jim submits:

"Lacanian Anarchism and the Left"

Todd May

A review of From Bakunin to Lacan:

Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power

Saul Newman, (Lexington Press)

1.

The overall goal of Saul Newman's new book, From
Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the
Dislocation of Power, is to offer a critique of the
way power, and specifically political power, is
commonly conceived. He avoids the standard approach to

such discussions that runs through an embrace or
modification of Marx, turning instead to the more
neglected arena of anarchism and articulating it with
current thinkers associated with the term
"post-structuralism." Newman argues that what he calls

the "place of power," the idea that treatments of
power seem often to constrain it conceptually to a
certain region or type -- in effect, essentializing
power into a natural kind -- misconceive the true
operation of power. Power is, as many recent thinkers
have argued, more diffuse and uncircumscribed than
traditional progressive treatments of it, especially
Marxism, have been able to recognize. 2.

The book starts with a treatment of Marxism,
showing that, for Marxists, the place of power is
always in the economy, and that non-economistic
approaches to power are not considered. The discussion

here focuses on the idea that, since Marxists have
often thought of the state as determined by economic
power, they have not been loath to assume state
control in order to change economic relations. The
consequences of such thought, long criticized by
anarchists, have been manifest throughout the history
of our century.

3.

Anarchism, by contrast, rightly sees that Marxism
has missed the role of state power in social
relations. Unfortunately, anarchists seem to want to
place all power at the state level, and thus merely
substitute one place of power for another. On their
view, the state is the site of power, and resistance
lies in the natural impulses of a humanity
uncontaminated by such power. Eliminate the state, and

deleterious power relations will fall away by
themselves.

4.

At this point, Newman turns, in an interesting
twist on the standard accounts, to the anarchist Max
Stirner in order to criticize the kind of humanism
inherent in much other anarchist thinking. For
Stirner, the human is not a natural resource of
uncontaminated resistance, but rather an empty site, a

project to be realized. This project can be realized
either in oppressive or non-oppressive ways. The
question is, then, how to conceive power and
resistance if neither is relegated to a natural place.

5.

Michel Foucault begins this process through his
analyses of the multi-form ways power operates.
However, he falters because, by seeing power
everywhere, he seems to preclude the possibility of
conceptualizing resistance without returning to a site

outside of power that is uncontaminated by it. Such a
site would be as essentialist as that offered by
anarchism.

6.

Deleuze and Guattari, by seeking new conceptual
categories for power, undermine the idea of distinct
places of power and resistance, especially in their
concept of the "war machine." However, by
counterposing desire and the social, they return to
many of the categories their work was designed to
resist.

7.

Derrida, by dislocating much of the oppositional
structure that characterizes political (and other)
thought, offers an opening for re-conceiving power and

resistance. If power and resistance are intermeshed in

ways that preclude separating them into distinct
sites, then a thinking that involves Derridean
categories such as differance and infrastructure may
be more appropriate to understanding their operation.
Derrida does not, however, offer a treatment of the
subject of resistance, the political actor.

8.

Here, finally, Lacan, the real hero of Newman's
book, becomes relevant. For Lacan, power contains its
own lack. The signifier is internally riven, allowing
resistance to occur within power rather than outside
of it. If the Lacanian subject is both encrusted in
and resistant to power in its very structure, then
both power and resistance exist without distinct and
essential places, are dispersed and multi-form, and
can be thought without the problems that have
characterized treatments from Marx to Deleuze and
Guattari. A post-anarchist thought, which takes
seriously the anti-authoritarian impulse of anarchism
while jettisoning its humanist treatment of power and
resistance, would start from here.

9.

Newman believes that by using a Lacanian
framework, one utilized also in the work of Ernesto
Laclau in his discussion of the logic of the empty
signifier, one can at the same time embrace an ethics
of critique and avoid any essentializing character to
which the terms of the critique might lend themselves.

If this sounds like Derrida's deconstructive approach
to language, it should. What Newman seeks to provide
is an approach to progressive thinking that takes off
from anarchism and post-structuralism rather than
Marxism and that sees the impulses behind these
movements as providing not only an approach to
conceiving power but as also, inextricably, an
approach to language.

10.

There are several aspects of From Bakunin to
Lacan that particularly commend it. First, unlike many

of the accounts that refer to the thinkers cited, the
book is clear and coherent. The summaries it provides
of the views of such difficult philosophers as Lacan
and Deleuze are both accurate and readable. This is a
difficult virtue to achieve in such a work. Second,
Newman has funneled a wide range of views into a
single program of political theory. The book does not
read like a set of disconnected chapters but as a
movement progressively through several views toward a
coherent theoretical approach to the conception of
politics. Finally, in contrast to my own work, which
was focused on Foucault, Deleuze, and Lyotard in
contrast to Derrida and Lacan, Newman's book seeks to
articulate an anarchism aligned with the
deconstructive elements of recent French thought.

11.

The question that remains for me is whether such
an attempt succeeds. I believe that it does not,
chiefly for reasons that motivated me to move away
from Derrida and Lacan in the first place. I am not
convinced that by utilizing a deconstructive approach
to language and politics there is room for the kind of

collective action that seems necessary for political
success. Indeterminacy is, to my mind, a weak basis
for political thought and organizing. It tends to
drive people apart rather than bringing them together.

I understand that Newman is concerned, as he is right
to be, that the bringing together too often runs the
risk of embracing once again essentializing concepts
and authoritarian forms of power. It seems to me,
however, that an adequate political approach cannot
avoid this risk; its task is to articulate a
conception of language that sees meaning -- and the
political categories that arise from it -- as
determinate but contingent, rather than necessarily
indeterminate. The choice, in short, does not seem to
me to lie solely between a Derridean/Lacanian
indeterminacy (or always-threatened determinacy) and
an authoritarian essentializing determinacy. A third
possibility, and to my mind the right one, would be a
contingent determinacy, a determinacy that can float
around the edges, be criticized and changed by
genealogical or other critique, but that retains its
power to provide the kind of ethical edge that Newman
seeks (but seems to me not to find) in Derrida and
Lacan.

12.

That said, I recommend the book highly to
scholars of progressive thought. Newman seems to me to

be right on target in seeing anarchism rather than
Marxism as the proper jumping-off point for
progressive political theory; and in that his work,
moreover, is in keeping with the current trend of
anti-globalization movements around the world. Whether

one ultimately chooses Foucault/Deleuze/Lyotard or
Derrida/Lacan as the proper inheritors and modifiers
of classical anarchist thought remains to be seen.
That Newman is providing an interesting and original
perspective, rooted in the right place, cannot be
denied.