From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power
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From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power Saul Newman Lexington Books, Oxford, 2001, 208pp. ISBN: 0-7391-0240-0. Contemporary Political Theory (2003) 2, 359–361. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300056
This is an intriguing and ambitious addition to the now growing literature attempting to recuperate, or at least reappraise, the legacy of anarchism for the development of an anti-authoritarian, post-Marxian, yet still radical politics. Like Todd May, whose The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism this work inevitably resembles, Newman’s aim is to test the credentials of anarchism as standard bearer for the mantle of ‘most credible alternative to otherwise exhausted totalizing doctrines’. This is to be achieved through subjecting it to the poststructuralist test of validity, that is whether anarchism can avoid the ‘essentialist’, ‘humanist’, ‘post-enlightenment authoritarianism’ that poststructuralists hold to be at the core of ‘modernist’ forms of theorizing. Part of what makes this work interesting is that the critical gaze is at the same time reversed so that the claim of poststructuralists to be offering the ingredients for a genuinely libertarian and liberating form of critique matching anarchist aspirations, if not their theoretical approach, is also the focus for the volume. Thus the first half of the text concerns the classical anarchist legacy, the dispute with Marxism and the importance of Stirner as a critic of authority. The second half examines the work of some of the more significant poststructuralist thinkers, including Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, and Derrida, subjecting them in turn to the anarchist ‘test’ for relevance in elaborating strategies of resistance to the status quo. What becomes clear over the course of the book is the nature of the synthesis Newman is aiming for, that is one between left libertarian ideals albeit in the hands of anarchists articulated on modernist terms, and a radical ‘postfoundational’ method which has (qua ‘postmodernism’ F poststructuralism’s bastard child) long been charged with political ineffectuality. This is, it is clear, an immensely difficult trick to pull off. Newman is nonetheless very compelling at least as concerns why it is an operation worth embarking on. As he argues, it is undoubtedly the case that a great deal for what passes as ‘critical theory’ is offered in the form of poststructuralist critique. It is also the case that whilst classical anarchists can sound very libertarian, all too often their suggestions as to how freedom and equality are to be reconciled have a worryingly authoritarian ring to them. What needs to be established is how such an
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approach advances radical critique. What positive recommendations do such a synthesis have to offer? What is telling in relation to the above is that Newman writes in terms of the development, not of a project or a specific vision of what a liberated form of existence would look like (too totalizing), but of, well, an ‘ethic’. This would be an e
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