Abstract

For the political left, the collapse of communism in the closing decades of the last century marked an intensification of a melancholic vision of history which Walter Benjamin first termed ‘Left-Wing Melancholy’. Understanding left political struggle as a series of losses, left melancholy is an affective state which manifests as a feeling of guilt for not challenging authority, in a mourning for the human costs of political resistance, and in a sense of despair and failure for not realising utopian aspirations.

Far less commonly acknowledged however is the understanding that within this extraordinarily rich tradition lie further resources for transformative political action. This paper is concerned with the correlative process by which twenty-first century fictional narratives recognise, respond, and work through left political loss. Reading Eat the Document (2006) in relation to the work of Walter Benjamin, I argue Benjamin’s rendering of melancholy as the renunciation of revolutionary efforts (intellectual compromise, adaption to the market, and the betrayal of the workers movement) paradoxically opens up possibilities for reconceiving loss as a critical product. While Benjamin’s left melancholic is one who gives in to ‘complacency and fatalism’, Spiotta’s narrative turns such fatalism into a new vector of political intention that warns against the sublimation of left political ideals to the capitalist market.