AN END ALMOST BEFORE A BEGINNING[1]

Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History and Memory

by Enzo Traverso

Columbia University Press, 2021   ISBN: 978-0-231-17943-0

Reviewed by Howard Slater 

“Victory-in-defeat, defeat-in-victory”

-          Victor Serge 

Over recent years a new fad has broken out amongst a section of the Academic Left. A fad that goes under the rubric of ‘Left-Wing melancholia.’ In and of itself this renewed incursion of psycho-dynamics into the discourse of Left politics is of welcome significance. It gives credence to the psychical cost of social struggles whose underlying premise is that of being wilfully alienated from a capitalist society based upon a social ‘non-relation’ and the perennial group-relational problems that ensue from this and that have undermined social struggles from within. However, as we will see, these are not avenues pursued by Enzo Traverso in this book. 

Whether the psychical state of left-melancholia is ascribed to the classical defeats of the classical worker movement, or to activist burnout, the tenor of the Academic Left’s take on these issues is one that not only continues the trend of not fully embracing the psychical dimension of social struggles as an embedded aporia – not least the necessary exposure to suffering and its emotional impact upon us – but neglects the continuum of disenchantments that have been registered throughout the history of social struggles. This is not even to mention the melancholia auto-generated from within the left itself.[2] 

However, such disenchantments, such defeats, as potential spurs to melancholia, can also be seen as opportunities for mourning; as modes of re-assessment and re-orientation that many sectors of the Revolutionary Left have continually been engaged in. Whether it be Anarchist critiques of the fledgling Bolshevik State or news of the Stalinist show trials breaking out in the 1930s, whether it be failing before the 21 Conditions of admission to the Communist International, the invasion of Hungary in 1956 or the exodus of women into the Women’s Liberation Movement, each of these junctures, marked by disillusionment, by mourning for a ‘lost object’, occasioned moments of both practical and ideological critique that assuaged the impact of melancholia.  

To deal solely with the classical ‘defeats’ is to remain at the level of the most visible and historicised level of social struggle, it is to risk fetishizing these defeats. Defeat as fetish, as both ‘part-object’ and magical incantation, is veering towards an acceptance of a “history written by the victors” as Walter Benjamin warned. It is not to walk along those fracture lines and pick through those ‘messianic shards’ of the past that, never taken up, still carry an auratic charge that can resuscitate the social imaginary. The Academic Left seems seduced by the ‘epochal’, by consensual demarcations. It rightly bemoans the tapering-off of any utopian incentive, but in stressing breaks that can amount to dissociation, it has the effect of cutting us adrift from those historical vacuoles, those different levels of experience, that reveal untimely and dissenting elements that could have helped Traverso in the “task of rethinking a revolutionary project.” (220)  As we will see this ‘rethinking’ has been a constant. 

Even so, it comes as a surprise that Traverso sets great store in the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, seeing it as the vanishing point of any communist effort: “Melancholy was always a hidden dimension of the left, even if it came to the surface only at the end of the twentieth century, with the failure of communism.” (38) We have already alluded to this hidden dimension of melancholia (not least as ‘wilful alienation’ and the implosion of solidarities) and we will return to it; but, for now, what is this communism that Traverso is referring to here? Drawing examples from this country we can offer that it is not the communism of Joseph Lane’s Anti-Statist Communist Manifesto (1887), not the communism of the Socialist League Manifesto (1885), not the communism of Sylvia Pankhurst’s Communism and its Tactics (1921), nor the communism of Guy Aldred’s Anti-Parliamentarian Communist Federation (1921-1950s.) In short, Traverso seems to be referring to a Soviet state that more than compromised the meaning of communism and long foreclosed practical and theoretical interrogations of its potential becomings. 

