Excited to be adding to my knowledge of the modern French Left, I started reading An Impatient Life but I really struggled to find some kind of handhold. This is not a beginner text for someone curious about radical politics in twentieth century France. Instead, it’s an account for those who already know the history well, but desire to take stock, or reassess the path of the journey. Rasan kept telling me to stick with it and I would soon get to parts of the book that I could sink my teeth into.
I changed my approach to the book. I read it like a novel. That was good for another couple of chapters. Rasan, who was by now hundreds of pages ahead of me, told me about Bensaïd’s view of Walter Benjamin and that led us both to Michael Löwy’s Fire Alarm, a talmudic-style commentary on Walter Benjamin’s Theses “On the Concept of History”. Reading and discussing Fire Alarm has preoccupied Rasan and me for the last couple of weeks.
Last night, I was looking for a copy of Bensaïd’s Walter Benjamin, sentinelle messianique: À la gauche du possible. I don’t think it’s been translated into English, so I’ve ordered the French original (which shipped today). During my search, I turned up a few interesting articles on Bensaïd including the obituary that Michael Löwy wrote for Against the Current. The short article is worth reading and provides an essential overview of Bensaïd’s intellectual career. Near the conclusion Löwy writes:
Among all of Bensaïd’s contributions to the renewal of Marxism, the most important, in my eyes, is his radical break with the positivist, determinist and fatalist ideology of inevitable Progress that so heavily weighed on “orthodox” Marxism, particularly in France. His re-reading of Marx, with the help of the 19th-century revolutionary Auguste Blanqui and 20th-century philosopher Walter Benjamin, led him to understand history as a series of crossroads and bifurcations; a field of possibilities whose issue is unpredictable. Class struggle is central in the historical process, but its result is uncertain, and implies a part of contingency.
Of course, this contingency is a central message in Löwy’s Fire Alarm and his reading of Benjamin’s Theses. The future utopia, the Kingdom of God, is not guaranteed or inevitable. Marxists and people of faith (Christians, Jews, and Muslims) should not sit around and wait for the intervention of History or God to bring about the Kingdom. If there is to be a Second Coming, then it’s up to us to make it happen.
The revolutionary is therefore a human being who doubts, an individual who puts an absolute energy at the service of relative certainties — in other terms, someone who tries, obstinately, to practice that imperative requirement called for by Walter Benjamin in his last writing, the Theses “On the concept of history” (1940): to brush history against the grain.
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