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Many contemporary philosophers – including Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben – ascribe an ethical or political value to anarchy, but none ever called themselves an “anarchist.” It is as if anarchism were unmentionable and had to be concealed, even though its critique of domination and of government is poached by the philosophers.
Stop Thief! calls out the plundering of anarchism by philosophy. It’s a call that is all the more resonant today as the planetary demand for an alternative political realm raises a deafening cry. It also alerts us to a new philosophical awakening. Catherine Malabou proposes to answer the cry by re-elaborating a concept of anarchy articulated around a notion of the “non-governable” far beyond an inciting of disobedience or common critiques of capitalism. Anarchism is the only way out, the only pathway that allows us to question the legitimacy of political domination and thereby wfree up the confidence that we need if we are to survive.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Epigraph
Notes
Translator’s Note
Anarchy in Translation, or Can Translation be Anarchist?
Notes
1 Surveying the Horizon
Notes
2 Dissociating Anarchism from Anarchy
An unthought
A theft
A disavowal
Notes
3 On the Virtue of Chorus Leaders: Archy and Anarchy in Aristotle’s
Politics
The aporias of Aristotle’s
Politics
First aporia: citizens, rulers, ruled
Second aporia: “regime” and “governing body” as synonyms
Third aporia: the subject of
Politics
Politics and domination, the return of
oikonomia
Notes
4 Ontological Anarchy: Traveling from Greece to the Andes with Reiner Schürmann
Anarchy, metaphysics, and “deconstruction”
Critiques of anarchism
Anarchy and meditation on principle
On Aristotelian teleocracy
From
archē
to
principium
Principle – of nothing
The emergence of anarchy as a political question
The time of anarchy
Reading Plotinus: politics as event
Reading Foucault
“What should we do today?”
Double bind
Delegitimizing philosophy, disarming the contradictory injunction
The (Greek) temple in the sun
To understand …
Notes
5 Ethical Anarchy: The Heteronomies of Emmanuel Levinas
On dissociation
Beyond deconstruction
Substitution without dual injunction
Two, but not double
Heteronomies
Consequential autonomy
Election and slavery
The figure of the subject subordinated to the tyrant
The figure of the proletarian
Who is elected?
Election and revolution
A blind spot appears
First level of opacity: anarchism of the state
Which state?
Israel in general
Second level of opacity: the entirely other heteronomy
Notes
6 “Responsible Anarchism”: Jacques Derrida’s Drive for Power
Is deconstruction anarchism?
Yes and no: deconstruction and anarchism
The anarchy question
Beyond principle: alternative and its two reasons
First reason: Freud presents anarchism with the most serious question of all
Second reason: Freud requires a special deconstructive reading
First occurrence of thematizing “anarchy”: metaphysics and the value of
archē
Second occurrence: Lévi-Strauss the anarchist
Why “
archē
,” not “
anarchē
-writing”?
Third occurrence: Levinas risking the transcendental
Fourth occurrence: Derrida’s reading of
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Freud and the ambiguity of the
Bemächtigungstrieb
“What is the difference between a principle and a drive?”
What does “mastery” really mean for Derrida?
The anarchist drive
Questions for Foucault
Freud’s answers
Terrorism, anarchy, and protective barriers
Undeniable anarchism, anarchism denied
Notes
7 Anarcheology: Michel Foucault’s Last Government
Anarchism rethought
Resistance and transformation
Resistance
Transformation
Disavowal: smokescreen readings
The “problem of government” and the problem with the problem
Governmentality
The persistence of commanding and obeying
The last turn:
parrēsia
The impossible possibility of the relation between government and truth
First approach: the instrumentalist soul
Impossible
parrēsia
Foucauldian immanence according to Deleuze
Auto-affection
Foucault’s response
Two Platonic dialogues, two subjects
Cynicism and anarchism
The coin’s currency
Conclusion
Notes
8 Profanatory Anarchy: Giorgio Agamben’s Zone
The question of profanation and anarchy
True anarchy
Denouncing semantic inflation, destituting the symbolic
Foucault’s 1977–78 lectures: “The King reigns, but he does not govern”
The fracture between beginning and command
The theological fate of the fracture, or the structure of exception of God
The dual anarchy of Father and Son
Return of the “sacred”
Glory
The “symbols of power”
Christ’s sacrifice
Ecce homo sacer
On Foucault’s immanent use
Critique of transgression
Questions and challenges
The four knocks of transgression
The zone
Notes
9 Staging Anarchy: Jacques Rancière without Witnesses
False leads
Is it police?
Explanatory detour: Granting a leave of absence to the unrepresentable
On the difference between dissensus and differend
Politics, distributions, representations
Distribution of the sensible
Having a part
Apportioning parts
Philosophy as “archipolitics”
The drawing of lots
Staging reconfiguration
Contra Lyotard
Unrepresentable and unpresentable
Two regimes of art
The words of witnesses
Devalorizing the act of witnessing
Anarchism without a regime of proof
“This is what I see right here”
Finally: a touch of anarchist painting
Notes
Conclusion: Being an Anarchist
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Stop Thief!
