Reading Thoughts on Saul Newman’s Postanarchism (2015)

At last, here we are reviewing Saul Newman’s magnum opus in the field of “postanarchism,” a term initially borrowed from Hakim Bey but has at this point developed into a description of Newman’s own brand of poststructuralist Stirnerite anarchism. If From Bakunin To Lacan (2001) (which I reviewed earlier: check it out here) was the Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals of postanarchism, his last major work on the topic, Postanarchism (2015), is The Metaphysics of Morals—I might review The Politics of Postanarchism (2010) (if the analogy is continued it would be akin to The Critique of Practical Reason) sometime in the future, but for now I think Postanarchism is Newman’s most interesting and philosophically relevant work. By the way, how confusing are all these names! He really needs to get creative with book titles.

The first chapter starts with another little introduction to anarchist political thought. By this point, Saul Newman has probably written more than a dozen of these introductions to anarchism for all the essays and books he writes on postanarchism and Stirner. However, he then goes on to introduce the concept of ontological anarchy, and he does this by invoking the thought of Reiner Schürmann. Schürmann draws mostly from Heidegger’s deconstructive metaphysics, developing an anarchistic direction from this approach. Though I am not familiar at all with Heidegger, Newman does a brilliant job at distilling the important aspects of Schürmann’s work and how it connects to his earlier version of postanarchism developed in From Bakunin To Lacan. Ontological anarchy underpins postanarchism by positing freedom as a point of departure in one’s actions instead of an end. Postanarchist subjects act with the assumption of freedom, anarchistically, without necessarily having any goal in mind. This approach of “[freeing] action from its telos” avoids a tendency in classical anarchism, diagnosed by both Newman (2001) and Schürmann (1987), that

the old masters of anarchism, such as Bakunin, Proudhon and Kropotkin, sought ‘to displace the origin, to substitute the “rational power”, principium, for the power of authority, princeps – as metaphysical an operation as there has been. They sought to replace one focal point with another.’

Of course, as I have previously established in my review of From Bakunin To Lacan, this diagnosis is not entirely true, and we can find anti-essentialist aspects in classical anarchist thinkers such as Pierre Proudhon and Emma Goldman. However, the approach of ontological anarchy is still more radical than anything from thinkers of antiquity, and it is distinctly a poststructuralist and postmodernist framework. Newman even cites our old friend Alfredo Bonanno on this matter, arguing that the current condition of society, with its fragmented metanarratives and decentralized methods of control, render “[t]he idea that social revolution is something that must necessarily result from our struggles” defunct.

This ties nicely into the next two chapters, which are on the topics of the singularity and insurrection, both heavily inspired by the ideas of Max Stirner. We have already discussed Stirner at length, but the term singularity is actually borrowed from Giorgio Agamben. Agamben theorized what he called “whatever-singularities,” which are “post-sovereign figure[s] which cannot be assimilated within the representative structures of the state.” “Whatever-singularities” form a “coming community,” which are “identified not through any particular category but simply by the condition of belonging – a sort of open, amorphous community without identity and borders.” A diligent reader can already see the parallels to Stirner’s concepts of the unique and the union of egoists, respectively. Newman uses Agamben as a poststructuralist expansion of Stirner, and the latter’s critique of humanism is almost perfectly in line with Foucault and Agamben’s critiques of essentialism. Stirner’s philosophy has always been a focus for Newman whether as it relates to postanarchism or not. The singularity for Newman is the revolutionary subject of postanarchism previously explored in From Bakunin To Lacan, the “creative nothing” and radical openness that defies traditional classifications such as the proletariat and provides the possibility to resist power. Curiously, Newman seemed to have abandoned Lacan in this part of his analysis. Perhaps he found Agamben’s whatever-singularity to be a more easily approachable and defined alternative to Lacan’s lack. The aspect of psychoanalysis and Lacan in postanarchism has also to my knowledge been extensively explored by Duane Rousselle, who has remained a familiar name in the field, but I have never read any of his actual books outside of the postanarchism reader he put together. Perhaps I should, though I am almost entirely a stranger to Lacan’s philosophy and psychoanalysis in general.

