Historical Materialism 24.

4 (2016) 150–169

brill.com/hima

The Time of History, the Time of Politics, the Time

of Strategy

Stathis Kouvelakis
Department of French, King’s College London
stathis.kouvelakis@kcl.ac.uk

Abstract

The theoretical problem Bensaïd tries to confront from the 1990s onwards is the prob-
lem of the categories that are necessary to account for the traumatically new experience
of history opened up by the defeat of the revolutionary experiments of the twentieth
century. Hence the necessity of new answers to these fundamental and inexhaustible
questions: How are we to understand history in its relation to human practice and to
politics? Can we talk of ‘necessity’ in history, of ‘laws of history’, of ‘determination’, or
‘determinism’, or of modes of causality operating within it? How are we to conceive
the notions of ‘historical possibility’, of ‘conflict’ and ‘struggle’? Bensaïd’s contribution
will focus on a dialectical notion of temporality that implies a primacy of politics over
history and a break with the traditional Marxist notions of a historical subject as an
internally homogeneous and fully-sovereign collective force.

Keywords

dialectics – Walter Benjamin – Capital – strategy – political theory

The publication in 1995 of Marx l’intempestif,1 generally acknowledged as

Daniel Bensaïd’s most significant theoretical work, should be considered as a
milestone in the intellectual trajectory of its author as well as in the French
debate on Marx. Coinciding with the first significant international Marxist
conference held in Paris in many years and with an upsurge of social struggles
in France, it appeared to vindicate Derrida’s position, formulated two years

1  Bensaïd 1995a and 2009.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/1569206X-12341497

The Time of History, the Time of Politics, the Time of Strategy 151

e­ arlier, on the impossibility of getting rid of the ‘spectre’ of the German thinker.2
If we add to this Pierre Bourdieu’s simultaneous rise to prominence as the lead-
ing public intellectual closely associated with the on-going renewal of social
movements, we can say that that year (1995) signalled a turning point in the
intellectual atmosphere of the European country in which the anti-Marxist
Stimmung of the 1980s and early 1990s had reached climactic levels.
If we narrow down the focus, and turn to the author and his place within the
political current with which his name is associated – the Ligue Communiste
Révolutionnaire (LCR) and, more broadly, Trotskyism in its Fourth International
‘Mandelite’ version – the picture appears more paradoxical. On the one hand,
Marx l’intempestif was immediately hailed as an important contribution, con-
firming Bensaïd’s turn to interventions of a more theoretical type. On the other
hand, it would not be an exaggeration to say that it also induced a sense of
disarray. Its overall approach was never successfully integrated as a reference
in the worldview of LCR/Fourth International activists and cadres, in the man-
ner of Ernest Mandel’s work or even that of Michael Löwy, to mention a figure
closer to Bensaïd’s generation. It is all too clear that the novelty and originality
of Bensaïd’s theoretical endeavour did not fit the intellectual ‘common sense’ of
the activists not only of that specific political current but those of the Marxist
Left more generally. It is highly likely, however, that the very reason why this
book provoked such resistance also afforded its capacity to withstand the test
of time. And, given the centrality of this last category in Bensaïd’s thought, this
should be considered as its ultimate achievement.

History as a Shock

How can we then define the theoretical problem Bensaïd is trying to con-
front? To put it as briefly and generally as possible, it is the problem of the
categories that are necessary to account for a new experience of history. Or
better: a traumatically new experience of history, the one opened up by the
defeat of the revolutionary experiments of the twentieth century, as crystal-
lised by the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Eastern-European satellites
and by China’s turn to capitalism. This context of defeat explains also the
French title of the book, Marx l’intempestif, ‘Marx the Untimely’, a term which
refers to Nietzsche’s ‘untimely meditations’ (Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen),
more particularly to the second one, on history. ‘Untimely’ does not simply
refer to the feeling of being ‘against the current’, a position shared by all the

2  Derrida 1993 and 1994.

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152 Kouvelakis

minority currents within the revolutionary movement; more fundamentally,

it is to go against the very direction taken by the course of history, of standing
against the time when the deeper stream of the revolution seems exhausted.
‘Untimely’, in other words, points to a moment when the subjective or even
the existential position which was previously considered as a given cannot be
sustained any further. To put it slightly differently, untimely does not mean
the changing of sides, deserting the previously occupied position, but exactly
the contrary: remaining faithful to the same subjective truth when everything
around goes the opposite way, without this faithfulness leading to a disregard
for the very existence, and, in a sense, the very necessity or internal logic of
that catastrophe.
This move implies nothing less than a gesture of theoretical refoundation;
not a ‘return to Marx’ or to ‘classical Marxism’ seen as a set of intangible truths,
but a return, in the sense of a critical reconsideration, to the foundations of
the theory. Bensaïd’s project is a reiteration, which also means a radicalisation,
of the critical operation which constitutes Marxism as such and situates it in
the continuity of the inaugural moment of German idealism – ‘The German
working-class movement is the inheritor of German classical philosophy’,
as Engels famously wrote in his Ludwig Feuerbach. Hence the overall struc-
ture of the book, as indicated by its subtitle (‘Adventures and Misadventures
of a Critique’), which presents itself as a triple critique, along the lines of the
Kantian model: a critique of historical reason, a critique of sociological reason
and a critique of scientific reason. The ambition is comparable: to cover both
the theory of knowledge and of practice, the relation of men to nature and to
history – the only missing element being the systematic discussion of aesthet-
ics, despite some considerations on the aesthetic dimension of the revolution-
ary wager as a form of existential choice.3 The Kantian dimension is even more
apparent in the properly critical dimension of the project: to submit the various
aspects of the Marxian legacy to an examination that will define their legitimate
use and clear the ground of theory of the previous metaphysics. This includes
not only the dogmas of the vulgarised versions but also a certain conception
of history, of praxis and of science which has deeply penetrated ‘really-existing
Marxism’, even in its heterodox versions. The unity of these three critiques will
thus be grounded in the same theoretical position: standing in opposition to
a philosophy of the ‘end of history’, Marx’s thought cannot be assimilated to a
sociology providing a vision of the proletariat as destined to be victorious; and,
for that same reason, it is also radically at odds with any notion of ‘universal
science’ tracing the path to progress to be followed by mankind. By taking a

