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.
Read more about this topic: From Bakunin To Lacan
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
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“To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)