Editors’ Introduction

Abstract

This special issue, entitled “Bensaïd, the Untimely,” revisits and remembers the person and work of Daniel Bensaïd, a one-of-a-kind public intellectual and militant of the idea and strategy of revolution. Edited by Josep Maria Antentas and Ceren Özselçuk, the issue brings together from different generations finely attuned essays that—while they mainly explore with fresh theses and connections Bensaïd’s trajectory after his encounter with Walter Benjamin in the 1980s and the resulting implications post-1989—also associate this “turn” with Bensaïd’s reworked reading of Marx. As Antentas puts it in his introduction to the issue, Bensaïd’s “diversion to Benjamin and return to Marx were part of a double simultaneous movement.” A determining, universalizing moment in Bensaïd’s thought can be found in the way that he conceptualizes the present as “bifurcated,” opening to contradictory possibilities for interpreting the past and taking up positions in relation to the future. Bensaïd’s take on temporality intimately informs his other formulations on politics, history, scientificity, and the aesthetics of knowledge. In this sense, the essays also demonstrate Bensaïd’s continuing relevance for analyses of the conjuncture, experienced in related yet differentiated ways around the world, and likewise for reinterpretations of the revolutionary events of ’68, also experienced in related yet differentiated ways around the world. Thus, it is not arbitrary that some of the essays in this issue obliquely refer to ’68 in Turkey as well as to relevant connections to the political-ecological movements of the “dispossessed” that are taking place right now. After Antentas’s concise introduction to Daniel Bensaïd, the issue opens with Michel Surya’s still timely interview with Bensaïd himself, “On Politics and History.” The interview, translated into English by David Broder, was originally published in 1998 as “La politique et l’histoire” in the journal Libre Choix, which is no longer in circulation. Timely, because the interview, which took place after the Maastricht Treaty in 1993, involves questions and assessments that still bear on the debates of the European Union today, with even more urgency than ever, and in a way foresees the predicaments that afflict the extimate borders of the EU in the present. In the interview Bensaïd responded to questions and comments posed by Surya on a number of pressing problematics and paradoxes that revolve around his then recently published book Le pari mélancolique, RETHINKING MARXISM, 2023 Vol. 35, No. 3, 307–312, https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2023.2223881