True, many people on the Left had short-lived hopes that the disintegration of the Soviet Union would give rise to a communist alternative. However, to write that “an entire representation of the twentieth century […] had fallen apart” (2) to offer that there has been an “ineluctable and definitive triumph of market capitalism” (219) from 1989 onwards, is not only to overlook the historical and theoretical critiques of the Soviet Union by the likes of Voline, Bruno Rizzi, Paul Cardan, Guy Debord, etc., it is to play down any consideration of how Capital, itself an ever-changing dynamic, has partaken of its own revolutions, its own becomings (restructurings). These have vastly altered the strength and combativeness of the working class to the point that, for more than half a century, it has not been socialised by implicit solidarities at the place of production but fractured and individualised by global markets.

So, in the Global North, we have long been living in the after-effects of the colonisation of everyday life. In the mid-60s Raoul Vaneigem wrote: “As General Eisenhower so candidly explained, the present economic system can only be rescued by turning man (sic) into a consumer, by identifying him with the largest possible number of consumable values, which is to say, non-values, or empty, fictitious, abstract values.”[3] This is maybe to take melancholy to the next level – does it not adumbrate despair? – for it is not just the passing of working class power nor its iconographic and seductive representation that is to be mourned – did it reach its peak in this country in the 1910-1914 period of ‘syndicalist’ struggles? – but the future of humanity itself as forewarned by such writers as Francoise d’Eaubonne[4] and Jacques Camatte. 

Here, then, not only do we have a source of generalised melancholia in a commodity-driven capitalism that entails ecological mayhem and an endlessly deferred promise of ‘happiness’, but we have a capitalist restructuring that brought about the ‘production of the subject’ which itself, in part, entailed the hijacking of the psychical energy of desire as it is inveigled towards narcissistic phantasms.[5] The Workers Movement, as well as much of the Revolutionary Left, never had an antidote to the way that capital, in marketizing ‘human values’ became a dictatorial community. Tales from the 1980s of miner’s returning to work so as to resume mortgage payments is one thing, but the shift to a micropolitics of desire, the “production of man (sic) as a consumer,” has persistently outflanked the vocabulary of the Workers Movement for whom melancholia and other forms of psychical suffering were seen as off-limits personal matters or shunted over to an anti-psychiatry (itself a term much disputed by its practitioners) that itself became a target for certain Leftists.[6]  

In their rich text on the rise and fall of the Workers Movement, Endnotes speak of the movement’s external limits. In terms of quantities (which is taken as an illustrative yardstick), the size of forces arraigned between capital and labour, they draw attention to how, contrary to some mythic overestimations, the industrial working class (the classic constituency of the workers movement) were never anything like a majority of the total workforce even at the height of its power. From the apex point of the 1914 Triple Alliance’s threat to the British State (which bears witness to the ‘syndicalist’ challenge posed by the coordinated inter-occupational solidarity of Miners, Railwaymen and Transport workers) the ever-increasing introduction of machines, as well as the post-industrial shift to services, meant that the ratio of industrial workers amongst wage-labourers was destined to decline. Added to this, and perhaps more disturbing, Endnotes also qualify the internal limits of the movement: “only a portion of the proletariat ever identified with the programme of the workers movement” from which they draw the conclusion that this marked the “limit of workers capacity or desire to identify as workers, to affirm that identity as something positive…”[7] So, to a degree, when we mourn the passing of a mass combative Workers Movement (and the Endnotes essay functions as a therapeutic ‘holding’ space for such mourning), are we not, in terms of its anti-capitalist revolutionary potential, mourning the passing of an illusion? Is the melancholy highlighted by the Academic Left both welcome and yet misplaced? Are we stood over an empty grave? 

