REVIEW
BOOK
Melancolía de
izquierda. Después
de las utopías.
TRAVERSO, Enzo (2019) Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, pp. 415
[original title. Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and
Memory. Columbia University Press, 2016]
Ricard Conesa
Historian, project officer
at the
EUROM
E
nzo Traverso (Gavi, Italia, 1957) is a well-known figure to scholars of historical
memory and readers of this journal. The previous issue of Observing Memories
contains a brief and thought-provoking interview in which the Cornell University
professor speaks on a variety of current issues: the effects of the victim/aggressor
dichotomy, post-fascisms, the complex legacy of dictatorships and European policies on
historical memory. Traverso’s internationally renowned body of work is wide and varied,
covering topics such as the Holocaust, intellectuals, policies on historical memory, and
historiographical debates on violence and revolution. As a historian, Traverso has never
sought to hide his political commitment to the left, and his latest volume, in the words of
the philosopher Josep Ramoneda in the Spanish edition, is a “libro militante”—a militant,
activist book.
The contents of Left-Wing Melancholia include a foreword, an introduction and seven
chapters (some of which have been published earlier in different formats) that set out to
rethink the history of socialism and Marxism through the lens of melancholia, connecting
the intellectual debates to their cultural forms. Following this approach, the book shifts
constantly back and forth between concepts and images, drawing its source material from
paintings, photographs and films, that is, from what Walter Benjamin called Denkbilder
(in English “thought-images” or “thinking images”). Traverso examines the emotional
universe and cultural footprints of the melancholia of missed opportunities, lost struggles
and battles for emancipation, and future utopias that were never realised yet remained in
the memory of the left, providing a self-critical knowledge of its past and keeping alive
a “horizon of expectation” that vanished with the end of communism. It was a forward-
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Observing Memories
ISSUE 3