Marxism, the far-right and the

antinomies of liberalism

An interview with Enzo Traverso

Interview by George Souvlis

Práticas da História, n.º 7 (2018): 176-193

www.praticasdahistoria.pt
 Marxism, the far-rightand the
antinomies of liberalism

An interview with Enzo Traverso

by George Souvlis*

In 2008 the capitalist system in Europe and in the United States suf-
fered a severe shock from which has not yet recovered. Suggestive indi-
cations of this “permanent crisis” are the draconian austerity packages
implemented as a response to these developments, triggering the disin-
tegration of European Union, the collapse of democratic institutions,
the impoverishment of the working people and the emergence of far-
right movements and parties throughout the European continent. Few
are more appropriate to discuss the ideas underpinning this authoritar-
ian turn, and the historiographical complexities related to it, than the
Italian intellectual historian Enzo Traverso. Ηis work on the intellec-
tual histories of the Marxist left and the far right, the anatomy of Na-
zism, the wider discussion around the holocaust and currents debates
on issues such as Totalitarianism give him an insightful understanding
of today’s political momentum and its meaning for the left. Traverso’s
contributions in the field of history have transformed the way we deal
with the phenomenon of the far right and the nature of autocratic
politics, the history of the non-Stalinist left and the liaisons between
history and politics. This interview was held in early 2019.

* European University Institute.

 Mirrors, Rooms, and one Very Big Building 177

George Souvlis (GS): By way of introduction, could you explain

what personal experiences strongly influenced you, politically and aca-
demically?

Enzo Traverso (ET): I belong to an Italian generation that discov-

ered politics in the early 1970s, a rebellious age in which culture was
extremely politicized; both high schools and universities were bastions
of the radical left and I became an activist almost naturally, without
being confronted with moral or political dilemmas. Furthermore, my
father was a member of the Communist party and did not hinder my
political commitment. My sisters were deeply engaged in the femi-
nist movement. This very intense politicization had not only positive
features. Universities had been transformed into realms of permanent
assemblies and mobilization; students were often graded collectively;
courses and seminars were troubled and the most popular courses were
taught by professors who were politically engaged. At the same time,
the atmosphere of freedom and freshness of 1968 was over. Very soon,
the contiguity between collective movements and terrorism —the Red
Brigades and other armed organizations— created a climate of violence
and fear: more than a radical change, people were waiting for a violent
confrontation with the state apparatus. In this context, many scholarly
currents —structuralism and post-structuralism, existentialism, criti-
cal theory, psychanalysis, aesthetic avantgarde, formalism, feminism,
and several historical “schools” such as those related to the French
journal Annales, “history from below,” microhistory, oral history, etc.—
were assimilated through an all-compassing Marxist framework, either
Gramscian-historicist (the “organic” historians of the Communist party)
or “operaista” (the current of Mario Tronti, Toni Negri among others).
Thus, I discovered the tradition of conservative thought and classical
liberalism a decade later, at the time of the “crisis of Marxism.”
In the 1980s, the cultural and political atmosphere in Italy had
become suffocating and getting a research position in an Italian uni-
versity was almost impossible (a situation that has not changed in the
following decades). Thus, I decided to emigrate. I learned German and
178 Enzo Traverso

wished to move to Berlin, a city that was already powerfully attractive,

but finally I opted for Paris, because I received a French fellowship and,
in spite of a general cultural change in continental Europe, Marxism
seemed to me more vibrant in France than in Germany.

GS: Your first study, The Jewish Question: History of a Marxist De-
bate (new English edition Leyden: Brill, 2018; original French 1990),
examines how the Marxists between 1843 and 1943 dealt with the Jew-
ish question, as the title indicates. What are the main limitations of
Marxists of this period according to your view? Are they summed up by
their incapacity to effectively grasp the religious phenomena in history
and their difficulty in theorizing the nation because of their determin-
istic epistemology? Could you delineate the basic lines of an analytical
Marxist framework that could grasp effectively the national aspect of a
historical social formation?

