ABSTRACT
In a widely cited essay published in 1999, Wendy Brown uses Walter Benjamin's term, “left melancholy,” to diagnosis a melancholia of the contemporary left. Her concern in the essay, which closely tracks Stuart Hall's discussion of the rise of Thatcherism, is to analyze the fears and anxieties of a left in decline, a left that is backwards-looking, self-punishing, attached to its own failure, and seemingly incapable of envisioning an emancipatory egalitarian future. For many Brown's timely and evocative essay captured a truth about the end of a certain history of the North American, British, and European left. Attuned to the ends and loss occasioned by the disintegration of the “we” previously held in common by the discourse of communism, in her words, to the “unaccountable loss” and “unavowedly crushed ideal, contemporarily signified by the terms left, socialism, Marx, or movement,” Brown provided an opportunity to reflect on the failures and continuities in left projects in terms of the desires that sustain them (Brown 1999: 22). Her treatment of a “lost historical movement” suggested a kind of left “coming to grips” with, or facing of reality, the reality of neoliberal capitalism and the defeat of the welfare state.
