ANKER Left Melodrama
ANKER Left Melodrama
ANKER Left Melodrama
Elisabeth Anker
Department of American Studies, George Washington University, Washington DC 20052, USA.
This essay is concerned with a type of contemporary political theory that has
become exceedingly popular in recent decades. Exemplary practitioners include
Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri and Giorgio Agamben, writers whose work
has captured the interest of a generation of scholars, as well as the interest of a
reading public broader than that enjoyed by most academics. This work
combines the narrative structure and thematic elements of the melodramatic
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Left melodrama
present and occludes Marx and Engels’ own counsel that the possibility of
radical transformation is diminished when the past furnishes the blueprint
for the future. For Marx and Engels, only when visions of the future are
open-ended can they remain unburdened by the structural and imaginative
limitations of the present. In this essay I make the argument for left melodrama
in three parts, beginning with an analysis of Benjamin’s concept of left
melancholy and its application to left melodrama. I then analyze the
melodramatic structure and form of the Manifesto itself. In the third part
of the essay, I combine these analyses to examine how the current left
melodramas of Hardt, Negri and Agamben melancholically recapitulate
the Manifesto’s melodrama, and I emphasize what is lost for leftist inquiry
in this process. Contemporary left melodrama entrenches the deadening
effects of left melancholy, and thus impedes political theoretical efforts to
challenge the specific forms of inequality, injustice and unfreedom that shape
our present era.
In The Origin of German Tragic Drama, where Benjamin engages more directly
in the concept of melancholy, he describes it in one iteration as ‘the deadening
of the emotions y [that] can increase the distance between the self and the
surrounding world to the point of alienation from the body’ (Benjamin, 2003,
p. 140). Melancholy’s deadening work creates distance between the self and
the world it places under investigation, an act that can potentially provoke
distanciation and enable innovative criticism, but that also harbors the
dangerous threat of devitalizing that very world. In melancholy, ‘the utensils of
active life are lying around unused on the floor, as objects of contemplation’
(2003, p. 140). Melancholy, in this regard, is a form of contemplation that
makes alien the things in the world; in the particulars of left melancholy,
this making-alien turns active material into unused, inert objects.1 In ‘Left
Melancholy’ Benjamin similarly describes Kastner’s intellectual movement
as accomplishing ‘the transposition of revolutionary reflexes y into objects
of distraction, of amusement, which can be supplied for consumption’ (2005,
p. 424). Left melancholy is akin to a process of reification, as habituated forms
of leftist scrutiny drain the vitality and energetics of both the melancholic and
the objects he holds on to, vitality necessary for sustaining the critical push for
freedom in a dark and dangerous time. Diminishing revolutionary potential,
left melancholy reflects the outward trappings that signify work for social
change while its animating core is inert, empty and lifeless.
At the end of the twentieth century Wendy Brown revisited ‘Left
Melancholy’ to ask how Benjamin’s analysis could supply a diagnosis for the
contemporary moment. In ‘Resisting Left Melancholy’ Brown (1999) argues
that loss now saturates leftist intellectual inquiry, as leftist academics must
contend with the loss of legitimacy for Marxism and socialism, the loss of a
unified movement and method and the loss of viable alternatives to counter the
nexus of liberal-capitalism. These losses originate in part in leftist critical
analysis, which has had difficulty accounting for recent formations of power
and thus has become ineffective in challenging them. For Brown, the difficulty
in analyzing contemporary power is traceable to new iterations of left
melancholy. She addresses unanswered questions from Benjamin’s piece
by examining the content of the losses that left melancholy clings to, and by
asking how left melancholy accomplishes its deadening work. Addressing the
latter question first, she suggests that deadening arises from the conventional
methodologies of left critical theory: economic determinism, totalizing social
analysis and a teleology of human emancipation have each proven inadequate
or unsustainable for grappling with the current conditions of contemporary
politics. Significant historical shifts have changed how politics and the
economy operate and interconnect with individuals since the mid-nineteenth
century, but leftist modes of critique have often been unable to keep pace
with them. Drawing from Stuart Hall (1988), Brown argues that attachments
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to older forms of critique narrow and devitalize the current dynamics they
scrutinize, and thus impede discovery of the unexpected and particular.
