Sad Marxist men: on theoretical choices and intergenerational repair

Abstract This article examines “sad Marxist men” in an autotheoretical exploration of the interaction between intellectualising as a defence in Freudian terms, and the feelings thus repressed in academic work. Interspersed with autobiographical elements relating to the author’s own process of psychoanalysis, experience of political organising, and encounters with mental distress, the Marxist theorists Peter Sedgwick and Mark Fisher, as well as the author’s father, are viewed as both unconsciously and consciously central to their ongoing research. The psychoanalytic resources of Freud on melancholy and mourning and superego formation, and Klein on splitting, the depressive position and reparation are used as a means to explore a particular confluence of politics and feeling, theorised as “sad Marxism”.