the historian Cyril L.R. James.
twentieth century with the eclipse of utopias, when Traverso stays with the figure of Adorno and delves
the idea of the “vanquished” faded away and the into his complex relationship with Benjamin, their
paradigm of the “victim” took hold: «The memory theoretical commonalities and their differences,
of the Gulag erased that of revolution, the memory of especially in their respective views of history and
the Holocaust replaced that of antifascism, and the the conception of fascism. Lastly, Traverso sets
memory of slavery eclipsed that of anti-colonialism: out Daniel Bensaïd’s rereading of Marx and the
the remembrance of the victims seems unable to influence of Benjamin in order to confront “the end
coexist with the recollection of their struggles, of of history”.
their conquests and their defeats».
Not only does Traverso pursue the melancholy
This work of Traverso stands at a distance from
his earlier books. His investigation into the memory
universe of the left with the aid of a robust body of the left, incited to action by the explosive tension
of theoretical works (Siegfried Kracauer, Walter between past and future, together with his genealogy
Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Reinhart Koselleck…), but of Marxism, serve as a theoretical recharge or
he also reconstructs an entire genealogy of Marxist reloading for the left, placing value on a left-wing
thought, delving into the (few) relations that the melancholia that «does not mean to abandon the
Marxist school has retained with studies focusing idea of socialism or the hope for a better future; it
on historical memory. Traverso also goes on to means to rethink socialism in a time in which its
examine a wide range of films (movies directed by L. memory is lost, hidden, and forgotten and needs
Visconti, G. Pontercorvo, T. Angelopoulos, K. Loach to be redeemed. This melancholia does not mean
and others), using them as a barometer of left-wing lamenting a lost utopia, but rather rethinking a
consciousness to reveal the left’s dilemmas and revolutionary project in a non revolutionary age».
changes over time. Employing the concept of “sites
of memory”, Traverso distances himself from Pierre
Nora, instead highlighting the films’ storylines
that pertain to the private, intimate, emotional
and sensitive realm in which collective experiences
intersect with individual fates and which Traverso
describes as hidden, secret, “Marrano memories”
with which everybody can identify in spite of their
irreducible uniqueness.
In his investigation of the left, Traverso
continues with a thought-provoking analysis
of the figure of the bohemian—from the artiste
maudit, or accursed artist, to the scheming or
conniving intellectual—and trains his eye on
K. Marx, Gustave Courbet, W. Benjamin and L.
Trotsky and the role that bohemians have played in
revolutionary movements. Traverso also analyses
Marx’s ethnocentrism within the context of the
epistemic framework of the German’s times and how
it affected his view of colonialism, an influence that
would persist in later Marxist schools, such as the
Frankfurt School, and that Traverso has dissected
here in the form of a “missed dialogue” between
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