3  This is covered more extensively in Bensaïd 1997.

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The Time of History, the Time of Politics, the Time of Strategy 153

Kantian-critical approach to prior forms of Marxism, Bensaïd offers a re-elab-

oration of dialectical rationality in all areas of human practice, including the
relation of agents to their natural environment, and a strategic conception of
politics as an art stemming from an existential wager on the transformability
of the world.
At first sight, Bensaïd’s target here is vulgarised Marxism, or ‘orthodox’, text-
book versions of the theory carrying the vision of an intrinsically revolution-
ary working class and a metaphysical guarantee of a bright future. If that were
the case, this critique, coming after the collapse of the Soviet Union, would
seem rather trivial. But things turn out to be more complicated, as revealed
by the harsh critique directed against Ernest Mandel’s sense of historical opti-
mism. According to Bensaïd, the leading figure of the Fourth International
thought that the fragmentation of the working class had no structural consis-
tency. Competition between wage-earners was imposed from the outside, by
the capitalists, and its supersession was therefore seen as inevitable. To this,
Bensaïd replies:

This is to underestimate the coherence of the mode of production in

which capital, as a living fetish, imposes its law on the whole of ­society,
and inseparably maintains competition between owners and wage-
earners thrown on to the labour market. Reducing sometimes antagonis-
tic social differences to mere ‘uneven levels of consciousness’ disposes of
the difficulty. Mandel thus ends up trusting in time, the great restorer and
leveller in the face of eternity, to iron out these inequalities, imposing
solidarity in conformity with the postulated ontology of the proletariat.4

‘Trusting time’: that is the core of the problem. The notion ‘that [we are] mov-
ing with the current’, as Walter Benjamin famously put it in his ‘Theses on the
Philosophy of History’, a belief which more than anything else ‘has corrupted
the German working class’ since the time of the Second International, turned
out to be the most durable element of the ‘common sense’ of the revolution-
ary movement of the twentieth century.5 Obviously, it became unsustainable
with the end of ‘really-existing socialism’ of the Soviet type. Breaking with this
belief without abandoning Marxism altogether thus entails a critique that is
also a self-critique of Marxism itself. This task should also be understood as
a necessary requirement for the criticism to be able to turn efficiently against

4  Bensaïd 2009, pp. 188–9.

5  Benjamin 1968, p. 258.

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154 Kouvelakis

the narrative of the ‘end of history’, the updated version of history written by
the victors.
The question of the cognitive categories required by a new experience
of (and immanent to) history is, needless to say, an old problem. It is effec-
tively the constitutive problem of modern philosophy, and more particularly
of the critical project, since Kant. We know that Kant confronted it by elabo-
rating the a priori, purely formal (i.e. not deriving from experience) notions
through which the subject actively constitutes the objects of her knowledge,
and that these categories are precisely those of space and time.6 Kant defines
them as pure forms of sensible intuition ‒ a priori conditions of any possible
­experience ‒ that are to be located within the subject. Time and space are
no longer thought in the dogmatic or purely empiricist way of the old meta-
physics, as substances that exist per se, or as indifferent, empty containers
in which the objects occupy a certain place or slot. But between these two
a priori forms, time enjoys a privileged position since it is the formal condition
of all phenomena and not only of external ones, as is space. Time orders repre­
sentations and determines the relation of representations within our minds.
It is thus the form through which the mind becomes aware of itself as being
affected by a given external to itself. Time thus allows the unification of repre-
sentations by the originary consciousness since, as a unity of a multiplicity, it
allows for the representation of the (synthetic) unity of the multiplicity given
by the sensible intuition ‒ its determination by the categories (causality, for
instance). Although it is not considered as an absolute, time is nevertheless
effective, an active form organising what comes through sensible experience,
and is thus not an empty appearance. Its reality is subjective; it allows the sub-
ject to apprehend the phenomena and situate herself in a world which is not
any longer organised by divine will and presents itself as something that can
be known and transformed according to rational principles.
As we will see below, Bensaïd will also accord a certain privilege to time,
a term that will tellingly appear in the title of several of his books7 and will
grace the name of the journal he founded in 2001, Contretemps. But his concep-
tion of time will decisively point towards Hegel: time is now not only desub-
stantialised but also desubjectivised, grasped as a movement of permanent
negation in its dialectical relation to space and in its inner dialectic, in which
the three dimensions of time (past, present, future) fall successively into each
other. As a ‘now’, the present is the passage into its other; it is immediately

