If the new world order after 1945 held a promise, the theo-political need of the present hour is a messianism of disappointment. This is one possible title for what Daniel Bensaïd described in 2004 as Une lente impatience, a slow or patient impatience (English: An Impatient Life). In that book, Bensaïd shaped his thought as a narrative, a personal story, of himself and the 1968 generation, which is the immediate history of our present hour. Bensaïd’s generation did not speak theology but historical materialism. In his tale, messianism dawned on Marxist thought when the revolution was disappointed, dematerialized by history.
Death of the Revolution
Scripture was there all along, he will tell. His narrative often makes biblical allusions, as if without them the events would not be completely intelligible, or they would not really be events. 1968 was disappointed to the point of disappearance: the year is infinitely more well known than what actually happened, and the prevalent version is that nothing actually did. Yet, in Bensaïd’s memory May 1968 was the battle for the promised land: “We marched beneath the walls at Renault-Billancourt factory as if they would crumble, like the walls of Jericho, at the sound of our hoarse megaphones” (83).
The story is about the defeat. As Bensaïd repeatedly notes, the ’68 revolutionaries, like Moses, never entered Canaan. The disappointment is a drama of multiple acts. There’s the electoral failure of 1974, for instance. But the real demise takes place in the late 1970s. The year of the final destruction is 1979, as information about the horrors of China’s cultural revolution and Cambodia’s genocide reach Western media and the Islamic Revolution breaks in Iran, a revolution to religion.
The revolutionary idea implodes from within. Bensaïd quotes Foucault: “Is it so desirable, this revolution?” (281). That same year the Revolutionary Communist League stops publishing its daily, Rouge quotidien, coedited by Bensaïd. He feels “death in the soul” (246). In the 1980s the death of the revolution spreads through neoliberal reforms worldwide, in 1989 it erased the Soviets and in 1991 it invaded the Gulf.
Subtleties of Messianic Reason
Death opens the door for the messiah. “Faced with the collapse of horizons of expectation, we needed an aleatory materialism, allied with the subtleties of messianic reason” (402). Messianism is for losers, for failed wannabees, who were proven wrong by history. For those who nonetheless still believe, the only salvation lies beyond historical reason, in another rationality, which proves the losers right in being wrong. Restoration begins with an epistemological search for intelligibility beyond historical materialism, for lucidity prior to Enlightenment. It requires “ressourcement” (402).
The source Bensaïd goes back to in the 1980s is Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah. More precisely, he goes back to the reception of Kabbalistic ideas in German-Jewish thought, where traditional Jewish knowledge was translated into the language of Enlightenment. He mentions Scholem, but also Fritz Mauthner, Gustav Landauer, Rosenzweig, Bloch, Lukacs, Tucholsky. His primary reference is Benjamin’s On the Concept of History, the epistle of the dying prophet to the defeated left.
The core insight that Bensaïd finds in Benjamin: if history is written by the powerful, messianism offers no alternative history, but an alternative to history, a different termporality of being. History valorizes existence as continuity, things remaining as they are, being as inertia or passivity. In contrast, messianic time is not duration but interruption. Messianic existence is not passive but impatience, it is action, revolution. From the perspective of history, messianism exists therefore not as being but as nonbeing, not as real but as – Derrida indicated this word in Marx, Bensaïd in Heine – spectral. From the perspective of messianic temporality, only losers can be right.
Moses and Marx
Restoring begins by re-storying, by retelling the past so as to redeem those who lost. Bensaïd retells 1968 by reframing communism not as material history but as a messianic happening. The point of departure is the first prophecy. The communist Moses is Marx. Bensaïd reads The Capital as the Old Testament, the revelation of creation: “At the beginning was the commodity” (431).
Following a central motive in 20th century Jewish thought, Bensaïd understands the story of creation, both by Moses and by Marx, and by all their later prophets and messias, as affirming not the eternal order of the world, but in contrast the possibility of reshaping it. Mosaism and Marxism are not religions but – a word dear to Bensaïd – heresies, they are not conservative, but impatient. Just as Moses’s Torah mobilized a popular liberation movement, Lenin translated Marx’s revelation to revolution.
What is the story? What is the great threat to the prophetic revolution? It is nothing outside of itself. Here lies the subtlety. The end of becoming is being, and the death of the revolution is its institution. The messianic movement, resisting historical mechanism, itself becomes history and so generates its own enemy, the counterrevolution.
After revelation, the heavy desert heat – Thermidor – sets again, and the fire of Sinai rematerializes as a mountain. The revolution’s demise is its own historical success: it becomes a state and turns against itself. Moses’s liberation movement became the Kingdom of Judea. Communism turned into the Stalinist Empire. The state puts heresy to sleep, retransforms critique to dogmatic slumber and impatience to passivity. In kabbalistic terms, the vital light is buried in the shell, in the qelippah.
