By revisiting the myth of Joan of Arc, Daniel Bensaïd endows his political militancy with a potential theological scope: that of a de-phallicized thinking of the divine.
Inspiration comes 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.
Daniel Bensaïd reinterprets Marxism as a Jewish messianism of “patient impatience,” in which political defeat, exile, and even anti-Semitism become the paradoxical sites from which a non-statist, heretical, and universalist revolutionary agency can re-emerge.
Bensaïd critiques political theology while defending Derridean sovereignty—itself theological—and the distance between the two theologies is short.
“Neither of us would be allowed to do our jobs had we adhered to our practice of wearing a veil.”
“Balthaser’s history is a helpful necessity. Without it the obligation has no shape, no lineage, no proof of its own non-marginality. But memory cannot be the ground of the obligation, only its occasion.”
Reading Glissant is important because he not only asks us to think about political life in terms of public speech and activity, he also reminds us always to situate that politics within the landscape and the seascape.
As an indicator of national frustrations, the headscarf crystallizes the collective hysteria of a declining power that clings to its dreams and its extinct splendor.
I will explore the covenantal relationship between statehood and religion and its implications for freedom of religion for religious institutions unaffiliated with white Christian Nationalism.
In an era of shrinking democratic space, Bensaïd’s prophetic pathos cuts through both quietism and theatrical revolt, demanding a radicalism patient enough to build and urgent enough to act.
Islam in China is going through a period of architectural amputation called Sinicization. The result is a haunting landscape where dome-less and minaret-less mosques visualize deficiency as a definition of what it means to be Muslim in China today.