Anarchism and Philosophy
Catherine Malabou
Translated by Carolyn Shread
polity
Copyright Page
Originally published in French as Au voleur! Anarchisme et philosophie © Presses universitaires de France/Humensis, 2023
This English edition © Polity Press, 2023
This book is supported by the Institut français (Royaume-Uni) as part of the Burgess programme.
This work received support for excellence in publication and translation from Albertine Translation, a program created by Villa Albertine and funded by FACE Foundation.
Excerpt from Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France 1982–1983, published 2010 by Palgrave Macmillan, reproduced with permission of SNCSC.
Excerpt from Jacques Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics,” Theory & Event, 5/3 (2001) © 2001 Jacques Rancière and The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press.
Excerpt from Giorgio Agamben, Omnibus Homo Sacer used with permission of Stanford University Press, 2017; permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5522-2 – hardback
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Epigraph
“Even those who do not consider themselves anarchists feel they have to define themselves in relation to it and draw on its ideas.”1
David Graeber
Notes
1
Graeber, David,
Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology
(Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004), p. 34.
Translator’s Note1
Anarchy in Translation, or Can Translation be Anarchist?
Having translated seven of Catherine Malabou’s books, I have argued consecutively that translation is plastic, differently feminine and not secondary to a binary, that the accident is its condition, that translation is textual epigenesis, that translation morphs with our intelligence in the age of A and that – oh yes – translation can be a clitoridian pleasure.2 Will I now ascribe anarchism to translation? No. That’s not possible. Anarchism cannot be attached as predicate to its substance. Its existence is other. To think anarchism philosophically, as Malabou explains, we’ll need to unseat foundations, starting with Aristotle’s archē, and all the principles, beginnings, commands, and orders that have ensued. We’ll have to move from vertical pyramids of hierarchy and control to the relief of horizontal planes. A new mapping will emerge from the translational topography in anarchist geographers’ sights.
Even if ascription is not possible, between translation and anarchism, there’s certainly something to be said. Let’s start with the history of disavowals of anarchism that Malabou parses here as she works through the thought of philosophers from Reiner Schürmann to Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Jacques Rancière, every time picking out with that astute eye we have come to trust and admire, the fault in the fabric of their thinking, the place where the light of anarchism shines too bright for them to see. Again and again, Malabou shows how even the most radical philosophers could not think … not the un-governable, that’s simple enough – could not think … the non-governable. Following her tracking, readers will recognize that gentle indocility of Malabou’s own thought, her refusal of mastery and masters, her penchant for looking toward the space of transformations brought about not by an unruly refusal to obey, but rather by quiet indifference. Anarchism is not about the ungovernable – that’s just distraction to keep some inside, others out, everyone and everything in their defined place on the colonizing map of hegemony. This is not about in and out; anarchism is a plastic world of its own.
But if anarchism is a critique of representation, a critique of the hierarchy of representing because to represent is to speak in the place of and for another, then how can translation be anarchist? That is, how is translation something other than representation? Walter Benjamin asked a similar question of photography in the age of mechanical reproduction. In the age of artificial intelligence, the question is about how in translation does there lie a potentiality beyond transfer: the plastic power of transformation. A type of translation that is not about speaking for, not a strategy of domination (translation has been used in this diminished manner far too often); it is about amplifying and regenerating an authorial voice with a translator’s own, working it in another idiom for more times and places. Taking anarchist practices to imagine liberation via language, I’ll posit that translation offers a plastic porte-parole, one that occasionally allows anarchism to emerge. This is precisely because translation here is not secondary and subservient representation, and not even deferred reformation; it is, rather, anarchism in action. Too often, translation is placed in a position of exception, cordoned off from writing – why? Because sometimes in its plasticity there is anarchist expression.
Anarchism is a powerful word. It turns heads. Then, usually, all too soon it is dismissed as anarchy, misconstrued and maligned as disorder, excluded from the realm of possibilities. As Malabou writes here: “Not for a moment do philosophers consider the possibility that we might live without being governed.” An anarchist imaginary sees the radical and transformational reordering the world calls for: climate crisis and the attendant wounds of capitalism compounded by slavery require what Joseph Proudhon reframed as the highest form of order – no other reparation is enough.
There is anarchism. In translation there is anarchism. Malabou concludes her meticulous reading of anarchism in philosophy by discussing the ever-renewed demand that anarchism offer proof that it exists. I suggest that, sometimes, that is just what translation does. I won’t claim that this translation is anarchist – it’s too ready to take on Malabou’s order, even when it is artfully plastic. But, like every translation, this Malabou in English does partake in the potentiality of translation that is always anarchism. It defends that plasticity as its condition of possibility and its world. The translational is what opens us to the transformation that is anarchism.
Notes
1
We have taken advantage of reprinting to make some corrections and revisions to the translation.