If we keep in mind – as this book almost does – the persistence of melancholy as a hidden psychological factor that is at play throughout the history of the Left (highlighted by the revealing title of a 90s left-communist journal Melancholic Troglodytes), then, in the words of Traverso, we should seek, as part of the mourning process of overcoming melancholia, to preserve “an affective relation with an exhausted past threatened with oblivion.” (98) Rather than condemn this entire history (and here Traverso’s dramatic use of the phrase ‘exhausted past’ undermines the very Benjaminianism he is drawing upon) should we not take stock of some continuing persistences of the Workers Movement (never mind earlier forms of resistance like Luddism with its equalising anonymity and the even earlier Digger occupation of land etc.) that retain a suggestive aura; that in mutated form still contribute to the renewal of the social imaginary? Will we not then discover, if we develop the ways and means of this affective relation, that the grave is far from empty and that it offers up some still intact artifacts to archaeological patience? 

It would be beyond the scope of this review-article to outline every innovation of the Workers Movement, innovations made by working class self-activity, but one that immediately springs to mind is the soviet form. Variously known as workers councils and carrying workers self-management of production as an aim, this form, with anthropological and psychological roots in any being-together, was not only the rallying call of the Russian Revolution, but was taken up by many revolutionaries as the very practical definition of communism. This communism, eventually known as Council Communism, was one that embraced the soviet as a form of social organisation in contradistinction to the State and in critical relation to Trade Unions as mediators seeking industrial peace. In this country, before the formation of the CPGB, there was, as mentioned above, a plethora of communist groups that viewed with suspicion the CPGB’s parliamentarian orientation (itself a requirement of membership of the Third International.) Not only this but by means of support for the soviet-form and direct-action trade unionism, a rapprochement was made between many anarchists and communists (e.g. in the early 1920s the Glasgow Anarchist Group became the Glasgow Communist Group.)  

These days in this country, it would be difficult to envision a soviet-style worker control of production not only because of the demise of manufacturing and thus of the ‘collective worker’ (exacerbated even further by robotisation and the coming of AI-run factories), but because, following upon commodity-capitalism, a main focus of production in the Global North has been to produce the subject itself as, paraphrasing Marx, an independent node of value, an entrepeneuriat. So, just as in the Soviet Union when the Soviet-form was sought to be perpetuated in a series of disparate communes – not without reference to still extant rural forms of organisation like the obshchina ­– with the 60s counter culture, the soviet form too, it could be said, mutated into a means of preserving and developing capital-critical modes of life, of living differently and gaining some leverage over the capitalist production of the subject often through a revivification of ‘peasant’ modes of life and their differing relation to time and space. That, in our day, this commune-form as a means of social organisation, as a “war machine and a care machine,”[8] is a far from negligible factor is in part testament to the prevalence of an ecological consciousness that the classical Workers Movement paid next to no attention to.[9] Indeed at one time it was, tellingly, referred to as ‘primitivism.’ 

This may be to return at a ‘higher level’ to that moment, in this country, before the formation of the CPGB in 1921. The increased incidence of the commune-form summons forth a democratic de-centralisation that marked the early C20^th Workers Movement as a diffusion of interlinked initiatives: “one of the features of the [period prior] to 1921 was the diversity of organisation, strategy and social thought [that] enriched the process of self-education.”[10] So, a narrowing-down took place within the Workers Movement. Not only did smaller unions amalgamate together into larger entities which had the effect of focusing power in executives and full-time officials, but the formation of political parties like the CPGB “established a pattern whereby the Party attempted to resolve what were essentially political issues by administrative and disciplinary procedures.”[11] Just as national collective bargaining increased mediational distances and stilled the intensifying overspill of outrage, so too Party procedures and intellectual gate-keeping had the effect of supressing dissent and carrying out forms of psychical attrition that fully institutionalised came to be epitomised by the Moscow Show Trials. 

