Interview With Saul Newman
by Sureyyya Evren, Kursad Kiziltug, Erden Kosova






Saul Newman



1. How did your interest in combining poststructuralism and anarchism developed? And what were the main influences, -post-Marxism, Ernesto Laclau, Hakim Bey, Todd May or other works?

I was basically an anarchist before I became interested in poststructuralism. I came out of the Marxist and Trotskyist traditions and, after becoming disenchanted with their latent authoritarianism - their fundamental inability to address the problems of state power - I became interested in anarchism, primarily as a critique of Marxism. A little bit later on I started to becoming interested in poststructuralist theory - particularly Foucault and his critique of power. Foucault’s analysis of the minutiae of power - the multiple and hidden dominations that go on behind the edifice of democracy and the sovereign state, within institutions like the prison and asylum, and in discourses of knowledge that we usually regard as political neutral and innocuous - seemed to be incredibly relevant to contemporary political and social struggles. It was also clear that there was a strong anti-authoritarian political ethics implicit here, one that extended the classical anarchist critique of authority to other sites of domination, and, at the same time, made the epistemological basis of this critique problematic by rejecting its assumptions about human nature and rationality. So while Foucault’s politico-ethics has been described as ‘libertarian’ or ‘anarchist’, it is clearly an anarchism of a different kind, one that is stripped of its ontological foundations in humanism and the Enlightenment.

It seemed, then, that there was a sort of unspoken dialogue - or potential dialogue - between anarchism and poststructuralist theory, and that one had implications for the other. And so it seemed logical to try to read them together - to see if it was possible to rethink anarchism in a new light, to see if it could be revitalised and become more relevant to radical politics today. In fact, when I first started researching this topic for my Doctorate it surprised me that there was next to nothing written on it apart from Todd May’s seminal book, which was a big influence. May takes a slightly different theoretical approach to me, but we both detected significant points of intersection between classical anarchist thought and contemporary poststructural theory - particularly in their emphasis on anti-authoritarian and anti-representative politics. Where I depart from May is in my shift away from a pure postmodern ‘politics of difference’ to a more Lacanian focus on the Real as that which dislocates, and at the same time, constitutes the subject in his/her lack. And here also Laclau and Mouffe’s post-Marxist project was an important reference for me. It seemed that there was a parallel between Laclau’s poststructuralist reading of Marxism (via Lacan, Derrida, Wittgenstein, and of course Gramsci) and my poststructuralist reconfiguration of classical anarchism. Both projects attacked the essentialist concepts and dialectical narratives that were at the heart of these discourses, and emphasised an anti-authoritarian, anti-institutional and radical democratic politics. There are also, of course, other influences - Zizek, Agamben, Badiou, to some extent, and Claude Lefort, amongst others.

2. Max Stirner is a key figure in your works. And you find parallel notions between Stirner and poststructuralist thinkers like Deleuze & Guattari, Foucault and Derrida. Do you see a genealogical relation between them too?

If by ‘genealogical’ you mean that Stirner had a direct influence on these thinkers, it is unlikely. Their point of departure is generally Nietzsche, although Deleuze in his work on Nietzsche, makes an extended reference to Stirner, who he sees as an extremely important figure in post-Hegelian thought and as a kind of precursor to Nietzsche. According to Deleuze, the central question for Stirner is ‘who speaks?’ - in other words, what particular interests and perspectives, and what mechanisms of domination, lie behind the universal idea of Man? In other words, the value of Stirner was in exposing these ideas as ideological - as concealing a particular position of power. So in the sense of exposing the particular standpoint behind the universal, and the domination it entails, Stirner can be seen to be performing a similar genealogical operation to Nietzsche - disrupting the grand narratives of the Enlightenment, and unmasking the violent antagonisms and discontinuities that are hidden behind it. Despite this, Stirner has been largely forgotten by contemporary scholarship - or is at best regarded as Nietzsche’s poor relation.

