💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › saul-newman-the-politics-of-postanarchism.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 14:07:32. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: The Politics of Postanarchism Author: Saul Newman Language: en Topics: philosophy, post-anarchism, post-structuralist Source: Retrieved on August 15, 2010 from http://www.scribd.com/doc/15122704/The-Politics-of-Post-Anarchism-by-Saul-Newman
In recent years radical politics has been faced with a number of new
challenges, not least of which has been the reemergence of the
aggressive, authoritarian state in its new paradigm of security and
bio-politics. The ‘war on terror’serves as the latest guise for the
aggressive reassertion of the principle state sovereignty, beyond the
traditional limits imposed on it by legal institutions or democratic
polities. Coupled with this has been the hegemony of neo-liberal
projects of capitalist globalization, as well as the ideological
obscurantism of the so-called Third Way. The profound disillusionment in
the wake of the collapse of Communist systems nearly two decades ago has
resulted in a political and theoretical vacuum for the radical Left,
which has generally been ineffective in countering the rise of the Far
Right in Europe, as well as a more insidious ‘creeping conservatism’
whose dark ideological implications we are only just beginning to see
unfold.
It is perhaps because of the disarray that the Left finds itself in
today, that there has been a recent revival of interest in anarchism as
a possible radical alternative to Marxism. Indeed, anarchism was always
a kind of ‘third way’ between liberalism and Marxism, and now, with the
general disenchantment felt with both ‘free-market’ style liberalism and
centralist socialism, the appeal of, or at least interest in, anarchism
is likely to increase. This revival is also due to the prominence of the
broadly termed anti-globalization movement. This is a movement which
contests the domination of neo-liberal globalization in all its
manifestations — from corporate greed, to environmental degradation and
genetically-modified foods. It is based around a broad social protest
agenda which incorporates a multitude of different issues and political
identities. However, what we are witnessing here is clearly a new form
of radical politics — one that is fundamentally different to both the
particularized politics of identity that has generally prevailed in
Western liberal societies, as well as to the old style Marxist politics
of class struggle. On the one hand, the anti- globalization movement
unites different identities around a common struggle; and yet this
common ground is not determined in advance, or based on the priority of
particular class interests, but rather is articulated in a contingent
way during the struggle itself. What makes this movement radical is its
unpredictability and indeterminacy — the way that unexpected links and
alliances are formed between different identities and groups that would
otherwise have little in common. So while this movement is universal, in
the sense that it invokes a common emancipative horizon which
constitutes the identities of participants, it rejects the false
universality of Marxist struggles, which deny difference, and
subordinate other struggles to the central role of the proletariat — or,
to be more precise, to the vanguard role of the Party.
It is this refusal of centralist and hierarchical politics, this
openness to a plurality of different identities and struggles, that
makes the anti-globalization movement an anarchist movement. It is not
anarchistic just because anarchist groups are prominent in it. What is
more important is that the anti-globalization movement, without being
consciously anarchist, embodies an anarchistic form of politics in its
structure and organization [1] — which are decentralized, pluralistic
and democratic — as well as in its inclusiveness. Just as classical
anarchists like Bakunin and Kropotkin insisted, in opposition to
Marxists, that the revolutionary struggle could not confined or
determined by the class interests of the industrial proletariat, and
must be open also to peasants, the lumpenproletariat, and intellectuals
déclassé, etc, so too the contemporary movement includes a broad range
of struggles, identities and interests — trade unions, students,
environmentalists, indigenous groups, ethnic minorities, peace
activists, and so on.