A more effective analysis would require a break with certain methods and
assumptions that had conventionally defined what it meant to be part of the
academic left.
Yet attachments to outdated forms of critique are only one part of the
problem, and they had already been confronted by key interventions from
feminist theory, queer studies and post-colonial studies among other modes of
inquiry. More influential, Brown suggests, is the loss that underpins the
attachments: ‘In the hollow core of all these losses, perhaps in the place of our
political unconscious, is there also an unavowed loss – the promise that left
analysis and left commitment would supply its adherents a clear and certain
path toward the good, the right, and the true?’ (1999, p. 22). Melancholy, in
Sigmund Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, is defined as the loss of what
cannot be loved, the disavowed desire for something that has left or abandoned
the subject. It is the refusal to acknowledge that a ‘love object’ has been lost, or
that one had desired this lost object in the first place (Freud, 1959).
Incorporating Freud’s analysis, Brown argues that left melancholy is formed
by the refusal to acknowledge the desire for what the left has lost: the faith
that leftist theoretical analysis and political commitment can provide a direct
means to truth, moral virtue and human freedom. This ‘hollow core’ of loss,
perhaps the core of Benjamin’s papier-mâché fist, underpins left critical theory,
and because unacknowledged it continues to inhibit the academic left’s
reckoning with the present; it weakens and marginalizes leftist inquiry. The
refusal to relinquish these desires, let alone acknowledge them, marks the
refusal to grapple with the failed promise of inevitable emancipation, or as
Hall puts it, the refusal to abandon the guarantee that leftist theory can ‘rescue
us from the vicissitudes of the present’ (Hall, 1988, p. 4). Both Brown and Hall
insist that the unsettling and difficult practice of self-critique can begin to undo
some of these attachments and counter the disavowals of left melancholy.
Sustaining leftist commitments paradoxically requires acknowledging the
left’s losses and failures.
In the decade since Brown made her analysis, the topics, range and methods
of left analysis have further expanded and reoriented crucial aspects of critical
thought. Widespread criticisms of America’s post-9/11 politics reinvigorated
leftist critical and political theory and remobilized its sustained commitment
to social transformation. Influential authors in American academic circles, such
as Giorgio Agamben, have written trenchant political critiques of contemporary
domination that did not privilege only class or capital in diagnosing experiences
of unfreedom. Others, such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, have used
multidisciplinary analyses to delineate complex formations of power and energize
revolutionary sentiment. Do these changes demonstrate that melancholy has
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loosened its hold on leftist intellectual scrutiny? The answer to this question,
I offer, is no. The attachments animating left melancholy are still present in
particular modes of left theoretical work, though they have been reinscribed in
new form.
Left melancholy continues to shape a type of left political-theoretical
inquiry, but the loss it holds onto is more specific than the earlier types
Benjamin and Brown diagnosed and manifests in different form, even as it
draws from the dynamics Benjamin and Brown identify. Current left
melancholy marks the loss of a particular love object. Freud’s analysis of
melancholy can help to interpret the nature of this object. Freud makes
clear that the lost ‘object’ – his psychoanalytic term for describing what or who
is desired – can be a person, a group identity, an abstraction, a country or an
ideal (Freud, 1959, 1990).2 The melancholic not only refuses to acknowledge
that it has lost or been abandoned by the object it loves. It also takes on the
characteristics of the lost love object. The melancholic subject incorporates
the disavowed lost object into itself in order to hold on to what it has lost
(Butler, 1997). Melancholy, therefore, includes both a disavowal of loss, and a
part of the self that turns into that very object, so that the self begins to mimic
the lost object of its desire. Through incorporation, the melancholic refuses to
let its object go.
The lost object, in current left melancholy, is a paradigmatic text that has
been weighted with representing the set of losses articulated above. It is a text
that provoked the promise and the dream of radical social transformation,
that augured revolution, indeed that founded left praxis, all of which can now
seem lost, failed and out of reach. Most important, this text galvanized millions
of people, and its widespread appeal, explosive moral power and emancipatory
guarantee engendered a century or more of transnational solidarity toward
the project of human freedom.