So I see Stirner as a seminal figure in the poststructuralist theoretical trajectory, just as important as Nietzsche. In his critique of Feuerbach and Hegel, Stirner introduces a sort of ‘epistemological break’ into the Enlightenment and humanism. He shows that the idea of Man is simply God reinvented - just when we thought we got rid of the Christian illusion, we have reintroduced it in the form of humanism. So for Stirner, Man is an ideological construct or ‘spectre’, something that has no real existence and yet which continues to haunt the individual, forcing upon him a normative ideal that he cannot live up to. Stirner’s rejection of the idea of essence - as a fixed identity or substance that lurked beneath the surface of the subject - was radical, and has a clear resonance with later poststructuralist approaches. His emphasis on flux and reinventing oneself, rather than conforming to a fixed identity, as well as his notion of ‘ownness’ as a radical form of autonomy, all become later on central poststructuralist and postmodern motifs. So, although poststructuralist thinkers have been largely silent about Stirner, I see him as a kind of missing link or ‘vanishing mediator’ - to use Zizek’s terminology. He facilitates a transition from the modern to the postmodern, from humanism to post-humanism, and yet - like one of his spectres or ghosts - disappears after his work is done.

3. In the light of poststructuralist thought, the dichotomy between individual and society can be seen as a kind of binary opposition which belong modernist thought. If so, is the division (split) of individualist anarchism and social anarchism still meaningful? In this context, what would you like to say about the label on Stirner marking him as “the founder of individualist anarchism.”
Yes I would agree that this essential dichotomy between the individual and society can no longer be sustained in light of poststructuralism. For instance, Foucault shows the way that our experience of individuality is constructed externally through discursive and power relations; Deleuze and Guattari saw the subject as being implicated in social networks of desire, and actually part of the ‘machinery’ of the social, etc. Despite this, however, I would still want to insist on a kind of ideological distinction between individualist and social anarchism. The reason for this is that while, for social anarchists, the notion of individual freedom is just as important as the egalitarian and collective dimension, for individualist anarchists, the concept of a broader social or collective identity is completely absent. And this is why individualist anarchism has been adopted by libertarians and anarcho-capitalists (‘the individual is everything, society is nothing’). This is not to say, of course, that we cannot benefit from the insights of certain individualist anarchist and libertarian traditions - as you know, I see Stirner’s thinking as being of enormous benefit to Left anarchism. Moreover, while I would certainly put Stirner in the individualist anarchist category, he clearly has nothing in common with contemporary anarcho-capitalist perspectives. He saw money as a fetish that enslaved the individual, and property relations as impoverishing and marginalizing whole sectors of society. There was nothing liberating, for Stirner, about private property. So we have to be a bit careful here. But the problem with even Stirner’s radical individualism is that doesn’t allow for any sort of collective political dimension - beyond a very vague idea of the ‘union of egoists’. This collective, universal dimension is crucial to the radical politics of the Left. As a matter of fact, I am working on a new book which should hopefully be appearing next year that considers the possibility of a radical universal political dimension within poststructuralist theory itself. Without this dimension there is no emancipation, beyond a kind of nihilist individualism. So this is why social anarchism - which sees individual freedom and autonomy as only being possible in an egalitarian society - is much more relevant and productive.







At the same time, though, we have to question this idea of ‘society’ that social anarchism has traditionally been founded upon. Society can no longer be seen as an organic wholeness that contains an immanent rationality and sociability - as Kropotkin, and also Bookchin imagine. Rather, as Laclau and Mouffe argue, society is not a valid object of discourse. In other words, it has to be seen as an antagonistic discursive field that is open, structurally incomplete, and which is not based on any essential rational or unifying principle. It is an open field of differences that can give rise to multiple and unpredictable political formations.

4. Do you think it is possible to combine Stirner’s thought with radical politics? Can it be possible to create some links to today’s libertarian activism?

