What, I wonder, did T.W. Adorno and C.L.R. James talk about over lunch—or was it just coffee, as Paul Buhle would have it in his biography of James?—when they met at the New School in the 1940s? According to Buhle, Adorno and his Frankfurt School colleagues “hardly knew what to make of the Black man who shared their enthusiasm for Hegel…. They dwelt upon the collapse of the West. James sought the fragments of redemption.” Buhle’s phrase for James’s project is curiously redolent of Walter Benjamin, naturally the recurrent reference point for Enzo Traverso’s Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory. Adorno was at first Benjamin’s epigone, then his friend, finally something like his patron, as Traverso notes. His “melancholy, analytical gaze focused on Western totalitarianism and completely ignored the colonial world” while James “scrutinized modernity as imperial domination, shifting its core from the West to the South and emphasizing the emancipatory potentialities of the colonized subjects…. Western Marxism and anticolonial Marxism…remained two separate intellectual continents.” This is only one “failed encounter” among many in Traverso’s penetrating history of Marxist melancholy, though one of the most momentous in its implications. Even more numerous are the outright defeats at the hands of power. The fall of the Paris Commune (35,000 citizens killed) left scars in the memories of those who had witnessed it, but the resulting melancholy could always be incorporated into a faith in compensatory victories to come; as Marx himself declared, “Working men’s Paris, with its Commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society.” The left’s melancholia of more recent times has been different: The events of 1989, as Traverso says, without remarking as clearly as he should how paradoxical it is, “meant much more than the implosion of a tyrannical regime, because it unveiled the shipwreck of the hopes of a century of emancipatory struggles.” How did emancipation and tyranny become so entangled? What Alain Badiou called the “obscure disaster” of 1989 was not a bloody loss to more powerful forces, but the revelation of a profound inner flaw, an inherent vice. And now, with climate change, there’s a deadline facing any attempt to build a new society, or even maintain the old one. The rise of the worldwide right is merely the rehearsal for a coming barbarism. Can we be pessimistic enough to suit the times? As Traverso points out, Adorno and James were both, surprisingly, readers of the reactionary Oswald Spengler, taking from him the clue that civilization is not threatened by the barbarians outside its gates but rather by the violence inside it, what Adorno called “the barbaric element in culture itself which must be recognized.” Marxism, too, and the revolutions it inspired, were products of both the European Enlightenment with its call to universal reason and the Romantic insistence that reason can never encompass the human as a whole—and in practice has reflected all too clearly its potential for savagery. Yet there’s little hope elsewhere. The traditions that flowed through Adorno and those that flowed through James, those of Western and postcolonial Marxism, says Traverso, could only merge decades later “under the sign of defeat”—in the academy. But really, only there? I hope not. Mélancoliques, encore un effort…
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Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory, is published by Columbia University Press, New York, 2016.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.