This brings us to a local and micropolitical area of the Workers Movement that the Trade Unions have long been involved in and which brings us closer to that area of their work that addresses the ‘hidden’ psychological dimension: bullying and harassment at work. This latter, in the form of either management-sanctioned intimidatory tactics or as personalised abuses of power, entails a shift from a sense of togetherness to the isolation of one-to-one relationships. Whether as disciplinary incursions or as unacknowledged sadism these take place on an individualised basis and very often, unlike wider more objective union issues that can entail finite negotiation, these can be without time-limit and subject to the perpetrator’s unpredictable whims. From racist discrimination to sexual harassment, from deliberately increased workloads to ‘passing-the-buck,’ these psychologically wearing and anxiety inducing conflicts often run the risk of triggering nervous breakdowns just as much as does the relentlessness of working in understaffed workplaces managed by blatherskite lackeys.  

It is, then, a surprise bordering on shocking, that this element of Trade Union activity, this ongoing bequest of the Workers Movement, has received scant attention even from the Revolutionary Left. There are reasons for this. One is that bullying and harassment are often seen as the domain of personnel departments and are kept as covert concerns that, often slyly taking place without the presence of witnesses and being eventually dealt with behind closed doors, don’t necessarily involve the entire union branch (it can also be a matter of lone-working and the random nature of staffing patterns when doing shift-work.) Another can be ascribed to the fact that this psychical dimension of the oppression and coercive control of wage-labourers, itself a cause of more than melancholy, pertains not just to bullying and harassment that can be de-socialised though personnel procedures, but to the way that obedience is enshrined in every job-contract to the degree that to be a wage-labourer could be said to be – in some cases knowingly – partaking in voluntary servitude. 

In spite of the fact that Trade Unions are there to offer defence and protection against such harassment –unfair and constructive dismissal cases etc. – they too seem to uphold the general consensus that psychological dynamics, reduced to inter-subjective conflicts and personal incompatibilities, are neither fully social nor structural matters, but are ultimately to be arbitrated as legal (evidence) and medical (sick note). Whereas the Trade Unions hold back from drawing conclusions from these psychical costs of wage-labour, it is possible, when considering this area of their activity, for us to indict the whole world of wage-labour, indeed capitalism, as one of coercive control at the hands of the value-imperative: “the abstract domination of value begins to be materialised in the labour process itself.”[12] But, just as it is possible to suggest, as Moishe Postone does, that this amounts to the “domination of people by abstract structures”[13] – which at the most basic level are laid-out in the ‘at the manager’s discretion’ clause in every job-contract – is it not, especially as concerns non-unionised workplaces, that these ‘abstract structures’ offer a cover for inter-personal domination, for the exercise of a power that can be libidinally motivated to the degree that we become unconsciously involved in far from playful sado-masochistic contracts?[14] 

So, with the example of the commune-form and trade union availability to defend workers against abuse in the workplace, it is surely an exaggeration to speak, as does Traverso, of the “shipwreck of hopes of a century of emancipatory struggle.” (219) Looked at over a longer time span than a century such rhetorical hyperbole (to what end?) is not only to ignore some of the historic ‘victories’ of the Workers Movement however forgotten or under threat they may be – the welfare state and the NHS, the legalisation of trade unions, the shortening of the working day, the outlawing of child labour, the decreasing wage gap between men and women etc. – it is, in placing his readers at the “mercy of a totalising causality,”[15] to reinforce a hapless melancholia that, as we have seen, does not need reinforcing. As Jacques Hassoun offers, melancholia – as it segues into depression – is marked by a drop-off of libidinal cathexis (desire), a withdrawal from the exterior world (including its history) that such statements as “shipwreck of hopes” do very little to counter. This is not to encourage the “affective relation to the past” that Traverso is recommending; rather it is to orbit a death-drive and occlude any feelings we may have for history. 