ET: I wrote this book as a PhD dissertation, when I moved to Paris

and met Michael Löwy, who became my supervisor at the Ecole des
Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). A Marxist born in Brazil
from a family of exiled Austrian Jews, Michael merged the tradition
of German-Jewish culture —Lukacs, Mannheim, the Frankfurt School,
Benjamin, Marcuse, etc.— with the legacy of Guevarism and Latin
American political radicalism; this was quite unique and very refresh-
ing. At that time, the reception of the Frankfurt School was almost
exclusively limited to its aesthetic dimension.
First of all, this book is the history of an intellectual debate last-
ing over a century: its methodological premise is that Marxism and the
Jews experienced a symbiotic relationship and, therefore, this debate
dealt with two continents deeply intertwined. On the one hand, the
Jews drew the intellectual profile of Marxism and, on the other, Marx-
ism became a fundamental feature of modern Jewish culture; it was a
result of the process of emancipation and secularization that took place
in Europe all over the nineteenth century.
 Marxism, the far-right and the antinomies of liberalism 179

Positing that bourgeois cosmopolitanism was destroying national

boundaries and creating a unified —today we would say “global”— so-
ciety, Marxist internationalism always approached the “national ques-
tion” —and the “Jewish question”— as a transitional step of histori-
cal development. This offered a satisfactory solution to the dilemma
of Central and Eastern European Jews, who had broken with Juda-
ism as a religion but remained stigmatized by anti-Semitism. Marxist
universalism allowed them to struggle against both bourgeois society
and religious prejudices. Their Jewish roots were a powerful “antidote”
against nationalism. But the Marxist approach to the Jewish question
was not monolithic; it implied a variety of currents lasting from radical
internationalism (Rosa Luxemburg) to “cultural autonomy” (Wladimir
Medem); from Marxist Zionism (Ber Borochow) to Jewish messianism
(Walter Benjamin). In other words, Marxism allowed the Jews to think
a word without national cleavages and, at the same time, to think their
own “national” emancipation. In some respects, an analogous reception
of Marxism took place in the colonial world, where Marxism became a
flag of both internationalism and national liberation.

GS: In your next study, The Jews and Germany: From the Judeo-Ger-
man Symbiosis to the Memory of Auschwitz (Lincoln: Nebraska Uni-
versity Press, 1994; original French 1992), you argue that coexistence
between German and Jews was just a culturally limited phenomenon that
never took place because Germans never aimed to such a synthesis. Could
you present us with the reasons why this happened and provide the wider
historical context within which it took place? Also, in the second part of
your study you argue that Germans have not overcome their Nazi past. 23
years later since the publication of your study do you believe that the situ-
ation has changed towards the better? Can you detect any important shifts
in the ways that national memory nowadays is dealing with the issue?

ET: I wrote this book between 1990 and 1992, in the middle of Ger-
man reunification. In that historical conjuncture, many voices warned
180 Enzo Traverso

against the risks of the rebirth of the so-called “Grossdeutschland.”

The intellectuals of the GDR denounced an annexation and a process
of colonization that simply destroyed all the democratic expectations
of 1989. Their posture was well synthesized by Hans Mayer in Der
Turm von Babel, where he explained that the pitiful end of the GDR
should not hide the hopes it aroused at its origins, when it appeared
as a conquest of the antifascist struggle. In the Federal Republic, peo-
ple like Jürgen Habermas and Günther Grass pointed out that united
Germany had been the premise of National Socialism. For them, the
division of the country was an open wound that permanently reminded
the Nazi crimes. One of the slogans of the alternative movements was
“Nie wieder Deutschland!” (Never Again Germany!). The shift from
democratic claims (“we are the people”) to identity claims (“we are
one people”) announced the rebirth of ethnic nationalism. Thirty years
later, we can easily recognize that, hopefully, the German reunification
did not mean the return of National Socialism. Today, the rise of a
post-fascist movement like Alternative für Deutschland is related to a
European tendency and cannot simply be explained as a Nazi legacy.
Nevertheless, these warnings were legitimate and contributed to the
inscription of the memory of the Holocaust within the historical con-
sciousness of the unified country. In other words, the reunification led
to a form of Habermasian “constitutional patriotism” rather than to
the rebirth of German nationalism (and AfD is a late reaction to this
historical change).
At the same time, the reunification was a major turn that allowed
us to put the German past in a historical perspective and clarified its
major features. Gershom Scholem was right when depicted the “Ger-
man-Jewish symbiosis” as a myth: the Jews had transformed German
culture from within but, with a few exceptions, an authentic dialogue be-
tween Germans and Jews never took place. The so-called “German-Jew-
ish symbiosis” was a Jewish monologue. This contradiction was one of
the premises of the exceptional intellectual creativity of the Jews of
Central Europe, who always thought and wrote as outsiders. They were
the most brilliant representatives of the culture of nations that nev-
 Marxism, the far-right and the antinomies of liberalism 181

