The Communist Horizon by Jodi Dean

Author:Jodi Dean
Language: eng, eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso
Published: 2012-08-29T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

Desire

In a widely cited essay published in 1999, Wendy Brown uses Walter Benjamin’s term “left melancholy” to diagnose a melancholia of the contemporary Left.1 Her concern is with the fears and anxieties of a Left that is backward-looking, self-punishing, attached to its own failure, and seemingly incapable of envisioning an emancipatory egalitarian future. Timely and evocative, Brown’s essay seemed to capture a truth about the end of a certain sequence of the North American, British, and European Left. Attuned to the ends and loss occasioned by the disintegration of the “we” previously held in common by the discourse of communism, Brown provided an opportunity to reflect on the failures and continuities in left projects in terms of the desires that sustain them. Her treatment of a “lost historical movement” thus suggested a kind of left “coming to grips” with the reality of neoliberal capitalism and the defeat of the welfare state.

Read from the distance of more than a decade, however, Brown’s essay now appears to err in its basic account of what was lost and why. Her discussion of Benjamin is misleading. Her treatment of Freud is one-sided. Nonetheless, by analyzing the Left in terms of a general structure of desire, Brown opens up possibilities for reconceiving communist desire, possibilities this chapter extends as it outlines a fifth component of our contemporary setting that communism tags: a collective desire for collectivity.

“Left-Wing Melancholy” is the title of Benjamin’s 1931 review of the poetry of Erich Kästner.2 Kästner was a well-regarded poet, novelist, and journalist during the Weimar period. Benjamin describes Kästner’s poetry as giving way to the complacency and fatalism of “those who are most remote from the processes of production and whose obscure courting of the state of the market is comparable to the attitude of a man who yields himself up entirely to the inscrutable accidents of his digestion.”3 In a further essay, “The Author as Producer,” Benjamin uses Kästner as the exemplar of the “new objectivity,” a literary movement that Benjamin argues “has made the struggle against poverty an object of consumption.”4 Quoting “a perceptive critic”—actually himself, writing in “Left-Wing Melancholy”—Benjamin says, “With the workers movement, this left-wing radical intelligentsia has nothing in common. It is, rather, a phenomenon of bourgeois decomposition…The radical-left publicists of the stamp of Kästner, Mehring, or Tucholsky are the proletarian mimicry of decayed bourgeois strata. Their function is to produce, from the political standpoint, not parties but cliques; from the literary standpoint, not schools but fashions; from the economic standpoint, not producers but agents—agents or hacks who make a great display of their poverty, and a banquet out of yawning emptiness.” As far as Benjamin is concerned, left-wing writers such as Kästner are hacks with no social function other than rendering the political situation into amusing content for public consumption. They transmit the apparatus of production rather than transform it, assimilating revolutionary themes into the bourgeois apparatus of production and publication while in no way placing in question the existence of the bourgeois class.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.