ABSTRACT
The failure of the major political projects of the twentieth centurywhether fascist, communist or liberal democratic-to deliver the benefi ts of modernity without also producing unprecedented forms of catastrophic destruction has often prompted a turning away from images of progressive change to those of mourning and loss. In an attempt to understand what is at stake in this cultural shift this book focuses on two distinct historical periods. The fi rst emerges with the onset of World War II. The fl ight of Jewish intellectuals from the Third Reich led to the production of several texts that in different ways attempted to outline a theory of historical trauma. In Moses and Monotheism Freud theorized a trauma that had shaped Jewish identity for over two thousand years. Benjamin and Adorno adapted other writings by Freud in their different accounts of the modernist aesthetics of Baudelaire and Wagner. These analyses situated the modern artist in a political history, in particular the revolutions of 1848, experienced as an unconscious trauma. Finally, Benjamin’s theses “On the Concept of History” pictured history as an endless series of catastrophes. All of these texts registered a political crisis which culminated in total war and genocide. Freud’s hopes for a liberal society that would embrace the insights of psychoanalysis and Benjamin’s and Adorno’s hopes for a progressive Marxist transformation, faced a profound defeat.
