Recent scholarship on Daniel Bensaïd draws attention to what appears as a paradox at the heart of his late work. On the one hand, Bensaïd devoted the last years of his life to engagement with Jewish sources, Kabbalah, and the notion of messianism developed by Walter Benjamin. On the other hand, he published Éloge de la politique profane explicitly against political theology (Antentas 2016; Querido 2023; Pafe 2025; Roso 2024; Svenungsson 2025; Traverso 2016). This apparent contradiction becomes more intelligible when we examine Bensaïd’s treatment of sovereignty in that very book, where his critique of one theological conception of politics reveals itself to depend on another. In what follows, I show that Bensaïd’s defense of Derridean sovereignty against both classical social contract theory and contemporary anti-sovereigntist positions can be considered theological even as it claims to be profane. However, the distance between the theology Bensaïd rejects and the theology he promotes is short.
The Problem of Multitude
Bensaïd’s engagement with sovereignty crystallizes in chapter seven of Éloge de la politique profane, where he addresses Michael Hardt’s and Toni Negri’s concept of “multitude.” For Hardt and Negri, “multitude” names something distinct from traditional concepts like “the people” or “working class.” It attempts to acknowledge the plurality and diversity of contemporary resistances while expressing the crisis of stable identities and belongings. The multitude, as Bensaïd explains, reflects political modernity’s non-homogeneous subjects who cannot be represented and cannot be dissolved into the abstraction of a hypothetical general interest (279-280).
Yet Bensaïd identifies three fundamental problems with this conceptualization. First, how can this non-homogeneous and non-representable entity become a political subject capable of common action? Without a common project, how can people act together to transform the political situation? The problem is not merely organizational but ontological—what constitutes the being of a political collective if not some form of unity, however provisional or contested?
Second, by rejecting the category of the proletariat, the notion of multitude shifts analytical focus from labor conditions to precariousness, from production to exclusion. This move, Bensaïd suggests, abandons the critical analysis of new divisions of labor in favor of a more diffuse and less politically operative category.
Third, and most decisively, despite its intention to refuse the hypostasis of a singular, capitalized Proletariat, “the Multitude becomes in turn a great mythical subject.” Where the plural formulation “class struggles” insists on antagonistic relations, “the ontology of the multitude” surreptitiously connects with the populist fetishism of a fusional people (291). The multitude thus enables a passage to regressive fantasy of unity—an escape from politics rather than its radicalization (300). Hardt and Negri would certainly contest this diagnosis, insisting that the multitude is precisely meant to resist any unifying metaphysics of the people; yet Bensaïd’s objection targets not their intention but the implicit ontology of political subjectivity their concept presupposes.
Derrida’s Political Sovereignty
Against this backdrop, Bensaïd claims that Derrida’s vindication of sovereignty is “more political” than Hardt’s and Negri’s critique of all unifying and totalizing political concepts through their notion of multitude. He quotes an interview where Derrida acknowledges that sovereignty “has its good aspects in certain situations, for struggling for example against certain global market forces…This is also what I say, in Rogues, about European democracy” (304. See also 77, 140).
Derrida’s position, however, is more complex than this quotation suggests. In Rogues, he refuses both the absolute affirmation and the absolute negation of sovereignty. On one hand, he insists it is necessary to call into question and limit the logic of nation-state sovereignty, to erode not only its principle of indivisibility but its right to exception, its right to suspend rights and law, along with the ontotheology that founds it: “In speaking of an ontotheology of sovereignty, I am referring here under the name of God, this One and Only God, to the determination of a sovereign, and thus indivisible, omnipotence” (157).
Yet in the same breath, Derrida warns it would be “imprudent and hasty” to oppose unconditionally a sovereignty that is itself unconditional and indivisible. One cannot combat sovereignty in general without threatening the classical principles of freedom and self-determination. Nation-state sovereignty can even become “an indispensable bulwark against certain international powers, certain ideological, religious, or capitalist, indeed linguistic, hegemonies that, under the cover of liberalism or universalism, would still represent, in a world that would be little more than a marketplace, a rationalization in the service of particular interests” (158).
This double position—simultaneously deconstructing sovereignty’s theological foundations while defending its political necessity—is what Bensaïd finds compelling. Where Hardt and Negri seek to dissolve sovereignty into multitude, Derrida maintains sovereignty as a contested site, an aporia that cannot be resolved through simple negation. What is decisive for Bensaïd is the temporal and structural logic that underpins this aporia. Derrida’s insistence on sovereignty does more than preserve a space for political agency. It introduces a form of expectation that exceeds purely institutional considerations and constitutes a messianic structure of politics, which, in Specters of Marx,Derrida calls a “messianic without messianism,” and which is influenced by his lecture of Benjamin (74).
Therefore, Bensaïd’s embrace of Derridean sovereignty draws on its Benjaminian messianic configuration, which he himself valorizes over Bloch’s concept of hope. As Bensaïd explains, “Benjamin excludes the category of Utopia from his writings to make way for the uncertain coming of the Messiah” (Bensaïd 2016, 45). For Benjamin, each present moment is charged with a redemptive mission: the revolutionary class pursues its emancipatory project in the name of defeated generations, as the last enslaved class (Bensaïd 2016, 46). This leads Bensaïd to a conception of history as open (Bensaïd 2010, 49), and of radical politics as both uncertain and redemptive—a conception reinforced by his references to Derrida’s sovereignty.
Indeed, the connection between Benjaminian messianism and Derridean sovereignty is most visible in their shared refusal of closure. Just as Benjamin’s messianic time refuses the progressive teleology of utopian thought, Derrida’s sovereignty refuses both the ontotheological closure of absolute power and the neoliberal dissolution of political agency. Both positions maintain an opening, a structural incompleteness that prevents politics from being reduced to administration or economic rationality. This is why Jayne Svenungsson characterizes Bensaïd’s politics as one that must be “patient in the sense that it enjoins us never to give up the work for justice.” Bensaïd redefines revolutionary temporality not as the arrival of a predetermined end but as a permanent vigilance, a “persisting struggle for partial or—in Trotskyist terms—transitional goals” (Svenungsson 2025, 56).
Conclusion: Between Two Theologies
The sovereignty Bensaïd criticizes—Rousseau’s general will, Schmitt’s decisionism, the populist fantasy of the fusional people—is theological in its claim to totality, its presumption of an undivided and self-identical subject. It sustains a theology of presence, a claim to embody the people’s will without remainder.
The sovereignty he defends through Derrida is theological in a different register: it cannot fully constitute itself because it remains open to what Derrida calls à venir (Derrida 2005a). This sovereignty does not embody popular will but holds open the space for political struggle and the emergence of new political subjects.
The distance between these two theologies is short. Despite Bensaid’s explicit rejection of transcendence, both maintain a reference beyond the empirical. The difference lies in their relationship to closure: one theology seeks to close the gap between transcendence and immanence through the figure of the sovereign who embodies the people; the other maintains the gap as constitutive of politics itself. Bensaïd’s profane political theology is not a return to religious authority but a refusal of political finality, a permanent openness to historical possibilities.
