No—Your Other Left: Newman’s The Politics of Postanarchism

Probably, it has happened to us all. A moment of befuddlement in the company of others: someone suggests a left turn, but you mistakenly drift rightward instead, and then in response someone archly pipes up, “No—she meant your other left.” Minus the sarcasm, Saul Newman’s book primes us on why that other left—namely, postanarchism—is the correct left and why the more dominant variants of left theory—those clustering around the writings of Chantal Mouffe, Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, and team Michael Hardt/Antonio Negri—are not the ones meant for contemporary radical politics. Indeed, in Newman’s estimation, these other, variously Marxist, approaches might no longer count as radical at all. Always forceful in its argumentation, occasionally polemical in its assessments of radical thought since Hegel, Newman’s Politics of Postanarchism is poising itself to instigate an insurgency whose effect would be to push politically engaged Euro-Atlantic theory toward its other left.

Newman is known as one of the pioneers of the post- turn in late modern anarchist theory and is associated most closely with “postanarchism,” although this major turn in anarchist thought is given different monikers, identified by the monographs of two other major proponents. Todd May offered the first sustained, book-length analysis with The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism in 1994 (Pennsylvania State University Press), and, in 2002, Lewis Call published Postmodern Anarchism (Lexington Books). Newman’s own initial study of postanarchism, From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power (Lexington Books), preceded The Politics of Postanarchism by nearly a decade in 2001. To be perfectly schematic, I would characterize May’s critical reconstruction of anarchism as having the closest affinities with epistemology and moral philosophy, Call’s as taking its bearings from countervailing trends in the cultural logics of late capitalist societies, and Newman’s as orienting itself most closely to contemporary political problematics. To be sure, Call and May do not avoid the political: cultivating an anticentralist, antiauthoritarian ethos is focal to their respective projects. However, neither engages so squarely as does Newman in the task of theorizing possibilities for practical resistance and autonomous political association in the wake of the global capitalist, neoliberal upheavals of states, civil societies, and economies after circa 1980. It is therefore appropriate and telling that Newman gives pride of place to politics in the title of his new contribution to this ongoing conversation, but he does so, as I explain in greater detail anon, by arguing that postanarchism overcomes anarchism’s fraught, anti-political relationship to politics. In this regard, Newman insists, against those who have taken umbrage at the over-and-done-with implications of postanarchism, that “postanarchism is not a transgression or a movement beyond the terms of anarchism; it does not leave anarchism behind but, instead, works within it as a constant engagement with its limits” (5).

However labeled, the post- turn brings poststructuralism or postmodernism to bear on anarchist thought by way of two mutually supportive tactics. Either it highlights the unacknowledged anarchistic character of poststructuralist theories—for example, it explicates the implicit antistatism or the power-decentering effects in Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus or Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality. Or it deploys postfoundationalist interventions against classical anarchist thinkers—Mikhail Bakunin, Pietr Kropotkin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon—in order to renovate anarchist thought by cutting it loose from naturalist and humanist ontological assumptions inherited from or at least codified by Enlightenment philosophies later rendered untenable by the abiding critique of foundations in postwar European thought. (Call also develops a third tactic by precipitating and theorizing postmodern anarchist visions of subjectivity and political geography in cyberpunk literature and film.)

Newman pursues both primary tactics in Politics of Postanarchism, which picks up exactly where his earlier From Bakunin to Lacan left off. Whereas the latter concluded with a chapter called “Toward a Politics of Postanarchism,” which sketched an ethics of...