As has been suggested so far, elements of the Revolutionary Left have long been accustomed to varying degrees of melancholia and have taken critical impetus from its ‘victories’ as well as its ‘defeats.’ In a similar vein, if we look into the minutiae of Marx’s writings we will find that the notion of the ‘historic party’ could be one that provides an antidote to left-melancholia and a framework for collective mourning. Marx: “I have also tried to clear up a misunderstanding that when I refer to the party, I means an organisation which died eight years ago, or an editorial board which broke up twelve years ago. When I refer to the party I do so in a historic sense.”[16] Jacques Camatte imaginatively extrapolates out from Marx’s sadness over ‘failures’ and lends it a utopian tenor. For Camatte the ‘historic party’ becomes “this reach beyond the possible [that] constitutes continuity among the human generations.” It can be said to contain “all of humanity perceived through time” that is hostile to capitalism.[17] Is this to offer that Camatte’s notion of the ‘historic party’, inclusive as it could be of ‘dead labour,’ coincides with the Benjaminian “messianic impulse” that Traverso mentions: to redeem the vanquished of history (219)?   

That said, there is time-travel in the reverse direction. For just as the ‘historic party’ provides a resting place to elegiacally hold the ‘vanquished’ as a living history, there is a kind of ‘afterwardsness’, a fruitful conjunction of the retrogressive and the progressive, to many contemporary protests through which the vanquished and the historic forms they pioneered, reappear as objects of libidinal cathexis. Here, one can think of the prominent presence of the Nakba in current pro-Palestine activism, the role that a remembrance of the victims of dictatorship played in the Brazil uprising of 2012[18] and, more recently, the continuities of struggle expressed by Iranian women and their supporters: “The time for revolution is akin to the future in the past, a time that has begun but has not concluded […] It’s potential roams free. Its capacities awaken.”[19] This is to summon forth the commemorative and combative role ancestors have played in Black struggle: from the arrivants of the middle passage to the modes of resistance to the plantation economy; from the work of black scholars and poets such as Edward Kamau Brathwaite in positing the history of Africa as central to civilization and its overthrow … to the neighbourhood commune form adopted by the Black Panthers. With these examples we have an antidote to the “culture of defeat” that Traverso focuses upon (22-53) as well as a turning of the ‘defeats’ into ‘victories’ in that as activatable archives they offer impetus to the renewal of the social imaginary: “I’m speaking of archives of sound /of memory/ Archives of the oral/Archives of spirit […] the Arrivant’s archive is immanent.”[20] 

When Traverso, in his last chapter, examines the work of “libertarian Leninist,” Daniel Bensaïd (210), he has cause to cite a passage of his written in the third person: “He fell into an infinite sadness that rendered him speechless. That digs a deep intimate emptiness as if one suddenly parted from ones’ self” (233). Here, feelings of sadness, prompted by the “symbolic moment of crystallization of a cumulative cycle of defeats” (232) that is 1989, are aligned with a loss of identity, a departure from self.  One could offer that what this passage communicates as a cause of regret is rather a matter of the welcome ‘self-abolition’ of an identity as it has been produced under the conditioning auspices of capitalism. Just as a large portion of the working class, as Endnotes offer, reached a stage when its proletarian identity became a site of anti-cathexis, so too it seems that Leftists – those who, it could be said, clung onto the mirage of a representation of the working class monumentalised in the Soviet state – should needs be follow suit. What is this ‘self’ that it is so sad to depart from? What are these class identities that seemingly place us at a distance from bourgeois mores? Mohammed Abdou suggests that the “instability of our identities […] in our everlasting engagements with conditions […] are strategically distinct from Enlightenment identity politics.”[21] In terms of the Global North and its production of callous sycophants are we not rather faced with what seems to amount to a negotiation with madness: either the wilful alienation of ‘self-abolition’ or the infinite sadness of nostalgia-laden ideals!? 

