![]() Instead, revolutionary defeat is cast in the tragic mold of succeeding by failing, a trope exemplified by figures such as Auguste Blanqui, Charles Péguy, or Daniel Bensaïd. Yet the nameless vanquished masses to whom Benjamin's concept of history seeks to do justice remain marginal in Traverso's book. Traverso's argument draws on Walter Benjamin's notions of materialist history, redemptive memory, and knowing melancholy. After the end of the Soviet Union and the global triumph of neoliberal capitalism, the communist utopian imagination of a classless society, Traverso suggests, can be reignited through memorial practices of resilient, resistant melancholy. ![]() ![]() Enzo Traverso's inspired book Left-Wing Melancholia revisits iconic representations of revolutionary hopes and defeats not to draw up an inventory of what has been lost but rather to remind his readers that past defeats also contain the traces of unfulfilled possibilities. ![]()
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