6  See Kant 1998, pp. 174–92.

7  Bensaïd 1995b, 1999 and 2001.

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The Time of History, the Time of Politics, the Time of Strategy 155

negated by the future, which in its turn negates itself and produces the past.8
For Hegel, only real time displays the dialectic of the three dimensions of time
in its concrete form and achieves the reconciliation of real time and negativity.
In it, the relentless negation of time is necessarily accompanied by its conser-
vation in the present, which, as a present mediated by the past, is precisely the
whole of time. Instead of purely disappearing, as in nature, the past is now in
the present, it is recuperated by Spirit. The timeline becomes that of a circle,
or rather, a spiral. To the extent that actual time is not the graveyard of the past
but its dialectical recovery, it is a sketch of historical time. Thus, history has
a meaning only with respect to the primacy of the present, as the time that
encompasses the three dimensions of time. Concrete history is thus under-
stood as possibility, and philosophical knowledge itself is not a contemplation
of the eternal but the knowledge of Being according to its own temporality.
Bensaïd’s perspective is now a shifting one, both in the temporal and in
the logical sense of the term. The categories are put in motion, historicised.
This operation leads to what is called ‘dialectics’; unsurprisingly, this is where
Marxism enters into the picture, but not in any straightforward way. The criti-
cal operation of clearing the ground of the old metaphysics needs to be reiter-
ated in order to reinvent a notion of historical time adequate to the moment
of the collapse of the ancient gods. If indeed we consider Marxism not just
as an intellectual tradition or ‘high theory’, but in a broader and more histori-
cal sense as the doctrine which informed the practice and the worldview of
immense social and political forces, organisations, parties and states, it is quite
obvious that what the historical dialectic concretely meant was a kind of nar-
rative structured around an idea of human history as a long road leading to
progress, or to the final revolutionary victory. The object of that implicit but
all-pervasive philosophy of history was to provide a guarantee that another
society will come out of the contradictions, or, to put it in other terms, that
the revolution and the victory are somehow inevitable, that ‘History – with a
capital “h” – will absolve us’, to paraphrase Fidel Castro’s famous remark. We
can call this kind of historical narrative ‘teleology’ like Althusser, or ‘the ideol-
ogy of progress’ like Benjamin, and there is no doubt that it formed the matrix
of the ‘common sense’ of the workers’ movement throughout the late nine-
teenth and ‘short twentieth century’. Without this belief – in the strong sense
of the term – the subjective commitment of millions of militants, which often
meant the sacrifice of their lives, the extraordinary resilience of a movement
constantly confronted with repression and, of course, the partial, limited,
fragile but nevertheless real victories of that same movement, would remain

8  Hegel 1970, pp. 33–40.

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156 Kouvelakis

incomprehensible and mysterious. And this diagnosis applies to all the varied
and antagonistic currents of the workers’ movement which shared this matrix,
despite their irreducible differences.
Of course, long before the final collapse of 1990, the vicissitudes and set-
backs of the revolution in the past century had marked the limits of this vision,
and nearly all the major thinkers of the so-called Western Marxist tradition,
from Bloch and Lukács to Sartre, Goldmann and Althusser have produced
powerful critiques of it. But it remained absolutely central to the ‘common
sense’ and the ordinary discourse of the activists, cadres and leaders of the
‘real existing Marxist movement’ at a global scale, and this fact also reveals how
limited the impact of all the above-mentioned thinkers has been politically.
This point is essential to understanding the way Bensaïd reacts to the event
of 1990, this ‘obscure disaster’ as Alain Badiou famously called it,9 an event to
‘which something enigmatic remains attached, both origin and bifurcation’ as
qualified by Bensaïd in a convergent formulation.10 As an origin and bifurca-
tion, the collapse of the Soviet Union has to be thought as a properly philo-
sophical event. And it is to this challenge that Bensaïd will devote immense
energy, an energy that was political, of course, but essentially theoretical and
even philosophical. From that moment onwards, also for personal reasons
related to his illness, he retreated partially from his leadership responsibilities
within his organisation and devoted most of his time to an expanding activity
of writing: four books before 1989, around 25 after, the most significant of them
being of a philosophical nature. Marx l’intempestif, as suggested previously,
represents the peak of that extraordinary productive stream.
Thinking the end of the twentieth century as a properly philosophical event
can be understood in two ways: negatively, it means refusing the reduction
of the event to the vindication of any pre-existing theoretical and political
position; positively, as emphasised above, it requires going back critically to
the foundations of Marxist theory. This search for new foundations does not
amount, however, to the idea of restarting everything from scratch or to put-
ting all the parts of the existing legacy on the same level. But it certainly leads
to a reappraisal of Kant’s problem, the problem of the categories of experience
and of historical time, a reappraisal to be conducted with what came out of the
post-Kantian discussion, in which Marxism is central but not exclusive.