Despite the limitations discussed above, I see Stirner as having much to contribute to contemporary radical politics in general. Although Stirner was writing in the nineteenth century, his analysis of the way that power and ideology operated is astonishingly relevant today. In a similar fashion to Foucault, he shows the way that the individual is subjected to a series of norms - of rational behaviour, moral hygiene, etc - that he/she is forced to conform to, and which, moreover, ties him to the state and political institutions. Resistance to this subjectification, moreover, cannot take the traditional form of a revolution, because this only reinvents domination in a different form. Rather, Stirner calls for an ‘insurrection’ which involves the individual rejecting his normalised identity, thus disentangling himself from the order of the State. We see this obsession with the norm even more so today, particularly in the West, where we are enthralled with questions of how we should behave (as directed by ‘ethics committees’), how we should look, how we should be enjoying ourselves, how we should be feeling. We live in what might be termed a ‘bio-culture’ where transgressions of the norm are seen as having biological causes and are treated medically - drugs for depression, anxiety, over-activity, underperformance. This is a cultural superego that no longer prohibits us from enjoyment, no longer says ‘No’ (as in the Freudian sense of Oedipal prohibition) but now says ‘Yes!’ (‘you can and you must!’): there is an injunction to enjoy, be happy, consume, strive for the ‘good life’, find fulfilment, experience full sexual jouissance, etc. This is merely a normalisation of a different kind - but it is just as dominating, prescriptive and vicious as the moral codes of previous centuries. Foucault said that increasingly power operates through the norm rather than the law, and this was precisely a phenomenon whose emergence Stirner detected in the nineteenth century. So the value of Stirner’s analysis today is in continuing to show us the multitude of ways in which we participate in our own domination by constantly striving to live up to socially prescribed norms.

5. In some of their highly polemical writings we sense that both Bookchin and Zerzan seem to avoid poststructuralist thoughts being incorporated into anarchism. What would you like to say about their approach to poststructuralist thoughts?

Bookchin and Zerzan attack poststructuralism from different angles and for different purposes, but their central contention is that poststructuralism - because it questions the autonomy of the subject, and the liberating potential of Enlightenment rationality - entails a kind of nihilistic irrationalism which, they argue, makes it incapable of being politically and ethically engaged and which ultimately has conservative implications. Instead they want to hang on to the legacy of the Enlightenment, and to a normative essence which is to be found either in nature (Zerzan’s primitivism) or in an immanent social rationality that is dialectically revealed (Bookchin’s social anarchism). What they say about poststructuralism is nothing new - this critique has been made time and time again by everyone from Marxists, critical theorists, and normative political philosophers.

My response to what they say would be to in part agree with their critique of postmodernism - which can be seen as a cultural index of global capitalism. However, I would insist here on a distinction between postmodernism and poststructuralism. The former is a general cultural condition that has implications for everything from pop-art to the architectural design of shopping malls, and in itself, is not subversive - in fact, its motifs of difference, flux, superficiality, virtual reality, cybernetics, and so on, seem to mirror the dynamics of capitalism today, whose very structure has become postmodernised. Poststructuralism, on the other hand, while it draws on certain aspects of the postmodern condition, is at the same time much more theoretically rigorous, and politically and ethically engaged. The analysis of the networks of power/discourse/knowledge that surround us has clear political and ethical implications, and the fact that there is no autonomous, essential subject that is somehow magically outside these networks does not mean that we should just give up on resistance, but rather that we have to find different ways of countering them. Secondly, Bookchin and Zerzan tend to have a rather simplistic reading of the poststructuralist critique of the Enlightenment, which is far more nuanced and sophisticated than they allow. Foucault, for instance, in his later writings on Kant, so far from rejecting the Enlightenment, actually sees it as containing a critical and emancipative potential that is still relevant today. Derrida has actually called for a defence of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, claiming that it can continue to inform radical political struggles. Poststructuralism does not reject the Enlightenment out of hand. Rather it seeks to invigorate it by reading it against itself. For instance, Foucault believed that reason could be used against the discourse of rationality in order to unmask its aporias, limits and contradictions. Thirdly, I would argue that we cannot simply ‘turn back the clock’, as Bookchin and Zerzan try to do, and ignore the implications of poststructuralist theory. Nor should we simply embrace a postmodern nihilism. We have to find a sort of middle ground, and be able to think about and practice radical politics without relying on essentialist concepts. For instance, the idea of there being a sort of rational essence at the base of society, or that the subject is autonomous from the linguistic structures that shapes his/her world, are no longer sustainable - and we have to work within these epistemological limits.