Indeed the Manifesto, when situated in this way, becomes the instantiation of
those guarantees. The logic of the Manifesto as the lost love object conjures
up a past era when the left’s moral certitude seemed self-evident, and aims to
recover the possibility that a single text can energize populations for the
collective pursuit of human freedom.3 The Manifesto also represents these
failed promises because the collective movements it engendered often only
entrenched the oppression they intended to overcome.
While this new form of left melancholy still interprets politics through older
leftist frameworks, including monocausality, teleology and moral certainty, it
displaces the earlier analytic targets of capital, revolution, immanent dialectic
and the working class onto different targets. And more strikingly, left
melancholy now adopts the galvanizing narrative form the Manifesto uses to
tell its story. Left inquiry draws upon the Manifesto’s particularly melodramatic
narrative form. Melodrama, I offer, shapes the foundational text that provides
a key framework for left political analysis. What I call ‘left melodrama’ is a
new form of left melancholy that holds on to the Manifesto’s promises by
incorporating the Manifesto’s melodramatic narrative and style into its very
constitution. The Manifesto’s melodrama is melancholically absorbed into
some of the most popular critical theory in left academe, particularly the work
of Agamben, Hardt and Negri. In the rest of this essay, I first outline certain
melodramatic conventions and detail the particular form melodrama takes in
the Manifesto. I then examine how the Manifesto’s melodramatic tropes
melancholically inhabit the left melodrama of contemporary critical theory.
Melodramas, while varying to a certain degree across time, place and
medium, generally portray events through a narrative of victimization and
retribution, and a character triad of villain, victim and hero (Elsaesser, 1987;
Gledhill, 1987; Neale, 1993; Brooks, 1995; Williams, 1998, 2001; Mulvey,
2009). Their stories are organized in cycles of injury and action, of suffering
and strength, until a hero rescues the victim and usually triumphs over the
villain.4 Melodramas encourage visceral responses in their readers and
audiences by depicting wrenching and perilous situations that aim to generate
affective connections to victims and the heroes who rescue them. Using a
morally polarizing worldview, melodramas signify goodness in the suffering of
victims, and signify evil in the cruel ferocity of antagonists. The victim’s injury
at the core of the narrative divides the world and demands retribution
or redemption as response. Many melodramas promise a teleology of change
that can rectify the social injuries they diagnose. They valorize the powerless
and vilify the powerful, even though the types of characters who are powerless
or powerful can shift radically in different texts and historic junctures;
within melodramas, human actions are often dictated by social position, indeed
individual characters are often the metonymic substitute for economic or social
classes.
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employing all of these tropes with the aim to affectively motivate its reader into
revolutionary action.
Manifesto Melodrama
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Freedman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild master
and journeyman – in a word, oppressor and oppressed – stood in
constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now
hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended either in a
revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of
the contending classes. (1978, pp. 473–474)6
From the outset of the text, Marx and Engels reconfigure the history of social
relations into various binary oppositions, which all become an opposition of
‘oppressor and oppressed’. This opposition is not particularly civilizational,
nor does it seem to partake in longstanding Greek/barbarian distinctions based
on superiority. And neither does it seem to be a product of an ontological
friend/enemy antagonism, even though Carl Schmitt melodramatically
describes it as such: ‘This antithesis concentrates all antagonisms of world
history into one single final battle against the last enemy of humanity’ (1996,
p. 74). Rather, this is a distinction that is specifically based on power. It is what
Marx and Engels explicitly describe as having become a ‘simplified’ polarity,
juxtaposing two options: powerful and powerless, in which power is
determined by economic production (1978, p. 474). For the authors, the
modern industrial era has tidied the pre-modern clutter of human relationships
into ‘two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other:
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worthless’ by their burdensome and monotonous toils; they are, in body and
soul, ‘enslaved by the machine’ (1978, p. 480, 479). Horrifyingly abject, they
are not only without property, but also without supportive family relations,
without nation, without law, morality, religion. Stripped of all human
connections save capital, ‘the proletariat is [Modern Industry’s] special and
essential product’ (1978, p. 482). The Manifesto both denaturalizes economic-
ally produced suffering and makes the weak harbingers of emancipation.