This notion of ‘self-abolition’ stems from the Marxist notion that the abolition of class society is concerned with the class abolishing itself by a revolutionary overcoming of the mutual inherence of the capital-labour relation. This perhaps tautological concept is maybe better accounted for as a process of ‘disidentification’ from the ways we have been produced as subjects by capitalism, or as Abdou puts it, from the hegemonic western identity that “structuralist-Euro-American (neo) liberal thought seeks to impose.”[22] This returns us to the opening paragraph of this review-article in that to be opposed to capitalism, to consciously criticise and attempt to reverse its scourges, is to embark upon the psychical conflict of being wilfully alienated from the mainstream of society. As Endnotes in their article suggest, we have perhaps moved from class consciousness as a rallying point to propogating a consciousness of capital, which as an inbreak of the Real, the disgustingly true of the brute facts of life,[23] can be traumatic in itself (c.f. adolescent crises). Not only can this be a source of melancholy it can, as the suicides of those on the Left attest, be a source of despair and when this is coupled to ‘wilful alienation’, the necessity for the psychical dimension of social struggle to be acknowledged and addressed is, not so much a side-line luxury as a pressing urgency.  

Traverso stumbles over such a point without giving it due recognition. He cites Adorno as saying “whoever wishes to experience the truth of immediate life, must investigate its alienated form, the objective powers which determine the individual existence into its innermost recesses.” (178) This ‘truth of immediate life’ as the everyday, whilst it is not addressing the wilful alienation of anti-capitalist struggle, is touching upon what, among other things, we referred to as the contract-of-obedience that is the job-specification and what Camatte has referred to as the “interiorisation of capitalism’s victory,”[24] and how these have undoubted psychical ramifications. However, to combat both this interiorisation (self-repression) and the wilful alienation (self-abolition) that accompanies it, to not be fated to infinite sadness, then we need to develop Traverso’s suggestion and do more than preserve “an affective relation to the past.” Whilst this latter is necessary so as to maintain the historical past as a fecund ‘afterwardsness,’ it should be noted that, leaving aside the historical and theoretical output of the Workers Movement, this affective relation, as an emotional bond in inter- and intra- psychic space, has long been present to us and developed in the left-novel as a site of not just idealist escapism but of revolutionary exegesis. Discussing Bensaïd, Traverso suggests that one of the strengths of his writing is that it looks to a “reconciliation between memory and history.” (231) One could say, then, that this reconciliation has long been a consistent factor in the novels, say, of Victor Serge, that create a space for an historical intimacy, for a poeticised documentation, that, in seeking to affect his readers, to encourage us to feel history, runs counter to Trotsky’s dry comment on his History of The Russian Revolution: “The circumstances that the author was a participant in the events does not free him from the obligation to base his expositions upon historically verified documents.” (55)  

Traverso recognises that the demarcation between memory (subjective) and history (objective) has been self-defeating for the historic Left. So much so that, as regards Bensaïd, Traverso comments that he only latterly (post 1989?) felt freed-up to “satisfy a literary vocation previously self-censured.” (210) Why this self-censuring? Because revolutionary writing can only take the form of theory or polemic or as a demonstration of commitment? Contrast this to Serge: “it was In Leningrad, at the Marie Hospital in 1928, as I lay dying (I really was and I knew it) that I made the resolution to write and, if possible, things that […] deserved to last at least for a while. My previous activity seemed to me to have been futile and insufficient.”[25] That this previous activity that Serge refers to has been his involvement in the revolutionary movement (or perhaps, more specifically, his decade of work for the Bolshevik State), is one further example that there has been a melancholic continuum that does not just arise from ‘defeats’ and ‘burnout’ but, as Serge’s Notebooks attest, from the Left’s “ignorance of social psychology”[26] that does not just blunt its revolutionary theory, but sees it imploding from within: “The old party ideas with their closed systems, which once satisfied the needs of certain social milieu, are now nothing but inertia, consequently an obstacle to experience and thought.”[27] And from here, as is well known, we get internal power struggles, sectarianism, careerism and unconscious sado-masochism whose lack of engagement with the ‘hidden’ psychological dimension becomes a major source of melancholic withdrawal.  