2
If this reference to the clitoris is unexpected, be assured that it is not gratuitous. I urge readers not familiar with Catherine Malabou’s previous book,
Pleasure Erased: The Clitoris Unthought
(2022), to consult this text as the clitoris is, in fact, integral to her rethinking of anarchism. Indeed,
Pleasure Erased
concludes with the striking statement “The clitoris is an anarchist.”
1Surveying the Horizon
I propose the term geographicity to parallel historicity.1
Yves Lacoste
If Marxism is a passion for history, anarchism is the love of geography. All historical approaches, whatever their methodology, inevitably reproduce hierarchical interpretations of dominant positions. Anarchist geography, on the other hand, avoids vertical readings, although this does not mean it exists on the flat. Élisée Reclus, author of The Earth and Its Inhabitants: The Universal Geography2 and The Earth: A Descriptive History of the Phenomena of the Life of the Globe,3 articulates better than anyone the lines drawn across distance that make up a landscape shaped by the harmonious juxtaposition of mountains and dales, rivers and valleys, the teeming life that lies behind every map: “Gushing springs, rivers disappearing deep into the earth, waterfalls, floods, fissuring glaciers, erupting volcanos, emerging sand bars and islands, waterspouts, hurricanes, and tempests.”4 To refuse verticality is not to walk in the plains. It is, instead, an entirely different way of knowing how to boldly face the expanse. It is a knowledge that is another means of presenting the relief. Each of the six volumes of his later L’Homme et la terre – the earth that Reclus explored so far and wide, largely on foot – bears the epigraph: “Geography is none other than history in space, in the same way that history is geography in time.”5
Reclus coined the French neologism entraide [mutual aid] for his friend and fellow geographer Peter Kropotkin, contributing a key element to the French translation of the 1902 masterpiece L’Entraide, un facteur de l’évolution.6 An indefatigable observer of Manchuria and Siberia, and author of three significant works on physical geography (a treatise on the orography of Asia, a theory of glaciation, and a study of desiccation7), Kropotkin, too, understood the ground we stand on not merely as inorganic fact but rather as the tangled traces of life. All across the Eastern steppes, palimpsests of evolution offer brilliant, frozen memories of relations between the animal world, humans, and the desert.
A forebear of social geography and ecology, anarchist spatialization works tirelessly to achieve a political vision of horizontality. It is no mere pun to say that both geography and politics establish this groundwork together. As a geography of emancipation, as opposed to a geography of domination, anarchism refers verticality back to what it is, namely, a governing logic that reduces every diestema to subordination. Yet organization does not necessarily require subordination. As Reclus puts it: “Our political aim … is the absence of government, it is anarchy, the highest expression of order.”8
The absence of government. This book was sparked by the question of how to understand this phrase. It invites readers to look at anarchism anew, forgoing hegemonic habits and the evaluative gaze.
This is a book of philosophy, however, not geography. It comes from a dawning awareness that philosophy is lagging behind geography. An awareness that philosophy is tardy when it comes to physical geography and a politics of horizontality. In short, that philosophy is belated in addressing anarchism.
The time has come to make up for this delay. To undertake the reckoning between philosophy and anarchism that has not yet taken place.
*
I explore the concept of anarchy in the work of six key contemporary philosophers: Reiner Schürmann, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Jacques Rancière. Although they all accord anarchy a critical value – be it ontological, ethical, or political – they fail to truly engage in a philosophy of anarchism. Even as they adopt the geographical language of surface, fold, and the demise of overviews to counter the diktat of pyramid models, ultimately, they are unable to rid themselves of the logic of government. My goal is to interrogate the anarchist failure of philosophical concepts of anarchism.
*
Why stage this reckoning now? Because horizontality is in crisis: dissociated, split, torn asunder by its uniformity, its geography is disoriented, the compass of differentiation lost.
Our current crisis in horizontality comes from the global coexistence of de facto anarchism and dawning anarchism. Their coexistence makes it difficult to establish a rigorous distinction between resignation and initiative, forced as they are now to tread the same ground.
As far as de facto anarchism is concerned, the state has already disintegrated. It is no more than a protective envelope for various oligarchies that have divided up the world between them.
It’s clear as day: there’s nothing more to wait for from on high. Everywhere, the social world is condemned to a horizontality of desertion.9 In economically privileged “democratic” countries, the effects of the longstanding collapse of the welfare state continue to circulate endlessly. No state institution, no common parliamentary organization (think of the dysfunctional European Union) has shown itself able to respond to the challenges of poverty, migration, or ecological and health crises in any way except through pitiful emergency measures.