er recognized them as their legitimate members, that rather perceived

them as a foreign and dangerous body. The “German-Jewish symbiosis”
is a retrospective construction: it’s a “realm of memory” of the Federal
Republic of Germany, an inexhaustible Trauerarbeit, the work of mourn-
ing of a destroyed German-Jewish past. The true cult of this engulfed
past —German cultural archives pay astronomic amount of money in
order to acquire the manuscripts of Kafka or other Jewish authors— is
the expression of this grieving, and a symbolic compensation.

GS: Your next study, Siegfried Kracauer. Itinéraire d’un intellectuel

nomade (Paris: La Découverte 1994), is devoted to Siegfried Kracauer.
What do you think are his major theoretical insights to the study of
phenomenon of Nazism? Could he be considered as part of the Frank-
furt School? Do you detect any important deviations in his political and
theoretical outlook from that of prominent members of the school like
Walter Benjamin?

ET: When I published this essay, in 1994, Kracauer was still considered
a marginal author, known almost exclusively for his both very original
and highly debatable book on German expressionist film: From Caligari
to Hitler (1946). In the following years, he has been canonized: his works
have been republished and translated into many languages and many
valuable critical studies have been written in both Europe and the USA.
Kracauer was a very peculiar figure, almost unclassifiable: a writer, a
literary critic, a philosopher of history, and a theoretician of cinema and
photography. He was deeply linked to Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin
and Theodor Adorno, with whom he had a short love story at the end of
the Great War. He never belonged to the Frankfurt School, a scholarly
institution with which he had a conflictual relationship, very similar, in
many regards, to that of Walter Benjamin. He shared with both Ador-
no and Benjamin a “romantic” interpretation of Marxism based on a
critique of capitalist reification and instrumental reason, but he never
accepted Adorno’s conservative rejection of the cultural industry and
182 Enzo Traverso

popular culture. From this point of view, his discrepancy with Adorno
was radical. Kracauer considered images as epistemological tools. For
him, photography and cinema were not only authentic realms of aes-
thetic creation, despite their commodity form; they were also devices
capable of revealing, describing, and interpreting history and society,
what he called “physical reality.” The Frankfurt School merged the leg-
acies of Weber (the critique of rationality), Marx (the critique of capi-
talism and a theory of commodity reification), and Freud (the discovery
of the unconscious) into a radical but exclusively romantic, resigned
and sometimes conservative criticism of capitalist modernity; Kracauer
added to these sources a phenomenological approach inherited from
Georg Simmel. This is why Adorno’s dry and cryptic prose never at-
tained the literary quality of Kracauer’s German writings. Kracauer had
understood that the twentieth century was the age of images. Adorno
despised cinema in which he saw nothing but a form of commodity rei-
fication. With Benjamin, Kracauer had recognized the potentialities of
the mechanical reproduction of art works and did not build his thought
on a nostalgic remembrance of its lost aura. He had broken the Jewish
“Bildverbot” (prohibition of images) and this transgression opened new
realms of knowledge: a new hermeneutic of modernity.

