From Bakunin To Lacan - Reception

Reception

Aimed at an academic rather than anarchist audience, the book was criticised in Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed #57 for its unsophisticated, cursory understanding of and engagement with anarchist theory. While praising that section of the book on post-structuralist philosophers, reviewer sasha k claimed that "Newman uses Kropotkin and Bakunin as his stand-ins for anarchism in general, and, in turn, only a few quotes from each to make his case". He questioned whether Newman's attribution of an essentialist conception of human nature to modern anarchists was accurate, concluding that had the book taken "a less one-dimensional view of anarchism", it would have to give up "most of what makes postanarchism post-anarchism.

New Formulation reviewer Michael Glavin cited Newman's ignorance of the initiative of anarchists to decentralize power and of anarchist forms of organisation such as trade unions, federations and affinity groups as evidence that he failed to understand power and wrongly conflated it with domination.

Since the publication of From Bakunin to Lacan in 2001, there have been several attempts to develop an account of postanarchism that, while retaining many of Newman's specific conceptions of the anarchistic qualities of radical post-structuralist thought, would take postanarchist theory beyond academic discourse and into broader and more diverse environments, as the originator of postanarchism, Hakim Bey, had intended.

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