As post-Marxists like Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe argue, the
radical political horizon is no longer dominated by the proletariat and
its struggle against capitalism. They point to a whole series of new
social movements and identities — blacks, feminists, ethnic and sexual
minorities — which no longer fit into the Marxist category of class
struggles: “The common denominator of all of them would be their
differentiation from workers’ struggles, considered as ‘class’
struggles.” [2] Class is therefore no longer the central category
through which radical political subjectivity is defined. Moreover,
contemporary political struggles are no longer determined by the
struggle against capitalism, but rather point to new sites of domination
and highlight new arenas of antagonism — racism, privatization,
workplace surveillance, bureaucratization, etc. As Laclau and Mouffe
argue, these new social movements have been primarily struggles against
domination, rather than merely economic exploitation as the Marxist
paradigm would suppose: “As for their novelty, that is conferred upon
them by the fact that they call into question new forms of
subordination.” [3] That is to say, they are anti-authoritarian
struggles — struggles that contest the lack of reciprocity in particular
relations of power. Here, economic exploitation would be seen as part of
the broader problematic of domination — which would include also sexual
and cultural forms of subordination. In this sense, one could say that
these struggles and antagonisms point to an anarchist moment in
contemporary politics.
According to post-Marxists, contemporary political conditions simply can
no longer be explained within the theoretical categories and paradigms
central to Marxist theory. Marxism was conceptually limited by its class
essentialism and economic determinism, which had the effect of reducing
the political to a site that was strictly determined by the capitalist
economy and the dialectical emergence of what was seen as the universal
emancipative subject. That is to say, Marxism was unable to understand
the political as a fully autonomous, specific and contingent field in
its own right, seeing it always as a superstructural effect of class and
economic structures. Thus, the analysis of politics was subordinated to
the analysis of capitalism. Because of this, Marxism simply has no
theoretical purchase on political struggles that are not based on class,
and are no longer centered around economic issues. The catastrophic
failure of the Marxist project — its culmination in the massive
perpetuation and centralization of state power and authority — showed
that it had neglected the importance and specificity of the political
domain. By contrast, contemporary post-Marxists asserts the primacy of
the political, seeing it as an autonomous field — one that, rather than
being determined by class dynamics and the workings of the capitalist
economy, is radically contingent and indeterminate.
What is surprising, then, is that post-Marxist theory has not recognized
the crucial contribution of classical anarchism in conceptualizing a
fully autonomous political field. Indeed, it is precisely this emphasis
on the primacy and specificity of the political that characterizes
anarchism and distinguishes it from Marxism. Anarchism offered a radical
socialist critique of Marxism, exposing its theoretical blindspot on the
question of state power. Unlike Marxism, which saw political power as
deriving from class position, anarchists like Mikhail Bakunin insisted
that the state must be seen as the main impediment to socialist
revolution, and that it was oppressive no matter what form it took and
or which class controlled it: “They (Marxists) do not know that
despotism resides not so much in the form of the State but in the very
principle of the State and political power.” [4] In other words,
domination existed in the very structure and logic of the state — it
constituted an autonomous site or place of power, one that must be
destroyed as the first act of revolution. Anarchists believed that
Marx’s neglect of this domain would have disastrous consequences for
revolutionary politics — a prediction that was proven all too accurate
by the Bolshevik Revolution. For anarchists, the centralized political
power could not be easily overcome, and was always in danger of being
reaffirmed unless addressed specifically. The theoretical innovation of
anarchism therefore lay in taking the analysis of power beyond the
economic reductionist paradigm of Marxism. Anarchism also pointed to
other sites of authority and domination that were neglected in Marxist
theory — for example, the Church, the family and patriarchal structures,
the law, technology, as well as the structure and hierarchy of the
Marxist revolutionary Party itself. [5] It offered new theoretical tools
for the analysis of political power and, in doing so, opened up the site
of the political as a specific field of revolutionary struggle and
antagonism, which could no longer be subordinated to purely economic
concerns.
Given anarchism’s contribution to radical politics and, in particular,
its theoretical proximity to current post-Marxist projects, there has
been a curious silence about this revolutionary tradition on the part of
contemporary radical theory. However, I would also suggest that just as
contemporary theory should take account of the intervention of
anarchism, anarchism itself could benefit greatly through an
incorporation of contemporary theoretical perspectives, in particular
those derived from discourse analysis, psychoanalysis and
poststructuralism. Perhaps we could say that anarchism today has been
more about practice than theory, despite, of course, the interventions
of a number of influential modern anarchist thinkers like Noam Chomsky,
John Zerzan and Murray Bookchin. [6] I have already pointed to the
anarchy in action that we see in the new social movements that
characterize our political landscape. However, the very conditions that
have given rise to the anarchist moment — the pluralization of
struggles, subjectivities and sites of power — are also the conditions
that highlight the central contradictions and limits of anarchist
theory. Anarchist theory is still largely based in the paradigm of
Enlightenment humanism — with its essentialist notions of the rational
human subject, and its positivistic faith in science and objective
historical laws. Just as Marxism was limited politically by its own
categories of class and economic determinism, as well as by its
dialectical view of historical development, anarchism can also be said
to be limited by its epistemological anchoring in the essentialist and
rationalist discourses of Enlightenment humanism.