GS: Your study, L’Histoire déchirée, essai sur Auschwitz et les intel-
lectuels (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1997), examines the ways in which
various Jewish intellectuals who survived the Holocaust interpreted the
experience of Auschwitz during the postwar period. What were their
main limitations and insights into the understanding of the phenome-
non just a decade after its occurrence? Which were their contributions
to the formation of the national memory of the Holocaust in Germany,
if there was any?

ET: L’Histoire déchirée is a study of the impact of the Holocaust on

postwar culture. It starts from the recognition of the discrepancy that
exists between our own perception of the extermination of the Euro-
 Marxism, the far-right and the antinomies of liberalism 183

pean Jews as a central event in the history of the twentieth century,

and its relative invisibility at the end of the Second World War, when
the Holocaust —this word did not yet exist at that time— was over-
whelmed and occulted by the magnitude of the war’s violence and
destruction. In this book, I sketch a typology of intellectual reaction
in the face of Auschwitz, going from incomprehension and neglection
(Sartre) to critical understanding and interpretation (Hannah Arendt,
Günther Anders, Theodor Adorno). I tried to explain that this latter
sharp perception in the middle of a blind world supposed a particular
gaze, made of both psychological proximity and critical distance, that
characterized the marginal position of many European Jewish intellec-
tuals who had emigrated to the United States. In my book, I interpret
this marginal position as the epistemological “privilege” of exile. This
“privilege” was gained at a very high price —think to an essay like Ar-
endt’s “We Refugees” or Adorno’s dark meditations on the “mutilated
life” of emigres— but resulted in some of the most powerful works of
twentieth century philosophy and critical theory.

GS: Which is your take on the relation between Auschwitz and Enlight-
enment? Was the former an expression of the latter’s logic, stretched
to its limits?

ET: At the end of the Second World War, antifascist culture depicted Na-
tional Socialism as a “throwback of civilization into barbarism.” Against
this commonplace, some critical thinkers —notably Arendt, Horkheimer
and Adorno— interpreted it as an authentic expression of modern civili-
zation. Arendt viewed the Holocaust as the result of the convergence be-
tween imperialism and modern anti-Semitism; Horkheimer and Adorno
as the epilogue of a process of the “self-destruction of reason.” Instead of
Hegel’s Absolute Spirit, they emphasized, the trajectory of the West led
to Auschwitz. In a famous aphorism by Adorno, “no universal history
leads from savagery to Humanity, but there is certainly one leading from
the stone catapult to the megabomb.”
184 Enzo Traverso

This epistemological shift radically changed our vision of both capital-

ism and fascism. It seems to me an essential achievement and a premise for re-
building a critical theory and a project of liberation in the twenty-first century.

GS: The next big important study you published was Le Totalitarisme: Le
XXe siècle en débat (Paris: Seuil, 2001), an intellectual history of the discus-
sion around totalitarianism. Could you speak about the origins of this debate
and what are the nodal shifts of the concept that you detect over the time?
Can we equate the Soviet Union with Nazism both in analytical and political
terms? Does the concept have any analytical value or is it just an ideological
fabrication in order to delegitimize any kind of non-liberal alternative?

ET: In this book, I tried to gather the most relevant contributions to

the debate on totalitarianism, which was one of the richest controver-
sies of twentieth-century intellectual history. It was conceived of during
the 1990s, the age of triumphant neoliberalism. Whereas in the United
States and western Germany the concept of totalitarianism belongs
first of all to the culture of the Cold War, particularly the 1950s and
the 1960s, in other countries of continental Europe, notably in France
and Italy but also in reunified Germany, it emerged in the 1990s, when
it became instrumental in capturing the meaning of the twentieth cen-
tury as the age of violence and genocides. In Germany, it meant the
“double past” of a country that had experienced both Nazism and real
socialism; in Italy, it allowed the former Communist party to shift
from socialism to left liberalism and Berlusconi to present himself as
a champion of modern freedom; in France, it accompanied the decline
of Mitterrandism and the burial of what remained of the Left. Perry
Anderson was right when he depicted Paris as “the capital of European
reaction.” It is there that François Furet wrote The Passing of an Illu-
sion (1995) and a team of scholars led by Stéphane Courtois published
The Black Book of Communism (1997).
My book took up a double challenge. On the one hand, it sought
to demystify a strong media campaign by showing its apologetic pur-
 Marxism, the far-right and the antinomies of liberalism 185