As far as dawning anarchism is concerned, the actual collapse in the social meaning of verticality coincides with an emergent planetary consciousness signaled by the dramatic rise in collective initiatives and experiments in alternative political visions.10 In France in recent years, for example, Occupy strategies, the Yellow Vests movement [Gilets Jaunes], and the creation of ‘Zones to Defend’ [ZAD: zone à défendre] have introduced the very real existence of organizations and modes of decision-making based on self-generated, collective care for an environment, territory, or structure within the political landscape. There’s clearly a connection between anti-globalization views of anarchism that date back to events in Seattle in 1999 and the explosion of the many phenomena taking place outside unions and political parties even though they do not openly align themselves with anarchism. In this context,
the circulation of information in fact occurs more through channels that, if they are not in competition with unions, at least exist in parallel, in forms of horizontality that contest the information “silos” of national organizations … This alters communications between individuals and activist groups and established actors who seek to offer collective expression.11
These alternative modes of communication are contemporaneous with what must be described as the anarchist turn in capitalism itself, for capitalism is the prime actor in de facto anarchism. Emerging from the financial crisis of the 2000s, this turn marks the shift from neoliberalism to ultraliberalism. In the critique of neoliberalism discussed by many contemporary philosophers, capitalism’s current anarchist turn can no longer be ignored. The development of post-Fordist capitalism at the end of the twentieth century was not yet fluent in the language that economic actors now practice openly and that has become the hegemonic language of anarcho-capitalism.
I hear the objection loud and clear: aren’t we witnessing a global hardening of political interventionism that is inseparable from a new form of centralized economic power? Aren’t we faced with intensified political authoritarianism, the consolidation of wealth and profit in the hands of just a few companies and conglomerates? Yes, certainly. But when political commentators declare in all seriousness that Donald Trump is an anarchist,12 they are not using words lightly. They are trying to express what the entire world is experiencing as a major crisis: the combination of government violence and an infinite uberization of life. Authoritarianism does not oppose the disappearance of the state; rather, it acts as its messenger. It masks this so-called “collaborative” economy that continuously erodes all fixed regulations by putting professionals and users in contact directly via online platforms.
Researching the world of cryptocurrency transactions and the circulation of non-national currencies heightened my awareness of this phenomenon. Cryptocurrencies leech off state currencies and compete in the usual circulation of funds by commercial and central banks.13 More generally, as Alain Damasio comments, “the fundamentally horizontal and libertarian architecture of the net” gives rise to a “polymorphic” anarchism that is just as libertarian as it is liberational.14 In the end, I concluded that cyber-anarchism is one of the most visible symptoms of the existing anarchy that is now a dimension of our reality, like it or not.
How can the horizontality of alternative formations be distinguished from the veinstone of anarcho-capitalism? How do we dig for the relief of difference at the surface? This is the new geographical, political, and philosophical challenge of the twenty-first century.
It might be argued that this difference, not to say incompatibility, is blindingly obvious:
“Anarcho”-capitalism is not part of the anarchist tradition and … has falsely appropriated the name … [We] present the case why “anarcho” capitalists are not anarchists … indicating where they differ from genuine anarchists (on such essential issues as private property, equality, exploitation and opposition to hierarchy) … [and] present a general critique of right-libertarian claims from an anarchist perspective … we show up why anarchists reject that theory as being opposed to liberty and anarchist ideals.15
This distinction is convincing, but is increasingly overshadowed. César de Paepe noted as much back in 1874: “The word an-archy … raises the hackles of our bourgeois, whereas the idea of indefinite whittling away of government functions and ultimately the abolition of government is the last word among the laissez-faire economists favored by these brave bourgeois!”16
There’s nothing new in the coexistence of revolutionary anarchism and market anarchism, but nevertheless the expansion of what Rifkin terms the “Collaborative Commons”17 has created an unprecedented situation that forces us to examine the polymorphism of anarchism in order to identify its limits. This is the arena where philosophy must intervene.
*
The problem is that even if some of the most significant continental philosophers of the twentieth century viewed anarchy as a deconstructive and transformative resource, rejecting the limitations of more established political theories (notably Marxism), not one of them managed to breach the distance that they argued separates anarchy from anarchism. This separation remains conceptually underdeveloped. Philosophy must therefore explore the anarchism of its various forms of anarchy. In return, anarchism must open itself up to philosophical dialogue to create the instrument of a differentiation that is lacking on our current horizon.
*
I hear the ready objection: but there’s no single anarchism! It has so many forms! How can we ignore the tremendous diversity of its aspects, cultures, languages, pragmatic modes? How can we flatten the long trail of its history, from the invention of its name, its status as a movement forged in the 1870s, the subsequent developments of anarcho-syndicalism, autonomy, anarcho-feminism, the anti-globalization turn of the 1990s, the emergence of post-anarchism, Occupy movements, the current rise of social uprisings without leaders …? How can we ignore the local specificity of Zapatista autonomy, Kurdish anarchist resistance, Anarchists Against the Wall in Israel, and Black Lives Matter in the United States?
Endlessly emphasizing the diversity of anything is also a way to avoid thinking it. As Jacques Derrida put it: “To pluralize is always to provide oneself with an emergency exit, up until the moment when it’s the plural that kills you.”18 Yet, contrary to what the enemies of thought always claim, the multiple is not the enemy of the idea. Responding to the journalist who asked, “What is anarchism?” in response to his documentary Ni Dieu ni maître [no gods, no masters], Tancrède Ramonet replied that one cannot say “what” anarchism “is”; one can only say “there is” anarchism, which does support a certain use of the singular.19 “There is anarchism” means “anarchism is in evidence” or “anarchism reveals itself,” both here and there.