The paradigm of Enlightenment humanism has been superseded by the
paradigm of postmodernity, which can be seen a critical perspective on
the discourses of modernity — an “incredulity towards metanarratives,”
as Jean-Francois Lyotard put it. [7] In other words, what the postmodern
condition puts in question is precisely the universality and absolutism
of rational and moral frameworks derived from the Enlightenment. It
unmasks the very ideas that we have taken for granted — our faith in
science, for instance — showing their arbitrary nature, and the way they
have been constructed through the violent exclusion of other discourses
and perspectives. Postmodernism also questions the essentialist ideas
about subjectivity and society — the conviction that there is a central
and unchanging truth at the base of our identity and our social
existence, a truth that can only be revealed once the irrational
mystifications of religion or ideology have been discarded. Instead,
postmodernism emphasizes the shifting and contingent nature of identity
— the multiplicity of ways in which it can be experienced and
understood. Moreover, rather than history being understood as the
unfolding of a rational logic or essential truth — as in the dialectic,
for instance — it is seen from the postmodern perspective as a series of
haphazard accidents and contingencies, without origin or purpose.
Postmodernism therefore emphasizes the instability and plurality of
identity, the constructed nature of social reality, the
incommensurability of difference, and the contingency of history.
There are a number of contemporary critical theoretical strategies that
engage with the question of postmodernity, and that I see as having
crucial implications for radical politics today. These strategies would
include poststructuralism, ‘discourse analysis’ and post-Marxism. They
derive from a variety of different fields in philosophy, political
theory, cultural studies, aesthetics and psychoanalysis, yet what they
broadly share is a discursive understanding of social reality. That is
to say, they see social and political identities as being constructed
through relations of discourse and power, and as having no intelligible
meaning outside this context. Furthermore, these perspectives go beyond
a structural determinist understanding of the world, pointing to the
indeterminacy of the structure itself, as well as its multiple forms of
articulation. There are several key theoretical problematics that can be
drawn out here, that are not only central to the contemporary political
field, but also have important implications for anarchism itself.
A) The opacity of the social. The socio-political field is characterized
by multiple layers of articulation, antagonism and ideological
dissimulation. Rather than there being an objective social truth beyond
interpretation and ideology, there is only the antagonism of conflicting
articulations of the social. This derives from the Althusserian (and
originally Freudian) principle of overdetermination — according to which
meaning is never ultimately fixed, giving rise to a plurality of
symbolic interpretations. Slavoj Zizek provides an interesting example
of this discursive operation through Claude Levi-Strauss’ discussion of
the different perceptions of the spatial location of buildings amongst
members of a Winnebago tribe. The tribe, we are told, is divided into
two groups — ‘those who are from above’and ‘those who are from below.’
An individual from each group was asked to draw the ground plan of his
or her village on sand or a piece of paper. The result was a radical
difference between the representations of each group. ‘Those who are
from above’drew the village as a series of concentric circles within
circles, with a group of circles in the center and a series of satellite
circles clustered around this. This would correspond with the
‘conservative-corporatist’ image of society held by the upper classes.