pose: the critique of totalitarianism was instrumental in legitimizing

the neoliberal order that had followed the end of the Cold War. On the
other hand, it attempted to reveal the complexity of a philosophical and
theoretical debate that could not be reduced to the ideological goals
of liberalism (“immunized” against both fascism and communism). The
twentieth century experienced new forms of total power with fascism
and Stalinism, both related to the inner logic of Western civilization.
Hannah Arendt interpreted totalitarianism as a unique form of the
symbiotic relationship between ideology and terror that aimed at de-
stroying politics itself, i.e. any form of interaction between different
subjects in a shared public space. There is also a Marxist critique of
totalitarianism —think to Trotsky, Marcuse or Castoriadis— that is a
radical criticism of total domination: totalitarianism as universal rei-
fication and the transformation of instrumental rationality into social
and political irrationalism. Of course, this critique of totalitarianism
has nothing to do with a defense of classical liberalism and its equation
communism=fascism=totalitarianism.
One of my conclusions is that, despite its pertinence in the realm of
political theory, where it can fulfil a critical purpose, the term is almost
useless for interpreting fascism and communism. We can detect some su-
perficial analogies between them, but they remain two antipodal political
phenomena in both their origins and their social and ideological content.
Even the violence they produce was deeply different, and the concept of
totalitarianism basically overwhelms and hides their discrepancies.

GS: In your study The Origins of Nazi Violence (New York: The New
Press, 2003; original French 2002), you make the argument that the
uniqueness of Nazism lay in its terrifying blend of many forms of dis-
tinctively Western violence. Which were these forms?

ET: I prefer to speak of “historical singularity” rather than of “unique-

ness,” a concept frequently related to mystical interpretations of the
Holocaust as a metaphysical or supra-historical event. In my view, Nazi
186 Enzo Traverso

violence was the synthesis, allowed by a set of exceptional historical

circumstances during the Second World War, of many tendencies which
had emerged in Europe since the beginning of the nineteenth century:
the birth of modern racism and anti-Semitism; the transformation of
conservatism and anti-Enlightenment into political irrationalism and
radical nationalism, leading to the birth of fascism; the triumph of co-
lonialism as a culture of domination and a practice of extermination;
the serialization of death and invention of industrial massacre, etc. The
Nazi aggression against the USSR in 1941 was at the same time a war
against Marxism and the Enlightenment, a colonial war for conquering
the vital space of Eastern Europe, and a war for exterminating the
Jews, the brain of Bolshevism and the intellectual avantgarde of a “low-
er race,” a kind of “sub-humanity” (Untermenschentum) in Hitler’s lan-
guage. If there is something “unique” in Nazism, it is this exceptional
fusion of many tendencies shaping the history of the West as a whole.
From this point of view, my interpretation of Nazism is antipodal to
that of Habermas: I see Nazism as the “distillation” of the West rather
than as the expression of a Sonderweg that separated Germany from
Western civilization. This genetic interpretation also tries to overcome
the limits of a theory of totalitarianism that simply depicts and crit-
icizes domination without paying attention to its historical premises.

GS: In light of what you call The End of Jewish Modernity (London:
Pluto Press, 2016) what has happened to the other part of the famous
polarity: Greece? Since the eighteenth century, major thinkers, from
the German Romantics to the Deconstructionists, have discussed mo-
dernity in terms of Hebraism vs. Hellenism, Jerusalem vs. Athens, the
messianic and the mythical, Abraham vs. Agamemnon and so on. If
Jewish modernity, as you argue, is over, what has happened to its Greek
counterpart over the last several decades?