A thing can reveal itself without becoming one and without dissolving into fragmented phenomenal occurrences. After several years of researching anarchism and many long months spent in the unreal exploration of the world via the confinement experience of technological a-geography, I’m taking a shot now at the singularly diverse exploration of the statement: “there is” anarchism.
Notes
1
Lacoste, Yves, “Élisée Reclus, une très large conception de la géographicité et une bienveillante géopolitique,”
Hérodote
, 2/117 (2005), pp. 29–52: p. 30. [CS translation]
2
Reclus, Élisée,
Nouvelle Géographie universelle. La Terre et les hommes
(Paris: Hachette et Cie Libraires-Éditeurs), 19 vols., 1876–94.
The Earth and Its Inhabitants: The Universal Geography
, trans. and ed. E. G. Ravenstein and A. H. Keene (London: J. S. Virtue and Co, 1876–94). See Philippe Pelletier “Élisée Reclus: théorie géographique et théorie anarchiste,”
Terra Brasilis
(Nova Série), 7 (2016).
3
Reclus, Élisée,
The Earth: A Descriptive History of the Phenomena of the Life of the Globe
, trans. B. B. Woodward (London: Bickers and Son, 1876).
4
Reclus,
The Earth
, in Béatrice Giblin, “Élisée Reclus, un géographe d’exception,”
Hérodote
, 2/117 (2005), pp. 11–28: p. 24. [CS translation]
5
Reclus, Élisée,
L’Homme et la terre
(Paris: Librairie universelle, 1905), 6 vols., quoted by Lacoste, “Élisée Reclus, une très large conception de la géographicité et une bienveillante géopolitique,” p. 39. [CS translation]
6
Kropotkin, Peter,
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution
(London: Freedom, 1987). The friendship between Reclus and Kropotkin began when they met in 1877.
7
See Renaud Garcia’s excellent thesis on Kropotkin, “Nature humaine et anarchie: la pensée de Pierre Kropotkine,” defended on December 7, 2012 at the École normale supérieure de Lyon; École doctorale de philosophie: histoire, représentation, création, ED 487, p. 32.
8
Reclus, Élisée,
Développement de la liberté dans le monde
. Discovered posthumously and published in 1928 in
Le Libertaire
; quoted in Giblin, “Élisée Reclus, un géographe d’exception,” p. 14.
9
In France this desertion by the state manifests in the closure of hospitals, police stations, and schools, the privatization and subcontracting of mail services, the spread of “flexible” work, the cancelation of “statutes,” the increase in temporary work contracts for public office, especially in higher education, ministry staff cuts, ever-increasing inequality in access to healthcare, legal protection, and education – to name just some of the symptoms.
10
After the riots that followed the murder of George Floyd in the United States, an anarchist collective wrote: “Today, Black Lives Matter activists are also employing a decentralized approach, permitting the movement to spread organically and ensuring that it cannot be contained or coopted.” “This
is
Anarchy. Eight ways the Black Lives Matter and Justice for George Floyd uprisings reflect anarchist ideas in action,”
Crimethlnc
, June 9, 2020.
11
Yon, Karel, “Les grèves et la contestation syndicale sont de plus en plus politiques,” interview with Marina Garrisi,
RP Dimanche
, February 9, 2020. [CS translation]
12
See, for example, the interesting article by Melissa Lane, “Why Donald Trump was the ultimate anarchist,”
New Statesman
, February 8, 2021, in which she writes: “The former president is being tried for his role in inciting anarchy but
anarchia
, in the Greek sense of ‘vacant office,’ characterized his entire term”: p. 3.
13
See my articles, “Cryptomonnaie: Le capitalisme amorce aujourd’hui son tournant anarchiste,”
Le Monde
, June 14, 2018, p. 13; “Les cryptomonnaies remettent en cause l’idée même d’État,” interview with Octave Larmagnac-Matheron,
Philosophie Magazine
, October 6, 2020; “L’Entre-iconomie: la monnaie à l’horizon,” in Peter Szendy,
Le Supermarché des images
(Paris: Gallimard/Jeu de Paume, 2019), pp. 255–60. In these texts, I acknowledge social uses of blockchain organizing around mutual aid, cooperation, and solidarity.
14
Damasio, Alain, “Internet est tellement vaste et polymorphe que l’anarchisme y reste possible,” interview with Mathieu Dejean,
Les Inrockuptibles
, June 22, 2015. [CS translation]
15
“Is ‘anarcho’-capitalism a type of anarchism?”
An Anarchist FAQ
, section F, version 15.4, March 17, 2020.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-editorial-collective-an-anarchist-faq-full
.
16
Paepe, César de, “On the organization of public services in the society of the future,” in Daniel Guérin, ed.,
No Gods, No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism
, trans. Paul Sharkey (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2005), p. 227.
