We invited several scholars to share their thoughts on the French Marxist philosopher Daniel Bensaïd (1946-2010). The essays in this collection explore the implicit and explicit theological connections in Bensaïd’s work, ranging from his engagement with Jewish messianism and sovereignty’s theological origins to his critique of the ideological tensions within the French founding national myth.
Jayne Svenungsson is Professor of Systematic Theology at Lund University in Sweden. Currently director of the multidisciplinary research program At the End of the World: A Transdisciplinary Approach to the Apocalyptic Imaginary in the Past and Present, her research focuses on political theology and philosophy of history. Her latest monograph is Divining History: Prophetism, Messianism and the Development of the Spirit (Berghahn, 2016). Co-edited volumes include Jewish Thought, Utopia and Revolution (Rodopi, 2014), Monument and Memory (LIT Verlag, 2015), Heidegger’s Black Notebooks and the Future of Theology (Palgrave, 2017) and The Ethos of History: Time and Responsibility (Berghahn, 2018).
Elad Lapidot is Professor for Jewish Thought at the University of Lille, France. His work is guided by questions concerning the relation between knowledge and politics. He is the author of Politics of Not Speaking (Albany: SUNY Press, 2025), as well as, among others, State of Others. Levinas and Decolonial Israel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming 2025), Jews Out of the Question. A Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism (Albany: SUNY Press, 2020), Hebrew translation of Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes (Tel Aviv: Resling Publishing, 2020) and Heidegger and Jewish Thought. Difficult Others, edited with M. Brumlik (London/New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).
Laurent Lévy, born in 1956, is an antiracist activist in the French communist tradition. He has published numerous articles on the question of islamophobia, which he has also addressed in two books, among others he has written: Le spectre du communautarisme, Amsterdam, 2005, and “La gauche", les Noirs et les Arabes, La Fabrique, 2010.
Annabel Herzog is Professor of Political Theory at the School of Political Science at the University of Haifa, Israel. Her research focuses on 20th-century continental philosophy, exploring the connections between ethics and politics and between philosophy and literature. Her last book, Levinas’s Politics: Justice, Mercy, Universality (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), was the recipient of the 2021 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in Philosophy and Jewish Thought.
Rachel Pafe is a writer and researcher based in Berlin. Her academic research deals with Gillian Rose, a sociologist and philosopher who had a fraught relationship with religion, Marxism, and political action. She explores this by charting Rose’s real and imagined conversations with Jacqueline Rose, Simone Weil, Emmanuel Levinas, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Daniel Bensaïd. Her broader writing has been featured in The Baffler, Radical Philosophy, Berlin Review, Vashti, Marginalia Review of Books, Protocols, and The Conversationalist. She is part of the Night Sheyds* collective, a host for the Biography channel of New Books Network, and runs the Reading in Constellation reading group and publication project at Hopscotch Reading Room.
Born in Paris in 1973, Ivan Segré is a philosopher and Talmudist. His doctoral dissertation, defended in 2008, was supervised by Daniel Bensaïd. He is the author of around ten books, including La Réaction philosémite (English translation, Verso, Reflections on Antisemitism), Le Manteau de Spinoza. Pour une éthique hors-la-loi (English translation, Bloomsbury, The Ethics of an Outlaw), and L’Occident, les Indigènes et nous. Éléments d’histoire et de philosophie. He is also the author of some forty articles published in various journals and a regular contributor to the alternative news website Lundimatin.
Symposium Essays
On the Necessary Revolutionary Slowness
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.
Daniel Bensaïd and the Islamic headscarf controversy
Coming
Between Two Theologies: Bensaïd’s Sovereignty
Bensaïd critiques political theology while defending Derridean sovereignty—itself theological—and the distance between the two theologies is short.
Coming
Messianism of Disappointment: Daniel Bensaïd and Jewish Left
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.
Coming
Bensaïd’s Melancholy Theo-Politics
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.
Coming
Daniel Bensaïd’s Joan of Arc
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.
Coming