Reading Thoughts on Saul Newman’s From Bakunin to Lacan

From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power was published in 2001 by Saul Newman, more than two decades ago, and is considered by many to be one of the foundational texts of postanarchism as a philosophical and political “tradition”. Now, tradition is a strong word considering that two decades later it is pretty much dead in the water, like the rest of anarchist thought in academia. However, the synthesis of philosophical poststructuralism and anarchist politics was a good idea in my opinion. Although nobody identifies as a postanarchist today, many contemporary anarchists are still influenced by Foucault and/or Deleuze. This includes post-leftists like Bob Black and neo-Proudhonists like Shaun Wilbur. Psychoanalyst Duane Rousselle also carried on Newman’s project of refining the postanarchist ontology with Lacanian ideas, though the psychoanalyst apparently does “not care much for anarchist politics.” Therefore, a thorough reflection of this foundational postanarchist text has the potential to bear some fruit.

Saul Newman starts off the book with a more or less orthodox anarchist critique of classical Marxism. I read somewhere in a Marxist review of the book (I forgot where and am too lazy to find it) that postanarchists are often eager to justify their political position against the academic hegemon that is Marxism by attacking Marxism in every work they publish. Therefore, postanarchism and anarchism in a whole is to an extent defined by its opposition to Marxism. The author of the review went on to use this as one reason why Marxism and anarchism should coexist and cooperate in academia, since they depend on each other’s existence for meaning. Anyway, Newman points out some contradictions in the Marxist corpus on the nature of the state before moving to Bakunin and Kropotkin’s ideas about the state and human nature. Newman thinks that the orthodox Marxist position about revolution is obviously futile, as Marx’s theory about the state based on historical materialism is divorced from reality. Replacing the bourgeois state with a proletarian state is only going to change the oppressor and not the nature of oppression. This is in line with what classical anarchists have said about statist socialism for hundreds of years.

However, Newman in chapter 2 asserts that anarchism suffers from the same problem but in a different way: the anarchist envisions a fundamental tension between human nature and morality, which is good and rational, and statist oppression, which is bad and originates from the outside of society. He comes to the conclusion that classical anarchism has an authoritarian tendency like Marxism due to its essentialism, and that the anarchist concept of the social revolution, by replacing the bourgeois state with a society of essentialist expectations and morals, is in danger of being authoritarian. This, as many others including Shaun Wilbur has pointed out, is an unfavorable reductionist view of what classical anarchists such as Bakunin actually believed. I won’t get into the specifics of this critique, but it is generally understood that many if not most of the postanarchist theorists were not being thorough with their representation of classical anarchist thought and often portrayed it as too much of a “unified body” composed of the works of a select canon of “major anarchist thinkers” instead of a diverse body of ideas contributed to by many people over a couple hundred years. Anarchists such as Shaun Wilbur pointed out that historical thinkers shoved under the label of “classical anarchism” such as Bakunin and Kropotkin were not understood enough by the postanarchists, and a lot of their critiques against those thinkers amounted to a misrepresentation or a cherry-picking mentality. Additionally, other anarchist thinkers not commonly addressed such as Pierre Proudhon and Emma Goldman actually have a lot of ideas that mirror those of poststructuralists.

I would defend postanarchism against these critiques to an extent. Although parts of postanarchism might be built on a critique of anarchism that in turn was built on a misrepresentation of what anarchism actually is, the reflections generated by postanarchism as a result of this made up conflict yields useful ideas anyway. Why would you read Proudhon “because he has ideas that are similar to poststructuralism” instead of just… well, reading the poststructuralists? The latter wrote much closer to our time than Proudhon, and their ideas carry a philosophical development over a few hundred years that were not available to Proudhon.

Newman concludes in the second chapter that classical anarchism is based on an “uncontaminated point of departure outside of power” that has its roots in essentialist values which originated in the enlightenment. This basis had to be rejected, but what do we put in its place? If power is ubiquitous and there is no outside to power, how can we create a free society starting from the one we are in right now? In the third chapter, Newman brings in what he believed to be a often forgotten anarchist thinker: Max Stirner, in order to begin his project of saving anarchism from its essentialist assumptions. Now, Newman was not familiar enough with the history of global anarchist thought to know that Stirner was already a very influential thinker in anarchism both among European individualists and also the American post-leftists who came much later. However, I still agree with Ernesto Laclau (who wrote the foreword to this book) in considering this portion of Newman’s analysis to be the most novel and well done part of the whole book. This is because Newman’s interpretation of Stirner’s ego differs from the standard understanding of the subject of egoism as reducible to an essential individualist, selfish subject. Instead, Stirner’s ego according to Newman is a “nonplace instead of a place,” a void that is undefined. Due to this nature of being empty, the ego is a “creative nothing” that radically self-invents without being subordinated by powers such as morality, religion or the state. Newman borrows heavily from this Stirnerite ego/unique in his conception of his insurrectionary subject, the singularity, which he touches on in the end of this book and expands upon significantly in his later work Postanarchism (2015). Newman also views Stirner as a “proto-poststructuralist” due to his rejection of a human essence and humanist politics, and this ties nicely into the next few philosophers he goes over.

