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
