Learning to Love Again

In a previous discussion, Angela pointed to the comments of Wendy Brown.  Though I am not very familiar with her work, I found this great interview where she discusses the current state of leftist political projects.  What I found particularly intriguing was her treatment of "leftist melancholia," particularly as it relates to finding a "productive way of coming to terms with what we are all losing, and with what must be put into play as the affirmative prospects of those loses, or the affirmation that comes from that loss."

Timothy Rayner: "... It seems to me that the problem of the left at the moment is like the problem of the person who has lost the one who gave them a future, has lost that sense of future and has to learn how to love again. How does the left learn to love again, to rediscover another future?

Wendy Brown: That’s a really beautiful question....Losing a loved one is not (or is only very rarely) like losing something that gave your whole life its trajectory, meaning, and above all else, its futurity. One can at least try to persuade someone who has lost a loved one that she still has a subjectivity of her own, that there are relational possibilities elsewhere. Yet for us on the left, to have lost, on the one hand, the very prospect of replacing capitalism with another social and economic form—if we really believe our critiques of capitalism are right, if we really do believe capitalism is fundamentally without the prospect for either equality or freedom for human beings—that is some loss. On the other hand—as I argued in “Neo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy”—if we are also losing liberal democracy to neo-liberal political rationality, that’s yet another kind of loss. It may not mean the same kind of devastation for the left. It’s more like the loss of the hated but needed father. Whereas the former is the loss of the beloved one. Together those losses mean we are one disoriented melancholy left. Is your suggestion that ‘we need to learn to love again’ the limit of the problem? What could possibly replace both the object of critique that the left as we have known it over the last several centuries has counted on, and the object of aspiration, the futurity that the left has counted on? We have to begin by saying, if we emerge from it, we are not ‘the left’. That identity is not the self-same left, it is some other thing. This is what some people working in the anti-globalization movement are trying to say. That they are some other thing. What I haven’t spied there yet—and this is not a critique, this is partly a willingness to say that I haven’t seen it, and I might not even recognize it if I do see it— ... is a vision that in any way replaces the alternative that communism or socialism held out. It is in the slogan that ‘another world is possible’, but I don’t know what that other world is, and I'm not sure that people who are uttering the slogan know either. Yes. We have to learn to love again. We also have to recognize that the ‘we’, the ‘I’, who will be doing that loving, if it is still committed, if there is some continuity in the cares that it has for a humanity that is in some way governing itself, as opposed to being run by a power larger than itself, the ‘we’ that loves again will be a different ‘we’ than the one we are.