Their political pessimism is a form of Left Melancholy that trades off with material action via discourse focus

For the last two decades, cultural theorist Stuart Hall has insisted that the “crisis of the Left” is due neither to internal divisions in the activist or academic Left nor to the clever rhetoric or funding schemes of the Right. Rather, he has charged, this ascendancy is consequent to the Left’s own failure to apprehend the character of the age and to develop a political critique and a moral-political vision appropriate to this character. For Hall, the rise of the Thatcher-Reagan Right was a symptom rather than a cause of this failure, just as the Left’s dismissive or suspicious attitude toward [End Page 19] cultural politics is for Hall a sign not of its unwavering principles but of its anachronistic habits of thought and its fears and anxieties about revising those habits. But what is the content and dynamic of these fears and anxieties? How would we begin to plumb these? Impossible to explore exhaustively in these few pages, I want to consider just one dimension of them, a dimension that many decades earlier Walter Benjamin termed “left melancholy.” As most readers will know, Benjamin was neither categorically nor characterologically opposed to the value and valence of sadness as such, nor to the potential insights gleaned from brooding over one’s losses. Indeed, he had a well-developed appreciation of the productive value of acedia, sadness, and mourning for political and cultural work, and in his study of Charles Baudelaire, Benjamin treated melancholia itself as something of a creative wellspring. But left melancholy is Benjamin’s unambivalent epithet for the revolutionary hack who is, finally, attached more to a particular political analysis or ideal—even to the failure of that ideal—than to seizing possibilities for radical change in the present. In Benjamin’s enigmatic insistence on the political value of a dialectical historical grasp of “the time of the Now,” left melancholy represents not only a refusal to come to terms with the particular character of the present, that is, a failure to understand history in terms other than “empty time” or “progress.” It signifies, as well, a certain narcissism with regard to one’s past political attachments and identity that exceeds any contemporary investment in political mobilization, alliance, or transformation.1 The irony of melancholia, of course, is that attachment to the object of one’s sorrowful loss supersedes any desire to recover from this loss, to live free of it in the present, to be unburdened by it. This is what renders melancholia a persistent condition, a state, indeed, a structure of desire, rather than a transient response to death or loss. In Freud’s 1917 meditation on melancholia, he reminds us of a second singular feature of melancholia: It entails “a loss of a more ideal kind [than mourning]. The object has not perhaps actually died, but has been lost as an object of love.” Moreover, Freud suggests, the melancholic subject will often not know precisely what about the object has been loved and lost—“this would suggest that melancholia [End Page 20] is in some way related to an object-loss which is withdrawn from consciousness, in contradistinction to mourning, in which there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious.”2 The loss precipitating melancholia is more often than not unavowed and unavowable. Finally, Freud suggests that the melancholic subject—low in self-regard, despairing, even suicidal—has shifted the reproach of the once loved object (a reproach waged for not living up to the idealization by the beloved) onto itself, thus preserving the love or idealization of the object even as the loss of this love is experienced in the suffering of the melancholic. Now why would Benjamin use this term, and the emotional economy it represents, to talk about a particular formation on and of the Left? Benjamin never offers a precise formulation of left melancholy. Rather, he deploys it as a term of opprobrium for those more beholden to certain long-held sentiments and objects than to the possibilities of political transformation in the present. Benjamin is particularly attuned to the melancholic’s investment in “things.” In The Origin of German Tragic Drama, he argues that “melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge,” here suggesting that the loyalty of the melancholic converts its truth (“every loyal vow or memory”) about its beloved into a thing, indeed, imbues knowledge itself with a thinglike quality. Another version of this formulation: “In its tenacious self-absorption [melancholy] embraces dead objects in its contemplation.” More simply, melancholy is loyal “to the world of things,” suggesting a certain logic of fetishism—with all the conservatism and withdrawal from human relations that fetishistic desire implies—contained within the melancholic logic.3 In his critique of Erich Kästner, a left-wing poet from the Weimar Republic, in which he first coins the phrase “left melancholy,” Benjamin suggests that sentiments themselves become things for the left melancholic