6. Todd May says he tends to resist your Lacanian orientation. And he raises doubts about the possibility to move from a Lacanian individual subject to a collective action. What do you think about this critique?

Here I disagree with May’s assessment of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. Even for Freud, psychoanalysis is much more than just an individual psychology. Because it is all about how one relates to those around them, first with family members, but later with others in society, it is a ‘social psychology’. So, for Freud, psychoanalysis was immanently situated to the social and political field, and could be used to explain complex social interactions, dynamics and phenomenon. Ten years before the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, Freud in his work Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, foresaw the emergence of a new political formation based on the libidinous attachment of the group to the figure of the Leader. Lacan extended the implications of the Freudian unconscious, seeing it as entirely external and social, rather than internal and individual. The unconscious was “structured as a language”, according to Lacan, and the structures of language - the relations between signifiers - are external to the subject. So my point is that the proper domain of Lacanian psychoanalysis is the inter-subjective dimension of language, rather than the strictly individual psyche. Subjectivity is to be understood, then, as the point of intersection between the individual and these external social structures. If we understand this crucial point, we can see that Lacanian psychoanalytic theory can not only be used to understand, for instance, ideological mechanisms and the effects they have on the subject, but also to intervene on the socio-political field by explaining the structural dynamics of radical political struggles. So there is a collective, or at least inter-subjective, dimension implicit in psychoanalysis, and this is what makes it important for radical political theory.

7. Another critique of your book claims that you quite reduced the implications of the general body of anarchism. Together with this, we would like to ask, what would be your postanarchist re-reading of anarchist practices like the Spanish Revolution?

It’s true that my account of anarchism is by no means comprehensive, and in focussing largely on thinkers like Bakunin, Kropotkin and Stirner, I have neglected many aspects of this rich and diverse tradition. But my book was not supposed to be an encyclopaedia of anarchist thought, or a historical account of anarchist movements. I was trying to explore a certain political logic at the heart of classical anarchist theory and to show how this ran into certain conceptual limitations, which I tried to address through poststructuralism. I have to confess that I’m not really an expert on the history of the anarchist militias and collectives during the Spanish Civil War. By all accounts a very significant and profound social revolution was taking place - a revolution that was also realised in the free collective social arrangements that started to emerge on a wide scale in many parts of Spain. Unlike the horrific forced collectivisation of industry and agriculture that was occurring at the same time in the Soviet Union, the Spanish anarchist collectives were free, decentralised, semi-autonomous and run democratically. These communities had collectively-run factories, workshops, farms, bakeries, hospitals, schools, public transport - all managed directly by the workers themselves, through decentralised committees where decisions on production, distribution and working conditions were taken democratically. Furthermore, these collective arrangements were apparently very efficiently run and they significantly improved the lives of poor and working class people, who benefited not only from a much more egalitarian distribution of resources and improved working conditions, but also from social services like free health care, education, care of the elderly, etc. So it’s clear that something very profound was happening in Spain at the time - a radical Event which contained a real emancipative potential. I see this movement as being an instance of the radical democratic imaginary that began with the French Revolution, and later with the Paris Commune, whose dreams were so mercilessly crushed. Radical democracy involves an extension of the democratic principle beyond the limits of the political domain, to social and economic sectors. This might take a number of forms, and the anarcho-syndicalist collectives in Spain provide a possible model to follow. But the crucial thing here is the decentralised, democratic and non-hierarchical forms for decision making that this involves - the way that it allowed for a much greater degree of reciprocity in power relationships between people (which was what Foucault advocated), and went beyond the logic of political representation. In this sense, I see radical democracy - of which the Spanish anarchist experience was a very moving example - as being at the core of the post-anarchist political project.

