Left melancholy describes a backward-looking attachment to dead ideological forms, lost struggles and impossible political positions. Unlike mourning, which acknowledges specific losses and works through them, melancholy treats loss as structural absence removed from history. This produces political formations more attached to their own impossibility than to potential for transformation, dwelling in marginality and failure rather than organising for change.
The concept originated in Walter Benjamin’s 1931 essay “Left-Wing Melancholy,” written as review of Erich Kästner’s poetry. Benjamin identified a phenomenon in Weimar German literature where supposedly radical writers addressed bourgeois audiences with nihilistic work disconnected from proletarian action. These writers transformed revolutionary politics into melancholic posture, producing literature that gestured toward radical critique whilst remaining safely within existing cultural circuits.
Freud’s mourning and melancholia
The theoretical foundation comes from Freud’s 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia.” Freud distinguished between normal mourning, where the loss of a loved object or ideal eventually gets worked through, and pathological melancholia, where the lost object becomes incorporated into the ego. The melancholic cannot acknowledge what has been lost or why. The lost object becomes part of the self, producing self-reproach and paralysis.
Mourning involves reality testing. The mourner gradually accepts that the loved object no longer exists. Libidinal energy attached to that object withdraws and becomes available for new attachments. This process proves painful but finite. Eventually the mourner returns to life.
Melancholia operates differently. The melancholic cannot specify what has been lost. The loss becomes abstract and transhistorical. Rather than working through loss, melancholia preserves it through incorporation. The lost object persists internally as part of the ego, which then attacks itself for inadequacies actually belonging to the lost object. This produces the characteristic self-reproach of melancholia.
Benjamin’s original formulation
Benjamin’s “Left-Wing Melancholy” applied this psychological framework to cultural production. He contrasted Kästner’s poetry with Bertolt Brecht’s committed political art. Kästner produced clever, ironic verses expressing vague dissatisfaction with bourgeois life. This poetry circulated widely among middle-class readers who could enjoy feeling radical without changing anything.
Brecht’s work functioned differently. It aimed at specific political interventions, addressed working-class audiences, and connected cultural production to revolutionary organisation. Benjamin praised this as genuine left-wing art whilst condemning Kästner’s work as left-wing melancholy.
The key distinction concerned relationship to political possibility. Kästner treated radical politics as already lost, something to mourn aesthetically rather than practice materially. His work conveyed sophisticated awareness of capitalism’s horrors alongside resignation to their continuation. Readers could feel politically astute whilst remaining politically inert.
Benjamin wrote this as fascism was ascending in Germany and communist parties faced mounting repression. His critique had immediate stakes. Left-wing melancholy was not merely aesthetic failure. It represented political abdication at moment when militant organisation was desperately needed.
Wendy Brown’s expansion
Wendy Brown’s 1999 essay “Resisting Left Melancholy” transformed Benjamin’s circumscribed definition into broader diagnosis. Writing after the Cold War’s end and during neoliberalism’s consolidation, Brown identified left melancholy as pervasive condition rather than specific literary tendency.
She described it as “a mournful, conservative, backward-looking attachment to a feeling, analysis, or relationship that has been rendered thing-like and frozen in the heart of the putative leftist.” This attachment prevents engagement with contemporary conditions. The melancholic left clings to outmoded analyses and nostalgic images rather than confronting actual political terrain.
Brown’s examples included attachment to traditional Marxist frameworks despite transformed class compositions, romance with revolutionary images despite changed political possibilities, and dwelling in marginality as identity rather than strategic position. She argued the left had become more attached to its impossibility than to its potential.
The psychoanalytic framework shifts in Brown’s account. Benjamin’s melancholy attached to specific lost objects. Brown’s describes attachment to impossibility itself. The melancholic left does not mourn particular defeats so much as cultivate impossible positions ensuring perpetual defeat. Marginality becomes comfortable. Failure becomes identity.
Jodi Dean’s real existing betrayals
Jodi Dean’s 2011 response to Brown pointed out key differences between Benjamin’s and Brown’s formulations. Benjamin identified melancholy in radical-chic cultural production for bourgeois consumption. Brown diagnosed it in left political formations generally. This expansion altered the concept’s critical force.
Dean argued that left melancholia, if it exists, derives from “real existing compromises and betrayals inextricable from its history” rather than solely external defeats. Communist parties’ Stalinist betrayals, social democratic accommodations to capitalism, and trade unions’ incorporation into state apparatuses created genuine losses internal to left movements.
Writing after the 2008 financial crisis and during Occupy Wall Street, Dean suggested a process of collective working through had begun. The occupy movements represented attempts to move beyond melancholic attachment to failed forms whilst learning from historical struggles. This distinguished mourning particular defeats from melancholic fixation on impossibility.
Dean’s intervention recovered the political specificity Benjamin’s concept originally had. Not all left formations exhibit melancholy. The concept names specific relationships to history and possibility that can be identified, analysed and potentially transformed.
Enzo Traverso’s epochal melancholia
Enzo Traverso’s 2017 book treated left melancholia as epochal condition following 1989. The fall of the Berlin Wall and socialism’s apparent defeat marked different kind of loss than earlier setbacks. Communism became a finished project. History itself was displaced by memory. Meaningful struggle gave way to vapid contemplation.
Traverso distinguished defeats of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from the more definitive capitulation marked by 1989. Earlier generations faced setbacks but maintained faith in eventual victory. The Paris Commune’s suppression led to exile and execution but also inspired future revolts. The Spanish Civil War’s defeat proved crushing but did not foreclose revolutionary possibility.
