Daniel Bensaïd, le pari mélancolique.

Abstract

Among the merits of Daniel Bensaid is prominently that of having introduced a new concept into the Marxist lexicon: bifurcation. Rosa Luxemburg had already spoken, in the Junius Brochure of 1915, of socialism or barbarism. But Bensaid’s approach goes further. His rereading of Marx, in the light of Blanqui, Benjamin and Charles Peguy, led him to conceive of history as  a series of branches and bifurcations, a field of possibilities where the class struggle occupies a decisive place, but whose outcome is unpredictable. Refractory to the causal course of ordinary facts, the  revolution is an interruption. It is not guaranteed by the “laws of history” and must be the subject of a bet, in the Pascalian sense, reviewed and corrected by the Marxist Lucien Goldmann, himself reviewed and corrected by the Marxist Daniel Bensaid.