9   Badiou 2005.
10  Bensaïd 2010, p. 124.

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The Time of History, the Time of Politics, the Time of Strategy 157

Messianic versus Dialectical Time

The first systematic outcome of Bensaïd’s work in that direction is his 1990
book on Walter Benjamin, which played an important role in the literature that
was proliferating at that time on the author by revealing to a French readership
a political Benjamin instead of a purely literary critic and cultural theorist.11
Why Benjamin? Because Benjamin’s messianic conception of history and time
seemed the most radical critique of that ‘ideology of progress’, that teleologi-
cal vision of history which had disarmed the workers’ movement in its fight
against fascism; an ideology which was now definitely and irreversibly lying
down dead. Benjamin’s attitude confronting the catastrophe of Nazism and
the start of the new World War, his vision of history as an accumulation of
ruins, his conception of the revolution as the revenge of the vanquished of the
past and not as the realisation of a utopian blueprint of the future, all this reso-
nated powerfully with the situation of defeat of the early 1990s. In Bensaïd’s
words: ‘The alliance of the revolutionary project with the utopian legacy is
now broken’.12
In his Preface to the second French edition of this book,13 Enzo Traverso
rightly points out that this anti-utopian attitude is an ‘internalisation of the
defeat . . . but not of course in the sense of surrendering to the dominant
ideology which assimilates utopia to totalitarianism’.14 Traverso also under-
lines that Bensaïd’s interpretation of Benjamin as a strategic and militant
thinker – which goes together with his affirmation that the latter’s messian-
ism has become entirely secular and subsumed by politics – is philologically
unsustainable. Benjamin’s political theology has to be taken seriously and its
author never made a secret of the strong theological dimension of his overall
approach. Moreover, nothing appears more remote from any notion of strate-
gic thinking than the messianic conception of history, which is based by defini-
tion on the radical rejection of any notion of causality and the no-less-radical
suspension of agency in history.
However, what should be added to this is that the book on Benjamin is only a
moment in the post-1990 trajectory of this author, the moment of the immedi-
ate reaction to the disaster. Marx l’intempestif represents a patiently reworked
and substantially-modified theoretical position, the elements of which I will
now try to delineate.

11  Bensaïd 2010.

12  Bensaïd 2010, p. 230.
13  Traverso 2010, pp. 7–29.
14  Traverso 2010, p. 20.

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158 Kouvelakis

Five years after the monograph on Benjamin, the reference to the author
of the Passagenwerk is maintained but his relative weight now appears more
modest. From the very first pages of the book, Bensaïd clarifies his own posi-
tion within the broader Marxist tradition:

I have traversed the variegated landscape of a century of readings and

commentaries. The approaches of Kautsky, or Luxemburg, Bukharin,
Korsch, Althusser or Rosdolski do not lead to the same Marx. We must
therefore choose our path and our company. For my part I have prioritised
two other great intermediaries: Walter Benjamin and Antonio Gramsci.15

This passage might give the impression that the two thinkers are put on the
same level. Actually, this is not the case. Benjamin now provides a kind of gen-
eral ethos to the whole work and an undoubtedly crucial critical edge, since
his attack on the ‘ideology of progress’ is fully maintained. Certainly, there is
also a degree of existential identification, referring back to his Marrano-Jewish
identity and the attitude of melancholic heroism in the face of historical
defeat. However, the philosophical position that will be developed in the core
chapters of the third section of the book (Chapters 7 to 9) is presented as the
position of a ‘new immanence’ in an explicit and well-developed reference to
Gramsci.16 This position consists in a radically dialectical reformulation of the
fundamental categories of temporal and historical experience based on a sys-
tematic cross-reading of both Marx and Hegel, more particularly of Capital
and of the Science of Logic, things all very different from the Benjaminian land-
scape of the previous, immediate post-1990, moment.
The fundamental and inexhaustible questions Bensaïd tries to answer can
be formulated as follows: How are we to understand history in its relation to
human practice and to politics? Can we talk of ‘necessity’ in history, of ‘laws
of history’, of ‘determination’, or ‘determinism’, or of modes of causality oper-
ating within it? How are we to conceive the notions of ‘historical possibility’,
of ‘conflict’ and ‘struggle’? And, to begin with, what is the type of theoretical
framework that is needed to explore the answers?
According to Bensaïd, Marx elaborates a new type of scientific rationality,
but not in the Althusserian sense of a ‘break’ with a pre-existing ideological
prehistory. This new type of science has to be understood as an articulation
of three different approaches: positive science inspired by the then-dominant

15  Bensaïd 2009, p. 4.

16  See also the crucial clarifications to this notion brought by Thomas 2010.

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The Time of History, the Time of Politics, the Time of Strategy 159

