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.
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.
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.