‘Those who are from below’drew the village also as a circle, but one
that is clearly divided by a line into two antagonistic halves — thus
corresponding with the ‘revolutionary-antagonistic’ view held by the
lower classes. Zizek comments here:
the very splitting into the two ‘relative’perceptions implies a hidden
reference to a constant — not the objective, ‘actual’disposition of
buildings but a traumatic kernel, a fundamental antagonism the
inhabitants of the village were unable to symbolize, to account for, to
‘internalize,’ to come to terms with — an imbalance in social relations
that prevented the community from stabilizing itself into a harmonious
whole. [8]
According to this argument, the anarchist notion of social objectivity
or totality would be impossible to sustain. There is always an
antagonism at the level of social representation that undermines the
symbolic consistency of this totality. The different perspectives and
conflicting interpretations of the social could not be seen merely
resulting from an ideological distortion which prevents the subject from
grasping the truth of society. The point here is that this differencein
social interpretations — this incommensurable field of antagonisms — is
the truth of society. In other words, the distortion here is not at the
level of ideology, but at the level of social reality itself.
B) The indeterminacy of the subject. Just as the identity of social may
be seen as indeterminate, so too is the identity of the subject. This
derives from a number of different theoretical approaches.
Poststructuralists such as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, have
attempted to see subjectivity as a field of immanence and becoming that
gives rise to a plurality of differences, rather than as a fixed, stable
identity. The supposed unity of the subject is destabilized through the
heterogeneous connections it forms with other social identities and
assemblages. [9] A different approach to the question of subjectivity
can be found in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Here the identity of the
subject is always deficient or lacking, because of the absence of what
Jacques Lacan calls object petit a — the lost object of desire. This
lack in identity is also registered in the external symbolic order
through which the subject is understood. The subject seeks recognition
of himself through the an interaction with the structure of language;
however, this structure is itself deficient, as there is an certain
element — the Real — that escapes symbolization. [10] What is clear in
these two approaches is that the subject can no longer be seen as a
complete, whole, self- contained identity that is fixed by an essence —
rather its identity is contingent and unstable. Therefore, politics can
no longer be based entirely on the rational claims of stable identities,
or on the revolutionary assertion of a fundamental human essence.
Rather, political identities are indeterminate and contingent — and can
give rise to a plurality of different and often antagonistic struggles
over precisely how this identity is to be defined. This approach clearly
calls into question the anarchist understanding of subjectivity, which
sees it as being based on a universal human essence with rational and
moral characteristics. [11]
C) The complicity of the subject in power. The status of the subject is
further problematized by its involvement in relations of power and
discourse. This was a problem that was explored extensively by Michel
Foucault, who showed the myriad ways in which subjectivity is
constructed through discursive regimes and practices of power/knowledge.
Indeed, the way that we come to see ourselves as self-reflexive subjects
with particular characteristics and capacities is based on our
complicity in relations and practices of power that often dominate us.
This throws into doubt the notion of the autonomous, rational human
subject and its status in a radical politics of emancipation. As
Foucault says, “The man described for us, whom we are invited to free,
is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than
himself.” [12] This has a number of major implications for anarchism.
Firstly, rather than there being a subject whose natural human essence
is repressed by power — as anarchists believed — this form of
subjectivity is actually an effect of power. That is to say, this
subjectivity has been produced in such a way that it sees itself as
having an essence that is repressed — so that its liberation is actually
concomitant with its continued domination. Secondly, this discursive
figure of the universal human subject that is central to anarchism, is
itself a mechanism of domination that aims at the normalization of the
individual and the exclusion of forms of subjectivity that do not fit in
with it. This domination was unmasked by Max Stirner, who showed that
the humanist figure of man was really an inverted image of God, and
performed the same ideological operation of oppressing the individual
and denying difference.
