The Left in its Defeats

Enzo Traverso studies what he considers to be a “hidden tradition” of left-wing thought: melancholy, whose disenchantment caused by the collapse ofUSSR is the last figure. Pantheon of the vanquished, lesson of defeats or saving reflexivity?

Enzo Traverso’s latest book is a continuation of his previous works, always driven by a dense and well-reasoned reflection on the 20e century. The author, one of the most recognized specialists in “totalitarianism” (his works on the subject are explicitly recommended by official secondary education programs), has provided numerous contributions on the history of the Jewish question, notably concerning the complex relationship that it has long maintained with the history of the left and Marxism.

Figures of melancholy

In this work, the historian returns to what he defines as a “hidden tradition”: left-wing melancholy. At a distance from a “withdrawal into a closed universe of sorrow and memories” (p. 7) that such a title might suggest, E. Traverso claims to want to deal with “a set of emotions and feelings that envelop the transition to a new era”. This tradition would have “always existed, discreet, modest, often underground”, but masked by “the glorious epic (…) of triumphs and great conquests” (p. 9).

Louise Michel, Rosa Luxembourg, the last Trotsky and especially Walter Benjamin would embody this uninterrupted lineage since the revolutions of the 19the century, which official speeches of all persuasions would have contributed to burying. It reappears in favor of the “second disenchantment”, after that diagnosed a century earlier by Max Weber, following the collapse of theUSSR and a certain Marxism.

Referring to the historian Reinhart Koselleck, for whom “historical gains in knowledge come from the vanquished”, the book gives us some beautiful pages on the lost revolutions of the 19e and 20e centuries. Here, Benjamin follows Blanqui to the pantheon of the vanquished, beaten by history but remaining lucid, icons accompanied by the theoretical meditation bequeathed by the thinkers of the Frankfurt School, first and foremost Adorno. E. Traverso joins by other paths the observation that the historian Eric Hobsbawm had been able to draw up (whom he had nevertheless criticized in a long review of several of his works) according to which “nothing sharpens the mind like defeat”.

To illustrate his point, a good part of the book, which mixes texts and images, meticulously studies revolutionary iconography and draws from it stimulating interpretations of well-known photographs or paintings, celebrities who rub shoulders with other representations that have remained on the margins of militant and national memories, but are no less suggestive. Chapter 3, entirely devoted to the “cinema of defeated revolutions”, from Eisenstein to Ken Loach via Chris Marker, offers a most successful panorama of a return to revolutionary history through the image.

As for “postcolonial melancholy”, it is evoked symmetrically to the nostalgia for colonial societies to deepen the link, now repressed but nevertheless powerful and lasting during the 1950s-1970s, between Marxism and anticolonialism. Taking up what has been largely developed elsewhere by Kevin Anderson, Traverso contradicts the lapidary remarks placing Marx and Marxism in a purely Eurocentric horizon, by highlighting the contradictions that run through the work of the author of Capital on the colonial question. Finally, he pays a strong tribute to the figure of CLR James, recently rediscovered in France.

A selective melancholy

Broad in the historical questions it raises, Traverso’s work raises questions about the preferred angles of attack. The historian’s interest in intellectual traditions that are exaggeratedly distant from their social and political roots paradoxically offers little room for anonymous people and protest movements, apart from a few prominent leaders or theoreticians.

“Melancholy” also tends to be selective. The proposed genealogy ignores other processes, less noble theoretically, but of prime historical importance. There is, for example, no trace of any study of melancholy with regard to “real socialism” on the part of the populations of the former Soviet bloc, which have legitimately preoccupied many historians. More surprisingly, while he calls for “rethinking socialism at a time when its memory is lost, hidden, silent”, the historian seems hardly interested in the renewal of research on figures he loves. Nothing on the extraordinary flowering of work on Rosa Luxemburg, valued here, but paradoxically frozen by an evocation of her most classic texts. No bibliographical pedantry to report, as the gazes that one could have on it move to the discovery of documents, texts and speeches long remained in the shadows during the “short 20e century “.

One of the central points that the Italian historian insists on is the “strong teleological temptation” of Marxist historiography (p. 75), discussed on several occasions. Such a criticism has been formulated regularly, not without solid arguments. On this point, the historian’s audacity gives way to a rather conventional and expected statement. The historicism and “progressivism” of the social-democratic and then communist movement emerge somewhat caricatured. How can we think about the emergence, in the long term, of the inscription of popular struggles in history? The caricatured affirmations of the presence ad nauseam “Class struggles” in the historical processes of social-democratic and communist textbooks certainly have something to smile about today, and no one would think of considering them as simple models to be reproduced. But they were among the first to lay the foundations of a history “from below”, the affirmation of which was then a fight against historical narratives that did not breathe a word about it.

The contradictory effects of this teleology would therefore have deserved a more nuanced examination. Moreover, one would have expected more from the author on the coherence of the argument of a François Furet, which could have been the object of a more subtle and developed criticism, than the only “recollection” of Theses on history Benjamin’s (to use the author’s favorite phrase) cannot claim to counter.

Left and strategy

The limits of the subject matter continue in the last chapter, which devotes a large part to the trajectory of the militant philosopher Daniel Bensaïd, founder and long-time leading leader of the Trotskyist organization Ligue communiste révolutionnaire. A rich portrait, with obvious empathy (which does not prevent a certain distance) of the man who made a significant change in the 1990s-2000s, through a Benjaminian inspiration leading him to discover the “melancholic galaxy”, the very one to which E. Traverso grants primary importance.

However, the historian seems to exaggerate, by minimizing the anchoring of Bensaïd’s thought in political strategy, the conquest of the State, etc. Significantly, the philosopher’s last work, centered on the diversity of the modalities of contemporary political combat, is not cited, nor are his strategic writings, recently reissued. E. Traverso reveals through his partial reading of Bensaïd the problems posed by his overall thesis: if melancholy can be salutary, can we nevertheless circumvent the founding issues of the left – the State, strategy, power – especially in authors for whom this reflection had remained central?

Despite its unthought-of implications, Enzo Traverso’s remarks lead us to reexamine from an original angle the delicate balance sheet of the multiple experiences of social and political change in the 20th century.e century. This is not the least quality of this brilliant essay, which must be read as an invitation to pluralize the paths of reflection on the history of the left.