Daniel Bensaïd scholars often see his relationship to religion as strictly secular, informed by a necessary cleft between Marxism and religion. Yet in examining Bensaïd’s interest in asking how theological ideas can inform political life, melancholy is a key term that evades strictly secular boundaries.
In his biography of Bensaïd, Daniel Rosso writes of a perceived divide in his work between the periods of 1966-1988 and 1988 until his death in 2010. Bensaïd’s later writings, Rosso notes, venture from more strictly Trotskyist territory into philosophical and theological realms, especially through engagements with thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Charles Péguy, and Auguste Blanqui. Scholars such as Enzo Traverso, Fabio Mascaro Querido, and Rosso have characterized Bensaïd’s relationship to Judaism in these later writings as strictly secular. This seems to follow Marx’s logic as outlined in the infamous “Die Judenfrage” (1844), in which he argues for the necessary absorption of particular religious movements into a broader universalism. Yet for Bensaïd, Jewish theological inspirations were actually a necessary driver of rethinking post-1989 Marxism.
In his memoir, An Impatient Life, Bensaïd writes that “faced with the collapse of the former perspectives, we needed an aleatory materialism, allied with the subtleties of messianic reason” (285). He was especially interested in what Isaac Deutscher famously called “non-Jewish Jews”, or thinkers throughout history such as Spinoza, Ariel Uriel da Costa, and Rosa Luxemburg whose Judaism fed their universalism and revolutionary spirit. So did Bensaïd see both his particular communist family history and his commitment to Trotskyist politics as an organizer and theoretician. This interest in what Querido calls a “dissident Judaism” coincided with his growing body of writing on the Frankfurt School. Walter Benjamin in particular was to join the ranks of the inspiring non-Jewish Jews.
In Marx for Our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique Bensaïd argues that Benjamin provides space to reconcile materialist politics with theological concepts, especially through attention to melancholy and messianism. Benjamin coined the pejorative term “left melancholy” in 1931 to describe a milieu of pseudo-political intellectuals mired in moralistic indictments rather than real political alternatives. As Wendy Brown amongst others have written, this term is also a very apt for a post-1989 climate in which Marxists scrambled to regroup amidst infighting and political depression. For Bensaïd, the idea of “melancholy politics” feeds on the potential of repurposing such despair.
Brown and Benjamin’s references to melancholy align with Freud’s 1917 concept of a loss that one is unable to overcome through a process of mourning and thus internalizes. Bensaïd’s is rather based on a kind of heightening of political stakes that occurs when one decides to choose faith in an uncertain revolution over a despair for foregone politics. On the one hand, this is based on his understanding of Benjamin’s idea of a weak kind of messianism, especially in “Toward the Critique of Violence” and “Theses on Philosophy of History”. Namely, one waits for a forthcoming revolution born of divine intervention that may or may not arrive.
This idea transposes a Jewish messianic tradition in which time is structured in waiting for an eventual, as-yet-unknown divine intervention, into a political register. Just as the Jewish people await a divine intervention, so does the political subject await a revolutionary moment of violence from a divine force. In both cases, divine intervention means the creation of a new world order, even if traditional Jewish sources dispute the extent of this. For Bensaïd, Benjamin captures a particular political atmosphere that must be approached as a source of potential rather than perdition.
“The ‘messianic concept’,” Bensaïd writes in his memoir, “expresses the tension and anxiety of what is merely possible. Like commemoration, which has the curious ability to modify what science has observed, its anticipation is active …The inspired ‘remembrance’ of the Hebraic tradition is thus inscribed in the stake of the event: for Benjamin, memory is always at war” (88-89). Although Bensaïd himself often refers to Benjamin as a secular thinker, here he sets him in conversation with a Hebraic tradition inscribed in the messianic concept. Memory is not only at stake in Benjamin’s well-known adage to “read history against the grain”, but also as a future-facing idea.
“Melancholy politics,” Bensaïd goes on, is “the melancholy of politics: in the absence of any divine command or last judgement, faced with the uncertainty of one’s own result, decision inevitably assumes the form of a wager. It becomes melancholy when the necessary and the possible diverge…” (318-319). He thus understands melancholy here as the theological-political situation of a world living without the certainty of divine guidance or messianic intervention.
This uncertainty that has certain resonances with the Jewish relationship to messianism. Namely, it is based on an endless waiting for a divine salvation that may arrive at any moment or perhaps not at all. As Jane Svenungsson has argued, there is a certain kind of resonance here with rabbinic Jewish discourses, particularly an emphasis on uncertainty as the condition for justice and a rejection of a divine authority beyond the law.
“The strategic calculation of probabilities,” Bensaïd goes on, “makes the difference between legitimate will and arbitrary voluntarism, between a reasoned wager, which is the political condition of man without God, and an act of faith” (318-319). One must hope against, amidst, and ultimately with this melancholy situation, placing faith in political hope. Melancholy is not a Freudian loss, but a source of revolutionary action.
Pascal’s famous wager is based on the choice to live as if there is a God despite rational proof; Bensaïd positions politics along a similar axis of faith. While Bensaïd emphasizes both a lack of theological content or legal force, in the end his melancholy wager is an affirmation of faith. As with Pascal, the benefits of believing in a divine force in the immanent world are greater than a despairing and unmoored rational life. Michael Löwy argues that this logic is inspired by Lucien Goldmann’s 1955 The Hidden God, which positions Pascal’s wager as transcendental and Marx’s as immanent and historical. Yet Bensaïd’s melancholy wager is filled with faith, whereas his rational world is Godless.
This active waiting creates an active political energy. “Messianic anticipation,” Bensaïd writes, “is never the passive certainty of an advent foretold, but akin to the concentration of a hunter on the lookout for the sudden emergence of what is possible” (84). Leftist melancholy becomes a melancholy revolutionary anticipation shot through with shards of messianic yearning.
This vision seems to challenge scholars of Bensaïd who wish to understand his Judaism as strictly secular. Yet it is precisely this tension between particular sources of revolutionary inspiration and the yearning for a universalist revolution that makes his reflections on Benjamin so interesting. Inspiration can come from previously off-limits traditions, just as emotions once dismissed as despairing gain untold potentials. This is the turn from leftist melancholy to melancholy politics.