However, historical developments themselves muddy the equilibrium of the waters and when the undertow has settled, aspects of the buried past, hidden historical initiatives, are revealed as more noticeable outcrops in the silt. So, the Left, perhaps one at a distance from the classical Workers Movement, did not remain totally bereft of a ‘social psychological’ dynamic. With the ‘subjective turn’, the turn to everyday life as a legitimate political concern – whether it be seen as an interiorisation of capital’s victory or as the ‘production of the subject’ or as a politicisation of desire – the psycho-social dimension became more visible in the 60s and informed a shift from a politics solely aligned to the party-form and the public sphere to one that, in taking cognizance of the public/private split and asymmetries of power informing most social experiences, embarked upon exploring a ‘politics of experience.’ The confluence here of the counter culture, the anti-psychiatry and co-counselling movements and the Women’s liberation Movement, gave rise to another historic vacuole: the East London Big Flame (ELBF) grouping of the mid 70s that intertwined classical militant activity at Dagenham Fords and the Lesneys factory with community activism in the form of Food Co-ops and Housing struggles. Combining the commune form – a majority of its members lived together in a shared house – with an interest in the disavowed psycho-social factors that TU activity has encountered but never politicised, the ELBF endeavour, in “struggling in every area of our lives,” in seeking to live its politics fully, may well have had no option but  to instaurate its Red Therapy project as a means of sustaining their activities, especially in light of their being “alienated and repressed by most current forms of left-wing activity.”[28] 

In sensing that workplace struggles were insufficient and in attempting to overcome the ‘separate spheres’ of social activity, in their will to share and integrate the often fuzzy emotional experiences of everyday life, the example of ELBF (and of even less visible initiatives?) is telling in terms modern social struggles and their ‘subjective’ psycho-social dimension. As they wrote, appealingly, to Big Flame Liverpool: “By ‘personal politics’ or ‘subjective politics’ we mean the politics of people’s everyday experiences of their oppression, the things they feel immediately oppressed by, the immediate source of their unhappiness and anxiety. The failure of traditional Left groups to recognise people’s feelings (as opposed to their comprehension) is why one of the main reasons why, in times of social crisis, the Fascists have blossomed and thrived.”[29] Here not only are the stakes of neglecting the psychological aspect of social struggle raised – as they were by Wilhelm Reich’s Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933)[30] – they are offered as so integral to social struggle that ELBF embarked upon a leaderless and non-hierarchic form of therapy; one that aimed to integrate memory and history, the subjective and the objective, the rational and the irrational, in the manner of Feminist Consciousness Raising groups; one that was not so much concerned with solipsistic personal development as seeking “to contextualise lived experience in relationships not only in terms of individual emotional histories but also with the social and historical relationships of power that we have grown up into.”[31] 

To end, then, we can offer that Traverso’s suggestion that “new-starts take unknown paths” (84) is something of a misnomer if we offer that an ‘affective relation to the past’, as the thumbnail sketches in this review-article suggest, is taken as a political desire, as a means of combating the psychical harmfulness of the social non-relation, and is not so much preserved in aspic as recognised and developed in the first place. Perhaps as a response to leftist criticisms of feminism at the time, Carla Lonzi wrote: “intimate life bears the signs of history.” Paying due heed to her we can acknowledge that our affective relations – not just to the past but to each other – are paths that have already been taken in periods before and since the demise of the Eastern Bloc. Whilst we welcome Traverso when he speaks of “metabolised defeats” (53) we cannot hold that “history is made of missed encounters, of lost opportunities that leave the bitter taste of melancholia” (177). Yes, there have been missed encounters but, as I hope to have shown, aren’t these still possible to uncover, cathect and, in doing so, add new drives to the social imaginary? Yes, there have been lost opportunities, but exactly what did opportunism achieve exactly? Yes, we can spit out black bile from time to time, but this expectorant only clears the way for what Ernst Bloch, in outlining the full socio-cultural scope of utopian yearning, described as “expectant emotion.”