It was a “strategic” memory of past movements and struggles, a future-oriented
memory. Today, this dialectic between past and future has broken, and the eclipse of utopias engendered by our “presentist”
time has almost extinguished this left-wing memory. The dialectical tension between the past as a “field of experience” and
the future as a “horizon of expectation” has become a kind of mutilated, “negative dialectic.” In this context, a melancholic
vision of history as remembrance of the vanquished deserves to be rediscovered. This hidden tradition of the left includes
many significant thinkers, from Auguste Blanqui to Rosa Luxemburg, from Walter Benjamin to Daniel Bensaid. Its creations are
not only textual but also aesthetic and find an accomplished expression in both cinema and painting. Neither passive nor resigned,
this multifaceted work of mourning may stimulate and empower our critical thought.
Enzo Traverso is the Susan and
Barton Winokur Professor in the Humanities at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. His work deals with modern European intellectual
history. His books, all translated into several languages, include Fire and Blood: The European Civil War (2016); Left-Wing
Melancholia: Marxism, History and Memory (2017), and The New Faces of Fascism (2019).
Eintritt frei. Anmeldung erbeten
unter
ecm_anmeldung@uni-ak.ac.at
