Daniel Bensaïd never had much patience with theology, let alone political theology. His was a profane politics, an earth-bound commitment in the midst of the uncertainties of mundane life.
Yet there was an ambivalence in his staunch rejection of “theology and its jumble of graces, miracles, revelations, repentances, and pardons,” as he once phrased it in the thought-provoking essay “Permanent Scandal” (42). As the very inventory of theologemes suggests, it was a specific type of theology he rejected. It was theology manifested as uncompromising faith and apocalyptic interruption, rather than, for example, as diligence and patient watchfulness.
In reality, Bensaïd’s thinking was imbued with messianic and prophetic pathos. Elsewhere, I have suggested that his thinking can be read as a “prophetic political theology” in contrast to what is sometimes explicitly referred to as “apocalyptic political theologies.”
I draw this contrast from Martin Buber’s 1954 essay “Prophecy, Apocalyptic, and the Historical Hour.” In line with recent historical scholarship, Buber discerned within the biblical legacy two basic tendencies. On the one hand, there is the ethos of biblical prophecy, which acts in the present to shape history. On the other hand, there is the ethos manifested in the apocalyptic literature, which retreats from history to await divine intervention.
Buber never made any secret of where his own sympathies lay. Far from the view that redemption would come about as the result of an arbitrary intervention of a sovereign deity, he was committed to the prophetic idea of the world as a fragile place with no divinely predestined guaranties for peace and justice. Prophecy, as a political attitude, locates the moment of justice in the here and now. It calls for an urgent attentiveness to what he dubbed “the radically demanding historical hour.” (203)
While seemingly paradoxical, there is a profound affinity between Buber’s commitment to prophecy and Bensaïd’s commitment to the profane. In both cases, politics is understood as an art of contingency, a sensitivity to the uncertain, pragmatic, and unfinished nature of any radical engagement.
Yet the affinities are not just structural. A careful reading of Bensaïd’s work reveals that he regularly deploys the term “prophetic,” not just in a nominal way but with explicit reference to the biblical prophets. Pondering the hypothetical character of Marx’s philosophy of history in An Impatient Life, for example, he states that “strategic prophecy, like those of the Old Testament, [is] always conditional,” (290) and goes on to clarify:
It harasses the present in the name of threatened tradition. It does not promise a guaranteed future in the form of destiny. It warns in the conditional mood of the probability of a catastrophe that there is still time to forestall.
Things will end up badly, if…
But they can (still) be sorted out…
The prophet is first of all someone who prevents peaceful sleep. (291)
If this attitude of permanent vigilance spoke to Bensaïd in a special way, I want to suggest that Bensaïd’s own refinement of this prophetic motif speaks in a special way to the present political moment, which may well be described as a “radically demanding historical hour.” Before detailing why, I shall say a few more words about the tendencies Bensaïd rejected when he railed against “theology and its jumble of graces, miracles,” and so on.
As already indicated, what seems to be at stake is the kind of theist theology of miracles that Carl Schmitt revealed as the precursor of his own authoritarian theory of the state. Yet at a closer glance, the specific target of Bensaïd’s critique turns out rather to be generalizing anti-statist and anti-nomian postures on the far left.
In the specific context of the quotation, Bensaïd takes issue with Simone Weil’s rejection of political parties in favor of “an unconditional desire for truth.” (41) Notwithstanding the urgent historical moment at which Weil pronounced these worlds, the question arises as to what prevents such theologically charged truth-claims from ensuing in arbitrary voluntarism: “[W]ho proclaims this absolute truth and who decides on this sovereign good? Abandon politics and one is left with theology.”(41)
Behind his polemics against Weil lies a more persistent critique directed at more recent tendencies to infuse radical political thinking with theological motifs. Although Bensaïd engaged with an array of (post-)Marxist interlocutors (including Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Rancière, Michael Hardt & Toni Negri), it was his intellectual companion Alain Badiou who more than any other represented the features he had in mind.
Most concisely summarized in “Alain Badiou and the Miracle of the Event,” Bensaïd criticized Badiou for reducing true political commitment to the moment of revolt, to an act of faith, disregarding the contradictions and tensions that characterize the practical reality of politics:
Detached from its historical conditions, pure diamond of truth, the event … is akin to a miracle. By the same token, a politics without politics is akin to a negative theology. The preoccupation with purity reduces politics to a grand refusal and prevents it from producing lasting effects.
The allusion to negative theology is key for understanding Bensaïd’s critique, not only of Badiou but also of a broader tendency within the academic left to evade historical and material complexity in favor of categorical demands for a clean break with the existing order.
