A (Profane) Judaism against the Grain: Daniel Bensaïd and Messianic Reason

Abstract

Known inside and outside the radical Left, Daniel Bensaïd’s political and intellectual trajectory entered a new stage in the second half of the 1980s amid the historical changes of the period. This essay estimates the importance of Judaism as an issue during this new phase of Bensaïd’s reflection, particularly emphasizing how the emergence of the issue in his thought is mediated by a very specific interpretation of Walter Benjamin.

Key Words:

• Walter Benjamin
• Daniel Bensaïd
• French Intellectuals
• Judaism
• Politics

Notes

2 Beside his precarious material conditions, the death of his father cast Bensaïd into a melancholic atmosphere. In homework from January 1961—that is, six months after his father’s passing, Bensaïd revealed in a fiction exercise based on the poem “Les fenêtres,” by Baudelaire, a sensibility and capacity for imagination and a style of writing that is unbelievable when considering his young age, his prose laden with melancholy and disbelief (from personal archives under the care of Sophie Bensaïd).

3 On the CVN, see Nicolas Pas (2000).

4 On the baby boomers, see Sirinelli (2003).

5 In 1998—that is, more than a decade after his adhesion to the French Socialist Party (Parti socialiste, or PS), in which he became assistant to Laurent Fabius and, later on, a senator and European deputy—Henri Weber (1998) wrote a book in which he saluted the contribution of May ’68 as a turn “aplenty positive,” in the direction of a “more liberal, more democratic” society, with a not negligible “modernization of custom.”

6 On Bensaïd and the strategic debate in the 1970s, see Roso (2018).

7 “When politics is down, theology is up. When the profane retreats, the sacred takes revenge” (Bensaïd 2007, 9).

8 “En tant que juifs,” Le Monde, 18 October 2000, https://www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/2000/10/18/en-tant-que-juifs_3716759_1819218.html.

9 See especially “Hantologies de l’être juif,” the fourth chapter of Bensaïd (2005, 85–124).

10 Personal communication with Sophie Bensaïd in 2014.

11 One never starts from scratch but always “from the middle,” as Bensaïd used to say, following Deleuze.

12 Concerning the junction between melancholy and strategy in Bensaïd’s trajectory, it is worth mentioning Antentas (2016).