8. We can trace parallel motives in poststructuralism and anarchism through your book and other works. But what about pre-modern anarchist-like ‘rhizomatic’ traditions in the world? Especially the heterodoxies in many cultures…

Certainly postanarchism can draw on some of these traditions, but I think at the same time we should be a bit wary about mythicising the pre-modern - along with its fascinating heterodoxies there can also be appalling cruelties, inequality, hierarchy, oppression of women, etc. I see postanarchism as taking modernity (and indeed postmodernity) with its liberating and democratic possibilities, as its starting point. An enthrallment with the pre-modern can often have conservative implications. I am not a big fan of Zerzan’s primitivism for instance. The idea that we can return to a sort of pre-modern ‘life-world’ uncorrupted by modernity and civilisation is ridiculous.

9. Do you see any parallel motives in postanarchism and post-Seattle anti-globalization movements?

Yes, certainly. Postanarchism is a political logic that seeks to combine the egalitarian and emancipative aspects of classical anarchism, with an acknowledgement that radical political struggles today are contingent, pluralistic, open to different identities and perspectives, and are over different issues - not just economic ones. The broadly termed ‘anti-globalisation’ movement, despite its uncertain future, is one of the most important developments in radical politics in recent years. It transcends the logic of new social movements - it is not simply another identity demanding recognition and autonomy. Rather it re-invents a universal politics in the way that it challenges capitalism as the general background to domination and exploitation. But the same time, it is not like the old Marxist working class struggles over economic issues. There’s no vanguard party leading the way. It doesn’t privilege any class or identity over another; nor does it see any particular issue as being central and overriding the others. Rather it combines a multiplicity of different issues and concerns - environmental concerns, labour rights, the rights of refugees, consumers, indigenous people, etc. Here I think it may be seen as an example of Laclau’s logic of hegemonic politics: it takes place against the universal background of global capitalism and state domination, but rather than this struggle being incarnated in a central identity - as in the proletariat, for Marx - it incorporates plural identities which mutate and form unexpected alliances with others during the course of the struggle. So it involves what might be seen as a contamination of the universal and the particular: there is a universal ‘enemy’ - global capitalism - but this is a kind of ‘empty universality’ that has different implications for different groups. The difference between this movement and Marxism is that, while Marxism created an imaginary universality on the basis of one particularity - the anti-globalisation movement creates a real universality on the basis of multiple particularities, particularities whose identities are themselves contingently constructed through the struggle itself, rather than being pre-determined.

10. And could we say that there are some kind of postanarchist elements amongst Zapatista movement and the writings of Subcomandante Marcos?

Yes, I think so. The Zapatista movement, in so far as it can be seen as an aspect of a worldwide struggle against neo-liberalism and global capitalism, is much more than simply a struggle for recognition, although this is of course an important aspect of it. At the same time, although it draws on Marxist and Althusserian elements, it is not exactly a Marxist struggle either. It appeals to broad sectors of Mexican society - the poor, disenfranchised, landless peasants, indigenous people. Moreover, it employs tactics which are much closer to those of post-Marxist new social movements - a combination of armed and un-armed campaigns, which are usually highly symbolic in nature; as well as using the internet to mobilise people and to publicise their cause to the outside world. Furthermore, they claim that they are not playing a vanguard role that their aim is not to seize power but to create a kind of emancipated social space. It is a sort of Gramscian notion of creating a hegemonic bloc that rivals that of the Mexican state.

11.What do you think about the “3rd world” today and the significance of postcolonial studies? And can there be a universal postanarchism?

