Daniel Bensaïd’s Moments of History before Althusser’s Crooked Smile

Abstract

Two distinct traditions of French Marxism have deconstructed a linear representation of history: Louis Althusser and his circle formed around Reading “Capital” and Daniel Bensaïd’s own reading of Marx, inspired by Trotskyist thought. This essay examines the confrontation between Althusser’s and Bensaïd’s theories of plural temporality to demonstrate their points of agreement and disagreement, out of which a concrete theory of history becomes discernible. The essay does not simply reiterate Bensaïd’s critique of Althusser but explores the two theorists in their complexity to show that many unresolved problems of Marxism remain.

Key Words:

• Louis Althusser
• Daniel Bensaïd
• G. W. F. Hegel
• Karl Marx
• Philosophy

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Josep Maria Antentas for the invitation to this symposium, as well as Mathew Abbott, Panagiotis Sotiris, and Frieder Otto Wolf for their helpful comments on this essay.

Notes

1 For a more detailed account of Althusser’s relation to French Marxism and the French Communist Party, see William S. Lewis’s (2005) Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism and Panagiotis Sotiris’s (2020) A Philosophy for Communism: Rethinking Althusser.

2 I use the term the “French moment of philosophy” in the sense of Badiou’s (2012, lii) usage, which refers to the combination of a philosophy understood as an intervention of universality while also being historically situated in France, throughout the second half of the twentieth century. For Badiou, the French moment of philosophy “constitutes a new moment of philosophical creativity.” Bensaïd and Althusser intersected with this French moment of philosophy—there was a conjunction of Marxism and philosophy—specifically as communists committed to partisan politics, straining to renew and re-articulate Marxism at the theoretical as well as the practical level. This is a commitment that characterized a whole generation of “Western Marxists” that Isabelle Garo has identified, in her obituary of Lucien Sève, involving a necessary tension: “All engaged Marxists who remain creative can be considered to be affected, in different ways and degrees, by the difficulties inherent in it [the dual commitment to theory and communist politics], from the very moment they accept the link between theoretical work and militant intervention—a link that is tight, but that exists without either the fusion or confusion of the two” (Garo 2020). For this reason, this paper needs to be understood as an effort to come to terms with Althusser’s and Bensaïd’s appreciations of the conjunction of Marxism and the French moment of philosophy, contributing an “analysis with the goal of understanding this difficult and stimulating articulation of theoretical work and political engagement” (Garo 2020).

3 See also Bensaïd (2013, 78).

4 Artous’s (1975) thesis at the time essentially claimed that Rancière flipped from a scientistic Althusserianism to an antitheoretical kind of populist spontanism.

5 Bensaïd (1995) is clearly aware of Capital’s “strange object,” requiring complex conceptualization.