Redemption: Mao and Paul
The main dilemma of any messianic movement, the central challenge of messianic reason, is how to respond to the necessary transformation of interruption to history, of revolution to state, of Marxism to Stalinism. The question is how to counter the counterrevolution, that is how to end it, or – as the question often arises in history – how to interpret and respond to its end. This is the dilemma of the year 70, which brought the demise of Jerusalem, and of the year 1968, which announced the end of the USSR.
Bensaïd’s analyses reveal two main possible responses, based on two different interpretations, two narratives about the end of the counterrevolutionary state. The first response interprets the fall of the messianic state as the end of history. It tells it as an event of redemption, of a messianic coming that restores the purity of creation before or beyond history. This is how Bensaïd understands the Maoist end of Stalinism. Mao’s cultural revolution countered the institutionalization of communism with the “fetishism of the event without historicity,” seeking to generate “absolutely new humanity” (405). If Stalin petrified Marxism in pure passivity, Mao dissolved it in pure impatience.
In post-1968 France, Bensaïd attributes the Maoist position to Alain Badiou, who in a “theological inversion” withdrew revolutionary action from history and invested it in a miracle-like event “beyond all calculation” (105). Bensaïd criticizes that this event-theology divests history from political meaning and so paradoxically acknowledges the historical right of the empire. Bensaïd does not mention Badiou’s Paul, but his critique echoes criticism common among French Jewish thinkers (such as Levinas or Benny Levy) against gnostic Christianity that banishes God from the world and delivers history to Rome.
Destruction: Trotsky and the Old Jews
The second response to the fall of the messianic state – Judean or Soviet – does not interpret it as the redemptive end of history. On the contrary, it tells the story of destruction, which opens the history of messianic action as counter-statist existence, as galuth. The second response to the counterrevolutionary empire does not depart from history, but reconfigures messianism as resistance to power, as a discontinuous tradition of interruptions, a holy history of losers. Against pure passivity and pure impatience, Bensaïd posits a messianic temporality of “patient impatience” (30).
He traces this messianic tradition back to the Old Testament, invoking Moses, who “never reached Canaan” (445), and Jeremiah, the prophet of the first exile in Babylonia, who announced that “it will be long.” Patient impatience is historical messianic agency in the form of galuth. Bensaïd’s reading of scriptural tradition is however shaped not by Babylonian Judeans. Linking messianic patience to “the Bilderverbot of the old Jews” (9), he refers not to the Talmud Bavli but to German Jewish thought.
Among the prophets of Marxism, in contrast to both Stalin’s counterrevolution and Mao’s final revolution, Bensaïd discerns patient impatience in Trotsky’s permanent revolution. He himself became a messiah of post-1968 Trotskyism, carrying on political action in the Revolutionary Communist League and the Fourth International. The Trotskyists (note how the German trotz-kysts means ‘stiff-necked people’), who in general refrained from recruiting, are compared by Bensaïd (also commenting on Jewish overrepresentation in Trotskyist organizations) to “a ‘chosen people’ with little inclination to proselytism” (128).
Non-Jewish Jew
Bensaïd’s narrative dives deeper. Moses and Marx do not just develop structurally analogous messianic projects. They belong to the same revolution. This intertwinement or genealogy is crucial for understanding the post-1968 era to the present moment not only through the dialectics of Marxist positions, but through the more complex articulation of leftist and Jewish positionalities, in which Bensaïd situates himself.
The key lies in the way that Bensaïd understands the concrete historical deployment of Jewish messianism as “patient impatience,” namely his concept galuth. His inspiration is kabbalistic, with German-Jewish mediation. He offers no explicit exposition, but seems to draw on the Lurianic-Hassidic notion of redemptive action in the world as “descent” into the qelippa, the “shell,” in order to release or “elevate” the sparks of light trapped in it. Messianic agency does not turn away from the sinful world to a purified existence. On the contrary, the righteous must leave the holy land and work in exile. Galut is impatience submerged in patience.
The messianic militant must therefore turn their back on their own community. For Bensaïd, the seminal Mosaic gesture, the corner stone of Jewish tradition, is heresy. The protagonists of his galuth history are Jewish heretics, such as Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank. The galuth Jew, the authentic one, is accordingly – Bensaïd quotes Isaac Deutscher – the non-Jewish Jew.
This conception harks back to theo-political responses to unprecedented phenomena of Jewish assimilation in non-Jewish societies in modern times, first as conversos in the Iberian church and later as citizens in secular European states. It interprets assimilation not as the end of Jewish galuth. On the contrary, assimilation enhanced galuth, by erasing not only Jewish life but the Jewish consciousness of the conversos, thereby exiling their Jewishness, exiling them as Jews into the unconscious, into spectral nonbeing. Upon entering modernity, messianic Jewish militants do not entirely vanish, they continue to exist as secret, dormant agents, unbeknownst even to themselves.
It is as such a state of dormancy that Bensaïd portrays his own non-Jewish Jewish childhood, hanging out in his father’s bistro in Toulouse, where on Monday mornings “the floor would be scattered with shells and lupin pods, looking like the aftermath of a battle or the qelippot of the Kabbalah” (40).