17
Rifkin, Jeremy,
The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, The Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
18
Derrida, Jacques,
Resistances of Psychoanalysis
, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 25.
19
“Anarchisme sur le retour avec Tancrède Ramonet,”
La Grande Table idées
, France Culture, April 11, 2017, Part 2. [CS translation]
2Dissociating Anarchism from Anarchy
Exploitation and government, the first affording the means whereby to govern and representing the prerequisite as well as the object of all government, which, in turn, guarantees and legalizes the power to exploit, are the two indivisible terms of all that goes by the name of politics. Since the beginning of history, they have indeed constituted the stuff of the life of States: theocratic, monarchical, aristocratic, and even democratic.1
Mikhail Bakunin
[Anarchism is] the rupture of the axioms of domination: a rupture, that is, in the correlation between a capacity for rule and a capacity for being ruled.2
Jacques Rancière
To distinguish de facto anarchism from dawning anarchism, we must first shed light on the other difference that separates philosophical anarchy(ism) from political anarchism. This difference has not yet been taken sufficiently into account, even though it signals their strange mutual ignorance amid a shared skein of tangled questions.
Although Schürmann, Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, Agamben, and Rancière all inscribe anarchy at the heart of their thought, they all insist nonetheless that anarchy is irreducible to political anarchism.
Political anarchism, too, is often hostile to philosophical reflection.
In L’Anarchisme aujourd’hui [anarchism today], Vivien García writes “Reading anarchist texts, one is inevitably struck by the constant affirmation of the immanent relation between theory and practice. Proudhon himself wrote: ‘know therefore that action is the idea.’”3 Nowadays there are endless assertions of the primacy of practice over theory, extending Proudhon’s rejection and Bakunin’s unwillingness to recognize himself as the philosopher that he is. Spanish anarchist Tomás Ibáñez, one of the creators of A cerclé [A in a circle, the anarchist symbol], recently stated:
To my mind, there is no anarchist philosophy and anarchism cannot be approached as if it were a philosophical reflection or system of philosophy. Even if we consider only its discursive aspect, it is clear that anarchism has no counterpart as a type of philosophical discourse, at least in the dominant tradition instituted by Plato. One reason for this is that its mode of production is not at all of the same order as the mode of production of philosophic discourse. Anarchist discourse is not solely the result of a pure intellectual activity, oriented towards analysis or understanding, nor even to the invention of concepts, as Deleuze defined the task of philosophy.4
This mutual avoidance is all the more confusing given that philosophical anarchy(ism) and political anarchism have a shared goal: the irrevocable critique of all phenomena of domination. Domination is not – at least not simply – mastery, authority, or power. These three terms are ambiguous because they have both negative and positive connotations. The power to do something, pedagogic authority, mastery of an instrument or discipline are not, in themselves, inherently coercive. By contrast, domination is bereft of any constructive resources. It relates unequivocally to subjection and alienation, blurring the line between power and abuse of power.5 Philosophical anarchy(ism) and political anarchism agree that domination is the power problem.
Consider the etymological proximity of the words “domination” and “danger.” “Danger” derives from the Late Latin dominarium, used in Northern Gaul for dominium and signifying “property, right to property,” hence “domination, power, right.” Subsequently, in feudal law “danger” became a lord’s right over his forests, meaning that landowners could neither sell nor manage them without his permission and without paying the tithe, under pain of confiscation. By extension, “estre en dangier d’aucun” eventually came to mean “to be at the mercy of someone,” and then “to be in danger” (estre en dangier).
Anarchism is not, and never has been, simply an attack on the state, as is claimed far too often. In fact, the destruction of the state is perhaps not even, or no longer, its leading light. Anarchism is first and foremost a fight against mechanisms of domination, which exceed the sphere of the state strictly speaking and affect all domains of life – public, private, collective, individual. Emma Goldman, for instance, lamented the fact that feminists in her time only ever called out “external tyrannies,” while the “internal tyrants” ruling over more intimate spheres such as businesses, homesteads, or the marital bed, continued their abuses with impunity. In “The tragedy of women’s emancipation,” Goldman writes:
The explanation of such inconsistency on the part of many advanced women is to be found in the fact that they never truly understood the meaning of emancipation. They thought that all that was needed was independence from external tyrannies; the internal tyrants, far more harmful to life and growth – ethical and social conventions – were left to take care of themselves.6
Goldman reminds us of the obvious fact that domination is never petty and there’s no such thing as insignificant domination.
Marxists criticized anarchists for separating domination from exploitation. But the critique does not stand. Without renouncing their critique of capitalism for a moment, anarchists recognize that the question of power infiltrates all areas of life – domestic, institutional, academic, psychic – and that this phenomenon must be the subject of specific attention and study.
“Domination” describes all forms of control that subject an individual or group to continuous subordination, often through terrorist tactics. Even when it is apparently at the furthest remove from the political sphere, subordination originates both psychologically and politically in what Proudhon calls the “governmental prejudice.”7 The critique of the state begins with the fact that the state is only a pretext for forms of governing, that is, the establishment of the unequal sharing between rulers and ruled. Such is the logic, or “prejudice,” of government: some command, others obey.
