This is a stunning book, one whose impact on critical theory will be felt for decades to come. And yet, the book is, to paraphrase one of its minor actors—Frantz Fanon—resolutely of its time, for ours is indeed a time of despair: “after dreams have become dystopia, after liberatory projects have fallen into disrepair, after progress, meaning, and reason in history give way to complexity, contingency, and new forms of subjection and unfreedom” (p. 52). Painfully present tense, we find this book perched amid the wreckage strewn about our collective feet. But to be simultaneously timely and timeless is no easy feat, and we have been despairing for decades now, if not a century. What has changed?

Despite the ruin of projects past, our moment is not purely one of despair—not in the traditional sense, at least. It is instead a point of inflection at which we tip from despair toward something else made possible only as the twin promises of Soviet communism and liberal universalism recede: “Despair,” Marasco tells us starkly, “is the refutation of the end of history” (p. 13). Where there was once end there is now beginning, in the dynamic movement of widespread popular struggles, but this possibility that explodes all around us—from the Arab Spring to Occupy and beyond—cannot shake off the residue of despair. And nor should it try to do so.

The Highway of Despair takes hold of this tipping point to salvage a dialectical concept of despair that allows us to think through these struggles that press forward absent a telos, despite the fact that we can muster “no rational hope that a brighter future will repay patient struggle in the present” (p. 1). And in fact from this condition, from our condition, despair—“the radical unmooring that allows consciousness to negate unhappiness”—“is the only way out” (p. 53).

What is despair? Marasco triangulates her notion against a sprawling constellation of what it is not: Despair is not pessimism or melancholia. Despair is not skeptical doubt, but “a negation of the simple negation that is doubt” (p. 40). It is neither Wendy Brown’s “wounded attachment” to the past nor Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism” toward the future, but a misrelation to the structure of the present. Most of all, despair is not nihilism, which destroys despair by leaving nothing to despair of, a letting go of attachment that actually makes life easier. Despair is what happens when that attachment persists, a stubborn humanity against a nihilistic world, and as a result, despair is the “surest defense against nihilism” (p. 4). Accordingly, despair is not the absence of hope but the “negative imprint” of that hope it cannot let go of—a hope “against all hopes” (pp. 17, 10).

Despair is instead “dialectical passion”—dialectical in that it is both internally “at odds with itself,” but also in the movement it energizes and propels forward (p. 5). To sketch the contours of this dialectical despair, this hope against hope, Marasco begins by pairing a Kierkegaardian Hegel with a Hegelian Kierkegaard. Hegel’s Phenomenology is best read “not as a roadmap to reconciliation . . . but as a philosophical staging of despair and its persistence,” and Marasco shows this by threading the needle of the despairing natural consciousness and the despair it suffers (p. 29). She diagnoses the centrality of despair through its absence from the text. Since natural consciousness is not simply skeptical but skeptical in relation to the world, despair is not a mere moment to be overcome in, but instead the “condition of possibility” of the dialectic itself (p. 32).

More than the mere splitting suggested by the German term Verzweiflung, despair is—in a phrase of Hegel’s to which she repeatedly returns—“utter dismemberment” (this gap between simple division and utter dismemberment is the essence of Marasco’s contribution to reading a despairing Hegel). This means that, for Marasco, “despair is the restlessness of the negative, or the energetic force with which consciousness keeps moving,” not one side of a binary to be dialectically overcome, but “the name for that undoing that the dialectic endlessly initiates” (pp. 31, 6).

Kierkegaard, Marasco admits, is “a dicey source” for critical theory given his antipolitical tendencies (p. 59). But as an anxious inhabitant of despair, there is no thinker more suited, and Kierkegaard points us toward the “disrepair” of the dialectic in which “Hegel’s speculative system promises a salvation that it cannot deliver” (pp. 60–61). Against Kierkegaard’s either/or of despair or faith, however, Marasco forces his opposition into dialectical motion by recognizing the ways that despair “prepares the subject for faith, but also keeps faith forever out of reach,” yielding a “permanently fractured” dialectic (ibid,).

The groundwork thus laid by this tense parallax of a despairing Hegel and a dialectical Kierkegaard, Marasco guides us along the highway, enriching and expanding critical theory as the paths chaotically diverge and intersect. Theodor Adorno, Georges Bataille, and Fanon all maintain “deep investments in the dialectic” and negative dialectics in particular, and each finds in despair a potent source for what are, respectively, “aporetic, aleatory, [and] untidy” dialectics (pp. 2–3). If they all offer something, however, none offers everything, and the very nature of their dialectics threatens at every turn to trip us up and lead us awry.