I would say that the Third World, which is currently feeling the sharp edge of neo-liberal economic ‘reforms’ and free trade agreements that have made ordinary peoples’ lives worse, not better, contains a potentially explosive situation. I think also the point Zizek makes is correct: that the logic of global capitalism is that it has no real centre - it is a decentred imperialism that is turning everywhere into just another sweatshop, market or cheap source of labour, and this is why there is a strong reaction against globalisation from the nationalist Far Right. So we have an increasing impoverishment and dislocation of massive sectors of humanity - the growing underclass of long term unemployed, for instance, who live in First World ghettoes which are increasingly coming to resemble Third World ghettoes. We also have a tension between the deterritorializing impulse of capitalism, and the reterritorializing desire of the nation State. So while there is, on the one hand, a freer movement of capital and labour around the world, there is on the other hand, more heavily policed national borders, more sophisticated controls and surveillance of populations, and more authoritarian and restrictive anti-immigrant policies. I think this can create the conditions for a universal rebellion, which will take different shapes in different parts of the world - but the target will be the same: the capitalism of the multinationals backed by State power, and all the domination and misery that these inflict on people everywhere.

12. What do you think about anti-Eurocentrist motives in poststructuralism and anarchism? Can there be any clue for a world politics after 9/11?

Paradoxically, the attack on Eurocentrism in poststructuralism (or to be more precise, poststructuralist inspired cultural and social theory) is in itself Eurocentric. Critics of Foucault used to say that his analyses were Eurocentric because they were based primarily in a European historical context - when Foucault was writing about prisons and asylums, these were French prisons and asylums. It is somewhat ironic, then, that the post-colonial/cultural studies critique of Eurocentrism derives from intellectual origins that are distinctly European. Moreover, I would say that while this anti-Eurocentric moment was profound and necessary, it is no longer all that relevant today. Capitalism itself is no longer Eurocentric but global and universal. So today attacks on Eurocentrism seem to miss the point, and in a strange kind of way, those who make these attacks confirm their own ‘Eurocentric’ position all the more.
9/11 is one of the most significant things to happen for a long time - what Baudrillard would call a real Event, one that retroactively alters its own conditions and actually transforms the way we think about politics. Everything from that moment now falls under the shadow of 9/11 and must be considered from this new perspective. It has caused the whole ideological ground to shift dramatically to the Right. It has provided the pretext for a sort of Orwellian state of permanent war - the so-called ‘war on terror’. A climate of fear and paranoia has pervaded political and social life, and this is deliberately manipulated by the State, not only to justify completely illegitimate military actions (the invasion of Iraq) but, more subtly, to launch an internal war against its own population in the dubious name of ‘security’. Liberal democracies in the West are increasingly coming to resemble totalitarian police states, with the massive expansion of the power of security apparatuses, the ever widespread use of surveillance technology - including biopolitical surveillance, such as DNA and digital fingerprinting - as well as the depressing daily limitation of even basic civil liberties and judicial safeguards. The ground has shifted to such an extent that to be radical these days is to insist on typically liberal demands like the rule of law and the protection of civil liberties. The target of the ‘war on terror’ is not the shadowy terrorist groups that we hear so much about. Rather its real intent is the increased regulation, control and surveillance of populations. So the most important question posed by the ‘war on terror’ and the aggressive reassertion of state sovereignty, is that of the contours of radical politics itself. That is to say, the increasing expansion of state power is something that concerns humanity as a whole. Ordinary people - not just minority groups - are now subjected to these new techniques of state surveillance and control. This is perhaps the most crucial feature of biopolitics - that it takes as its target human existence itself. In other words, the implications of the ‘war on terror’ are universal - but not in the sense that its advocates suggest: it is rather that everyone is being caught up in a strange new network of power, and inscribed on a new ideological terrain where the only choice that appears to be available is that between an authoritarian state and a fundamentalist dogma, and between the violence and terror inflicted by both. Humanity itself is caught between these forces. Radical left politics must urgently address this polarisation of the political and social field. In other words, radical politics must devise a more universal and collective approach to this problem. If it fails to do this, then it risks being pushed aside entirely by a new ideological conservatism that is pervading Western societies, where any form of political dissent is now in danger of being branded with the convenient term ‘terrorism’. So I think that 9/11 provides the conditions for a rethinking of politics generally, and radical politics in particular - indeed, it demands that we do so.

13. Could you compare the position of contemporary Marxist thinkers such as Antonio Negri and John Holloway with postanarchist political theory?