model of hard science; German Wissenschaft, which refers essentially to

Hegel’s dialectical legacy; and finally the critique, in the form of the critique
of political economy, which mediates between the two. However, this articu-
lation should not be seen as a harmonious construction but rather a produc-
tive tension between these three elements, which remain irreducible to each
other. It is within this framework that the antinomies between the objectivity
of knowledge and its historicity can be resolved; on the one hand, by bringing
temporality into the analytical categories and, vice-versa, by bringing rational
categories into the temporal developments. This new science can therefore
reconstruct the movement leading from the appearance to the essence of the
mode of production and reflect on that movement as part of the very reality it
seeks to penetrate.
As might logically be expected, the following chapter, entitled ‘A New
Immanence’, goes in-depth into the founding text of this new type of science,
Marx’s Capital. It proposes a discussion of the classical topic of Marx’s method
of exposition and its relation to the Hegelian Logic. Firmly based on the deci-
sive reading of Marx’s magnum opus by Stavros Tombazos, its specific aim
is to provide an understanding of the Marxian conception of temporality.17
Broadly speaking, Bensaïd defends a Hegelian interpretation of Capital which
nevertheless integrates structural moments within the broader dialectical
framework. This is a dialectical interpretation different from the so-called
‘logical-historical’ one which, following some suggestions by Engels, is based
on a strict parallel between the logical order of categories and their order of
appearance in real history (commodity = merchant capitalism, production =
industrial capitalism etc.). But it is also different from the Frankfurt School-
inspired approaches that focus exclusively on the dialectics of the value-form,
thus dismissing any considerations on quantitative measure and substituting
a narrative of the all-encompassing expansion of abstracted social forms for
the Marxian theory of exploitation. Vis-à-vis the first approach, Bensaïd will
defend the primacy of structure over its genesis: ‘the structure holds the key
to its own genesis’.18 This does not mean, however, that there is no relation
between the two (structuralism), but that this relation is of an inverse articula-
tion. And this inverse articulation has a specific temporal valence. It affirms
the methodological primacy of the present:

the present dispels the necessary misrecognition of the inner structure of

the mode of production at the price of a spectacular inversion, by which

17  Tombazos 1994 and 2013.

18  Bensaïd 2009, p. 255.

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160 Kouvelakis

capital dominates its various initial forms. A negation of scientific fetish-

ism, the critique of political economy is rooted in this inaugural present.19

To the second – dialectical but formalistic – interpretation, Bensaïd, here

again closely following Tombazos’s reading, opposes a full restoration of the
dialectics of quantity and quality as appropriated by Marx in his analysis of
the commodity. The problem to be solved is that of the category of ‘measure’,
i.e. of the measure of the value of the commodity by labour-time. At first sight,
this problem appears as a purely quantitative issue. But the standard of refer-
ence is not external, indifferent to what it measures: it is properly immanent
to it. Time is not an external reference, it is a social relation in which concrete
labour has, through market-exchange, been reduced to abstract labour, and
that labour crystallises in exchange value. Therefore quantity decides every-
thing. But ‘measure concerns not a quantity indifferent to quality, but being as
qualitatively determinate quantity’.20 As the special ‘science of the concrete’,
the critique of political economy starts with the external measure to move to
the study of the inner connection of the qualitative and quantitative aspects.
In Hegelian terms, ‘formal measurement, or specific quantity, becomes real
measurement in order to lead from being to the becoming of the essence’.21
This is the new immanent conception of measure to which Capital leads
us: ‘the measurement that determines itself as qualitatively defined quantity
is immanent to the object it determines’.22 The temporal implications of this
conception are clear: although it tends to be reduced to a purely abstract and
homogeneous temporality in which qualities manifest themselves in quantita-
tively measured units, time becomes the new quality, a complex and uneven
totality of differential temporalities which open up to the contradictory logic
of historical events and processes.
This logic will be fully developed in the next chapter, significantly entitled,
following a formulation of Max Weber, ‘The Distress of Historical Logic’. The
focus shifts now onto the link between temporality and causality combined
with a re-examination, in the light of the ‘new immanence’, of the categories
of law, teleology and possibility. The main problem here is the overcoming of
the old Kantian dualism between nature and freedom, or between contin-
gency and necessity, or, to put it in a more contemporary way, overcoming
the dualism between the singularity of events and decisions and the internal

19  Bensaïd 2009, p. 257.

20  Bensaïd 2009, p. 251.
21  Ibid.
22  Bensaïd 2009, p. 252.

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The Time of History, the Time of Politics, the Time of Strategy 161

determinations of processes. Marx’s new science precisely allows for an under-

standing of necessity as adequate necessity, as a set of internal connections
between conditions and effects, which is distinct from both random contin-
gency and determinism. It therefore becomes possible to grasp the existence of
laws in history as laws of tendency. These laws, unlike the natural or mechani-
cal laws, operate only through a contradictory set of tendencies and counter-
tendencies. Their realisation thus requires a constant interplay of necessity
and contingency: an unpredictable event determines itself by posing retroac-
tively its own conditions as necessary. Likewise, teleology and immanence no
longer constitute an antinomy if we understand teleology, not as submission to
transcendence, but as ‘internal finality’ and immanent thrust: ‘the opposition
between Hegelian teleology and Spinozist immanence is then resolved in the
invention of temporal relations without first or final causes and in the gravita-
tional necessities of social conflict’.23 It is here that we grasp fully the scope of
the notion of new immanence as posed by Gramsci in a famous paragraph of the
Prison Notebooks (Notebook 10) which Bensaïd quotes extensively: ‘does not the
“discovery of the formal logical principle of the ‘law of tendency’ . . . imply
a new ‘immanence’, a new conception of ‘necessity’ and of freedom . . .?” ’.24
History therefore appears as determinate possibility, open to human praxis
and the bifurcations of eventful time.
But Bensaïd does not stop here: in a further dialectical move, he reopens
the issue of necessity and contingency via the Gramscian operation of ‘abso-
lute historicisation’, in order to reinterpret Benjamin’s eschatology: if necessity
can be only apprehended retroactively, if the event only achieves its own self-
determination ex post facto, then necessity is suspended to that very moment
of historical closure. This moment, Benjamin’s Judgement Day, can only be
conceived as a borderline surmise:

it is then and then only that necessity, a category of the past, reveals itself
as the possibility that has come to pass, and cannot now be cancelled.
A category of the future, possibility is a necessity still in a state of poten-
tiality. As for reality, a category of the present, it indissolubly combines
necessity and possibility.25