D) The genealogical view of history. Here the view of history as the
unfolding of a fundamental law is rejected, in favor of one that
emphasizes the ruptures, breaks and discontinuities in history. History
is seen as a series of antagonisms and multiplicities, rather than the
articulation of a universal logic, like the Hegelian dialectic, for
instance. There is no “timeless and essential secret” to history, but
merely, as Foucault says, the “hazardous play of dominations.” [13]
Foucault saw Nietzschean genealogy as a project of unmasking the
conflicts and antagonisms, the “unspoken warfare” that is waged behind
the veil of history. The role of the genealogist is to “awaken beneath
the form of institutions and legislations the forgotten past of real
struggles, of masked victories or defeats, the blood that has dried on
the codes of law.” [14] In the institutions, laws and practices that we
come to take for granted, or see as natural or inevitable, there is a
condensation of violent struggles and antagonisms that have been
repressed. For instance, Jacques Derrida has shown that the authority of
the Law is based on a founding gesture of violence that has been
disavowed. The Law must be founded on something that pre-exists it, and
therefore its foundation is by definition illegal. The secret of the
Law’s being must therefore be some kind disavowed illegality, an
original crime or act of violence that brings the body of the Law into
existence and which is now is hidden in its symbolic structures. [15] In
other words, social and political institutions and identities must be
seen as having political — that is to say, antagonistic — rather than
natural origins. These political origins have been repressed in the
psychoanalytic sense — that is, they have been ‘placed elsewhere’ rather
than eliminated entirely, and can always be re-activated once the
meaning of these institutions and discourses is contested. [16] While
anarchism would share this deconstructive engagement with political
authority — it rejected the social contract theory of the state, for
instance — it still subscribes to a dialectical view of history. Social
and political development is seen as determined by the unfolding of a
rational social essence and immutable natural and historical laws. The
problem is that if these immutable laws determine the conditions for
revolutionary struggle, then there is little room for seeing the
political as contingent and indeterminate. Moreover, the genealogical
critique could also be extended to the ‘natural’ institutions and
relations that anarchists see as being opposed to the order of political
power. Because genealogy sees history as a clash of representations and
an antagonism of forces, in which power relations are inevitable, this
would destabilize any identity, structure or institution — even those
that might exist in a post-revolutionary anarchist society.
These four problematics that are central to poststructuralism/discourse
analysis, thus have fundamental implications for anarchist theory: if
anarchism is to be theoretically effective today, if it is to fully
engage with contemporary political struggles and identities, it must
eschew the Enlightenment humanist framework in which it is articulated —
with its essentialist discourses, its positivistic understanding of
social relations and its dialectical view of history. Instead, it must
fully assert the contingency of history, the indeterminacy of identity,
and the antagonistic nature of social and political relations. In other
words, anarchism must follow its insight about the autonomy of the
political dimension to its logical implications — and see the political
as a constitutively open field of indetermination, antagonism and
contingency, without the guarantees of dialectical reconciliation and
social harmony.
Postanarchism may therefore be seen as the attempt to revise anarchist
theory along non- essentialist and non-dialectical lines, through the
application and development of insights from poststructuralism/discourse
analysis. This is in order to tease out what I see as innovative and
seminal in anarchism — which is precisely the theorization of the
autonomy and specificity of the political domain, and the deconstructive
critique of political authority. It is these crucial aspects of
anarchist theory that must be brought to light, and whose implications
must be explored. They must be freed from the epistemological conditions
that, although they originally gave rise to them now restrict them.
Postanarchism thus performs a salvage operation on classical anarchism,
attempting to extract its central insight about the autonomy of the
political, and explore its implications for contemporary radical
politics.
The impetus for this postanarchist intervention came from my sense that
not only was anarchist theory in nuce poststructuralist; but also that
postructuralism itself was in nuce anarchist. That is to say, anarchism
allowed, as I have suggested, the theorization of the autonomy of the
political with its multiple sites of power and domination, as well as
its multiple identities and sites of resistance (state, church, family,
patriarchy, etc) beyond the economic reductionist framework of Marxism.
However, as I have also argued, the implications of these theoretical
innovations were restricted by the epistemological conditions of the
time — essentialist ideas about subjectivity, the determinist view of
history, and the rational discourses of the Enlightenment.