Marranism as Anti-Anti-Semitism
The wakeup comes from no transcendence, it is immanent. The qelippot being qelippot, goodness turned evil, Marx turned Stalin, the revolutionaries, even dormant, find no peace in the world. Their passivity, within the existing order of things, within the state, turns against them, necessarily become suffering, passion. The assimilated, non-Jewish Jews are called back to their Jewishness by persecutions, by the call of anti-Semitism, just like Bensaïd and his father before him. Anti-Semitism rejudaizes conversos into Marranos, who for Bensaïd are the paradigmatic messianic Jews: “The Marrano is both patient and impatient. Slowly. He bets on the long run” (400).
The Marranos, disillusioned conversos, have no positive Judaism, no tradition, no knowledge, no identity. Their Jewishness emerges as the negation of their non-Jewish identity, which is their only identity, such that for them being Jewish means having no identity. Marrano Jewishness draws its meaning from its response to anti-Jewish hate. Bensaïd describes his father as Jewish “by defiance” (384). Marranism is the modern regeneration of Judaism through the power of anti-anti-Semitism.
The multiple positionalities of modern Jewishness, in the sense of Jewish existence that assimilated into the modern state, may be mapped based on divergent anti-anti-Semitic attitudes. For the post-Holocaust generation, Jean-Paul Sartre distinguished two basic attitudes. One kind of Jewishness is based on utter denial of the anti-Semitic call. This Jewish position responds to anti-Semitism by denying its Jewishness and so generates a self-denying, or inauthentic Jewish consciousness. In contrast, authentic Jewishness internalizes the anti-Semitic designation and takes a Jewish stance against anti-Semitism.
For Sartre in 1945, it was obvious that the Jewish fight against anti-Semitism was allied with the fight against all racism. Authentic Jews were obviously leftist and Zionism represented a form of Communism – it was the same messianism.
Post-1968 Decision
This alliance, if it ever in fact was obvious, lost its obviousness in 1967-1968. Marxism and Zionism fell ontically apart: while the Communist State was fading into nonbeing, the Jewish State emerged as the triumph of political and military power in history. This was a moment of crisis and split within the Jewish left, a moment of decision, which brought to the surface inner tensions of modern Jewishness and determined the different directions for its development to this day, both in France and beyond.
These directions can be differentiated by using Bensaïd’s dialectics of messianic reason. For the Stalinist approach, which invested its redemptive action in state power, the USSR was replaced by the State of Israel. This attitude can be observed in Sartre himself, but it generated French Jewish positions in thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas and the post-1968 “nouveaux philosophes” such as Alain Finkielkraut and Bernard-Henri Lévy. In contrast, the Maoists, such as Benny Lévy, turned away from secular politics and proclaimed a return to original Jewish orthodoxy, beyond state and history. Bensaïd’s insight about the counterrevolutionary complicity of Stalinism and Maoism may help understand how in 2000 Benny Lévy, Alain Finkielkraut and Bernard-Henri Lévy cofounded in Jerusalem the Institut d’études lévinassiennes.
The year 2023 made visible this complicity – and along it the need for an alternative, a third post-1968 Jewish position. In contrast to the alliance of Stalinist history and Maoist posthistory, of Rome and Church, Jewish State and Jewish Community, Daniel Bensaïd offers the Trotskyist messianicity of Jewish heresy. This kind of Marranism does not counter anti-Semitism through the foundation of positive Jewish identity, statist or metaphysical. Rather, it performs Jewishness as the resistance to all identity, as the foundation of universalism.
Bensaïd follows Yirmiyahu Yovel in identifying Spinoza as the paradigmatic figure for this performance, who produced the basis of modern subjectivity. He concurs with Derrida in indicating this Marrano logics in Marx’s internationalism, reading Communism as the late-modern Jewish performance of Mosaic messianism. Other figures dear to Bensaïd are Arendt’s conscious pariahs – Heinrich Heine and Bernard Lazare.
However, in the post 1967-1968 era Trotskyist messianism required, to counter the new Israel-related Stalinist-Maoist counterrevolution, a new kind of Jewish heresy: Jewish anti-Zionism. This messianic agency consists in solidarity not with the victors of history, not with the Jewish State, but with the losers of history, the victims of Jewish state power, the Palestinians. Bensaïd tells that the first time he demonstrated as a Jew was in the 1982 protests against Israel after the Sabra and Shatila massacres, and again during the Second Intifada in 2000, in a group that included other French Marranos such as Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Gisèle Halimi and Michael Löwy.
If we follow the “subtleties of messianic reason” in Bensaïd’s narrative, the most authentic post-1967/8 embodiment of messianism, both Mosaic and Marxist, in its Trotskyist-Jewish form, namely as patient impatience, that is as militant galuth, is the anti-Zionist Jewish-Palestinian organization that operated in the State of Israel itself, Matzpen. Applying Benjamin’s messianic temporality, we have today no difficulty agreeing with Bensaïd that the activists for Jewish-Palestinian internationalism have all along been right, since it is today clearer than ever than history proved them wrong.
