Moi, la Révolution—Revolutionary Poetics in the Storm of Counterrevolutionary Times

Abstract

Daniel Bensaïd’s Moi, la Révolution revolves around remembrances of the French Revolution, with the word “remembrance” already resisting any commemorative embalming. But the book also queries the return of the feminine, that which is perhaps “without limits,” being a return to permanent Revolution. Exploring such poetics, this essay shows how the choice to make the Revolution speak as a woman ventriloquist then bequeaths a political and philosophical actuality to the revolutionary stake. Bensaïd’s book highlights an ironic, worried historian who gives the critical function a real existence in society without taking himself as a spokesman for the social. Accepting discomfort, uncertainty, and even intellectual torment, such a historian is confronted with their own ethics, without the aid of a preauthorized compass, and must build reference points by use of the “sensitive reason”: a reflexive tie to the sensitive experience of the world and to a position in it.

Key Words:

• Daniel Bensaïd
• Dialectics
• French Revolution
• Poetics
• Temporality

Notes

1 Quotes from Bensaïd (1989) are translations from French and page numbers refer to the relevant French edition of the book.

2 That is, Sartre’s (2009) practico-inert in the present, as he describes it in Critique of Dialectical Reason.

3 This is the subject of my thesis, defended in 1994 and published in 1997, eight years after the publication of Moi, la Révolution. See Wahnich (1997).

4 Here, I draw on Reinhart Koselleck’s (1990) categories.

5 This is the option taken by François Furet in a volume on the French Revolution published in Hachette’s major collection on the history of France. Jean Chesnaux (1985, 14) had already pointed this out.

6 On the meaning of historiographical divisions and particularly on the question of sequentiality, see Lazarus (1995).

7 For instance, see the edition published by Don Quichotte, with a preface by Arlette Farge (Bensaïd 2017).