Bensaïd follows this by noting that ‘this present is the time of politics’, the
impure time when praxis delineates between contradictory temporalities and

23  Bensaïd 2009, p. 271.

24  Bensaïd 2009, p. 281.
25  Bensaïd 2009, p. 284.

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162 Kouvelakis

determinate possibilities. As Hegel famously wrote in the preface of Elements

of the Philosophy of Right to define this primacy of the present, the task of
philosophical thought is to ‘recognize reason as the rose in the cross of the
present’.26
Benjamin’s status seems redeemed here, but it has not escaped the atten-
tion of any careful reader that this reference to the Messianic moment is itself
deeply dialecticised, inscribed in the immanent temporal dynamic of the reali-
sation of the potentialities of the present; something clearly different from,
and indeed quite contradictory with respect to, Benjamin’s vision of revolution
as the leap of the tiger into the past at the moment of the absolute interruption
of time. This dialectical notion of temporality implies a break with the tradi-
tional Marxist notions of a historical subject as an internally homogeneous
and fully-sovereign collective force, whether we define it socially, as a class, or
politically, as a party:

This mediated identity of opposites deconstructs sovereign subjectivity.

Neglect of this contradictory unity results in abstract unilateral interpre-
tations, structuralist-objectivist on the one hand, humanist-voluntarist
on the other, reducing the crisis of humanity to a crisis of revolutionary
leadership.27

The self-critical dimension of this last remark is striking since the latter part of
the formulation – ‘the historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the
revolutionary leadership’ – is the well-known founding statement of Trotsky’s
Transitional Programme of the Fourth International.
Following the harsh criticism of Mandel’s sociological and political teleol-
ogy, the scope of the critique becomes now even broader:

if ultimately the masses make history, this ‘making’ sits ill with the way in
which will and consciousness are ordinarily represented. Is a class a sub-
ject? Maybe, but an unruly, contradictory, schizoid subject. Is the party
as imagined by Lukács a subject? Perhaps, but subject to lunacies, lapses,
terrifying nightmares. For a long time, the Marxist vulgate contrasted
the blind mechanism of the market with the controlled future of plan-
ning, conceived as the expected advent of consciousness in history . . .

26  Hegel 1991, p. 22.

27  Bensaïd 2009, p. 269.

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The Time of History, the Time of Politics, the Time of Strategy 163

A pitiless century has subjected this edifying vision to a severe scientific

and political ordeal.28

These are probably among the most lucid and terrible lines written by a revo-
lutionary Marxist reflecting on the experience of defeats of the past century.
They do not lead, however, to abandonment of the problem of the construc-
tion of an antagonistic social force able to overthrow capitalism. However, the
question of the unity, or, rather, of the unification of such a force should be
considered as an open problem, not as a sociological given or as the automatic
after-effect of a ‘historical mission’. The terrain on which this problem can
be adequately posed is that of politics – a specific level indissociably linked
with the concept of hegemony. In his last texts, Bensaïd will tirelessly criticise
both the ‘anti-political’ illusions of Holloway and Negri and the dissolution of
the hegemonic dimension of politics by Laclau and Mouffe in an amorphous
‘practice of articulation’ of the social.29 To this he will oppose the lessons of
both Lenin and Gramsci as thinkers of the specificity of political struggle,
­irreducible to the interplay of social interests and demands. The possibility of a
political intervention that is both unifying and respectful of pluralism, capable
of confronting the unified force of capitalist domination without suppressing
the specificities of the multiple struggles conducted by the subaltern groups,
lies precisely in this constitutive gap between the political and the social and
in the distinction between classes or social groups and organisations aspiring
to provide a sense of strategic orientation. Hence the necessity of an organ-
ised political force posing the objective of state power which would act as the
agent of that intervention, in contrast to the conception defending the self-
sufficiency of social movements, which Bensaïd defines as the ‘social illusion’
inherent to the ‘utopian moment’ of the re-emergence of a wave of mobilisa-
tions ‘from below’. But to prevent any misunderstanding, he also adds that ‘to
the extent that the relation of such a party to social interests becomes irreduc-
ibly problematic, political pluralism (as well as the pluralism of social actors)
is founded in its principle’.30

