Melancholy as historical konstruktion

Abstract

In his last work, the historian Enzo Traverso affirms that the utopias of the 20th century have disappeared, leaving a present loaded with memory but powerless when projecting itself into the future (Traverso, 2018: 34). The current era of historical presenteeism, as François Hartog calls it, mummifies all past experience, stripping itself of revolutionary potential and, in turn, nullifying the possibility of an emancipatory future in the face of the immanence of the same. This totalitarian historical force appears to us as an inanimate continuum devoid of any historical narrative. The dominant historiography is the product of the addition of disconnected stories, so much so that the rekonstruktion principle updates the past in keeping with the legitimization of the victors. Given this, left melancholy is an exercise that seeks to “rethink a revolutionary project in a non-revolutionary era” (Traverso, 2018: 55). In melancholy, unlike grief, “the subject maintains his fidelity to the lost object, refusing to renounce his link with it” (Žižek, 2019: 63). The culture of defeat collected the traces of the buried past and it is now, in a uniform present, where it tries to recover from oblivion that project completed in a catastrophic way. The objective of this work is to rethink and build the past in light of the recovery of what has not happened. To collect the unfinished fragments by means of the konstruktion principle is also to give a beam of light to the suspending power of the present time.