Duane Rousselle: Post-anarchism has come to mean different things to different people. In the anglophone world, Saul Newman has described a Lacanian/Stirnerian “post-anarchism,” Todd May has called for a practice-oriented “post-structuralist anarchism,” Lewis Call has described a time of “post-modern anarchism,” and Hakim Bey has called for a reinvention of traditional anarchist discourse in his 1987 essay “post-anarchism anarchy.” In my own research, I have noticed that there is a striking difference in the way post-anarchism has been conceived in the non-anglophone world. I would like to ask you a bit about what post-anarchism means for you and for your audience.

Antón Fernández de Rota: To answer your question, Duane, I think that we can not avoid the place from where post-anarchism’s voices are heard. And that place is the Academy and its boundaries. Basically, post-anarchists understand to some degree that the collection of post-anarchists are related in one way or another with the University, with the Human Sciences, Philosophy and the Arts; many of us are university students – usually studying for doctorates. But there is also a reduction of the number of young professors born from the children formed within the crisis of the left, or, at least, during the boom years of “alter-globalization.” I do not cite the political trauma of the left by coincidence. Neither do I ignore that inside the anarchist milieu, the critics of “post-anarchism” have often reproached it for being limited to an academic phenomenon (or worse yet, a merely discursive movement, and a practice nothing more than textual, elitist, an elusive writing without any relevance or contact with the “street”).

My objective is not to argue. I also do not think that a polemical response is the best way to relate. Jürgin cited Foucault who dedicated a good part of his work to devising an ethics of the thinking subject. The polemicist, said Foucault, approaches the battle ready to debate; he does not have before himself a speaker with whom to seek the truth, but rather he has an adversary. In this fight, armed with the rights that authorize the war, the polemicist fights by suppressing the dialogue and annulling his counterpart. Paradoxically, far from putting an end to the word, what the polemic does is multiply it through debates wrapped in hostilities that become a repetitive performance – where time and again the same orders and the same phrases are exchanged. For the polemicist, the proper existence of the adversary signifies a threat that should be caught, but when the new adversary is consolidated in the demand of his space, the polemic functions like a ritual in which nobody listens and each speaks for his or her part by reaffirming his or her respective identities.

“Post-anarchists” have wanted to introduce new debates into anarchism. Post-anarchists have imported discourses, intending to create bridges between distinct traditions in order to elude the methods of the polemic. In this way, they have unfolded vectors that moved from the classical authors and from the large exploits and anarchist organizational experiences of the first third of the 20th century toward the “long sixties” and such authors as Foucault, Deleuze or Derrida. Post-anarchism has also offered a series of analysis on the contemporary transformations today’s social movements, where the content and the possibilities of anarchism are redefined. David Graeber speaks of anarchists with a little “a” to portray the thickness of the activist networks of the North American alter-global experience. A short time before the socialist Manuel Castells expressed it in the same terms, he considered that two powers were growing in the world: “new anarchism” (alter-global and post-Cold War) and “fundamentalism” (of the religion that was). Also Barbaric Epstein verified the increasing importance of the “anarchist,” in detriment of the political Marxists in the left in the USA. None of these authors are “post-anarchist,” but all these ideas agree broadly speaking with the general lines of its political diagnosis. The questions that emerge here do so with a certain optimism and are of vital importance for the anarchist tradition and the left in general: Has the Era of Revolutions happened already? And if it is so, what alternative is there to the 19th century logic of reform/revolution? Has the old political subject and the forms of its political organization arrived at its end, and if it is so how should the subject, politics, and the relation that occurs among both be thought? Is there a “beyond” to the crisis of the left and the prison of the “politics of identity” exist?

Post-anarchism, as a chiefly academic phenomenon, appeared to promote these types of questions. Likewise, it arose as a reaction from this discomfort. Eluding the polemic does not signify yielding to complacency. The discomfort has to do with the evident desertion of “expert thought” from the rows of anarchism. Post-anarchism has wanted to rectify this problem through the actualization of theory. It remains to be seen if this is the best approach. There still lacks a thinking through of the implications of the role of the academic.

This is part two of an ongoing conversation about post-anarchism with Jürgin Mümken, Süreyyya Evren, and Anton Fernendaz de Rota. It has been translated from Spanish to English by Jake Nabasny with adaptations by Duane Rousselle

Duane Rousselle: Post-anarchism has come to mean different things to different people. In the anglophone world, Saul Newman has described a Lacanian/Stirnerian “post-anarchism,” Todd May has called for a practice-oriented “post-structuralist anarchism,” Lewis Call has described a time of “post-modern anarchism,” and Hakim Bey has called for a reinvention of traditional anarchist discourse in his 1987 essay “post-anarchism anarchy.” In my own research, I have noticed that there is a striking difference in the way post-anarchism has been conceived in the non-anglophone world. I would like to ask you a bit about what post-anarchism means for you and for your audience.

Jürgin Mümken: In order to answer the question of what post-anarchism means to me, I must first of all discuss my ‘philosophical beginnings.’ While I was studying architecture during the end of the 1980s, I grappled with the problem of prison architecture. I was struck by Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. This was serendipitous for me because at that time in Germany, Foucault barely played any role in those discourses that occurred outside of philosophy.

