The 1AC is a form of Left Melancholy that re-inscribes political complacency through nihilism. Their attachment to ideological purity foregoes the opportunity for emancipatory liberation.

In summer 2017, I went to see Wendy Brown deliver a talk in Berlin on “Apocalyptic Populism” during which she asked, like Hall and Rose before her, why people were drawn to vote for right-wing authoritarians. The first of the three “strains or energies” she identified behind white support for Trump was psychic: “fears and anxieties.” But I was more interested to discover that these two feelings also appear as key terms in her 1999 essay “Resisting Left Melancholy,” and in that earlier essay they are associated with the left rather than the right. She begins the essay by returning to Hall’s writings on Thatcherism and the crisis of the left, asking if it might be possible not only to identify left-wing “fears and anxieties,” as Hall does, but to understand their “content and dynamic.” To do this, she explores the phenomenon of left melancholy. What happens when hope curdles? Left melancholy should not be confused with understandings of melancholia in medicine and psychiatry, which have a complicated history stretching back to ancient Greece. Its origins are more recent and can be traced to Walter Benjamin’s “Left-Wing Melancholy” (1931); a strange review of a book by poet Erich Kästner, it is addressed to a specific phenomenon that Benjamin identifies in the supposedly radical literature of Weimar Germany. Despite proclaiming themselves sympathetic to the working class, poets like Kästner address themselves to a “middle stratum” of readers, producing a body of work Benjamin derides as “the decayed bourgeoisie’s mimicry of the proletariat.” Distant from political action, with “little to do with the labour movement,” writers like Kästner transform political struggles into pleasant objects for the titillation, consumption, and amusement of a bourgeois public, resulting in a nihilistic poetry of “tortured stupidity.” Rather than depicting the masses in anticipation of revolutionary moments, Kästner’s poems, in Benjamin’s analysis, present flabby stereotypes, ignoring the realities of mass unemployment. The left-wing melancholic is a reactionary figure, politically complacent and nihilistic, who would “trample anything or anyone in their path.” Benjamin likens left melancholy to constipation. In Brown’s gloss, which transforms Benjamin’s circumscribed definition of the concept into something more general: “Left melancholy” is “a mournful, conservative, backward-looking attachment to a feeling, analysis, or relationship that has been rendered thinglike and frozen in the heart of the putative leftist.” Left melancholy is not just an incapacity to move on from loss; it involves converting something that had belonged to someone else in the first place into a hollow, deadened thing. Proletarian action is replaced by bourgeois routine. Here, Benjamin’s proximity to Hall is apparent: in his view, the (pseudo) left has become too attached to its outdated and hollow ideological apparatus to apprehend the surging realities of the actual world and its living inhabitants. Brown expresses her fears about the comforts and seductions offered by left melancholy: It is a Left that has become more attached to its impossibility than to its potential fruitfulness, a Left that is most at home dwelling not in hopefulness but in its own marginality and failure, a Left that is thus caught in a structure of melancholic attachment to a certain strain of its own dead past, whose spirit is ghostly, whose structure of desire is backward looking and punishing. Paradoxically, loss itself becomes the lost object. A dusty case is all that remains when its once-sparkling contents have disappeared: “Now the hollow forms are absent-mindedly caressed.” As Benjamin observes, left melancholics are myopic and only position themselves to the left of “what is in general possible.” There is something strange about the temporality of left melancholy. Marx and Engels’s specter haunting Europe counterintuitively came from the future, whereas the left-wing melancholic grieves for the loss of something that was never fully realized. And that ossified grief becomes a permanent political disposition. In Brown’s account, published ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the losses are many—of theories, of movements, of faith, of certainties. Yet her analysis is zoomed out and intellectual, devoid of references to localized struggles or particular instances of defeat. Another twelve years later, Jodi Dean pointed out key differences between Benjamin’s definition of left melancholy and Brown’s: his targets were hacks who peddled revolutionary ideas to a bourgeois audience at the expense of proletarian action (implying the existence of a nonmelancholic left still committed to class struggle), whereas Brown, elaborating on Hall, describes a left clinging to outdated orthodoxies in the absence of ongoing revolutionary movements. Dean’s own diagnosis is different again. She describes a left that has abandoned the totalizing goal of revolution for smaller, more dispersed activities, “sublimat[ing its] goals and responsibilities into the branching, fragmented practices of micro-politics, self-care, and issue awareness.” She proposes that left “melancholia derives from the real existing compromises and betrayals inextricable from its history,” from capitulations and accommodations with capitalist reality as much as from defeats that have external origins. However, in a paper that was first delivered in New York in autumn 2011 and ends with a discussion of Occupy Wall Street, she suggests that times had changed—insufficiently and tentatively but decisively—since Brown’s essay and that a process of collective working through had begun. Indeed, therapeutic questions form part of these historical experiences, whether integrated into political struggles or pursued in response to them. Enzo Traverso’s 2016 book on the concept is more explicit in identifying left-wing melancholia as an epochal condition, but he does not share Dean’s sense that the economic crisis of 2008, the Arab Spring, and the Occupy movement shifted anything. Although he acknowledges that “the history of revolutions is a history of defeats,” he distinguishes the defeats that punctuated the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from the more definitive capitulation marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Traverso treats communism as a finished project and speaks of the paralysis of the utopian imagination and the hollowing out of the emancipatory promises of liberation movements of the sixties and seventies. In his account, history has been displaced by memory, meaningful struggle by vapid contemplation. Unlike the revolutionary defeats of the past, which nourished future radical movements, generated pride, and provided an inspirational repertoire from which current revolutionaries could draw, 1989, in Traverso’s view, was not just the end of history but the end of the capacity for people to make their own.