The 1989 defeat operated differently. It retrospectively rendered the entire communist project impossible. Not only did actually existing socialism fall. The very idea that alternatives to capitalism could exist seemed discredited. Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis captured this sentiment. Capitalism appeared as final form of human organisation.
This created melancholic condition at civilisational scale. The left lost not merely particular struggles but the framework giving struggle meaning. Without plausible alternatives to capitalism, critique became purely negative. Resistance appeared as rear-guard action delaying inevitable processes rather than building different futures.
The problem with epochal diagnoses
Treating melancholy as generalised condition affecting “the left” as such risks obscuring important distinctions. Not all left formations or individuals exhibit melancholic attachment. Many continue organising, experimenting with new forms, and building movements despite defeats.
The concept works best when identifying specific tendencies within particular contexts. Stuart Hall’s analysis of British left responses to Thatcherism exemplifies this approach. Hall argued sections of the left clung to outmoded analyses and nostalgic images of the working class rather than understanding how Thatcher successfully reorganised common sense.
This was not universal condition. Some responded to Thatcherism by developing new analyses and organising strategies. Hall’s critique identified specific failures without totalising them. The question was not whether “the left” was melancholic but which tendencies exhibited melancholic attachment and which confronted changed conditions.
The danger of epochal diagnoses is they can become self-fulfilling. Declaring the left melancholic and trapped in impossibility reproduces the very condition diagnosed. It forecloses examination of actual struggles occurring and experiments being attempted.
Nostalgia and melancholy
Nostalgia presents related but distinct phenomenon. Medical nostalgia originated as pathological homesickness. Political nostalgia differs fundamentally. It can be either backward-looking and stultifying or forward-facing and energising.
The Paris Commune provides instructive example. Communards exiled to New Caledonia suffered genuine psychological distress from displacement. Some died from what authorities termed excessive nostalgia. Yet figures like Louise Michel refused despair, maintaining commitment to future struggle.
The question is not whether to remember historical struggles but how. Melancholic nostalgia reifies past into unchangeable monuments. It treats historical defeats as proof of impossibility. Forward-facing nostalgia learns from defeats without being trapped by them. It finds resources in past struggles for present organising.
Rosa Luxemburg’s final writing before her execution exemplifies non-melancholic relationship to defeat. She proclaimed that history marches inexorably toward final victory despite thunderous defeats. Each defeat teaches and strengthens future struggles. This differs from both melancholic paralysis and naive triumphalism.
Depression and melancholy
Depression following political engagement raises related questions. Activists describe depression descending without obvious connection to particular defeats, creating problems of scale where individuals lose capacity to connect subjective states to structural forces.
Some theorists conflate political depression with left melancholy. Mark Fisher’s concept of capitalist realism, for instance, treats widespread depression as collective symptom of capitalism’s apparent inescapability. This resembles Traverso’s epochal melancholia, diagnosing systemic condition affecting entire populations.
However, depression and melancholy operate differently. Depression appears as causeless state lacking clear attachment to lost objects. Melancholy specifically concerns attachment to lost political forms and impossibility. Someone can be depressed without being melancholic and melancholic without being clinically depressed.
The relationship between political defeat and psychological suffering proves more complex than either concept captures individually. Defeats produce genuine grief that may develop into either mourning or melancholy. They may trigger depression operating at different scale from political attachments. These phenomena intersect without reducing to each other.
Working through versus incorporation
The crucial distinction concerns whether losses get worked through or incorporated. Mourning works through specific historical losses whilst maintaining capacity for future attachments. Melancholy incorporates lost objects, preserving them internally and attacking the self for their absence.
Working through requires acknowledging what was actually lost. The Commune fell. Spanish anarchism was defeated. Soviet socialism betrayed its promises. These are historical facts. Working through means understanding these defeats in their specificity without treating them as proof that all future struggles must fail.
Melancholic incorporation treats losses as transhistorical. It extracts them from specific contexts and converts them into eternal truths. The Commune’s defeat becomes evidence that working-class revolution is impossible. Soviet authoritarianism proves that all attempts at planned economies inevitably produce totalitarianism. Historical defeats become metaphysical impossibilities.
This removes events from history and politics. It forecloses examination of what enabled particular defeats, what could have been done differently, what lessons might inform future struggles. Instead, defeats become fetishised as monuments to impossibility.
Political implications
Left melancholy serves depoliticising functions. It converts political questions into affective states. Rather than analysing why particular strategies failed, it cultivates feelings about failure. Rather than experimenting with new approaches, it declares experimentation impossible.
This proves particularly damaging because melancholy disguises itself as sophistication. The melancholic left can claim to be more historically aware, more theoretically rigorous, more realistic than movements attempting to build alternatives. Dismissing contemporary struggles as naive becomes easier than engaging with them seriously.
However, the critique of left melancholy itself risks becoming melancholic. Endless diagnosis of melancholy without engagement in actual organising reproduces what it criticises. The point is not to achieve psychological purity but to identify and transform patterns blocking political action.
Contemporary movements demonstrate possibilities beyond melancholic paralysis. Climate justice organising, abolitionist campaigns, tenant unions and mutual aid networks build power despite understanding capitalism’s resilience. They learn from historical defeats without being trapped by them. Whether these constitute working through or merely new attachments remains to be seen.