Because the proletariat is so stripped, their needs are self-less, aligned with all
of humanity. The heroic possibility of human emancipation thus lies with
them. They become what Karl Löwith calls the ‘universal human function of
the proletariat’, as their self-emancipation will necessarily emancipate all
humanity (1993, p. 110). Their abjection is exactly what makes them capable of
a world-historic heroism.
After describing the power of villainy and the victimization that it inflicts,
the Manifesto moves along the melodramatic narrative trajectory and turns to
the victim’s heroic overcoming. At the end of section one, Marx and Engels
write of the ‘decisive hour’, the classic heightening of suspense, the race-to-the-
rescue last minute tension that makes melodrama such an affectively engaging
mode (1978, p. 481). In their analysis, heroic overcoming will occur by the very
victims of capital’s cruel and violent logic. Victims become the heroes and
perform their own rescue; as Sheldon Wolin writes, ‘Not only is revolution to
destroy the rule of capital, but the experience is to transform the worker into a
heroic actor of epic stature’ (2004, p. 434). As the proletariat’s numbers grow
and its strength concentrates, the future collision between the two classes
fulfills the narrative promise, a teleology of revolution providing freedom
in/and equality. The melodramatic cycle whereby the injustice of victimization
legitimates the violence of heroism is here made manifest in the authorization
of revolution.
Combined with the detailing of villainy, this explanation of victimization
and heroism intends to engender, viscerally, a new sentiment. It aims to
motivate the desire, and the difficult work, for revolutionary change. The
horrors endured by the proletariat inform the Manifesto’s readers this suffering
is unjust, cruel, and yet eradicable. Film theorist Jane Gaines emphasizes
melodrama’s ability to motivate revolutionary sentiment; she argues,
‘Theatrical melodrama has historically been the preferred form of revolu-
tionary periods for precisely its capacity to dichotomize swiftly, to identify
targets, to encapsulate conflict and to instill the kind of pride that can swell
the ranks of malcontents. Revolutionary melodrama can be depended upon
to narrate intolerable historical conditions in such a way that audiences wish
to see wrongs ‘righted’, are even moved to act upon their reaffirmed convictions,
to act against tyranny and for the people (Gaines, 1996, pp. 59–60, emphasis
added). Gaines, drawing from Sypher, argues that readers of Marx, ‘like the
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melodrama audience, see patterns of injustice laid out before us, and we are
appalled’ (Gaines, 1996, p. 60). Melodrama’s affective power, what literary
theorist Peter Brooks calls melodrama’s ‘excess’ and Williams calls its ‘pathos’,
makes melodrama so politically powerful for mobilizing large-scale transfor-
mations, and can help explain the widespread transnational and transhistorical
effects of the Manifesto. The Manifesto ends with a galvanizing call to action:
‘The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world
to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!’ Having been
shown the cruelties and exploitations of industrial capitalism, and asked to
reinterpret their own experience through its injustices, the Manifesto’s readers
are energetically summoned to fight for revolution.
The Nazi death camp functions in this argument as the archetype and
epitome of the relationship of sovereignty and bare life, and it models modern
individuals’ relationship to the state. Agamben’s treatment of the camp, which
he calls ‘the hidden paradigm’ of all modern biopower, weakens his analysis of
present politics by diminishing the heterogeneity of power, the dynamism of
juridicality, the multifaceted and nonlinear directionality of accountability,
and the existing forms of nonsovereign politics (1998, p. 123). If political life is
captured only by the state of exception, and power is an all-encompassing form
of dehumanizing sovereignty – one that seems to apply as much to Nazi death
camps as to the suburbs – then all modern individuals become lumped
together, categorized without differentiation as pure victims of a villainous
entity that has full control over human life. Yet the melancholy of Agamben’s
left melodrama is not simply the use of earlier analytic methods but the
longings that propel their use, especially the desire for unproblematic moral
righteousness. Agamben takes pains to assure his readers that homo sacer ‘is
the protagonist of this book’ (1998, p. 27). And later, ‘If today there is no
longer any one clear figure of the sacred man, it is perhaps because we are all
virtually homines sacri’ (1998, p. 115).