ET: Used as metaphors, Athens and Jerusalem mean the invention of

democracy and the invention of monotheism, reason and revelation,
 Marxism, the far-right and the antinomies of liberalism 187

the contradictory pillars of the West. This is also the reason why Leo
Strauss considered their impossible synthesis “the secret of the vitality
of Western civilization.” Broken by Nazism, which transformed Athens
into a realm of “Aryanism” and Jerusalem into the symbol of an enemy
“race,” this problematic link was reestablished during the Cold War by
the partisans of the so-called “free world.” Today, for the ideologists of
neoconservatism, Athens and Jerusalem mean the alliance between the
United States (liberal democracy) and Israel (a Western bastion in the
Middle East). I consider more appropriate the metaphors suggested by
Toni Negri and Michael Hardt in Empire: Washington (the Pentagon),
New York (Wall Street) and Los Angeles (Hollywood), in other words
the military, financial, and cultural pillars of the West, a modern ver-
sion of what Polybius called “mixed government.” In this new config-
uration, Athens, i.e. democracy, has simply disappeared. I agree with
Wendy Brown that neoliberalism is a way of “undoing the demos.”
In my view, the end of Jewish modernity means that after the
Second World War, with the progressive decline of anti-Semitism in
Western societies and the birth of Israel, the Jews have exhausted their
historical role as the critical consciousness of Western culture, a sub-
versive subject that “deconstructed” and putted into question Western
culture from within, acting as one of its constitutive and at the same
time disruptive elements. This transition is symbolically embodied by
two antipodal figures that dominate the Jewish world in the first and
the second half of the twentieth century: Leon Trotsky, the wandering
Jew of world revolution, and Henry Kissinger, the strategist of US
imperialism. Obviously, this does not mean that all Jews have become
conservative or reactionary: hopefully, a Jewish tradition of critical
thinking is still alive and produces fruitful results. But the premises for
the explosion of intellectual creativity that took place at the turn of the
twentieth century no longer exist.

GS: In your study, Fire and Blood: The European Civil War 1914-1945
(London-New York: Verso, 2016; original French 2007), you criticize
western historiography with analytic tools that derive from the western
188 Enzo Traverso

historical canon. What do you think about this paradox and the wider
issue of the use of universal categories for the critique of liberalism?
Are they adequate? How we can we renew our analytical repertoire by
using non-western concepts, if we can at all?

ET: This book is an attempt at analyzing the entanglement of violence,

culture, and politics in Europe between the two world wars. It seems
to me that “civil war” is the best concept for capturing the transfor-
mations produced by total war in the anthropological structure of the
continent. A civil war is an anomic conflict that affects all dimensions
of human life and pushes violence to paroxysm. In spite of its aporetic
aspects —civil wars have always been studied as internal wars that put
into question the state monopoly of violence— this concept has many
advantages. On the one hand, it captures the end of classical wars, as
inter-state conflicts between sovereign powers have been replaced by
ideological or Weltanschauung wars. On the other hand, it includes
the enchainment of revolutions and counterrevolutions that occurred
in Europe after October 1917. Civil wars are the antithesis of politics
as conceived of by classical liberalism. This is the reason for which its
most interesting thinkers are —from antipodal perspectives— either
Marxists or fascists: on the one hand, Lenin and Trotsky, Rosa Luxem-
burg and Gramsci; on the other hand, Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt.
“Civil war” is a political concept rather than a “universal category.” In
my book, I quote many of the intellectual actors of the “European civil
war” (Gramsci, Trotsky, Schmitt, etc.) but I owe this concept to con-
temporary thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Mario Tronti and Jacob
Taubes, among others. Do these critical thinkers belong to a supposed
“Western canon”? Yes, they are not postcolonial thinkers; but many el-
ements of this “Western canon” could easily be detected in The Wretch-
ed of the Earth by Frantz Fanon or Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James,
and they perfectly knew that. I agree with Dipesh Chakrabarty when,
in Provincializing Europe, he explains that postcolonialism means a
displacement of sight rather than a rejection of Western analytical
categories.
 Marxism, the far-right and the antinomies of liberalism 189

GS: Should the left mourn its defeats? Should it also —complimentary
to this process— mobilize resources and memories for the past victories
like the antifascist struggle —both on political and intellectual levels—
as did, for example, the British Marxist historian did in order to wrote
their major works (E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm)?

