Gray Leonard

Working Through Left Melancholia in Brown and Dean

Wendy Brown, in her 1995 States of Injury, diagnoses progressive
discourse with an impotence that is sustained by a history and a historicity of
Leftist desire that is melancholically foreclosed. Identity politics is
conceivable in part as both product and reaction to this condition the
politicized identity accepts its impotence by resenting power; through an
application of Nietzschean slave morality, Brown finds that [politicized]
identity structured by ressentiment becomes invested in its own
subjection.1 To open up the possibility of a desire for [political] futurity, she
posits reconstituting the sovereign subject such that it is understood as an
effect of an (ongoing) genealogy of desire, including the social processes
constitutive of, fulfilling, or frustrating desire 2 However, what remains
unanswered is how a critique of capitalism a capitalism that as she
rightfully argues sustains the structure of identity politics3 can arise that
challenges the very basis, logic, of capitalism instead of a partial critique at
the level of how today's capitalism breeds sexist/racist oppression. 4
Browns pessimism about todays nostalgic and broken humanist Left limits
her analysis of contemporary radical politics. Jodi Deans on-going critique of
Browns insistence on reconstituting Leftist desire within a postmodern
1 Wendy Brown, States of Injury: power and freedom in late modernity,
(Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1995), 70.
2 Ibid., 75.
3 Ibid., 58-9.
4 Slavoj Zizek, Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, Please! in
Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, (Verso Books: New York, 2000), 96.

framework, through a re-reading of Benjamins Left-Wing Melancholy,

argues that it is not the modernist historicity of Communism that has been
lost, but rather the Lefts desire to actively struggle with the proletariat. To
sustain this today, she develops the notion of proletarianization by analyzing
Occupy Wall Street. Deans response to left melancholy is to re-invoke a
utopian, impossible desire for Communism that is formalized in the Leninist
Party, an empty vehicle for collective desires. This utopianism fails to garner
popular support because it does not do enough to engage with political
reality today resistance to liberal democratic forms of politics for the
promise of revolution lacks intersubjective overcoming of Left melancholia.
In this paper I will first articulate Browns notion of melancholia as well as its
effect: identity politics. Her response to identity politics is lacking because of
an inability to treat capitalism as both a possible object of critique and an
object worthy of critique. I will then point to Jodi Deans critique of Brown,
emphasizing her optimism of a Left that has overcome its melancholia. To
conclude, I will critique Deans impossible desire for communism by looking
at existing and emergent radical political struggles that engage with an
always-violent existing political structure to show that it is not utopic dreams
but minute and precise alterations that can potentially bring about radical
change outside of traumatic and ephemeral crises.

Wendy Browns Melancholic Left

In Benjamins enigmatic insistence on the political value of a dialectical
historical grasp of the time of the Now, left melancholy represents
not only a refusal to come to terms with the particular character of the
present, that is, a failure to understand history in terms other than
empty time or progress. It signifies, as well, a certain narcissism
with regard to ones past political attachments and identity that
exceeds any contemporary investment in political mobilization,
alliance, or transformation.5

For Wendy Brown, contemporary politics does not have a history. Opposed to
a historical emancipatory project, the politicized identity, caught up in
individualization, normalization, and regulation, makes recourse to the very
power structure that strips the subject of its freedom. To expand this claim
ontologically to incorporate non-political subjects, the (neo)liberal subject is
caught in a regime of disciplinary power that naturalizes capitalism and
normalizes social individuation. Subject positions are regulated through
classificatory schemes, naming and normalizing social behaviors as social
positions6 so that identities are private, mediated through interactions with
authorities, and individual. Politics within this structure of power only enables
the discursive possibility of giving an unaccounted for subject position a
place within the disciplinary regime. We find the results of this regime in
Browns mention of the purple hair ordinance that was passed by the city
council in her town, a perfect instance of the universal juridical ideal of
liberalism and the normalizing principle of disciplinary regimes within the
discourse of politicized identity.7 The ordinance banned discrimination based
5 Brown, Resisting Left Melancholy in boundary 2, Fall 1999, (Duke
University Press: Durham, 1999), 20.
6 Brown, States of Injury, 58.
7 Ibid., 64.

