Interview with Daniel Bensaïd: On Politics and History

Abstract

This timely translation of an interview with Daniel Bensaïd was originally published as “La politique et l’histoire” in the journal Libre Choix in 1998 (no longer in circulation). In the interview Daniel Bensaïd responds to questions and comments posed by Michel Surya on a number of pressing problematics and paradoxes that revolve around his then recently published book Le pari mélancolique, which provokes readers to interrogate the epistemic separations among the social fields of history, politics, and literature. The interview addresses such themes as historicization including the plurality of times and comparisons in history; European identity and nonnational citizenship in the context of neoliberal “economic automatism and ethical consolation,” Eurocentrism, and an always already globalizing world; and the melancholic wager and role of aesthetics in revolutionary politics.

Key Words:

• Historicity
• European Citizenship
• Derrida and Marx
• Revolutionary Thought
• Melancholic Wager

Acknowledgments

This is a translation of an interview originally published as “La politique et l’histoire,” Libre Choix, Brussels, February 1998. It has been translated into English with the kind agreement of Michel Surya, Caroline Oudin-Bastide, and Jérôme Oudin.

Notes

1 See Collectif, Devant l’histoire, Éditions du Cerf, 1988.

2 Translator’s note: The English translation is taken from Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 93–4.