Reading Wednesday

[sabotabby]

Currently reading: Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory by Enzo Traverso. A friend of mine, who's a giant Traverso fanboy, invited me to a talk he was giving at York on trains and revolution. I'm not up on my contemporary Marxist academics, so I was like, this is rad as fuck, what's he written, and the title alone of this one got me. It's a look at the left—broadly speaking, from social democrats to hardline Marxists to anarchists—in defeat. Traverso's jumping off point is of course Walter Benjamin, who exemplifies both in his writing and life a non-positivist view of revolution.

As Billy Bragg put it, "there's simply no guarantee of a happy ending to history."

This feels very much like the thing to be reading right now, a book about how to form meaning and momentum out of defeat and despair. It's dense and sprawling, spanning history, psychoanalysis, and (my favourite chapter) cinema, and it's really good. I've been reading too much trashy fantasy and I'm tired so much flies over my head, but I'll definitely be checking out more of his work.

Comments

[seasonoftowers]

Sounds fascinating!

[sabotabby]

It's really interesting.

He's a fun lecturer too. Like on the one hand, he's talking about storming Heaven (presumably to punch God, though he didn't phrase it as such) and on the other hand he was struggling to get the Zoom share screen to work.

[frenzy]

This sounds good!

[sabotabby]

I think you'd like it.

[radiantfracture]

This sounds like it would chime interestingly with My Novel. Should I read it?

[sabotabby]

Yes you should! And tell me what you think.

[frandroid]

> trains and revolution

weee!

[sabotabby]

I was hoping China Miéville would pop up, but alas, no.

[lokifan]

Oh, that sounds fascinating! And definitely potentially helpful rn, yep.

[sabotabby]

Finished it last night! Definitely recommend.