When “politics outstrips history”: Gramsci and Benjamin in Daniel Bensaid’s thought

Abstract

Recently deceased (in January 2010) in Paris, Daniel Bensaid is, without a doubt, one of the principal names of the contemporary French intellectual left. Anchored in reflections on Gramsci and Walter Benjamin, he dedicated himself to thinking about politics as a field of possibilities for the concrete reopening of history. The goal of this article is to systematize, by way of introduction, the theoretical implications of this contemporary recuperation, and to use them as a point of departure for a creative re-reading of Marxism.