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.

List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Haunting Pasts Without Utopias
1. The Culture of Defeat
2. Marxism and Memory
3. Melancholy Images
4. Bohemia: Between Melancholy and Revolution
5. Marxism and the West
6. Adorno and Benjamin: Letters at Midnight in the Century
7. Synchronic Times: Walter Benjamin and Daniel Bensaïd
Notes
Index