28  Bensaïd 2009, p. 270.

29  Bensaïd 2008, pp. 279–311; Bensaïd 2003, pp. 47–74; Bensaïd 2007.
30  Bensaïd 2008, p. 337.

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164 Kouvelakis

The Strategic Imperative

Bensaïd’s dialectics of historical time and his call for a new strategic under-
standing of politics represent a genuine and promising alternative to the
antinomies in which most of contemporary radical thinking on the relation
between these two levels seems nowadays caught and, most certainly, trapped:
on the one side, the pure ultra-politics of the Event, deprived of the triviali-
ties of processes, consequences and determinations; or, on the other side, the
micro-politics of the anonymous, quasi-geological micro-processes forming a
seamless tapestry of ultimately indifferent differences. To these conceptions,
Bensaïd will oppose his ‘melancholic wager’, defined as the unity of a political
and strategic vision, an ethics and an aesthetics of the action. This wager itself
relies on a dual thesis.
Thesis 1: Politics attains primacy over history.
Thesis 2: The possibility of revolutionary political action is incompatible
with a notion of a homogeneous and linear time, subjected to the teleology
of progress or of the final victory. It comes out of the discordances of time, its
internal gaps, immanent differentiations, and breaks.
‘Politics attains primacy over history’ means that history ‘does nothing’, in
the words of Marx and Engels in the Holy Family, that it is not the equivalent
of a secular God or the expression of a Reason that functions as a Supreme
Tribunal. In history there is consequently no ‘final judgement’: successes or
failures say nothing about the truth of an action. The defeat of the revolutions
of the ‘short twentieth century’ is not the end of history. Even if this defeat was
not inevitable, it should nevertheless be understood as the result of a struggle
between antagonistic tendencies. In history, there are only relative necessi-
ties and real potentialities, which refer to contradictory possibilities. Between
these possibilities, struggle decides. In other terms, politics is the decision that
retroactively, hence dialectically, turns possibility into necessity as it trans-
forms the fundamental coordinates of the situation. Its outcome contains
therefore an irreducible part of unpredictability, of contingency. Politics that
tries to change things at the root, i.e. radical or revolutionary politics, must
accept that part of contingency, the absence of a guarantee. This is why it takes
the form of the wager, assuming the risk of failure in order to trace a new path.
This is also why the time of politics is a complex time: it is the instantaneous
time, the moment of extreme condensation when, depending on the decision
to be taken, everything can change. As Lenin famously said, for the uprising to
be successful, yesterday was ‘too early’ and tomorrow will be ‘too late’. Or
to quote again Benjamin’s ‘Theses’, ‘history is the subject of a structure whose
site is not homogeneous, empty time but time filled by the time-of-the-now

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The Time of History, the Time of Politics, the Time of Strategy 165

[ Jetztzeit]’.31 But history is also a process, the long-term time of daily action, of
an often-ungrateful, slow construction, a time during which one has to resist
and fight against the current. The time of politics is the time of a ‘slow impa-
tience’, to cite the oxymoron Bensaïd used as a title for his autobiography.32
The paradox of the formulation reveals that these two dimensions refer to
each other in the very interplay of their difference, that they form a dialectical
unity. Thus, the time of history is not the linear time during which things are
changing, little by little. It is an uneven time, a fragmented time polarised by
leaps and disasters.
The possibility and necessity, to be distinguished from the ‘inevitability’,
of the political intervention arises from this ‘discordance of times’.33 Its agent
remains the political party, which is defined as a strategic operator, although
in a way that sharply contrasts with the simplified dialectic of ‘class conscious-
ness’ to be realised thanks to the mediation of the ‘Revolutionary Party’. The
canonical conception of the ‘vanguard’ acting as the depository of class-con-
sciousness under the guidance of which the unconscious masses will become
aware of their historical interests has definitely failed and needs to be aban-
doned. But, this should not by any means lead us to ‘renounce the idea of a
party-as-strategist, engaged in the uncertainty of the battle, immersed in the
permanently changing relation of forces, which needs to take decisions in the
form of a reasoned wager, deprived of any guarantee of scientific or historical
truth as well as of any divine will.’34
Such a party does not work by referring to sanctified ‘models’ (be it October
1917, the Paris Commune, or 1937 Catalonia), understood as eternal truths
waiting for their return, but according to ‘strategic hypotheses’, by definition
experimental and temporary, subject to the specificities of conjuncture, that
act as guides for action. In his last interventions,35 linked to the situation cre-
ated by the upsurge of the social mobilisations of the late 1990s and the first
half-decade of the present century, and the processes of recomposition of
a new anti-capitalist Left, Bensaïd clarified the terms of the major strategic
reorientation that corresponded to the new historical moment. Reviewing self-
critically the ‘double strategic hypothesis’ of the revolutionary Left in the post-
1968 moment – the insurrectionary general strike for the developed capitalist
countries and the various forms of ‘people’s war’ in the countries of the global

