Daniel Bensaïd’s Profane Politics

Abstract

Daniel Bensaïd (1946–2010) was a key name on the French political-intellectual scene of the 1990s and the first decade of our millennium. He was one of the founders of the Jeunesse communiste révolutionnaire (JCR) in 1966, and of the Ligue communiste (LC) in 1969 (renamed the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire, LCR, in 1973 after the LC was outlawed). In his youth he was a May 1968 leader of the Mouvement du 22 Mars and remained faithful to his revolutionary commitment until the end of his life. Although the theoretical and militant dimensions frequently crossed over in his career, it was not until the last two decades of his life that Bensaïd became a fully-fledged thinker. In this article I am going to focus on a central theme that runs through the whole of his oeuvre: the defence and search for a profane politics, a question related to the messianic turn his work took under the influence of Walter Benjamin.