From Bakunin To Lacan - Content

Content

Philosophy professor Todd May asserts that the overall purpose of the book is "to offer a critique of the way power, and specifically political power, is commonly conceived". Newman persistently questions how anarchism can refrain from reproducing the forms of oppression that it strives to overcome.

Newman incorporates concepts from post-structuralist thought such as post-humanism and anti-essentialism into classical anarchism. Unlike May, whose post-anarchism is a combination of the two, Newman attempts to move beyond both anarchism and post-structuralism. He proposes that "by using the poststructuralist critique one can theorize the possibility of political resistance without essentialist guarantees: a politics of postanarchism … by incorporating the moral principles of anarchism with the postructuralist critique of essentialism, it may be possible to arrive at an ethically workable, politically valid, and genuinely democratic notion of resistance to domination".

The book uses the work of French philosophers Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Jacques Derrida as well as classical anarchist thinkers such as Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, recognizing "proto-poststructuralist" Max Stirner as an important forerunner of postanarchist thought. Newman focuses particularly on the work of Deleuze, Derrida, and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.