An Impatient Life

Praise

France’s leading Marxist public intellectual.”
—Tariq Ali

“Daniel’s death is like a wound, not a sadness. A loss which leaves us heavier. However, this weight is the opposite of a burden; it is a message composed, not with words, but with decisions and acts and injuries.”
—John Berger

“Daniel Bensaïd was my ‘distant companion’ … With his disappearance, the intellectual, activist, political, and what we might call, even though the adjective is today obscure in meaning, ‘revolutionary’ world has changed.”
—Alain Badiou

“His ideological fervour comes through in the memoir. Part autobiography, part activist’s logbook, and part political treatise, it’s the story of how a working-class boy went on to co-found a party that twice participated in French presidential elections, and became a leader of the Fourth International, the global organisation of Trotskyist followers.”
—Independent

“This absorbing, affecting memoir is a beautiful testament to a richly productive and dignified life…this is an energising book, a book that reminds us of the rightness of refusing the inevitability of capitalism and war, of the promise of international solidarity and socialism, of our responsibility to all those who have made sacrifices in this struggle.”
—Dougal McNeill, ISO

“Bensaïd crafts each chapter with a painter’s hand, stroke by stroke, offering us musings, vignettes, and reflections that are intricately argued, sometimes speculative, and always subtly insightful.”
—Alan Wald, International Socialist Review

“From love to Leninism, journalism to Jewishness, Bensaïd always has something interesting and original to say.”
—Ken MacLeod

“An honest, and often moving, chronicle of a revolutionary life in unrevolutionary times.”
—Marc Mulholland, English Historical Review