Miguel Abensour

Miguel Abensour (, February 13, 1939 – April 22, 2017) was a French philosopher specializing in political philosophy.

Beginning his academic career as a professor of political science at Dijon, then at the University of Reims, before teaching political philosophy at the Paris Diderot University (Jussieu), where he became emeritus professor.

Born in February 1939 to parents who came to France from Algeria only a few months before the beginning of World War II, Abensour had to live in hiding during the Occupation, as his father was Jewish.

The family left Paris and settled in a village in the Lower Pyrénées.

Reflecting on this period of his life in a lengthy interview conducted by Michel Enaudeau, he stated:

"We lived in a small village, and my parents had pointed out to me the houses that we had to avoid and the people not to talk to. It's undoubtedly extremely unsettling for a child to realize that the world in which they live every day is divided in two and includes dangerous places and people."

- Miguel Abensour

After the war, his father worked as a German interpreter at the Nuremberg trials.

In the same interview with Enaudeau, the philosopher recounted another disquieting episode from his childhood:

"Around the age of twelve, I searched through his bookshelf and found, mixed in with the trial documents, a volume of related photographs about the death camps. This book suddenly introduced me to an unsuspected universe that defied all thought. I remember the photos of deportees, whose gazes called out to me as if they were from another planet; I remember heaps, actual piles of glasses several meters high, poignant images of mass killings. These images have never left me."

- Miguel Abensour

Abensour was also deeply marked by the period of the Algerian War, "especially the idea that torture was commonly practiced, even by people who had been part of the [French] resistance. [fr]" In 1957, he spent part of the summer in Oran: "An atmosphere of widespread hatred prevailed there. All communities despised each other. I could also observe the humiliations that Algerians endured daily from the French colonizers. [fr]"

Holding an agrégation in political science, Abensour began his teaching career as a professor of this discipline at Dijon during the 1960s.

Later, he spent some time at the CNRS.

During the 1970s, when a doctorate program in political theory was established, he was appointed as a professor of political science at the University of Reims.

He established there the Centre de philosophie politique, where Claude Lefort and Pierre Clastres came to present their works.

In the early 1970s Abensour became involved with the journal Textures, created and led by the Belgian phenomenologist Marc Richir.

In 1973, he obtained a PhD in political science after successfully defending in 1973 a thèse d'État on utopia in the 19th century, first supervised by Charles Eisenmann and later by Gilles Deleuze.

In 1977, along with Cornelius Castoriadis, Pierre Clastres, Marcel Gauchet, Claude Lefort, and Maurice Luciani, he co-founded the journal Libre under the Payot editions.

According to Franck Berthot, those two journals played a significant role in the resurgence of political philosophy in France during the turning point of the 1980s with critical discussion of the themes of democracy and totalitarianism, emancipation and domination.

His involvement within these journals was intense, and the debates among collaborators in the various journals were quite lively.

Founder and director of the editorial collection "Critique de la politique" at Payot and president of the Collège international de philosophie from 1985 to 1987, he is generally viewed as a left-libertarian thinker and as a theoretician of radical democracy.

With thinkers such as Claude Lefort, Pierre Clastres, Cornelius Castoriadis, and Marcel Gauchet, Abensour greatly contributed to the renewal of French political philosophy in the post-war period.

Aware of the many controversies surrounding the legacy, history, and historiography of the French Revolution in France, he examined the contradictions of the French revolutionaries and commented their texts (especially Saint-Just).

In the wake of the rediscovery of Karl Marx, notably his early writings, Abensour aimed to distinguish Marx's own thought from Marxism.

After the advent of the Nazi regime and the Shoah, the Italian fascism and against Soviet totalitarianism, Abensour questioned the nature of those totalitarian experiences in which he sees the blossoming of domination and the vanishing of politics.

Moreover, while several political leaders in France and worldwide have advocated for liberal democracy, Abensour emphasized the distinction between representative government and democracy.

In the same spirit of critique, Abensour has offered many studies on Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, and Emmanuel Levinas.

He examined the history of utopia and identified in it a "new utopian spirit."

Finally, Abensour has developed a conception of democracy that he refers to as "insurgent democracy."

This complex idea, akin to other theories of radical democracy, insists on the dissolution of the State-form and political domination as the authentic democratic moment per excellence.

Whether in his work as an editor, as a thinker, or as a public intellectual, Miguel Abensour always reflected on the emancipation of the oppressed.

Acting as the guiding thread of his thought, the question posed by Étienne de La Boétie never left him: "why does the majority of the oppressed not revolt?"

Eventually, he reframed this fundamental question with the terms set by Baruch Spinoza: "why do men fight for their servitude as if it were for their own salvation?"

In 1990, he joined the University of Paris VII-Denis Diderot, where he taught until the end of his career and eventually became professor emeritus of political philosophy.

Within this university, he took part in the adventure of the Centre de sociologie des pratiques et des représentations politiques and its affiliated journal, Tumultes.

As a professor, he supervised the doctoral theses of several influential figures in the renewal of political philosophy in France, including Luc Ferry, Philippe Raynaud, Jean-Michel Besnier, and Étienne Tassin.

Miguel Abensour was "an active figure in the world of journals. [fr]" His first published article, appearing in two installments in the Annales historiques de la Révolution française, was dedicated to Saint-Just.

Subsequently, alongside his academic and teaching pursuits, Abensour engaged with various journals such as Textures and Libre.

In an 2007 interview with Jean-Claude Poizat, reflecting on his journey, Abensour stated, "I am more of a journal-oriented person. I participated in Textures, Libre, Passé-Présent, Tumultes; the practice of writing has the merit of introducing distance between the members of the journal. [fr]"