Left-Wing Melancholia

Left-Wing Melancholia PDF Author: Enzo Traverso
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231543018
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Book Description
The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the Cold War but also the rise of a melancholic vision of history as a series of losses. For the political left, the cause lost was communism, and this trauma determined how leftists wrote the next chapter in their political struggle and how they have thought about their past since. Throughout the twentieth century, argues Left-Wing Melancholia, from classical Marxism to psychoanalysis to the advent of critical theory, a culture of defeat and its emotional overlay of melancholy have characterized the leftist understanding of the political in history and in theoretical critique. Drawing on a vast and diverse archive in theory, testimony, and image and on such thinkers as Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and others, the intellectual historian Enzo Traverso explores the varying nature of left melancholy as it has manifested in a feeling of guilt for not sufficiently challenging authority, in a fear of surrendering in disarray and resignation, in mourning the human costs of the past, and in a sense of failure for not realizing utopian aspirations. Yet hidden within this melancholic tradition are the resources for a renewed challenge to prevailing regimes of historicity, a passion that has the power to reignite the dialectic of revolutionary thought.

A Leftist Ontology

A Leftist Ontology PDF Author: Carsten Strathausen
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816650292
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 331

Book Description
Rich with analyses of concepts from deconstruction, systems theory, and post-Marxism, with critiques of fundamentalist thought and the war on terror, this volume argues for developing a philosophy of being in order to overcome the quandary of postmodern relativism. Undergirding the contributions are the premises that ontology is a vital concept for philosophy today, that an acceptable leftist ontology must avoid the kind of identity politics that has dominated recent cultural studies, and that a new ontology must be situated within global capitalism.

Melancholia of Freedom

Melancholia of Freedom PDF Author: Thomas Blom Hansen
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400842611
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 373

Book Description
The end of apartheid in 1994 signaled a moment of freedom and a promise of a nonracial future. With this promise came an injunction: define yourself as you truly are, as an individual, and as a community. Almost two decades later it is clear that it was less the prospect of that future than the habits and horizons of anxious life in racially defined enclaves that determined postapartheid freedom. In this book, Thomas Blom Hansen offers an in-depth analysis of the uncertainties, dreams, and anxieties that have accompanied postapartheid freedoms in Chatsworth, a formerly Indian township in Durban. Exploring five decades of township life, Hansen tells the stories of ordinary Indians whose lives were racialized and framed by the township, and how these residents domesticated and inhabited this urban space and its institutions, during apartheid and after. Hansen demonstrates the complex and ambivalent nature of ordinary township life. While the ideology of apartheid was widely rejected, its practical institutions, from urban planning to houses, schools, and religious spaces, were embraced in order to remake the community. Hansen describes how the racial segmentation of South African society still informs daily life, notions of race, personhood, morality, and religious ethics. He also demonstrates the force of global religious imaginings that promise a universal and inclusive community amid uncertain lives and futures in the postapartheid nation-state.

Egress

Egress PDF Author: Matt Colquhoun
Publisher: Watkins Media Limited
ISBN: 1912248883
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
Egress is the first book to consider the legacy and work of the writer, cultural critic and cult academic Mark Fisher. Narrated in orbit of his death as experienced by a community of friends and students in 2017, it analyses Fisher’s philosophical trajectory, from his days as a PhD student at the University of Warwick to the development of his unfinished book on Acid Communism. Taking the word “egress” as its starting point—a word used by Fisher in his book The Weird and the Eerie to describe an escape from present circumstances as experiences by the characters in countless examples of weird fiction—Egress consider the politics of death and community in a way that is indebted to Fisher’s own forms of cultural criticism, ruminating on personal experience in the hope of making it productively impersonal.

Capitalist Realism

Capitalist Realism PDF Author: Mark Fisher
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 1803414316
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 116

Book Description
An analysis of the ways in which capitalism has presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system.