ET: In my book Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Mem-

ory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), I argue that what
helped the left to overcome its defeats during the nineteenth and twen-
tieth century, from the Paris Commune to the Chilean putsch of 1973,
was the conviction that the future belonged to socialism and even the
most tragic failures were only lost battles. Rooted in a teleological vi-
sion of history, this belief in a final goal gave the left an extraordinary
strength, which today no longer exists. Far beyond the collapse of the
USSR and real socialism, the turn of 1989-1990 created a general aware-
ness that a revolutionary sequence had been exhausted. And this new
historical consciousness put into question the idea of socialism itself.
This does not mean that the left experienced a “final” defeat —think to
the myriad of social and political movements that have emerged in the
twenty-first century— but this historical consciousness claims a rein-
vention of the left, of its culture, its projects, its organizational forms,
and its methods of action. Socialism, I argue with Lucien Goldmann,
is a human “bet,” a possible future inscribed in human potentialities,
and we know that socialism itself can become a new form of barbarism.
This is the lesson of the twentieth century, which inevitably makes this
bet suffused with melancholia. One of the best book of Daniel Bensaid
is titled “the melancholic bet” (Le pari mélancolique).
Left-wing melancholia does not mean nostalgic resignation, pas-
sivity, or impotence. In my view, it belongs to the “structure of feelings”
of the left —I borrow this concept from Raymond Williams— that has
always haunted its history, from the French Revolution onwards. Chang-
ing the world requires not only strategic projects, valuable diagnostics
of force relations, effective claims, and strong organizations; a process
of human self-emancipation forcefully mobilizes powerful emotions, ex-
190 Enzo Traverso

pectations, and hopes. Melancholia is one of these feelings. After any

historical defeat, it charges with memory the process of mourning and
the building of a new perspective. In other words, left-wing melancholia
can become a link between the past and the future. I am not sure that
my view of Left-wing melancholia corresponds with Eric Hobsbawm’s
sensibility, generally suffused with resignation, as expressed in his auto-
biography, Interesting Times. As for E.P. Thompson, I would speak of
romantic rather than of melancholic Marxism (think to his biography
of William Morris). In my book, the most relevant examples of melan-
cholic radical thought are Walter Benjamin and Daniel Bensaid.

GS: Let’s move forward to the liberalism of today. Nowadays, the

emergence of xenophobic far-right movements is a common political
denominator in many European countries. At the same time, Tariq Ali
and others have pointed to the emergence of an “extreme center,” as
center-left and liberal parties increasingly embrace far-right policies. Can
we still speak about “political liberalism,” or do we need new analytical
categories to grasp these transformations?

ET: The new right is nationalist, racist, and xenophobic. In most West-
ern European countries, at least where it is in power or has reached a
significant strength, it adopts a democratic and republican rhetoric. It
has changed its language, its ideology, and its style. In other words, it
has abandoned its old, fascist habits, but it has not become a complete-
ly different thing yet; it is not an ordinary component of our political
systems. On the one hand, the new far right is no longer fascist; on
the other hand, we cannot define it without comparing it with fascism,
which in many cases remains its matrix. The new right is a hybrid
thing that might come back to fascism or turn into a new form of con-
servative, authoritarian, populist democracy. My concept of post-fas-
cism tries to capture this transitional status. In my view, post-fascism
is a regressive reaction to neoliberalism as carried out by the “extreme
center” in the last decades. In the UK, Tony Blair claimed his continu-
 Marxism, the far-right and the antinomies of liberalism 191

