It has become commonplace to lament the current beleaguered and disoriented condition of the Left. Stuart Hall is among the few who have tried to diagnose the sources and dynamics of this condition. From the earliest days of the rise of the Thatcher-Reagan-Gingrich Right in Europe and North America, Hall insisted that the “crisis of the Left” in the late twentieth century was due neither to internal divisions in the activist or academic Left nor to the clever rhetoric or funding schemes of the Right. Rather, he charged, this ascendency was consequent to the Left's own failure to apprehend the character of the age, and to develop a political critique and a moral-political vision appropriate to this character. For Hall, the rise of the Right was a symptom rather than a cause of this failure, just as the Left's dismissive or suspicious attitude toward cultural politics is for Hall not a sign of its unwavering principles but of its anachronistic habits of thought, and its fears and anxieties about revising those habits. In short, the Left's disintegration and disarray must be pinned not on external events or developments in the late twentieth century, but on the way the Left positions itself in relation to those events and developments.
In his reflections on two decades of Left troubles, Hall often teeters on the brink of psychological speculation — he speaks in terms of fears, anxieties, and rigidities — but despite his extensive use of psychoanalytic insight in his work on identity and subjectivity, here he never takes the plunge. Undoubtedly this hesitation pertains to Hall's abiding generosity and concern for coalition building, his sensitivity to the potentially chilling sectarian effects of psychologizing those with whom one disagrees. So in what follows I shall briefly go where our angel appropriately fears to tread. I want to think about Hall's account of Left travails in terms of “Left melancholia,” a term coined by Walter Benjamin in the 1930s.
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