Editors’ Introduction

This special issue, entitled “Bensaïd, the Untimely,” revisits and remembers the person and work of Daniel Bensaïd, a one-of-a-kind public intellectual and militant of the idea and strategy of revolution. Edited by Josep Maria Antentas and Ceren Özselçuk, the issue brings together from different generations finely attuned essays that—while they mainly explore with fresh theses and connections Bensaïd’s trajectory after his encounter with Walter Benjamin in the 1980s and the resulting implications post-1989—also associate this “turn” with Bensaïd’s reworked reading of Marx. As Antentas puts it in his introduction to the issue, Bensaïd’s “diversion to Benjamin and return to Marx were part of a double simultaneous movement.”

A determining, universalizing moment in Bensaïd’s thought can be found in the way that he conceptualizes the present as “bifurcated,” opening to contradictory possibilities for interpreting the past and taking up positions in relation to the future. Bensaïd’s take on temporality intimately informs his other formulations on politics, history, scientificity, and the aesthetics of knowledge. In this sense, the essays also demonstrate Bensaïd’s continuing relevance for analyses of the conjuncture, experienced in related yet differentiated ways around the world, and likewise for reinterpretations of the revolutionary events of ’68, also experienced in related yet differentiated ways around the world. Thus, it is not arbitrary that some of the essays in this issue obliquely refer to ’68 in Turkey as well as to relevant connections to the political-ecological movements of the “dispossessed” that are taking place right now.

After Antentas’s concise introduction to Daniel Bensaïd, the issue opens with Michel Surya’s still timely interview with Bensaïd himself, “On Politics and History.” The interview, translated into English by David Broder, was originally published in 1998 as “La politique et l’histoire” in the journal Libre Choix, which is no longer in circulation. Timely, because the interview, which took place after the Maastricht Treaty in 1993, involves questions and assessments that still bear on the debates of the European Union today, with even more urgency than ever, and in a way foresees the predicaments that afflict the extimate borders of the EU in the present. In the interview Bensaïd responded to questions and comments posed by Surya on a number of pressing problematics and paradoxes that revolve around his then recently published book Le pari mélancolique, which not only enlightens and alerts readers about the contradictions and tensions that European Union formation encountered but also provokes them to interrogate the epistemic separations among the knowledge and social fields of history, politics, and literature, the continuing existence of which also informs the reasons for the political conundrum facing the EU. The interview addresses many themes: historicization, time in its pluralities, and historical comparisons; identity and nonnational citizenship in a Eurocentric neoliberal context, with its economic automatism and ethical consolations under globalization; and revolutionary politics’ melancholic wager in relation to aesthetics. In responding to Surya’s engaged questions, Bensaïd demonstrated his singular literary manner of handling a discourse, proposing theses and reflections that cut across and weave together the fields of aesthetics, politics, and history.

In “Recommence the Defeats: Bensaïd’s Péguy” Josep Maria Antentas follows the track of “the messianic turn,” which he argues Bensaïd undertook during the 1980s, up to his death, to reformulate his commitment to a strategic framing of revolutionary thinking and politics. This turn, which was heavily influenced by the works of Benjamin, led Bensaïd into contact with a “heterogeneous French heretical and antipositivist tradition that includes figures such as Auguste Blanqui, Charles Péguy, Georges Sorel, and Bernard Lazarre,” among which, for Antentas, Blanqui and Péguy stand out. Antentas’s essay shows a remarkable detail of research and contributes to a relatively unexplored dimension of Bensaïd’s oeuvre: that is, his relation to Péguy. For Antentas, Bensaïd read Péguy selectively, acknowledging his contradictions and ambiguities while drawing from him as source and inspiration a strategic thinking of commitment and dissidence and of necessity and possibility. Of significance for Bensaïd was Péguy’s understanding of temporality, which is “based on a rejection of the mechanical, linear temporality characteristic of positivist conceptions of history and philosophies of progress” and which enabled an understanding of “crisis as a moment of truth in which possibilities open up.” This critique involves a certain investment that privileges the present over past and future, memory over history, and a melancholic recommencing over rigid designations of defeat and victory. The conceptual implications matter for engaging with both history and politics, or rather for their revolutionary articulation. In “Bensaïd’s Péguy,” Antentas also unearths and puts forth some insightful linkages between the intellectual universes of Gramsci and Péguy, as well as those of Benjamin and Péguy.