ity with Margaret Thatcher; in France, it was very difficult to recog-

nize any significant difference between Nicolas Sarkozy’s and François
Hollande’s presidencies; in Italy, Matteo Renzi was usually depicted as
an authentic inheritor of Berlusconi’s neoliberalism; in Germany, the
“grand coalition” showed that social-democracy and Christian conser-
vatives shared the same objectives: the final result of these anti-social
policies have been Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, Matteo Salvini, and
Alternative für Deutschland.
The European tragedy lies in the fact that the rise of these reac-
tionary and nationalistic “Europhobic” movements is a product of the
policies implemented for twenty years by the EU Commission itself. The
EU has become the tool of financial capitalism that has imposed its rules
—I am speaking of a compulsory legal structure, made of laws some-
times inscribed into constitutions— on all its governments. After two
Commission presidents like Barroso (today a Goldman Sachs advisor)
and Junker (the former leader of a fiscal paradise like Luxemburg); after
the Greek crisis of 2015 and ten years of austerity policies on a continen-
tal scale, the rise of right-wing populist leaders like Matteo Salvini and
Victor Orban is not striking at all. In other words, we cannot struggle
affectively against post-fascism by defending the EU; it is in changing
the EU that we can defeat nationalism and right-wing populism.

GS: Which similarities can you detect between the current far-right
that is emerging throughout Europe and that of the interwar period?
Can we call Le Pen and Trump fascists? Is it a legitimate conceptual-
ization? What does your experience of European history tell us about
the stance that an intellectual should keep today in the face of the disin-
tegration of liberalism by the ultra-right in France, the UK, and the US?

ET: Trump clearly shows —I would say ostentatiously exhibits—

many fascist features: authoritarian and charismatic leadership, hatred
of democracy, contempt for law, exhibition of force, derision of human
rights, open racism (notably against Blacks, Latinos, and Muslims),
192 Enzo Traverso

misogynism, homophobia, etc. But he is a fascist leader without a

fascist movement behind him. He was elected as a candidate of the
Republican Party, which is a pillar of the American political establish-
ment. A fascist president in a liberal democratic system is an anomaly
that cannot become durable: either democracy will reject this fascist
threat, or democracy itself will be put into question. A similar dilem-
ma, in an even more dramatic and striking form, is at stake in Brazil
after Jair Bolsonaro’s victory in the presidential elections.
At the same time, the new radical rights —particularly in Eu-
rope— have lost the “utopian” dimension of their fascist ancestors:
Bolshevism, their historical enemy, no longer exists, and they do not
pretend to be an alternative to both liberalism and communism. They
have abandoned their old ambition to create a “New Man.” They wish
to come back to national sovereignties, protectionist policies and the
defense of “national identities” threatened by globalization and Muslim
immigration. From this point of view, they are much more reactionary
than fascist.

GS: Could tell us in which ways do you think we can productively and
strategically engage with the Holocaust and anti-Semitism, since it has
been hijacked by the state of Israel and the European center-right?

ET: I think that Islamophobia has replaced anti-Semitism in the po-

litical culture and ideology of post-fascism. This does not mean that
anti-Semitism has disappeared —think to the recent massacre in Pitts-
burgh or the terrorist attacks in France a few years ago— or that the
current wave of Islamophobia is preparing new genocides. History does
not repeat itself, and Islam in the twenty-first century certainly cannot
be compared with a small minority like the Jews in the first half of the
twentieth century. Nevertheless, post-fascist propaganda turns Muslims
into the scapegoats of Western fantasies, fears, and psychoses. They
haunt current xenophobic impulsions, whereas anti-Semitism is declin-
ing in most Western societies. Furthermore, most of nationalist leaders
 Marxism, the far-right and the antinomies of liberalism 193

have very good relationships with Netanyahu and the current Israeli
government. Some among the most anti-Semitic currents of Western
conservative culture —think to Christian fundamentalists— have be-
come the most enthusiastic supporters of Israel.
A useful and effective politics of memory should inscribe the lega-
cy of the Holocaust within this new context: instead of legitimizing Is-
raeli policies of occupation and colonization, it should be used as a lever
against the current forms of xenophobia, racism, and discrimination.

Referência para citação:

Traverso, Enzo. “Marxism, the far-right and the antinomies of liberalism: An in-
terview with Enzo Traverso.” Por George Souvlis. Práticas da História, Journal on
Theory, Historiography and Uses of the Past, n.º 7 (2018): 176-193.