on socially determined identities and characteristics including race, gender,

sexual orientation, along with height, weight, and other de-politicized
attributes.8 The effect of such categorizations is that any potentially
subversive rejection of culturally enforced norms as themselves normal, as
normalizable, and as normativizable through law.9 The politicized identity,
individuated into normalized categories of subjectivity, treats politics as a
means to ensure that its particularity can be a part of the universal ideal of
liberal inclusion insofar as it is at the same time always excluded, disciplined.
The politicized identity cannot recognize the condition of its own subjectivity
disciplinary power because it relies on it for its politicization. As Brown
writes, disciplinary power infiltrates rather than replaces liberal juridical
modalities.10
The politicized identity is concerned with its own subjection to power
because it misrecognizes the disciplinary techniques that constitute it as
natural. Brown makes the leap from misrecognition to ressentiment: the
sovereignty that makes the subject strictly accountable is coupled with a
Nietzschean ressentiment - the triumph of the weak as weak.11 The
contradiction between the sovereign subject and the liberal task of social
egalitarianism breeds ressentiment between the right and the left, the
bourgeois and the proletariat, because desire is not oriented towards a
collective emancipation but rather towards claims of individual or group
8 Ibid., 65.
9 Ibid., 66.
10 Ibid., 65.
11 Ibid., 67.

victimization. The politicized identity is stuck in a vicissitude of suffering and

revenge, where one group who claims victimization attempts to enact
revenge on the blamed other. In other words, punishment and revenge are
the techniques through which politicized identities react to its own
disciplinary subjectivation and consequent impotence. This results in a
politics that is sustained by, but never questions, the sovereign subject of
accountability that liberal individualism presupposes, nor the economy of
inclusion and exclusion that liberal universalism establishes.12 At the same
time, the lack of a history, historical project, or historicity in identity politics
is essential in the structure of its desire for un-freedom. The postmodern
condition is marked by a lack of historical teleology this lack is found
present in the politicized identity. The modernist promise of a history that has
laws is no longer true; instead, using Foucault, Brown argues that history is
an irrational force that has no particular hold on political projects today,
which operate on spatial and infiltrational terrains. Of course, these political
projects are imbued with liberal political discourse that eschews any notion
of a history that could move beyond the present universality of liberalism.
Why can history be subdued in this way, why does it lack power in liberal
politics?
Brown presents a contradictory utilization of history in liberal
discourse: We know ourselves to be saturated by history, we feel the
extraordinary force of its determinations; we are also steeped in a discourse

12 Ibid., 71.

of its insignificance, and, above all, we know that history will no longer
(always already did not) act as our redeemer.13 This contradiction forces the
subject to incessantly react to its historical impotence its particular history
is powerless, foreclosed because it cannot be reinscribed as an active and
discursive genealogy. Rather, because identity is completely invested in its
history that is subordinated to the predominant liberal ahistoricity, the
politicized identity seeks to avenge his lost history ahistorically. The same
impotence in the sovereign liberal subject is also found in its history. This
condition is termed melancholia. Browns Resisting Left Melancholy
expands upon this notion of a melancholic loss of history in politics. In it, she
attempts to explain why a Left politics in crisis in late capitalism has lost
sight of collective emancipatory struggle. She turns to Walter Benjamins
1931 Left Melancholy, a critique of contemplative, disconnected Leftist
desire. The interpretation she provides finds left melancholy characterized as
the revolutionary hack who is, finally, attached more to a particular political
analysis or ideal-even to the failure of that ideal-than to seizing possibilities
for radical change in the present.14
In late capitalism, the Leftist subject has given up on collective action
and instead resigns himself to a narcissistic enjoyment of disavowing the
political condition he finds himself in. His lost object of love the historical
importance and even possibility of communist power is turned into an
impossible image that defines the ego. This melancholic ego is disoriented in
13 Ibid.
14 Brown, Resisting Left Melancholy, 20.