State sovereignty does not exist without the governing logic, and there is no governing logic without domination. Any individual mandated to represent another person is inevitably led to will in their place. As Proudhon puts it:
This external constitution of the collective power, to which the Greeks gave the name archē, sovereignty, authority, government, rests then on this hypothesis: that a people, that the collective being which we call society, cannot govern itself, think, act, express itself, unaided, like beings endowed with individual personality; that to do these things, it must be represented by one or more individuals, who, by any title whatever, are regarded as custodians of the will of the people and its agents.8
His conclusion is damning:
To be GOVERNED is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so … To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown it all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality! And to think that there are democrats among us who pretend that there is any good in government; Socialists who support this ignominy, in the name of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity; proletarians who proclaim their candidacy for the Presidency of the Republic!9
*
What does philosophy have to say on the matter? In a brilliant dissertation titled “The primacy of resistance: Anarchism, Foucault and the art of not being governed,” Derek C. Barnett, an early career researcher in critical theory at the University of Western Ontario, suggests that we name the philosophical version of “governmental prejudice” the “archic paradigm.”10 The archic paradigm refers to the structure that, right from the beginning of the Western tradition, links state sovereignty and government to one another. The name of this structure is archē, a term whose philosophical meaning comes from Aristotle, who defined it as both “beginning” and “command.” As Barnett explains it, “archē … is the principle that locates the question of politics at the intersection between power exercised as government and the logic of state sovereignty.”11 This paradigmatic unity remains the touchstone of all political philosophy right up to the second half of the twentieth century. There’s not a treatise in classical political philosophy that does not begin with joint consideration of sovereign and governmental authority, considered as absolute starting points.
While dismantling this paradigmatic unity is of interest both to philosophers of anarchy and to anarchists, for philosophers it requires far more than a hasty denunciation of a “prejudice.” Philosophers of anarchy must first determine where exactly prejudice inheres in the “governmental prejudice.”
These philosophers recognize that the logic of the governing body, as the foundation of traditional political thought, is a fundamental motif in Greek philosophy, especially in Aristotle, who argues that the constitution (politeia) or Republic – what we call the state sovereignty today – cannot exist without a form of government (politeuma). Moreover, in Book 3 of Politics, Aristotle goes so far as to establish their synonymy: “The governing body is the constitution.”12 Later he continues: “‘Constitution’ and ‘governing body’ signify the same thing, since the governing body is the authoritative element in cities.”13
For contemporary philosophers, anarchy is therefore already inscribed in the heart of the logic of forms of governing defined by Aristotle. Anarchy is to come only because, paradoxically, it is already here. Indeed, a critical examination of the archic paradigm reveals that anarkhia haunts archē upon its emergence, as its necessary flaw. Anarchy is originary, inscribing contingency in political order.
But at first sight, nothing signals this flaw. In Politics, the archē, as the excellent form of the constitution (aristè politeia), is invested with a triple meaning: sovereign or supreme power (to kurion), the distribution of particular powers or magistratures (arkhai), and the exercise of government (politeuma). This structure is supposed to guarantee that the Republic is protected from disorder (anarkhia).
So, where’s the contingency? Originary anarchy is based on a secret twist in archē: the archic paradigm grants the value of a principle to something that is actually derivative.
The political order cannot be, and can never be, purely political. That which is pre-judged in the “governmental prejudice” is the indestructible relation between forms of governing and domestic domination. Although Aristotle clearly asserts that archē politikē is born of the divorce from archē despotikē – the domination of father over wife and children, master over slaves – he fails to uncover a purely political normativity, one that is entirely sui generis and takes nothing from the domestic economy. The law of the master remains the disavowed model of all government. The law of the home, oikonomia, thus has an ambiguous relationship with archē politikē, that is, it is the paradoxical cement of the archic paradigm. The reversibility of commanding and obeying, which is the specific mark of citizenship, since Aristotle says that all citizens must be able, alternately, to command and to be commanded, is inevitably fractured by the fact that in the end only some people – those who are supposedly more apt to govern than others – give commands. This hegemonic betrayal of the equality of citizens reveals the indelible trace of the figure of the master of the house in a sphere from which it is supposedly excluded.
The anarchic virus infecting archē from the start is the inability of political order to found itself. This order thus reveals its dependence on that from which it is supposedly cut off and which Rancière, taking oikos outside the walls of the home, describes as “the natural order of the shepherd kings, the warlords, or the property owners.”14
Even though it is concealed, the contingency of archē thus derives from a paradoxical revelation of its heteronormativity.
