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Daniel Bensaïd: From the Actuality of the Revolution to the Melancholic Wager

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Published Nov 2023
ISBN: 978-90-04-68702-8

Darren Roso

 

Author: Darren Roso

Daniel Bensaïd: From the Actuality of Revolution to the Melancholic Wager is the first systematic full-length study of Bensaïd’s renovation of Marxism. Bensaïd, a student leader during the May ’68 revolt and founder of the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire, was an exemplar of a creative and open liberatory Marxism, leaving a vast oeuvre for a new generation of Marxists to explore. Much of Bensaïd’s writing remains untranslated into English, and Roso’s volume offers a comprehensive critical overview.

Biographical Note

Darren Roso is a communist philosopher based in Naarm (Melbourne), Australia. His writings have appeared in Historical Materialism, Contretemps, Revuepériode, and Marxist Left Review. He was based in Paris during the writing of this book.

Readership

Daniel Bensaïd: From the Actuality of Revolution to the Melancholic Wager will be of signicant interest to academic libraries, graduate and post-graduate students, social change activists, and students of critical theory, Marxism and philosophy.

Table of Contents

Foreword vii

Foreword: The Power of Indignation xi

Acknowledgements xiii

Introduction: Fitting the Bow for the Renewal of Marxism 1

part 1

Bensaïd Encounters Lenin in the Early Years

1 Bensaïd Encounters Lenin 19

2 Revolution and Power 79

3 The Dark Years of Readjustment 134

part 2

New Inventions and Illuminations

4 History Has Two Faces 175

5 Marx from Beneath the Ruins 253

6 Ready to Roll the Dice? 385

part 3

Open-ended Conjunctural Judgements

7 The Return of the Social Question 443

8 Who Is the Judge? 476

9 Smile of the Frightful Hobgoblin 509

part 4

Bensaïd and His Contemporaries

10 Althusser: Trapped in Stalin’s Glass Jar 591

11 Negri: The Dissolution of Politics into Violence 618

12 Badiou: A Distant Companion 638

13 Derrida: Fellow Marrano 668

part 5

Strategic Thinking to Break the Reproduction of Fetishism and Domination

14 Praising the Profane 683

15 Commodity Fetishism 747

Conclusion: Pointing Towards Spaces of Liberation 797

Appendix: Daniel Bensaïd’s Melancholic Wager – Jury D’habilitation

2005 (by Way of an Introduction) 803

Michael Löwy

References 806

Index 818