his present historical reality because not only does he remain captured by his
lost object but he revels in its loss similarly to the Nietzschean subject with
slave morality, he loves his powerlessness, his impotence. Because
communism was so totally lost in modernity the collapse of the USSR
famously ushered in the neoliberal end of history, but the Stalinist project
prior to that violently ended any utopian notion of a powerful but stillemancipatory communist project and because discourse today uses the
specter of communism as an impossible but total threat, the Leftist subject is
unable to productively reorient himself as long as he sustains his identity by
hanging onto the past by contemplating it, displacing its failures onto various
contingent failures, and attempting to revive it discursively instead of
actively. In the same way that the politicized identity cannot approach the
disciplinary power that sustains it because its identity depends on it being
unforeseen, the melancholic Left cannot coherently engage in late capitalism
because its desire is structured around a lost object of desire, lost in history
but still constitutive of the ego. Because of this, as Brown writes, [w]hat
emerges is a Left that operates without either a deep and radical critique of
the status quo or a compelling alternative to the existing order of things.15
This does not mean that melancholia is a permanent condition; it
arises as an abnormal response to loss, where the normal response is
mourning, reconstituting the lost object to accept its loss and move past the
loss. Brown only briefly addresses the problem of escaping melancholia, but

15 Ibid.,26.

her response advocates uprooting modernist conceptualizations of

communist emancipation and engaging with a new political and economic
dynamic where the authoritarian urges inherent to 20th century communism
can be undone and a coherent response to present (neo)liberal reality can be
formulated. Brown runs into trouble, however, allowing an absolute critique
of late capitalism within the political formations within liberal and neoliberal
discourse, including identity politics. She half-heartedly looks at Nietzsches
notion of forgetting as a way to move beyond the politicized identitys static
identification with its privatized history and individual sovereignty, but
quickly redirects because of a connotation of violence inherent to forgetting
forgotten histories and pasts are indeed the violent consequences of
capitalist imperialism and colonialism. More productively, Brown seeks to find
a way to give the politicized identity a way to recognize itself as an effect of
an (ongoing) genealogy of desire, including the social processes constitutive
of, fulfilling, or frustrating desire 16 However, her pessimism of Marxist
praxis disallows her to fully articulate the ways in which the very structure of
identity politics is dependent on, but forecloses any critique of, capitalism. In
order for the politicized identity to recognize itself as constituted by
disciplinary power, it must be able to see itself as a product of a fragmented
capitalism and a state that works to guarantee the continuation of capitalism
through discipline.

16 Brown, States of Injury, 75.

[W]hat we have come to call identity politics is partly dependent upon

the demise of a critique of capitalism and of bourgeois cultural and economic
values. [I]dentity politics concerned with race, sexuality, and gender will
appear as tethered to a formulation of justice that reinscribes a bourgeois
(masculinist) ideal as its measure. While Brown argues that theres a latent
critique of class within identity politics, identity politics does not treat class
as a condition of capitalism but only as another sphere of possible excesses,
injustices, and victimizations. Class only comes into discourse when a class is
excessively targeted, victimized; the structure of class distinction is accepted
and given limits of acceptability, an equilibrium, due to the sovereign subject
that is subjectivated as a capitalist who sees others as at least partly
responsible for their class position, or sees the violences inherent in class
difference solvable through calculated reorganizations of the market.17 Now,
two decades after States of Injury was published, politicized identities still
operate within a political field that does not realize the conditions that

17 A good example of this is the celebration of charitable givings by

millionaires and billionaires in liberal discourse as a political ideal
exploitation that directly or indirectly creates inequality is accepted so long
as one can see that capitalists have empathy, guilt, or a desire to humanize
the exploited. The actual, promised effect of charity solving poverty (the
popular use of the word solving in charitable projects can be read as the
liberal rationalization that systemic problems can be solved without
addressing the systemic causes but by harnessing ingenuity, innovation,
capital I think of the website advertisements that propose the user with
one trick that promises satisfaction without jouissance), ending racism, etc.
is always imminent; charities will never end a systemic problem that arises
from exploitation arising symptomatically from capital (not just labor
exploitation but (neo-)imperialism, (neo-)colonialism, etc.) because the very
conditions that charities operate it create the problems that charities
address.