The way I see it, the next three chapters can be bundled together. Foucault, Deleuze/Guattari, and Derrida are analyzed in this order, and it is a very reasonable order. Foucault’s theory of the discursive construction of power can be seen as a postmodern continuation of Stirner’s rejection of spooks. However, Foucault’s conception of power was too all encompassing, and he struggled to provide a consistent outside to power (though he tried). Deleuze and Guattari in their A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia posited the war machine as an antagonist to the state form, but Newman deemed it not consistent enough to be the basis of resistance either. Derrida came the closest with his deconstruction of authority in metaphysics, and his work revealed a limitation of the approach of poststructuralism to Newman. However, even Derrida did not adequately theorize an outside, unable to go far enough beyond this limitation. These three chapters were Newman’s explorations of the failed attempts of poststructuralist thinkers to fully theorize the outside to power. As Catherine Malabou argued in her recent book Stop Thief! Anarchism and Philosophy, this could be due to the fact that, although poststructuralist thinkers borrowed heavily from political anarchism in formulating their anarchic philosophies, no poststructuralist thinker was actually convinced of the possibility of living without governance: i.e., the actual project of political anarchism.

In chapter 7, Newman brings in Lacan and the concept of the lack to try and go beyond the limitation of poststructuralism and finally theorize an outside to power in order to construct the possibility of resistance and a politically anti-authoritarian ethics. His reading of Lacan is peculiar, in a good way. The fundamental disconnect between the subject and the signifier that represents it in Lacanian psychoanalysis, the lack, is interpreted as a “radical disconnect” by which the subject could actually reconstruct itself. Sound familiar? This brings us back to Stirner’s ego. Lacan’s lack, which resides within the symbolic order, is used to finally transcend poststructuralism and the need for an “outside to power” at all. The subject of resistance actually resides within the structures of power, but as a disconnect, a place of emptiness that resists power’s influence on it.

The final chapter marks the beginning of Newman’s project to create a practical theory of postanarchism. Richard Day in his book Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements (2005) criticizes this portion of Newman’s book, saying that it allows for the return of certain essentialist and hegemonic assumptions. Newman talks about how he wants to make the anti-authoritarian project “more democratic,” which sounds really weird and reminiscent of Post-Marxist radical democracy. Newman also claims the need to “respect and recognize autonomy and difference,” which Day noted mirrors the claims of liberal multicultural politics. Day’s book was centered around the rejection of the “logic of hegemony” and the promotion of the alternative “logic of affinity" through a critique of various liberal and Marxist political theories, and this consciously anti-hegemonic way of thinking seems to be absent from From Bakunin to Lacan—though Newman would go on to address similar topics Day addressed in the former’s next book on postanarchism, The Politics of Postanarchism (2010).

Saul Newman’s From Bakunin to Lacan was an important but in many ways immature development for the theory of postanarchism and anarchism as a whole. It is also the most philosophically focused of his three books on the topic, acting as a basis for more practical theory to come. As a layman, the thing I appreciated the most while reading this book was how understandable and clear the language use was, as opposed to the method of writing most other works on poststructuralist philosophy employ. As we discussed previously, this book and postanarchism as a whole has been subjected to a lot of criticism from both philosophers and anarchists, for valid reasons. Postanarchism was an interesting trend in academia that died out, probably because of both the errors in its foundational assumptions and also the general lack of affinity for academia that political anarchism has, a hostility that is reciprocated by the academy for anarchism. As David Graeber correctly pointed out, anarchists in history have always been more concerned with practical “low” theory and political ethics compared to Marxists and other leftists, who make abstract “high” theories of society their interest. Although postanarchism presented us with some novel analyses and useful ideas, its demise suggests that maybe it is best for anarchism to stay out of the academy and instead remain on the streets, like it has been doing since the 19th century.