It is at the juxtaposition of these two claims that the ‘hollow core’ of this
argument shines through. Everyone is a victim of sovereignty; ‘we’ are all homo
sacer, ‘the protagonist of this book’. Everyone who aligns politically and
morally against the sovereign state, against indefinite detention, is a besieged
and virtuous protagonist. Agamben’s critique moves solely outward, against a
force so nefarious and omnipotent that all can disclaim responsibility for the
political horrors his texts depict. This juxtaposition nourishes leftist disavowed
desires: we are right, we are beyond reproach, we are against camps, against
bare life. As homines sacri, we are innocent victims, free of complicity with
oppression, harm and violence effected in our world. Morality is clear, and
the discomforting work of self-evaluation is unnecessary, even obsolete. The
perhaps unintended effect of this move is that individuals are left somewhat
bereft of the capacity to shape society, and in this respect Agamben’s
melodrama resembles those of Douglas Sirk. His Sirkian narrative offers up
victims but denies a readily available hero, and thus undoes the guarantee that
freedom will be imminent. Aside from his hopes that humans might create a
nonsovereign politics, Agamben’s individuals are left to passively wallow in the
state of exception, the flip side perhaps to homines sacri’s passive protagonism.
This is where Empire, the book hailed as a ‘Communist Manifesto for the 21st
century’ steps in (Žižek, 2001). A different form of left melodrama, Hardt and
Negri sew politics, culture and the economy into a complex yet unified tapestry
of global society dominated by the machinations of Empire. Empire is ‘the
political subject that effectively regulates these global exchanges, the sovereign
power that governs the world’ (Hardt and Negri, 2001, p. xi). It operates as an
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agent that governs, but supersedes, myriad variations of power and economy in
order to permeate varied registers of society and regulate all of them. As the
prime mover of contemporary political forces, Empire is ‘the idea of a single
power that overdetermines them all, structures them in a unitary way, and
treats them under one common notion of right that is decidedly postcolonial
and postimperialist’ (2001, p. 9). The primary antagonism in Empire and
Multitude is between empire and the multitude, the villain and the victim of this
melodramatic story: the multitude is, like the Manifesto’s proletariat, a ‘radical
counterpower’ comprised of marginalized and suffering groups across the
globe whose very existence signifies revolutionary promise (2001, p. 66). Hardt
and Negri see signs of revolution at the unraveling margins of society. They
examine local resistance efforts in different and unaligned sectors of the
multitude, and argue that these efforts combined become harbingers of a
more total social transformation. With Empire as the ‘parasitical’ ‘single
power’ of oppression, all forms of challenge presage human emancipation
(2004, pp. 336, 9).
The antagonism between empire and multitude carries explanatory power
for contemporary society by giving hope and meaning to conditions of
domination. It highlights the moral rightness of the dominated, and promises
that they will overcome unfreedom. This optimistic analysis and melodramatic
rhetoric have captured public imagination, reaching across academic audiences
to a broader public readership thirsting for social change. Yet Hardt and
Negri’s narrative of victimization and heroism, description of a ‘single power’
as the agent of oppression, and prophetic overcoming of social suffering
function like Agamben’s analysis to deaden the dynamics of the society they
subject to scrutiny. It tidies the messiness, confusions and contingencies of
political life, narrows what formations of power and politics can be understood
within its terms and revivifies the promise that emancipation is imminent. The
aim of Multitude is in part to mobilize the multitude as a new historical force,
but as Terrell Carver describes it, ‘the enterprise as a whole is much more about
updating than it is about announcing anything radically new to the world, as
Marx and Engels pointedly did y’ (2006, p. 352). In other words the authors’
argument becomes, as Timothy Brennan states, ‘everything for newness
provided newness is polite enough to appear in familiar forms’ (2005, p. 204).