Poststructuralism is, in turn, at least in its political orientation,
fundamentally anarchist — particularly its deconstructive project of
unmasking and destabilizing the authority of institutions, and
contesting practices of power that are dominating and exclusionary. The
problem with poststructuralism was that, while it implied a commitment
to anti-authoritarian politics, it lacked not only an explicit
politico-ethico content, but also an adequate account of individual
agency. The central problem with Foucault, for instance, was that if the
subject is constructed through the discourses and relations of powerthat
dominate him, how exactly does he resist this domination? Therefore, the
premise for bringing together anarchism and poststructuralism was to
explore the ways in which each might highlight and address the
theoretical problems in the other. For instance, the poststructuralist
intervention in anarchist theory showed that anarchism had a theoretical
blindspot — it did not recognize the hidden power relations and
potential authoritarianism in the essentialist identities, and
discursive and epistemological frameworks, that formed the basis of its
critique of authority. The anarchist intervention in poststructural
theory, on the other hand, exposed its political and ethical
shortcomings, and, in particular, the ambiguities of explaining agency
and resistance in the context of all-pervasive power relations.
These theoretical problems centered around the question of power, place
and the outside: it was found that while classical anarchism was able to
theorize, in the essential revolutionary subject, an identity or place
of resistance outside the order of power, this subject was found, in the
subsequent analyses, to be embroiled in the very power relations it
contested; whereas poststructuralism, while it exposed precisely this
complicity between the subject and power, was left without a theoretical
point of departure — an outside — from which to criticize power. Thus,
the theoretical quandary that I attempted to address in From Bakunin to
Lacan, was that, while we have to assume that there is no essentialist
outside to power — no firm ontological or epistemological ground for
resistance, beyond the order of power — radical politics nevertheless
needs some theoretical dimension outside power, and some notion of
radical agency that was not wholly determined by power. I explored the
emergence of this aporia, discovering two central ‘epistemological
breaks’ in radical political thought. The first was found in Stirner’s
critique of Enlightenment humanism, which formed the theoretical basis
for the poststructuralist intervention, within the anarchist tradition
itself. The second was found in Lacanian theory, whose implications went
beyond the conceptual limits of poststructuralism [17] — pointing to the
deficiencies in the structures of power and language, and the
possibility of a radically indeterminate notion of agency emerging from
this lack.
Therefore, postanarchism is not so much a coherent political program,
but rather an anti- authoritarian problematic that emerges
genealogically — that is, through a series of theoretical conflicts or
aporias — from a poststructuralist approach to anarchism (or indeed, an
anarchist approach to poststructuralism). However, postanarchism also
implies a broad strategy of interrogating and contesting relations of
power and hierarchy, of uncovering previously unseen sites of domination
and antagonism. In this sense, postanarchism may be seen as an open-
ended politico-ethical project of deconstructing authority. What
distinguishes it from classical anarchism is that it is a
non-essentialist politics. That is, postanarchism no longer relies on an
essential identity of resistance, and is no longer anchored in the
epistemologies of the Enlightenment or the ontological guarantees of
humanist discourse. Rather, its ontology is constitutively open to
other, and posits an empty and indeterminate radical horizon, which can
include a plurality of different political struggles and identities. In
other words, postanarchism is an anti-authoritarianism which resists the
totalizing potential of a closed discourse or identity. This does not
mean, of course, that post-anarchism has no ethical content or limits.
Indeed, its politico-ethical content may even be provided by the
traditional emancipative principles of freedom and equality — principles
whose unconditional and irreducible nature was affirmed by the classical
anarchists. However, the point is that these principles are no longer
grounded in a closed identity but become “empty signifiers” [18] that
are open to a number of different articulations decided contingently in
the course of struggle.
One of the central challenges to radical politics today would be the
deformation of the nation state into a bio-political state — a
deformation which, paradoxically, shows its true face. As Giorgio
Agamben has shown, the logic of sovereignty beyond the law, and the
logic of bio-politics, have intersected in the form of the modern state.
Thus, the prerogative of the state is to regulate, monitor and police
the biological health of its internal populations. As Agamben has
argued, this function produces a particular kind of subjectivity — what
he calls homo sacer — which is defined by the form of “bare life,” or
biological life stripped of its political and symbolic significance, as
well as by the principle of legal murder, or murder with impunity. [19]
Paradigmatic of this would be the subjectivity of the refugee, and the
refugee internment camps that we see springing up everywhere. Within
these camps, a new, arbitrary form of power is exerted directly on the
naked life of the detainee. In other words, the body of the refugee,
which has been stripped of all political and legal rights, is the point
of application of sovereign bio-power. However, the refugee is merely
emblematic of the bio-political status that we are all increasingly
being reduced to. Indeed, this points to a new antagonism that is
emerging as central to politics. [20] A postanarchist critique would be
directed at precisely this link between power and biology. It is not
enough to simply assert the human rights of the subject against the
incursions of power. What must be critically examined is the way in
which certain human subjectivities are constructed as conduits of power.