31  Benjamin 1968, p. 261.

32  Bensaïd 2004 and 2013.
33  Bensaïd 1995b.
34  Bensaïd 2008, p. 337.
35  Bensaïd 2007, 2002 and 2011.

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166 Kouvelakis

South – he admits that these two forms of ‘dual power’ do not any more provide
sustainable political perspectives. The surge of mass movements that provide
the ground of any revolutionary process cannot be conceived as entirely exter-
nal to the existing institutional framework. Neither can they be conceived as a
frontal attack upon the bourgeois state seen as a besieged fortress. The transfer
of power and legitimacy interacts with the existing representative institutions
and needs to be posed through a struggle for hegemony based on transitional
demands and the building of broad social alliances.
The main references here are Gramsci, the Trotsky of the Transitional
Programme and of the texts on the United Front, but also, crucially, the elabo-
rations of the third and fourth congresses of the Communist International on
the ‘workers’ government’. This last question is the most ‘tricky’, and Bensaïd
admits that its many divergent formulations in the 1920s were the ‘expres-
sion [of] a real contradiction and [of] an inability to solve the problem’.36 He
calls for a flexible line, adapted to the specificities of each situation, but also
respectful of some fundamental principles which prevent tactics from being
dissociated from strategy and falling into trivial opportunism. Hence the three
criteria he poses as conditions for the participation of revolutionaries in such
governments: the articulation with an on-going political crisis and the poten-
tial of a robust mass movement; a governmental programme that initiates
a dynamic of rupture with the established order on the basis of transitional
demands; a balance of forces that allows revolutionaries to play a significant
role in the ruling coalition or at least of forcing it to pay a high cost in case of
a betrayal. Such a perspective is logically linked to an ‘algebraic formula’ of
the ‘new political force’ which would operate on the terrain of ‘radical space’,
which has found diverse expression in the emergence of new social move-
ments and electoral formations. This is the present-day basis for ‘reconstruc-
tion and regroupment’.37 ‘Algebraic formula’ here means the opposite of a rigid
model, which would provide a strict organisational solution. In this specific
conjuncture, and thinking politically always means thinking in (and not only
on) the conjuncture (i.e. under the conditions posed by the conjuncture), the
primacy of politics over history means the primacy of the strategic compass
over organisational or doctrinal purity.
In his last major book, Éloge d’une politique profane, Bensaïd devotes a long
chapter entitled ‘New Spaces’38 to a discussion of the new forms of imperial
domination and the strategic meaning of notions of state-sovereignty and

36  Bensaïd 2007.

37  Ibid.
38  Bensaïd 2008, pp. 233–77.

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The Time of History, the Time of Politics, the Time of Strategy 167

territorial control. This enhanced attention to space does not mean that spa-
tial contradictions have now eclipsed temporal ones. However, the urgency
of providing a framework for a more-concrete strategic elaboration leads to
a renewed attention to the spatio-temporal dialectic which characterises the
current conjuncture. The historical period in which we are living is structured
more than ever by the time of the uneven and combined development of a
social and economic system that has spread across the entire planet. Spatial
inequality combines with temporal discrepancies, the unevenness of the
rhythms of capital in the various forms of its cycle: the time of production
and the time of circulation of commodities, the linear time of accumulation
and the disruptive time of the crises. This antagonistic plurality of social times
and polarised spaces provides the key to a strategic understanding of time: it
is in the unevenness of capitalist development in Russia, to mention a stan-
dard example, that the possibility of a victorious revolution, combining a peas-
ant revolt and a workers’ uprising, was to be found. It is also this unevenness
that dictates the new spatial forms of popular politics, characterised by the
entanglement of levels of intervention, from the local to the international. This
world-wide space appears, however, increasingly fragmented by the divergent
rhythms of capitalist accumulation and geopolitical configurations always
mediated by the national level. Although weakened, as a result of the domina-
tion of the internationalism of capital, the latter retains therefore a strategic
centrality and should not be assimilated to nationalism or chauvinism. On the
contrary, it is the disdain of the national and the impotence of nation-states to
limit the power of capitalist expansion that leads to deeply regressive identi-
ties, of a tribal or sectarian type. ‘De-connecting’ from the imperialist chain, or
‘de-globalising’ productive processes and claiming popular sovereignty, as
suggested by theorists and activists such as Samir Amin or Walden Bello, are
necessary ingredients of an anti-capitalist strategy that can and needs to be
articulated with a proper internationalist vision.39
But if the heterogeneity and the discordance of spaces and temporalities
open up the possibility of a revolutionary break, they also open up the possibil-
ity of a disaster. To quote Lenin again, one month before the October uprising,
there is the issue of ‘the impending catastrophe and how to combat it.’40 The
disaster is not certain, it will happen only if . . . It is in those moments of exac-
erbated, generalised crisis that the proximity of the disaster and the victorious
break becomes most noticeable.

39  Bensaïd 2008, p. 266.

40  Lenin 1977, pp. 323–69.

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168 Kouvelakis

Today, the face of that disaster is not restricted to violent counter-revolution

and war, although both decisively shape the realities of the world we live in.
But what is perhaps most characteristic of the post-1990 historical conjunc-
ture is the ‘possibility of the disappearance of politics’ itself as it appears
‘crushed between the order of the financial markets – which is made to seem
natural – and the moralising prescriptions of ventriloquist capitalism’.41 At the
root of the present crisis, of which the economic recession is only the latest
development, lies the blockage of the possibility of figuring out an alternative
future, the entrapment into the ‘empty and homogeneous time’ of the com-
modity and of capitalist accumulation. But it is at this precise moment that
‘the vital, urgent question is that of politics from below, politics for those who
are excluded and cut off from the state politics of the ruling class’.42 It is this
Leninist – and Benjaminian – sense of urgency that animated the reflections
and actions of Daniel Bensaïd. It is ‘against the catastrophe that threatens us’
that the ‘possibility of persuading through example, the need for a new link
between the necessary and the possible arises again’.43
If, to repeat Joyce’s well-known aphorism, ‘History is a nightmare from which
I am trying to awake’, then this permanent effort to wrest ourselves awake can
only mean experiencing that nightmare so fully and intensely as to turn it into
the very way our dreams will ultimately take their revenge. It is also then, and
only then, that Bensaïd’s fundamental thesis – ‘politics attains primacy over
history’ – will become true.

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The Time of History, the Time of Politics, the Time of Strategy 169

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