who “takes as much pride in the traces of former spiritual goods as the bourgeois do in their material goods.”4 We come to love our left passions and reasons, our left analyses and convictions, more than we love the existing world that we presumably seek to alter with these terms or the future that would be aligned with them. Left melancholy, in short, is Benjamin’s [End Page 21] name for 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. If Freud is helpful here, then this condition presumably issues from some unaccountable loss, some unavowably crushed ideal, contemporarily signified by the terms left, socialism, Marx, or movement. Certainly the losses, accountable and unaccountable, of the Left are many in our own time. The literal disintegration of socialist regimes and the legitimacy of Marxism may well be the least of it. We are awash in the loss of a unified analysis and unified movement, in the loss of labor and class as inviolable predicates of political analysis and mobilization, in the loss of an inexorable and scientific forward movement of history, and in the loss of a viable alternative to the political economy of capitalism. And on the backs of these losses are still others: We are without a sense of an international, and often even a local, left community; we are without conviction about the truth of the social order; we are without a rich moral-political vision to guide and sustain political work. Thus, we suffer with the sense of not only a lost movement but a lost historical moment; not only a lost theoretical and empirical coherence but a lost way of life and a lost course of pursuits. This much many on the Left can forthrightly admit, even if we do not know what to do about it. But in the hollow core of all these losses, perhaps in the place of our political unconscious, is there also an unavowed loss—the promise that left analysis and left commitment would supply its adherents a clear and certain path toward the good, the right, and the true? Is it not this promise that formed the basis for much of our pleasure in being on the Left, indeed, for our self-love as leftists and our fellow feeling toward other leftists? And if this love cannot be given up without demanding a radical transformation in the very foundation of our love, in our very capacity for political love or attachment, are we not doomed to left melancholy, a melancholy that is certain to have effects that are not only sorrowful but self-destructive? Freud again: “If the love for the object—a love which cannot be given up though the object itself is given up—takes refuge in narcissistic identification, then the hate comes into operation on this substitutive object, abusing it, debasing it, making it suffer and deriving sadistic satisfaction from its suffering.”5 Now our challenge would be to figure out who or what is this substitutive object. What do we hate that we might preserve the idealization of that romantic left promise? What do we punish that we might save the old guarantees of the Left from our wrathful disappointment? [End Page 22] Two familiar answers emerge from recent quarrels and reproaches on the Left. The first is a set of social and political formations variously known as cultural politics or identity politics. Here the conventional charge from one portion of the Left is that political movements rooted in cultural identity—racial, sexual, ethnic, or gendered—not only elide the fundamental structure of modernity, capitalism, and its fundamental formation, class, but fragment left political energies and interests such that coalition building is impossible. The second culprit also has various names—poststructuralism, discourse analysis, postmodernism, trendy literary theory got up as political analysis. The murder charges here are also familiar: Postfoundational theories of the subject, truth, and social processes undermine the possibility of a theoretically coherent and factually true account of the world, and also challenge the putatively objective grounds of left norms. Together or separately, these two phenomena are held responsible for the weak, fragmented, and disoriented character of the contemporary Left. This much is old news. But if read through the prism of left melancholy, the element of displacement in both sets of charges may appear more starkly, since we would be forced to ask: What aspects of left analysis or orthodoxy have wilted on the vine for its adherents but are safeguarded from this recognition through the scornful attention heaped on identity politics and poststructuralism? Indeed, what narcissistic identification with that orthodoxy is preserved in the lament over the loss of its hold on young leftists and the loss of its potency in the political field? What love for the promises and guarantees that a left analysis once held is preserved, as responsibility for the tattered condition of those promises and guarantees is distributed onto debased others? And do we here also see a certain thingness of the Left take shape, its reification as something that “is,” the fantastical memory that it once “was,” at the very moment that it so clearly is not/one?