Yes, I think there are parallels and points of similarity between postanarchism and neo-Marxists like Negri, particularly in the way that both projects are about unmasking new forms of power, domination and ideology that we find around us today - not only the sovereignty of the state, but all of the diffuse, multiple networks of power that are infused throughout the social. Moreover, both perspectives are emancipative, and go beyond identity politics. Where I see neo-Marxism departing from postanarchism is in the way that the former hangs on to the Marxist legacy of class and economic determinism, although in a somewhat different form. For instance, for Negri and Hardt the figure of emancipatory politics is the ‘multitude’, which is seen as being immanent within capitalism itself. Here they are very much presenting a Marxist argument about the way that the dynamic of capitalism is producing a class subjectivity that will bring about its downfall through transforming the means of production. I also think that we need to theorise some notion of the ‘multitude’, but here I would agree with Laclau - that identities of resistance are political articulations, which means that they must be constructed contingently rather than being seen as somehow determined by underlying economic transformations. Certainly economic transformations might create certain social conditions and political opportunities, but it remains the work of activists and those involved in direct struggles themselves to define the contours of this multitude.

14. Zizek is another political figure today who also refer(s) to Lacanian thinking. What would you like to say about his approach?

I have had a lot of admiration for Zizek over the years. But I have to say that I also have concerns about the political conclusions he seems to draw from his very sophisticated Lacanian analyses. There has been a shift in his thinking from his early orientation towards a discourse analysis approach and radical democratic politics; to his later work, where he has been espousing a highly authoritarian Leninist style revolutionary politics of the vanguard - as well as a sort of nihilistic and terroristic ‘propaganda by deed’. His latest book on Deleuze ends up with a highly suspect ode to Mao’s Cultural Revolution. So I don’t know what’s going on with Zizek at the moment, and whether one should take him seriously here - I think on the one hand, that he is being deliberately provocative (trying to upset liberals), and on the other, that there is a very serious attempt to use Lacanian theory to break out of the ideological straightjacket of liberal-democracy, which he sees being simply the institutional form of global capitalism. Now I agree that we need to go beyond the current limits of liberal-democracy, but this can take forms other than that of the authoritarian revolutionary politics of the vanguard that he seems to be espousing. Do we really want to go back to Leninism? For instance, we could even expand the liberal-democratic framework and break its link (which was always contingent) with capitalism, extending it to the social and economic realm - in the manner suggested by Laclau and Mouffe, and also by Claude Lefort. So I would draw different political conclusions from Lacanian theory, probably along the lines of Yannis Stavrakakis’ Lacan and the Political. Lacan’s central notions of the Real and the constitutive lack in social identity are seen here as giving expression to radical democratic struggles that are symbolically empty, and open to a plurality of different struggles. Because I see the focus of Lacanian as being on the structural incompleteness of identity and the unattainable nature of the object of desire, this lends itself to a politics of openness and contingency. Zizek has a slightly different reading of Lacan, and draws different political and ethical conclusions from it.

15. Your project in general and our project over here belongs to a vast range of yearnings that aim to fuse the recent emergence of new subjectivities after post-structuralist thought with some sort of resolute activeness on the political terrain -which appears to be somehow lacking in the writings of the post-structuralists. The re-fashioning of Situationism by the contemporary radical theory, for example, hints also to that sort of search. In your texts on Stirner you propose that he offers way outs for the impasses between the mystified formulation of the “agency” of the subject within the humanist- Hegelian-Marxist tradition and the overwhelming closure of the “structure” within (post)structuralist thought. Instead of more recent, contemporary attempts to break off this paralysis, you bring forth Stirner as a solution. What are the reason and the need for that retrospective move? What would you say about for example the arguments of performative theory that allows caesuras and moments of interruption that allow occasions for re-signification within the structure?