The concept of insurrection is addressed following the singularity. As someone who started with Kropotkin and Malatesta, I have always appreciated the anarchist concept of social revolution vs. political revolution, and how the latter is a statist Marxist concept doomed to failure. Newman explains this idea in classical anarchism well, but obviously his anti-essentialist critique of the political revolution also extends to the anarchist social revolution. Stirner’s insurrection is Newman’s answer to the question “what is to be done?” after both these methods of revolution are deconstructed. The insurrection for Stirner, or Empörung, is an “insurrection of the self”, a process carried out by the unique, the subjective rejection of spooks and acting, as explained earlier, with the assumption of ontological anarchy. Indeed, Newman calls the insurrection “the political articulation of ontological anarchy.” By focusing on altering the self and by extension social relations, this insurrection mirrors Foucault’s notion of micro-resistance and also Gustav Landauer’s anarcho-socialist philosophy (see chapter 4 of Richard Day’s book Gramsci Is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements for a contemporary perspective on Landauer). Newman sees contemporary methods of revolt such as the Occupy movement as the real-world application of his concept of the insurrection. The “self organized and autonomous” actions of people during Occupy, which included “setting up encampments, and living and sleeping in public squares,” is a display of their “defiance of or, rather, indifference to power.” Again this goes back to the idea of ontological anarchy and acting without telos.

The aim is not to communicate demands and proposals to Power, because this only affirms the position of Power; it is not to be a counter-Power or counter-hegemony. Rather it is to generate forms of autonomous political interaction and intensity.

In the fourth chapter, Newman deals with the ethical concerns of revolutionary violence through the philosophy of Georges Sorel and Walter Benjamin. Newman simultaneously rejects revolutionary terror a la Jacobinism and dogmatic non-violence. Ethical violence against institutional violence, according to Newman, must align with ontological anarchy. He shows how Sorel’s concept of the proletarian general strike and Benjamin’s concept of divine violence are both examples of violence without telos, and through this violence the insurrectionary subject is “endowed” with “the capacity for freedom.”

In the fifth chapter, Newman grapples with the concept of voluntary servitude through the philosophy of Enlightenment thinker Étienne de La Boétie, a curious choice for a political philosophy based on the questioning of Enlightenment values. However, he extracts a particularly optimistic outlook from the work of La Boétie: the impotence of power. This has also been articulated in a similar fashion by Max Stirner (“I reject power’s power over me”), and La Boétie’s skepticism when faced with the reality of voluntary servitude reinforces the idea that the power of a tyrant (or state) is entirely granted by its people. This phenomenon mirrors to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of micro-fascism. The fundamental impotence of power can lead one to nihilistic despair, but Newman teaches us to see this as a positive for radical change of society: if there is no essential and fundamental hurdle to overcome, insurrection and micro-resistances through the shifting of social relations are the solution.

So it is not even a question of overthrowing the tyrant, but simply no longer to empower him and instead to empower ourselves, upon which the tyrant will fall of his own accord and the spell of domination will be broken[.]

In the final chapter of the book, Newman elaborates on his usage of the phrase “politics of autonomy” through a critique of liberal concepts of autonomy and freedom. Kant’s deontological ethics are rejected as tyrannical in a classic Stirnerite fashion. Post-Kantian liberals continue Kant’s line of reasoning by appealing to government institutions, which are intended to protect freedom through violence. At the end, Newman circles back around to reinforce ontological anarchy and what he calls the “axiom of freedom:” the principle that grounds postanarchist politics and the continuous thread running through this whole book.

Saul Newman’s Postanarchism is in some ways a rehashing of previously available ideas presented by people like Richard Day, but it involves novel and nuanced analysis of lesser known thinkers like Georges Sorel and Étienne de La Boétie, which I appreciate. This book has also made a very strong case for ontological anarchy and philosophical anarchism, and I think I will continue on to study philosophers like Agamben and Derrida to develop my own understanding of ontological anarchy and what it means to be free and to have always been free.