In “A (Profane) Judaism against the Grain: Daniel Bensaïd and Messianic Reason,” Fabio Mascaro Querido explores further the significance and the implications of Bensaïd’s “messianic turn” after his encounter with the work of Benjamin in 1985–6. That context was one, Querido underlines, in which an epochal transition was taking place both in France and rest of the world “under the sign of crisis (that of bureaucratic socialism, or Marxism, and of the Left itself).” Benjamin’s “conception of time anchored in the present” opposed the deterministic “unraveling of an ‘homogeneous and empty time’” and thus involved a “revolutionary conception of temporality.” This conceptualization gripped Bensaïd, accompanied with other reference points to Spinoza, along his path to criticize the conformist and historicist determinism of progress in socialism and to reformulate the position of a militant intellectual who steered away from the antinomy of the conjuncture—namely, between “republican universalism” and “multicultural intransigency.” Yet Querido’s essay highlights another important dimension of Benjamin’s reflections on history for Bensaïd: notably, the articulation of a “dissident Judaism,” a profane messianic source that, in fact, also carries a new approach to scientificity, for reclaiming the past from an understanding of the present that neither petrifies nor totalizes but rather attends to “ruptures, bifurcations, and passages.” This source enabled Bensaïd to not only revitalize his commitment to Marxism but also demarcate a political critique of Zionism as separate from religious antisemitism while also developing the idea of a melancholic wager “on the possibility of another world.” In the end, Querido skillfully situates Bensaïd, a “sui generis intellectual” and political militant, as the protagonist of a sequence of organizational decisions, personal and political events, and intellectual and conjunctural turns, thereby interrupting the linear narrative of biography.

A common thread that has so far emerged in the essays of the special issue is the powerful influence that the work of Benjamin had in Bensaïd’s rethinking of “revolutionary temporality”—which, as the authors claim, especially weighs in the writing of his trilogy of history and memory. It is the first book of this trilogy, Moi, la Révolution, that Sophie Wahnich takes up in “Moi, la Révolution—Revolutionary Poetics in the Storm of Counterrevolutionary Times.” In this book from 1989, Bensaïd incarnated the French Revolution in the first person, speaking as a woman ventriloquist—in Wahnich’s words, a “Bensaïd in drag”—and thereby accessing remembrances of the French Revolution. This “Revolution-woman” counters the “Socialist-president-man as the orchestrator of the bicentenary” qua François Mitterand, the representative of the dominant (counterrevolutionary) tendencies of that celebration. Wahnich gives a special value to the concept “remembrances”: she highlights its literal meaning of “giving back limbs” and associates it with bringing back the “feminine” and the “limitless,” a position of living memory that is pitted against the petrifying bicentenary celebration of the Revolution. There is no access to reality, Wahnich says, placing the historian in a state of ethical decision making—a not so easily endurable position that Bensaïd himself assumed, and not so assumable by those in the position of the Historian as we know it. Playing with a number of sexuated categories and positions—such as fiction and history, remembrance and embalming, regimes of meaning and regimes of scientificity—Wahnich carves a picture of Bensaïd’s unique aesthetics as he brought together the triptych positions of fiction writer, historian, and nonactual philosopher, each with its uncertain definitions and porous borders, while remaining present to discontinuities, reversals, and multiple temporalities in a working through of remembrances. Wahnich’s text weaves a rich density of references that go back and forth across different temporalities, fields, and sites, interpellating (especially French) readers to interpret and freely associate. In this sense Wahnich’s text can itself be considered an example of a certain “poetics of knowledge.”

Next are two essays that perhaps speak to Wahnich’s “remembrances.” First is a combination of two interviews conducted by Bülent Küçük and Ceren Özselçuk with Nevhiz Tanyeli, accompanied by a small selection of the latter’s artwork in a sequence beautifully designed by Yahya M. Madra. Here, Nevhiz’s art continues in its longstanding vein of vital sensibility and productivity. Born in 1941, Nevhiz has practiced figurative painting as a living witness and activist member of the ’68 generation in Turkey. The interviews, which were in part informed by Bülent Küçük’s research on participants’ recollections of the events of ’68 in Turkey, capture “Nevhiz’s poetic sensibility, one that weaves the violent historicity of witnessed events with personal memories of the living” and the undead dead. This poetic sensibility shares something of the literary sensibility of Bensaïd, which several authors in this issue also associate with a certain intuitive capacity connected to bodily openings. For instance, it is Péguy’s nose—as Antentas quotes, from Bensaïd—that gives his capacity to “[smell] from afar.” And it is in Querido’s ears, a reference to Bensaïd’s “uncanny capacity to apprehend the inaudible, that which resists being unveiled.” Nevhiz says her paintings constitute a diary. It is a diary, the interviewers add, that “combines the personal with the political, the dreamlike with the factual, and the associative with the nightmarish and repetitive real of the past. Her paintings, while they belong to certain dates, characters, and places, thus remain open for others’ imaginations to interpret.”

In the accompanying art essay, several of Nevhiz’s paintings are collated with lines from Federico García Lorca’s “Sleep, Fly, Rest: The Sea Too Dies.” They depict the aftermath of the shooting to death of Hüseyin Cevahir (with twenty-three bullets in his body) “at the age of twenty-six by security forces that had trapped him in an Istanbul apartment,” a unique revolutionary militant of ’68 in Turkey, born in Dersim, with roots in the Alevite-Kurdish formation. Nevhiz’s paintings allude to the moment when he was being taken out on a stretcher from his apartment hiding place after the hostage-taking episode and killing of Ephraim Elrom, the Israeli consulate general, in another apartment—taken hostage to save Cevahir’s militant friends Deniz Gezmiş, Hüseyin İnan, and Yusuf Arslan, who were waiting to be executed (and were executed) in the aftermath of the 1971 coup.