From Adorno, the poster child for despair, we get aporetics—the literal no-way of the highway. Here as elsewhere, Marasco does not refuse this well-trodden path, but instead walks it anew. She does not reject “Adorno as the figuration of despair, but the presumption that despair spells disaster” (p. 87). Insofar as Marasco hopes to rescue Adorno’s aporetic approach from those who instrumentalize thought, the argument is more than convincing, in part because, like Habermas’s “rescue operation,” those most opposed to despair fail to offer a politics remotely worth pursuing (p. 85). As her claims about Adorno become stronger, they become less convincing and even dissonant to the argument as a whole: namely, that “critical theory after Hegel begins with Adorno” and is even “unthinkable” without him (pp. 82–83).

Against the Hegelian temptation toward ordering, Bataille enters as champion of the havoc wrought by chance: “Chance sends projects into ruin, leaving their architects to despair. Chance rips our designs to shreds” (p. 114). Few are quite sure what to do with Bataille in political terms, but this uncertainty is part of the equation. He is not, Marasco insists, the “left fascist” of caricature, but a theorist willing to wager the world by refiguring Nietzsche’s will to power as a “will to chance” (p. 119). This is despair at its most literally playful, not giving itself over to the containment maneuver of probability but instead embracing the vertiginously “abyssal experience” of betting it all even if the odds are never in our favor (p. 123).

If the surety of the path and the denial of chance set Hegel apart from Adorno and Bataille, respectively, for Fanon this line is slashed by the knife itself. Hegel, in what is arguably one of the book’s most revealing readings, is mesmerized by the depersonalized mechanization of the gun, whereas Fanon is drawn toward the irreducible concreteness of a sharpened blade tearing embodied flesh. This is about more than just the abstract and concrete, however, but equally about the immediacy of a very real violence and about, paraphrasing Michel Foucault, critique as cutting, albeit in an even more despairing sense: condemned to brandish the knife blades of reason against worldly unreason with no hope that they will be effective.

True to form, Marasco confronts prevailing misreadings, and true to form, she presses unhesitatingly on. Contra Arendt, she rightly indicates that Fanon’s argument is neither a defense nor a denunciation of violence, but an “analytic of violence” as symptomatic of the colonial order. And contra those misconceptions about Fanon seeking out “authentic virility” in Algeria’s revolutionary struggle, Marasco reminds us of the obvious: that “Fanon saw women there too”—fighting, tensing their own muscularity, and carrying their own knives (pp. 141–42).

Marasco’s optic of despair, allows her to draw out “surprising affinities” between Fanon and Adorno (p. 19). Just as Habermas and others decry Adorno’s despair, so too did Albert Memmi disparage Fanon’s revolutionary faith as a cover for deep despair. Again Marasco accepts this charge while revaluing despair and sharpening it into a weapon—arguably the sharpest in her arsenal. Neither an optimist nor a pessimist, the despairing Fanon “permits ruthless critique to finally abandon its attachment to hope and find its dynamism elsewhere,” in a militancy that “draws its strength from despair,” propelling forth a negative dialectic that is irreparably “broken, fractured, damaged, or in some way thrown into irreconciliation” (pp. 145–47).

By way of conclusion, Marasco presses the reader to understand nihilism as a form of cowardice, against which dialectical despair is a tool for “becoming a little less cowardly” (p. 183). Fanon once wrote, “He’s an idealist, they’ll say. Not at all; it’s the others who are the scumbags,” and he meant both parts of this equation seriously (Black Skin, White Masks, 2008, p. 16). Refusing to be a salaud, the Sartrean term for those taking refuge in bad faith, does not mean embracing an equally cowardly idealism. This tense in-between marks the timeliness of The Highway of Despair, whose relevance far exceeds its own parameters because it confronts questions powerfully germane for the present.

Take, for example, Melvin Rogers’s recent insistence, against Ta-Nehisi Coates, that black folks “can’t afford despair” (“Between Pain and Despair: What Ta-Nehisi Coates Is Missing,” Dissent, July 31, 2015). While Coates rejects black despair in Between the World and Me (2015, p. 70), his refusal of “the comforting narrative of divine law” and “fairy tales” of “redemptive history,” resonate with Marasco’s own project. Or take recent debates about what is often called “Afro-Pessimism,” and which claims Fanon as an inspiration. Echoing Marasco’s rejection of the optimism/pessimism binary, Lewis Gordon has sought to reclaim Fanon from any pessimistic posture. At a book presentation at Red Emma’s Bookstore, Gordon insisted that “the problem in the formulation of pessimism and optimism is they are both based on forecasted knowledge, a prior knowledge. And in fact, what in the world are we if we need to have prior knowledge to act? You know what you call such people? Cowards” (June 10, 2015).

Against the cowardly refuge of either optimism or pessimism, The Highway of Despair might help us to navigate a different path without even meaning to do so, a radically dialectical “Afro-Despair” with Fanon at its heart, struggling forward without any guarantees of success but also none of failure, in which the only certainty is that “the war goes on.”