delimit political moves. The Foucauldian understanding of (political)

discourse as a field of power relations is becoming more prevalent in radical
identity politics, but such a politics still depends on the homo conomicus
that seeks liberation individually or for a particular group without making the
connections between identities that have interrelated struggles vis--vis
capitalism and its complementary liberal state, and as a result collective
emancipatory desire stays latent, unconscious. Why is this the case? Why,
even after the financial crisis of 2008-09 and the popular revolt of Occupy
Wall Street that brought into popular consciousness the frailty and
destructiveness of financial markets, is a total, systematic critique of
capitalism in the United States an unfruitful and unexplored vehicle for
political action? Why is a critique of capitalism still foreclosed? Is the Left still
melancholic?
Jodi Deans Response: a Desire for an Impossible Desire of
Communism
Jodi Dean would place the narcissistic (re)actions of the politicized
identity within what she terms communicative capitalism. Communicative
capitalism reconstitutes desire into a circuitous drive that gives the
participant an enjoyment from an appearance of action. Importantly, acting
within communicative capitalism is only ever a semblance of action. Dean
writes:
Communicative capitalism designates that form of late
capitalism in which values heralded as central to democracy take
material form in networked communications technologies. Ideals
of access, inclusion, discussion and participation come to be

realized in and through expansions, intensifications and

interconnections of global telecommunications. But instead of
leading to more equitable distributions of wealth and influence,
instead of enabling the emergence of a richer variety in modes of
living and practices of freedom, the deluge of screens and
spectacles undermines political opportunity and efficacy for most
of the worlds peoples.18
Dean gives a variety of examples of communicative capitalism, often
oriented around digital political engagement such as signing online petitions
and sharing news articles, but perhaps most powerful is her analysis of the
anti-war protests that took place in response to the United States invasion of
Iraq. The massive protests that took place, such as 250,000 protesters
surrounding the White House or 400,000 in London19 failed to convince Bush
and other political leaders. As Dean writes, the anti-war message circulated,
reduced to the medium. Even when the White House acknowledged the
massive worldwide demonstrations of February 15, 2003, Bush simply
reiterated the fact that a message was out there, circulating the protestors
had the right to express their opinions. He didnt actually respond to their
message.20 We thus return to the impotence of liberal politics that Brown
identified subjects without power assert themselves politically by voicing
their discontent and, failing to effect change, resenting those in/with power.
Indeed, the anti-war protesters can claim their revenge by pointing to the
utter failure of the invasion and the release of the Senate Intelligence
Committees report on the CIAs use of torture that also proved completely
18 Jodi Dean, Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of
Politics in Cultural Politics, vol. 1, issue 1 (Berg, United Kingdom: 2005), 55.
19 Ibid., 52.
20 Ibid.

ineffective. Such retroactive satisfaction I told you so! denotes

ressentiment in politics today: the Obama administration did not prosecute
the key figures integral in committing war crimes and developing torture
methods because from their standpoint it would have been superfluous the
public found out, and they can judge.
For Dean, then, historical attachment is lost in the vicissitudes of drive
of communicative capitalism. The powerless still celebrate their
powerlessness and still treat power with a cynical resentment. However, in
her Communist Desire, Dean critiques Browns diagnosis of Left melancholia
through a different interpretation of Benjamins text melancholia arose not
from an inability to critically engage with the present political and economic
reality due to a libidinal attachment to the lost object of 20th century
communism, but from a failure of the Left to reassume a commitment to
proletarian struggle and collective emancipation after existing communist
projects were contingently defeated by liberal capitalism, instead opting to
treat class struggle as a contemplative object that can be turned into a
commodity for enjoyment. Thus, to overcome melancholia understood in this
way the Left must reincorporate its history and history itself. This allows
Dean to negate postmodern and post-structuralist critiques of Marxism such
as Browns critiques that attempt to reform Marxism by claiming that they
accept that there is no alternative to capitalism. As she writes, [t]his
[melancholic] Left satisfies itself with criticism and interpretation, small
projects and local actions It sublimates revolutionary desire to democratic