The problem, as Bensaïd perceived it, is that such “preoccupation with purity” leaves us with a form of radicality that simultaneously aims too high and too low. It aims too high insofar as it demands nothing less than the total overthrow of the current world order. It aims too low insofar as it tends in practice to amount to little more than a tacit acceptance of the world as it is, since the perfect revolution will always fail to materialize. Thus Bensaïd remarks, again with Badiou as his specific target:
Holy purification is never more than a short step away from voluptuous sin. If, as Badiou was claiming already in 1996, “the era of revolution is over,” the only available options are either to withdraw into the haughty solitude of the anchorite or learn to get used to the contemptible state of current affairs.
In sharp contrast to such defeatist attitudes, Bensaïd passionately defended a notion of politics as tenacity and perseverance – a struggle against the relentless order of things even when immediate results fail to appear.
This is also how we should understand his plea for the at once profane and prophetic nature or politics: not as a resigned concession that “the era of revolution is over” but as an urge to rethink the implication of radical engagement in the light of continuous historical experience.
Another way to phrase this is to say that the revolutionary moment is every moment, whereupon it suddenly becomes apparent how Bensaïd’s Trotskyist commitment resonates with the biblical legacy. Although rarely thematized, it is not difficult to see an affinity between the idea of the permanent revolution and those strands of prophetic and messianic thinking that place emphasis on redemption as an ongoing work of justice – a constant attentiveness to what Buber, again, called “the radically demanding historical hour.”
All of which brings me back to my claim that Bensaïd’s philosophical refinement of biblical prophecy speaks in a special way to the present political moment. It does so, because it offers a thinking that does not allow us to rest; that “prevents peaceful sleep.” Thereby it also invites us to rethink what radical commitment may entail: to shift focus from practices of refusal and disinvestment to questions of strategy and action.
Such a shift is urgently needed, I believe, because what we are experiencing today is something different from the post-political predicament of the decades during which the “negative theologies” of thinkers like Badiou and Agamben took center stage of the academic debate.
Faced with the raw power that is now being exercised by unabashedly autocratic rulers, we find ourselves in a situation that calls for a new kind of radicalism, at once fast and slow, driven by an “impatient patience,” as Bensaïd would often phrase it, with equal importance given to both words.
Such patience is impatient in that it insists on the imminent nature of justice. This was one of the many lessons Bensaïd drew from the Trotskyist notion of the “united front” as it crystalized in the 1930s: confronted with the threat of fascism, we no longer have the luxury of refusing compromise and pragmatism in the name of pure resistance. Instead we need to join forces and act now to save whatever democratic structures there still are to be saved.
This speaks to the present moment. As Masha Gessen remarked, commenting on the public execution of Renee Good on 7 January 2026:
What happens as autocracy establishes itself is that the space available for action shrinks very rapidly. I talk about this a lot when I do public speaking and people ask me: What should we do? And I say: Well, do something. Because whatever you can do today, you’re not going to be able to do tomorrow. So act where you can act.
The example Gessen gives of a place where people have been able to act is precisely ICE Watch. Although it has not been able to prevent the violence carried out by ICE agents, it has nonetheless had an extraordinary effect as an organizing mechanism that has brought people together to protect their common values and their neighbors.
Yet radical political engagement cannot thrive on speed and impatience alone. On the contrary, as Gessen goes on to elaborate, “speed generally benefits the autocrat. Democracy is very slow.” This logic, epitomized in the second Trump administration, reminds us that democratic commitment needs to last beyond the moment of revolt. It needs to be slow, persistent and assiduous.
This is arguably where much of the academic left has been found wanting over the past decades. As Robert Orsi comments, with specific reference to the Christian left: “there has developed an ethos that rejects ordinary political action in favor of protest, dissent and critique, driven by a belief in the failure of the liberal state.” At the same time, the right has been appropriating the functions of the liberal state for its own ends, accelerating the dismantling of democratic institutions.
Orsi makes this observation in relation to Amy Carr and Christine Helmer’s important book Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times. What Carr and Helmer show, again in Orsi’s words, is precisely how these two tendencies feed off each other: “the abandonment on the left of ordinary politics – in state houses, for example, or on school boards – opened the space for the dominion of the political sphere by the right.”
The remedy proposed by Carr and Helmer for this political cul-de-sac is spelled ordinary politics rooted in ordinary faith. Bensaïd would call it profane politics infused with prophetic pathos. This is also the sense in which the “impatient patience” at the heart of his thinking is still patient. If the goal of any radical engagement is to actually effect change, it needs to assume the mundane and less glamorous aspects of political life.
Bensaïd was well acquainted with these aspects. Looking back at his long (and yet all to short) life of ground-level political work, he recalled, in his memoirs, how he early on had to learn “the necessary revolutionary slowness, the courage of the everyday and the will of each day, which are again a restrained and dominated impatience.” (18)