The conceptual vocabulary to analyse these new forms of power and
subjectivity would not have been available to classical anarchism.
However, even in this new paradigm of subjectifying power, classical
anarchism’s ethical and political commitment to interrogating authority,
as well as its analysis of state sovereignty — which went beyond class
explanations — continues to be relevant today. Postanarchism is
innovative precisely because it combines what is crucial in anarchist
theory, with a postsructuralist/discursive-analytic critique of
essentialism. What results is an open-ended anti-authoritarian political
project for the future.
[1] See David Graeber’s discussion of some of these anarchistic
structures and forms of organization in “The New Anarchists,”New Left
Review 13 (Jan/Feb 2002): 61–73.
[2] Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy:
Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso, 2001. p. 159.
[3] Ibid., p. 160.
[4] Mikhail Bakunin, Political Philosophy: Scientific Anarchism, ed. G.
P Maximoff. London: Free Press of Glencoe. p. 221.
[5] See Murray Bookchin, Remaking Society, Montreal: Black Rose Books,
1989. p. 188.
[6] The last two in particular have remained resistant to
poststructuralism/postmodernism. See, for instance, John Zerzan, “The
Catastrophe of Postmodernism,”Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed (Fall
1991): 16–25.
[7] See Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: a Report on
Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1984.
[8] See Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek, Contingency,
Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London:
Verso. pp. 112–113.
[9] See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Trans. R. Hurley. New York: Viking Press, 1972. p. 58.
[10] For a comprehensive discussion of the political implications of
this Lacanian approach to identity, see Yannis Stavrakakis, Lacan and
the Political. London: Routledge, 1999. pp 40–70.
[11] Peter Kropotkin, for instance, believed that there was an natural
instinct for sociability in men, which formed the basis for ethical
relations; while Bakunin argued that the subject’s morality and
rationality arises out of his natural development. See, respectively,
Peter Kropotkin, Ethics: Origin & Development. Trans., L.S Friedland.
New York: Tudor, 1947; and Bakunin, Political Philosophy, op cit., pp.
152–157.
[12] Michel Foucault. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.
Trans. A. Sheridan. Penguin: London, 1991. p. 30.
[13] Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,”in The Foucault
Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon, 1984. 76–100. p. 83.
[14] Michel Foucault, “War in the Filigree of Peace: Course
Summary,”trans. I. Mcleod, in Oxford Literary Review 4, no. 2 (1976):
15–19. pp. 17–18.
[15] See Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of
Authority,’in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed.
Drucilla Cornell et al. New York: Routledge, 1992: 3–67.
[16] See Jacob Torfing, New Theories of Discourse: Laclau, Mouffe and
Zizek, Oxford: Blackwell, 1999.
[17] The question of whether Lacan can be seen as ‘poststructuralist’or
‘post- postructuralist’forms a central point of contention between
thinkers like Laclau and Zizek, both of whom are heavily influenced by
Lacanian theory. See Butler et al. Contingency, op. cit.
[18] This notion of the “empty signifier”is central to Laclau’s theory
of hegemonic articulation. See Hegemony, op. cit. See Ernesto Laclau,
“Why do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics?”in The Lesser Evil and the
Greater Good: The Theory and Politics of Social Diversity, ed. Jeffrey
Weeks. Concord, Mass.: Rivers Oram Press, 1994. 167–178
[19] See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life.
Trans., Daniel Heller- Roazen. Stanford, Ca: Stanford University Press,
1995.
[20] As Agamben argues: : “The novelty of coming politics is that it
will not longer be a struggle for the conquest or control of the State,
but a struggle between the State and the non-State (humanity)...”Giorgio
Agamben, The Coming Community, trans., Michael Hardt. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993. p. 84.