Hardt and Negri’s left melodrama is thus an expression of melancholy
because of the way its structure is organized by loss. The melodramatic form
often harbors a backward focus, in that its critiques of injustice stem from a
desire to recapture an idyllic lost past, rather than to postulate a new and
unknowable future. The injury that jumpstarts melodramatic narratives often
marks the loss of a past state of virtue that will be recaptured by righting the
victim’s injury and re-establishing a prior state of moral rightness. In Peter
Brooks’ analysis, melodramas aim to re-establish a virtuous world that was
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This essay reads melodrama in the Manifesto in order to draw out why
melodrama may appeal to certain segments of contemporary political theory as
a mode of analysis. Of course reading the Manifesto through melodramatic
does not, could not, exhaust the varied cultural modes and rhetorical devices
that structure its logic and shape its worldwide effects; to claim the Manifesto
as fully explainable in this way would be its own form of melodrama. Much of
the text does not conform to melodramatic conventions, and even disrupts its
melodramatic elements: its forward-looking vision, its refusal to ground
critique in the loss of a past ideal, its ambiguity in detailing the agency of heroic
emancipation, and the proletariat’s complex relation to the overcoming of
the villainy of capital – as both its conqueror and inheritor – all disrupt
conventional melodramatic tropes. The Manifesto is not a melancholic text,
and refuses to generate a lost past ideal as a model for the future. Yet the
current re-uptake of its melodrama works in this way. While this certainly
does not mean that contemporary thinkers should refuse the inspiration of the
Manifesto, it suggests that melancholic incorporation of the Manifesto’s
melodramatic tenets limits the critical salience of contemporary leftist theory.
Left melodrama appropriates the Manifesto’s style in order to hold on to the
failed guarantee of immanent freedom, and to reassure the present left of its
unwavering moral rightness in the face of its weakness and defeats.
I would like to be clear about my claims: I think it is imperative to diagnose
and rectify conditions of social, political and economic violence, injustice and
inequality and name their sources of accountability. And any strong push for
real social transformation must be motivated and galvanized by moral visions
of what is good and right. I am certainly not arguing that extraordinary
political, economic and socially produced suffering does not exist in
contemporary life, that moral goodness is impossible or that clarity must be
forsaken in political inquiry. Each of these claims would be a melodramatic
counter to what I hope to diagnose as a particular problem: the intellectual and
political dilemmas that arise when the Manifesto’s melodramatic tropes shape
contemporary political explanation, when its tenets become normalized in
current intellectual inquiry, when its narrative promises become future visions
of heroic emancipation. In this vein, I am wary that this essay could itself be
interpreted as a product of left melancholy, read as a critique of left melodrama
from a position of melancholic self-flagellation against the internalized lost
object of moral promise. My hope is that, by attempting to identify the
operations of some of these losses, this essay derives from a different place, in
which the very working through of loss marks an effort to transform it, in
which the refusal to grant moral purity to cherished canonical texts, key modes
of inquiry and firm political identifications keeps them open to examination.
There are certainly examples of contemporary political theory that align with
the self-critical working-though of left melancholy. They include political
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critique that avows the loss of moral righteousness and sees it as mark of
strength that can engender innovative and vital political diagnoses;10 work that
emphasizes the tragic dimension of politics, highlighting the inescapable
losses, and losers, inherent to all forms of political inquiry and collective self-
governance; scholarship in which leftist individuals, collectives and political
groups are partly accountable for inequality and injustice and also have the
potential to change them; and scholars that accept a multiplicity of coexisting
visions for radical political, economic and social change in part by acknowl-
edging the partial quality of their own assertions.11 These modes of theory
address the precise problem of melancholy because they explicitly avow
responsibility, loss or a refusal of self-purity as starting conditions for critical
interrogation. While no single approach could be a panacea for the leftist
theory’s current dilemmas and each of these options is limited in its own right,
one thing is clear: recourse to left melodrama deepens the deadening work
of left melancholy and intensifies the pressing challenges that left political-
theoretical work aims to expose, scrutinize and diminish.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Sam Chambers,
The DC Queer Studies Consortium, Steven Johnston, Joel Olson, Matthew
Scherer, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, Neve Gordon, Elizabeth Weed, Linda
Williams and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and
conversations on this essay.