In the 1990s, I began to bring together Foucauldian thought with anarchism. When, in 1997, my first article on this topic—“No Power for Anyone: Attempts at an Anarchist Appropriation of the philosophical project of Michel Foucault”—was published in an anarchist newspaper, I did not know about the analogous argument in the Anglo-American world. In this article I referred also to the method of deconstruction present in Judith Butler’s work. I called my approach a “deconstructive anarchism.” However, I now argue that this ought not to be a new anarchist trend, as I had formulated it at the time, but rather a form of anarchist thought with wide-reaching consequences in intercourse with the dominant categories and concepts of our time.

While doing research on the Internet I discovered the work of a student in Berlin, whose thesis was that I had in fact been carrying on the thought of Todd May. As I have said, I made recourse to Judith Butler’s deconstructivism, elaborating that an anarchist society ought not to be identified through the absence of power but rather that it is founded upon a reversal of power relationships in accordance that no rigid state of authority be permitted to develop. At that point in time, I had just published my book Freedom, Individuality and Subjectivity: State and Subject in Postmodernity from an Anarchist Perspective but I had not yet heard of Todd May or Saul Newman. I began to research their work on the Internet and came upon the term “post-anarchism.” I considered (and then adopted) the term as my ‘label.’ Later I registered the website http://www.postanarchismus.net. Today post-anarchism remains for me a label within, but increasingly tightly-bound with, the multifaceted approaches to the contemporary actualization of anarchist theory and practice.

However, I do not use the term “post-anarchism” to set myself apart from “classical anarchism.” Foucault, Derrida, Butler, Deleuze, among others, can help us to read classical anarchism again. For example, there are many new and interesting things to discover in Stirner and Bakunin. In the anglo-American world, the German and French approaches to post-anarchism are largely ignored, whereas May, Newman, Call and Day have had no real relevance in the debates in German.

To me post-anarchism means an actualization of anarchist theory and practice with help from the “post-structuralist toolbox.” The prefix “post” stands for challenging and rejecting some of the basic assumptions of classical anarchism, but not for the abandonment of anarchist goals. For me, post-anarchism holds fast to the goal of a classless and stateless society, the term only makes sense within that context.

This is part one of an ongoing conversation about post-anarchism with Jürgin Mümken, Süreyyya Evren, and Anton Fernendaz de Rota. It has been translated from German to English by Enkidu (enkidu[at]AngryNerds.com) with adaptations by Duane Rousselle.

We have been witnessing a growing interest in the development of a distinctly ‘anarchist studies’ approach to scholarship. Along with this, divergent disciplines are beginning to take anarchist scholarship more seriously. We are beginning to get the sense that, as anarchists, our work is rapidly coming to be defined as the radical position within various ‘schools’ of radical studies. Within this shift, there has been an expansion within the anarchist rubric toward more vibrant and diverse contributions: non-anarchists are beginning to adopt anarchistic philosophies, anarchists are beginning to appropriate non-anarchist philosophies as their own by reading them through their own selective lens, and anarchist scholars are beginning to draw upon any number of sources and methodologies for their inspiration. As a result, the anarcho-sphere has been witnessing adventurous and refreshing new debates.

We hope to offer a platform for the documentation of these recent developments in anarchist thought and to inspire others to see anarchism in all of its brilliant manifestations by linking these developments under a common tendency. We are inspired by Jesse Cohn’s invitation to an ‘anarchist cultural studies’ wherein he has suggested that “anarchists have pretty much always been interested in and actively theorizing about and investigating the kinds of things that now get called ‘cultural studies’” — we are pleased to offer the space in which you, our friends and comrades, can further explore these investigations.

The most difficult part of this project was simply to begin. But we are happy to share with you all that we have passed that part! The first issue of ADCS, volume 2010.1, “Post-anarchism Today,” includes articles from geology, film studies, sociology and religious studies. The publication of this issue coincides with the release of our new book “Post-anarchism: A Reader” (Pluto Press) and may be thought to include materials that expand upon the discussions included therein. You may pre-order hard copies of ADCS 2010.1 for yourself or for your (campus and radical) libraries by visiting http://littleblackcart.com/index.php?main_page=product_book_info&products_id=597. However, you may also read the first issue on our website at the end of the month in a typographically accurate PDF format and print this out to share with your friends and colleagues by visitinghttp://www.anarchist-developments.org. Our promise to you: we will always keep our journal free and easily accessible online using the highest quality print-ready formats.

We should state at the outset: our journal aims to disrupt the compulsion toward the commodification of radical knowledge. In this regard, our journal will always be freely available to read, download, print, and distribute from our website. Our publication uses open source software (the Open Journal Systems web platform) and fonts, and aims to contribute to the open source movement.

We invite you to order a hard copy of our journal and to watch our website for updates. We also encourage submissions for future issues to Duane.Rousselle@unb.ca. Thanks goes out to the North American Anarchist Studies Network for providing the needed infrastructure for this project to get off of the ground – we consider ourselves to be working within the Cultural Studies working group of the network and invite others to join the discussions at http://www.naasn.org.