Rejecting commonplace notions of "totalitarian evil," he rediscovers the feelings and reinterprets the ideas of an age of intellectual and political commitment when Europe shaped world history with its own collapse. Utilizing multiple sources, Enzo Traverso depicts the dialectic of this era of wars, revolutions and genocides. It was a time of both unchained passions and industrial, rationalized massacre. During these three decades of deepening conflicts, a classical interstate conflict morphed into a global civil war, abandoning rules of engagement and fought by irreducible enemies rather than legitimate adversaries, each seeking the annihilation of its opponents. It opened with conventional declarations of war and finished with "unconditional surrender." Proclamations of national unity led to eventual devastation, with entire countries torn to pieces. Its overture was played out in the trenches of the Great War its coda on a ruined continent. Left-Wing Melancholia is well-written, timely and original.Europe's second Thirty Years' War-an epoch of blood and ashes Fire and Blood looks at the European crisis of the two world wars as a single historical sequence: the age of the European Civil War (1914-1945). His publications include The Origins of Nazi Violence (The New Press, 2003) Fire and Blood: The European Civil War (Verso, 2016) The End of Jewish Modernity. In other words, this book is a gem.Įli Zaretsky, The New School for Social Research: Enzo Traverso redefines our understanding of the current regimes of temporality-a sorrowful transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century-and challenges historians and critical theorists alike to think beyond the standard binaries between history and memory, revolution and defeat, and melancholy and politics. Left-Wing Melancholia is a path breaking work that combines history and political theory with a concise, richly analytical, exciting narrative. Intricately constructed with acrobatic prose, electric compressions, and magisterial assuredness, Traverso's scholarly milestone synthesizes an ambitious spectrum of interventions into the revolutionary aspirations and defeats of the twentieth century that is historically engaging, eminently readable, and pressingly pertinent.įederico Finchelstein, The New School for Social Research: Each engrossing chapter provides a tour-de-force of trenchant observations and lucid argumentation about the melancholic landscape of socialist memory. Marvelously learned and gorgeously poetic, Left-Wing Melancholia is a transcendent masterpiece of the Marxist imagination. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor of English Literature and American Culture, University of Michigan: If so, should the contemporary Left finally concede the failure of its dreams of revolutionary redemption? Or, and this is the gamble of Enzo Traverso's provocative new book, is it better to remain defiantly melancholic in the hope that those dreams may still be realized? Drawing on a lifetime of immersion in the history of modern European culture and politics, he provides future progressive movements a glimmer of hope that the dialectic of defeat may not yet be history's final word.Īlan Wald, H. Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley:Īccording to Freud, mourning is differentiated from melancholia in its working through grief by acknowledging the irreparable loss of a love object. Left-Wing Melancholia is both an exhilarating work of intellectual synthesis as well as a pathbreaking study in cultural history. Yet, in the tradition of Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch, Traverso also instructs us on how the experience of loss can simultaneously generate heretofore untapped repositories of social hope. With Left-Wing Melancholia, Enzo Traverso provides us with a timely and learned meditation on the politics of grief, mourning, and historical loss. Richard Wolin, author of Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption: Read this book using Google Play Books app on your PC, android, iOS devices. Taking inspiration from heterodox critical responses to the darkness enveloping Europe in 1940, Traverso seeks to uncover trace elements of a new utopian imaginary, as a leap without guarantees, a melancholy wager. Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914-1945 - Ebook written by Enzo Traverso. ![]() Europe’s second Thirty Years’ Waran epoch of blood and ashes Fire and Blood looks at the European crisis of the two wor. The overarching trajectory of struggles oriented toward an emancipatory future that characterized and motivated movements in the past two centuries has been fundamentally broken, resulting in a profound melancholia. Read 'Fire and Blood The European Civil War, 1914-1945' by Enzo Traverso available from Rakuten Kobo. ![]() In this wide-ranging, conceptually rich, nuanced and thoughtful meditation, Enzo Traverso takes stock of the current historical moment as marking a fundamental historical and cultural crisis for the Left.
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