Notes
1 Melancholy, for Benjamin, is always a product of the historical moment it inhabits. Its
operations and source of sadness are temporally shifty; indeed, it is one aim of the Origins of
German Tragic Drama to investigate the constellation of interpretations for how melancholy has
been differently situated. Benjamin connects ‘Left Melancholy’ to the work in German Tragic
Drama when writing that left melancholy is the latest development of 2000 years of melancholia.
Left Melancholy’s deadening of revolutionary reflexes is inescapably situated in, and a product
of, its time period. Perhaps, then, the making dead of live things provides an accurate reflection
of the historical moment Benjamin analyzes: it is the work of commodification and alie-
nation, of capital’s turning the world and its inhabitants into dead objects. Left Melancholy,
possibly, encapsulates this turn, revealing the true story of the violence in which it is situated, of
a life lived through processes that turn all things into commodities and numbers, that render live
things dead for efficiency and profit.
2 I retain Freud’s term ‘object’ to describe what has been lost in left melodrama because the term
attends to the psychic dimension of the losses I examine. I therefore use ‘object’ as specific
reference to the psychoanalytic valence of melancholy, and do not intend it to mark a broad or
quotidian use of the term.
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3 The Manifesto did not function as a worldwide spark for radical social transformation until
years after its initial publication, yet its eventual influence makes it, perhaps, the most
galvanizing work of political theory in western modernity.
4 For the purposes of this article, I utilize a core set of conventions that generally are present
throughout melodrama’s different iterations, while being attentive to how melodrama manifests
differently in different texts and historical moments, in particular noting its differences in the
Manifesto, Empire and Homo Sacer. As Neale (1993) and Williams (1998) among others note,
melodrama references a set of generic conventions yet it also shifts and evolves; the term
‘melodrama’ means different things at different historic moments and social spaces, as can be
demonstrated by its varied definitions in Rousseau’s origination of the term, its use in the
American film industry in the 1920s, and again in feminist film and theater studies in the 1980s.
5 Sergei Eisenstein’s classic film Battleship Potemkin (1925) is a paradigmatic example of how
melodrama quickly transitioned from Soviet theater to film.
6 For the purpose of this essay I leave to one side ongoing and important debates about the
different roles and attributions of Marx and Engels in crafting the Manifesto. For a compelling
analysis of Marx and Engels’s various roles, see Carver (1999, pp. 22–23).
7 I am not suggesting that these books could be exclusively explained through recourse to
melodrama, but instead intend to show what can be illuminated when we read their projects as
melodrama.
8 And a similar question would be: Is the Bush administration the main line of accountability for
the state of emergency after 9/11, as States of Exception implies? Agamben (2005, p. 22) writes,
‘President Bush’s decision to refer to himself constantly as the “Commander in Chief ” after
11 September 2001, must be considered in the context of this presidential claim to sovereign
powers in emergency situations. If, as we have seen, the assumption of this title entails a direct
reference to the state of exception, then Bush is attempting to produce a situation in which the
emergency becomes the rule, and the very distinction between peace and war (and between
foreign and civil war) becomes impossible’.
9 On this point see Nealon (2009, p. 41): ‘Though [Hardt and Negri] caution that this
socialization does not mean that all struggles are alike, or that all exploitation is equally intense,
their stance clearly makes room for the affect-workers of the northern literary academy to
imagine themselves in alliance with the exploited of the global south’.
10 In ‘Occupying Hannah’ Jones (2008) queries whether she could, perhaps, have been as banal as
Eichmann, and thus insists on challenging her own sense of moral righteousness and drawing
from this insistence to galvanize social change. For a pointed critique of left righteousness see
Dean (2009).
11 See Coles (2005), Connolly (1995) and Johnston (2007); Brown (2001), Kaufman-Osborn
(2008), Puar (2007) and Wolin (2008); Borradori (2004), Butler (1997, 2004), Gilroy (2004) and
Thiem (2008).
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