Zionism and Melancholy

Zionism and Melancholy PDF Author: Nitzan Lebovic
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 025304183X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 189

Book Description
Nitzan Lebovic claims that political melancholy is the defining trait of a generation of Israelis born between the 1960s and 1990s. This cohort came of age during wars, occupation and intifada, cultural conflict, and the failure of the Oslo Accords. The atmosphere of militarism and conservative state politics left little room for democratic opposition or dissent. Lebovic and others depict the failure to respond not only as a result of institutional pressure but as the effect of a long-lasting "left-wing melancholy." In order to understand its grip on Israeli society, Lebovic turns to the novels and short stories of Israel Zarchi. For him, Zarchi aptly describes the gap between the utopian hope present in Zionism since its early days and the melancholic reality of the present. Through personal engagement with Zarchi, Lebovic develops a philosophy of melancholy and shows how it pervades Israeli society.

The New Faces of Fascism

The New Faces of Fascism PDF Author: Enzo Traverso
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788730461
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Book Description
What is fascism in the twenty first century? What does Fascism mean at the beginning of the twenty-first century? When we pronounce this word, our memory goes back to the years between the two world wars and envisions a dark landscape of violence, dictatorships, and genocide. These images spontaneously surface in the face of the rise of radical right, racism, xenophobia, islamophobia and terrorism, the last of which is often depicted as a form of "Islamic fascism." Beyond some superficial analogies, however, all these contemporary tendencies reveal many differences from historical fascism, probably greater than their affinities. Paradoxically, the fear of terrorism nourishes the populist and racist rights, with Marine Le Pen in France or Donald Trump in the US claiming to be the most effective ramparts against "Jihadist fascism". But since fascism was a product of imperialism, can we define as fascist a terrorist movement whose main target is Western domination? Disentangling these contradictory threads, Enzo Traverso's historical gaze helps to decipher the enigmas of the present. He suggests the concept of post-fascism--a hybrid phenomenon, neither the reproduction of old fascism nor something completely different--to define a set of heterogeneous and transitional movements, suspended between an accomplished past still haunting our memories and an unknown future.

The Rise of the Right

The Rise of the Right PDF Author: Winlow, Simon
Publisher: Policy Press
ISBN: 1447328485
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
One of the biggest political stories of the past few decades in the United Kingdom and elsewhere has been the growing divide between the working class and the mainstream liberal left, which historically has spoken for them. This book offers a close analysis of that phenomenon by showing how the political scene looks to underemployed white men who have seen their standards of living fall in recent years even as their communities have fractured around them. Rather than cast aspersions or mount arguments about the larger success of society as a whole, The Rise of the Right takes these men and their concerns seriously, showing where their opinions are factually wrong but arguing powerfully that liberal politics must find a way of acknowledging and addressing their legitimate fears and frustrations.

The Origins of Nazi Violence

The Origins of Nazi Violence PDF Author: Enzo Traverso
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1459604229
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 302

Book Description
In the half-century since the appearance of Hannah Arendt's seminal work The Origins of Totalitarianism, innumerable historians have detailed the history of the Nazi years. Now, in a brilliant synthesis of this work, Enzo Traverso situates the extermination camps as the final, terrible moment in European modernity's industrialization of killing and dehumanization of death. Traverso upends the conventional presentation of the Holocaust as an inexplicable anomaly, navigating an excess of antecedents both technical and cultural. Deftly tracing a complex lineage - the guillotine and machine gun, the prison and assembly line, as well as widespread ideologies of racial supremacy and colonial expansion - Traverso reveals that the ideas that coalesced at Auschwitz came from Europe's mainstream and not its margins.

Neither Vertical nor Horizontal

Neither Vertical nor Horizontal PDF Author: Rodrigo Nunes
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788733851
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 406

Book Description
A decade ago, a wave of mass mobilisations described as "horizontal" and "leaderless" swept the planet, holding the promise of real democracy and justice for the 99%. Many saw its subsequent ebb as proof of the need to go back to what was once called "the question of organisation". For something so often described as essential, however, political organisation remains a surprisingly under-theorised field. In this book, Rodrigo Nunes proposes to remedy that lack by starting again from scratch. Redefining the terms of the problem, he rejects the confusion between organisation and any of the forms it can take, such as the party, and argues that organisation must be understood as always supposing a diverse ecology of different initiatives and organisational forms. Drawing from a wide array of sources and traditions that include cybernetics, poststructuralism, network theory and Marxism, Nunes develops a grammar that eschews easy oppositions between "verticalism" and "horizontalism", centralisation and dispersion, and offers a fresh approach to enduring issues like spontaneity, leadership, democracy, strategy, populism, revolution, and the relationship between movements and parties.
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