drive.21 Curiously, she historicizes Browns Resisting Left Melancholy,

published in 1999: Browns essay would then be a contribution to the
working through and dismantling of left melancholia22 because it accepts
the hegemonic discourses declaration of the end of communism in Brown,
the Leftist ego resents itself, sees itself as impotent and insignificant. By
declaring that the time of Leftist melancholia is over, that the Left has
successfully reconstituted itself against its lost object, Dean is able to
articulate and orient a communist desire outside of an a-historical liberal
discourse. The sovereign subject gives way to a collective desire for a new
emancipatory project. She does so by reinstating communism as a utopian
desire, where the subject presupposes the very impossibility of communism
as the condition of desire. This impossibility is what she calls the communist
horizon: a necessarily unarticulated telos to orient ones desire around. That
said, the impossible of communist desire is not the same as its cause. The
object-cause of communist desire is the people and, again, the people not as
a name for the social whole but as a name for the exploited, producing
majority.23

Critique of Deans Impossible Communism is it still melancholic?

To cement the escape from melancholia (that, to reiterate, arose from a
disavowal of the revolution instead of a libidinal attachment to the lost object

21 Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon, (Verso Books: New York, 2012), 174.
22 Ibid., 177.
23 Dean, The Communist Horizon, 204.

of modernist communism), Dean returns to the Marxist-Leninist conception of

the party as an empty vehicle for revolution. She reconfigures the party
through a reading of Occupy Wall Street in such a way that it still remains
impossible, unimaginable; as she writes, [w]e dont yet know how we will
structure our communist party in part because we stopped thinking about
it, giving way instead to the illusion that our individual activities would
immanently converge in post-capitalist practices.24 The nature of Occupy
Wall Street: a decentralized movement that aggressively resisted elected
leadership, opting for radically democratic modes of decision-making;
resisting centralizing its purpose or naming its target, but demanding the
impossible, to paraphrase Zizek. Dean finds in this new form of politics a
prototype that had latent in it the emancipatory demand of revolution: its de
facto slogan of We are the 99% was representative of this latent desire.
Further, occupation denotes a new form of non-liberal, non-sovereign
organizing that is able to incorporate collectivity and collective desire. She
critiques Occupy at a very interesting point: Occupy celebrates only
horizontality, treating verticality as a danger to be fought at every turn.
Diagonality is basically neglected, which means we havent put much energy
into developing structures of accountability and recall.25 This critique allows
her to posit the Leninist formulation of a vanguard party to retain collective
emancipatory desire. Curiously, she doesnt mention the panoply of MarxistLeninist parties that are active in the United States today that have the same
24 Dean, Communicative Capitalism, 20.
25 Dean, The Communist Horizon, 238.

goal in mind.26 In this section, I will explain why this oversight is necessary to
sustain an impossible desire for communism: Dean, along with Occupy Wall
Street and the Marxist-Leninist parties, fail to invent effective means of
political action because she insists on an always-imminent communism that
still rejects engaging with the political and economic reality of (neo)liberalism
and late capitalism.
Jodi Deans immediate shedding of a melancholic left is based not in its
efficacy but in its potential efficacy; it is based in looking at new theories of
communist practice that have been published since 1989. However, Dean
still insists on a communism that accepts the universal, ahistorical struggle
between the proletariat and the bourgeois. She fits this standardized notion
of class struggle into late capitalism by replacing the proletariat as an
identifiable, fixed class with proletarianization, a condition of exploitation
that is felt by the fragmented people who do not recognize themselves as a
single class. Most importantly, she fails to take into consideration the
specificities and history of political organization in the United States as an
important of political salience. In other words, I disagree with her assumption
that the Left has overcome its melancholy, and that melancholy is so easily
overcome by recouping modernist Marxist discourse and applying its
universals to a set of conditions that has not been determined to adhere to
the same political and economic logic. Instead, as Judith Butler articulates,