Bülent Küçük’s Remarx essay, “The Forgotten Icon of ’68 in Turkey: Hüseyin Cevahir,” briefly traces this history from a (post)colonial perspective. He inquires into the forgetfulness of the counter-Left public in Turkey regarding Cevahir’s memorable political and intellectual influence and collective-building role during ’68 and its close aftermath. This question is certainly raised from a present of formative and ongoing exclusions from equal citizenship experienced by the Alevite and Kurdish peoples in the crisis-ridden history of Turkey’s Republican nation-state. Küçük argues that this forgetfulness is not “merely a matter of cultural difference.” On the contrary, his silent transformative effect on the Turkish Left was due to “his subaltern presence embodied in a ‘double memory.’” This double memory speaks to the interstice of belonging to and navigating two different worlds while carrying the burden and responsibility of rendering them intelligible and speakable about the gaping rift between them. It is through situating Cevahir in the path of this burdensome “bifurcation” that Küçük brings into relief the blindness afflicting the recognition of the dominant identity that has impressed itself on the disposition of the Turkish Left, despite all its internal conflicts, sectarian splits, and contingent political unifications. The essay ends with an enigmatic question regarding the life of Cevahir, cut tragically short, which begs for further investigation and interpretation while keeping in mind the constitutive effects of “double memory” and the fact that it is impossible to access the historical real: “How could such a kind, nice, thoughtful person like Cevahir, as reminisced by comrades, family, friends, and witnesses; who was able to communicate with all walks of people; who was intellectually gifted, wrote literary criticisms, and had an interest in art and poetry; how did such a person also assume a position as a bank robber or even a gangster, taking people hostage and risking his life to kill and be killed?”

The issue then takes a turn, with Darren Roso’s, “Daniel Bensaïd’s Moments of History before Althusser’s Crooked Smile.” This original essay brings the discussion squarely back to Bensaïd’s reading of Marx, inspired by Trotskyist thought in conjunction with Althusser’s reading of Marx and Capital, an encounter that Roso situates in the impasses of “the French moment of philosophy.” More specifically, the essay carries a symptomatic reading of Bensaïd’s “mature” reading of Marx, approached from the Althusserian point of view, and attends to the structural gaps of Bensaïd’s reading, especially in the ways that he treats Hegel’s dialectical relation of form and content, the notion of the epistemological break in Marx, and the related issue of the demarcation between science and ideology. Yet this is not a one-way symptomatic reading. Roso’s essay also pays attention to gaps in Althusser’s reading from Bensaïd’s perspective: the issue of the permanent pushing of Marx’s epistemological break to the final instance of Marx’s texts, the unsettled question of Althusser’s relation to Stalinist political references, and the unfinished analysis of the relation between contingency and necessity in aleatory materialism. Roso’s essay stages a productive antagonistic relation between Bensaïd’s and Althusser’s readings of Marx, initiated from the field of philosophy. In this sense, as with the positions of Althusser and Bensaïd, Roso’s essay does not aim to be solely philosophical. If Roso stages the antagonism between Althusser’s and Bensaïd’s committed readings of Marx as having roots in the field of philosophy, this is to bear upon the exoteric: the essay attends to how this antagonism can be used to analyze these thinkers’ diverging, though partly converging, takes on science, politics, and history. Roso summarizes this in his conclusion as the “nonphilosophical and scientific stakes involved in a materialist assemblage of thought. The stakes are nothing less than the production of arms for revolution.”

In the final contribution to the issue, Igor Shoikhedbrod reviews Bensaïd’s The Dispossessed: Karl Marx’s Debates on Wood Theft and the Right of the Poor. He finds the timing of the English translation’s publication opportune for the radical Left today as useful for relevantly addressing “a series of interlocking crises—ecological, political, and economic.” Bensaïd’s attempt at reconstructing Marx’s earliest journalistic writings on peasants’ wood theft and an early law to criminalize what had been a customarily accepted activity, Shoikhedbrod explains, is purposed to make “critical sense of contemporary forms of dispossession and of the diverse struggles to which they give rise.” Bensaïd’s approach is different than those of earlier texts on the issue, such as E. P. Thompson’s, with which he thoughtfully engaged. Different here is the scope from which Bensaïd rebuilds a lineage of “the antinomy in Marx’s thinking on rights, as reflected in his earliest writings all the way through his mature works.” According to the usual affect produced by Bensaïd’s writings, present in this book as well, readers are left in suspension with a desire for additional elaboration and analysis that they must perform themselves, especially regarding the question of “the diverse composition of the dispossessed in the twenty-first century and the resulting implications for solidarity strategies locally and globally.”

The editorial members, authors, and readers of Rethinking Marxism remain “committed intellectually” as we go on to pursue such questions.

—The Editors