As I said above, I think Stirner’s solution has its limitations, precisely because it is so highly individualistic. Having said this, I am interested in the new ways in which Stirner allows us to think about individual agency and subjectivity - seeing it as an open and contingent structure that is no longer completely defined by notions of humanity and rationality. In other words, I think the value of Stirner is in allowing us to free the subject from the essentialist identities, and this is where he lays the groundwork for poststructuralism and post-humanism. So this is where Stirner goes beyond both humanism and structuralism - while the subject is not autonomous, in that he/she is defined through ideological abstractions and ‘fixed identities’, at the same time, there are still ways of resisting this subjectification, and redefining oneself in one’s own way, thus inventing a kind of radical autonomy. But this involves a rejection of essence - a kind of transgression of the self. This is similar to Foucault’s later attempts to explore the possibility of different modes of subjectivity, through ethical strategies such as ‘care of the self’. So I wouldn’t say that Stirner offers a complete solution by any means - in fact, his notion of agency is quite problematic. He has to be seen as part of a project for rethinking the subject, beyond essentialist identities, while at the same time allowing for a degree of autonomy and freedom of action. There are certainly parallels between Stirner’s call to reinvent the self in unpredictable ways, and Judith Butler’s performative theory, which seeks to subvert fixed identities through parody. Both emphasise the way in which identity is performed, and thus contingent, rather than being essential and fixed. Again, these are incomplete political solutions in themselves, but when applied to questions of collective action and hegemonic political formations, they can be very valuable in understanding the different ways in which political identity may be constituted.

16. Both the anarchist tradition and post-structuralist thought bear the Nietzschean legacy on emphasis on style. But your method of writing seems to be closer to the analytical language of Anglo-American academia. What would you say about this?

Well it’s true that to some extent I am part of this Anglo-American tradition, despite my affinity with continental philosophy. I work within the academic discipline of political theory - a discipline which unfortunately still remains generally indisposed towards poststructuralist theory. And there does seem to be a dissonance between the two traditions, even in terms of their writing style- although I’ve always found people like writers like Foucault much clearer, and certainly much more suggestive, than some of the very dry Anglo-American theory. But I also think that one tradition can benefit greatly from engaging with the other, and this is what I have always tried to do - to understand and develop the political implications of poststructural theory and continental philosophy, how it allows us to think about concepts like power, sovereignty, democracy and political agency, in new ways. So my writing style perhaps reflects my attempt to do precisely this. Moreover, I suppose I have a very ‘non-poststructuralist’ notion about the importance of being able to communicate my ideas clearly so that others can understand them.

17. For years we have been struggled for locating ourselves out of the constraints of the orthodoxies of historical left and classical anarchism. But when will we at last step into the practical potentialities of the gain we retrieved in our discussions? When we going to leave the self-reflexive mode of theory, epistemological terrain, encyclopaedism of what post-anarchism is? When is this new discursive manoeuvre going to function?

We can never simply step out of theory. Social and political phenomenon can only be discursively understood - without theory, they would be unintelligible. Actually your question reminds me of uprisings in Paris in May’68, where the student activists who attended Lacan’s seminars asked him why he was insisting on theorising about politics when there was a real revolution going on the streets outside. He answered by drawing on the blackboard four highly abstract formulas, and these became the basis for his seminar series (XVII) on the Four Discourses. But his point was that these ‘discourses’ or theoretical structures actually underpin all political and social phenomena, allowing revolutionary transformations to be explained in structural terms, and that, in this sense, structures do indeed “march in the streets”. So we have to be aware that theoretical paradigms and discourses will always be present in any political activity, and therefore they are fundamental in understanding why people resist, how they resist, what they are actually resisting. So political activism will always be informed by theory - in fact, Foucault and Deleuze believed that they were actually part of the same activity: to do politics was at the same time to do theory, and vice versa. So there is a sort of symbiotic relationship between theory and practice. For instance, I see postanarchism as a theory that is continually being informed and expanded by concrete political struggles such as the anti-globalisation movement. On the other hand, postanarchist theory provides a conceptual paradigm that allows such movements to be explained - how and why they take place, and the social and epistemological conditions that give rise to them. So to answer your question, we are already seeing postanarchism - or at least elements of this theory - functioning in precisely these sorts of struggles.