26 Such as the Party for Socialism and Liberation, Progressive Labor Party,
Socialist Workers Party, Communist Party USA, among many others.

melancholia is overcome through a constant intersubjective engagement

with others and with a shared reality.
Dean, among many other Marxist thinkers, argues that liberal
institutions of politics founded upon liberal democracy delimit possible
political moves. As such, in order to stage an emancipatory political act that
does not regress into ineffective theatricalities or, worse, betrayals, an
authentic revolution that totally overthrows the current system is necessary.
Given that it is total, it is unknowable: The actuality of revolution is thus a
condition of constitutive non-knowledge for which the party can prepare. Its
a condition that demands a response 27 Although the party can prepare for
the revolution, by its very nature a revolutions outcome cannot be
predicted; it is this unknowability that demands the existence of a party to
attempt to steer the revolution. In the same way that politicized identity
depends on its exclusion to exist, the party depends on imminence to appeal
to others. Every break, exposure of capitalism such as Occupy can be an
Event if the masses cohere and organize into a revolutionary group because
they spontaneously recognize the impotence of capitalism to assume
universality. In this formation as well, the future is unknowable: the desire for
futurity is not articulable until it is imminent.
What recent political events in Europe have shown us is that it is not
contemplative recognitions of an inherent contradiction in capitalism that
allows for radical political action but a concentrated focus on mechanisms of

27 Dean, 241.

capitalism that can be organized around not as an impossible desire but a

very practical one; mechanisms of capitalism that can be targeted through
already existing political structures. The European Lefts on-going
experimentation with radical democracy shows that utilizing democracy as it
is practiced in liberal governments can bring about a revolutionary situation
that is not dependent on a sudden, traumatic rupture of capital that allows
for claims of victimization, of excess, but a situation that can bring about
such a rupture in a coherent and identifiable way. Electoral politics places
radical language and discourse within the very power structure of capital and
the state. Instead of reconceptualizing the people into categories that
adhere more to a theory than to reality, democracy enables the radical party
to learn its terrain and to more effectively organize in that terrain.
Radical projects in the United States that consciously refuse to
participate in existing political structures only reinforce the impossibility of
their desire. They retain the implications of melancholic loss in their ego:
they are still dependent on the truth and unity of their lost object over an
experimental engagement with the intersubjective world, an engagement
similar to what the mourning ego would experience after a melancholic
episode. For Dean, the imminence of emancipation arises from capital itself
not the politics that sustains it. She assumes that once the contradictions are
made visible it will evoke an interpretation that has a possibility of success.
Because the crisis is always on the terms of the powerful more than half a
million protesters couldnt stop a war in 2003 radical politics must

incorporate itself into the power structure. This allows for a true vanguard
that doesnt depend on contingent events but can develop its own terms and
rework power from within. The American anti-capitalist Left is impotent not
because it lacks truth but because it does not seek power in what Benjamin
would call the Now, the present historical moment.

Conclusion
While today there are many emerging popular/populist radical parties around
the world that do not cling to an outdated, idealist, or utopic vision but rather
adhere to a pragmatic view of politics and conflict, there is a distinct lack of
such parties in the United States. Browns focus on American politics is a
beneficial starting point because it treats the United States as a particular
that has its own discursive functions and idiosyncrasies. This particularity
demands careful consideration of what a salient radical politics might look
like all too often crude communists are consumed in communicative
capitalism because they simply do not have the practical or theoretical
knowledge of the political framework in the United States that would allow
them to productively engage. Instead, every time traumatic events such as
the 2008-09 financial crisis occur the melancholic Left secretly desires that it
would be worse if it were worse, then capitalism will be sublated. This
displacement of impotence originating in a radical politics dependent on
existing power structures onto the excesses of power structures, as Brown
articulates, is what sustains the ego of the politicized identity. To reconstitute
the self in this power relation isnt dependent on a mistake of the master but
the incessant will of the slave that recognizes itself as such the radical
project that is oriented towards power from the very start, that enters
institutions of power on its own terms, is undertaking the usually
unforgiving and unfruitful process of radical reconstitution of the self and
collective desire without any promise of success.