Philosophers argue that this problem requires a more radical elucidation than the one offered by anarchist critiques. Even if the philosophers discussed here do not all consider themselves “deconstructionists,” this clarification draws more on a Heideggerian Abbau or Destruktion of metaphysics than on revolutionary thought. Moreover, in Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, Schürmann explicitly connects Heideggerian “deconstruction” to anarchy.15 The dismantling of the archic paradigm can occur only at the price of the deconstruction of metaphysics, which alone is capable of undertaking a deconstitution of archē. A deconstitution that is ontological (Schürmann, Derrida), ethical (Levinas), and political (Foucault, Rancière, Agamben). Starting from a genealogy of philosophical tradition, each of these three directions follows the vacillations of the principality of principles through to the exhaustion of their legitimacy and authority.
The first, “ontological anarchy,”16 interrogates the archeo-teleological domination that imposes the derivative schema – according to which everything starts with a beginning and is arranged toward an end – onto thought and practice. The second, “an-archic responsibility,”17 unseats the domination of the same and the subordination of alterity. The third, undertaking the “anarcheological” critique of “apparatuses” (Foucault),18 reveals “the anarchy internal to power” (Agamben)19 and claims that “politics has no archē, it is anarchical” (Rancière).20
*
How are we to understand the fact that, despite everything, philosophers never refer to the anarchist tradition? The explanation given is often the same: for them, classic political anarchism is only a moment in metaphysics. Anarchists have a substantialist view of power and oppose the politico-metaphysic principles that have reigned up to now only to replace them with others such as human nature, moral good, and reason. In the opening pages of From Principles to Anarchy, Schürmann declares: “Needless to say, here it will not be a question of anarchy in the sense of Proudhon, Bakunin and their disciples. What these masters sought was to displace the origin, to substitute the ‘rational’ power, principium, for the power of authority, princeps – as metaphysical an operation as has ever been.”21
Philosophical anarchy thus adopts the paradoxical form of an anarchy without anarchism. This helps explain why no serious reading of the work of Proudhon, Kropotkin, Bakunin, Malatesta, Goldman, Bookchin, not to mention more contemporary anarchists, is used to support the philosophical deconstruction of the archic paradigm. The sarcasm with which Marx and Engels ridiculed and marginalized anarchism has not yet been subject to deconstruction.
Moreover, for a philosopher, if there’s no shame, and never has been, in declaring oneself a Marxist, calling oneself an anarchist is almost indecent, since anarchism is immediately associated with the impossible, the unachievable, a confounding mix of terrorist violence and naivety. As Alain Badiou put it: “We know today that all emancipatory politics must put an end to the model of the party, or of multiple parties, in order to affirm a politics ‘without party,’ and yet at the same time without lapsing into the figure of anarchism, which has never been anything else than the vain critique, or the double, or the shadow, of the communist parties, just as the black flag is only the double or the shadow of the red flag.”22
But Schürmann, Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, Agamben, and Rancière are undoubtedly closer to anarchism than to Marxism. Why didn’t they develop the anarchist dimension of their interventions, ridding the anarchist posture of all the clichés with which it is so widely associated?
*
Some will say they did just that. The “post-anarchism” movement, first named by Hakim Bey (Post-Anarchism Anarchy, 1987) and bringing together several mostly anglophone anarchist thinkers, was inspired by Foucault, Rancière, and Agamben inasmuch as they outlined the possibility of an other anarchism. Important theorists such as Todd May, Saul Newman, and Lewis Call argue that the dichotomy between anarchy and anarchism instituted by continental or “poststructuralist” philosophers was not reactionary at all, contributing instead to a rejuvenation of classic anarchism.
In his Introduction to The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism, May writes: “The purpose of this essay is to sketch the framework of an alternative political philosophy, one that differs from its dominant predecessors,” in other words, the works of traditional anarchists.23 This “alternative political philosophy” presents as “tactical thinking,”24 whose characteristics May borrows from Foucault and, indeed, must succeed the “strategic thought” of earlier anarchism, based as it is on an overly simplistic opposition between power and resistance. Today, “power is decentralized … sites of oppression are numerous and intersecting.”25 Traditional anarchism remains dependent on a pyramid view of the state and forms of governing. For instance, many militant anarchists believed in “terrorist attacks against heads of state, to eliminate power at a perceived source.”26 But the notion of a single source of power is a recent target of poststructuralist critiques.
Poststructuralist thought is considered to have the advantage of opening political philosophy in general, and anarchism in particular, to a theoretical and practical perspective freed of a monolithic view of power. It frees anarchism from the idea that each individual is a representative of “human essence.”27 Ultimately, May’s claim is that poststructuralist political theory is more anarchist than anarchism itself.
For post-anarchists, it’s as if the history of anarchism were secretly oriented toward a future that could be confirmed only by deconstruction. The three main periods in this history – the anarchist movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century; the anarcho-syndicalism of the 1930s; the anti-globalization movement of the 1990s – would eventually lead to a renewal in revolutionary practices more inspired by philosophical concepts of anarchy than the now unusable core ideas of historical anarchism. Lewis Call concludes that it “is becoming increasingly evident that anarchist politics cannot afford to remain within the modern world. The politics of Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin … have become dangerously inaccessible to late twentieth-century readers.”28
Indeed, it is always with reference to poststructuralist philosophers that post-anarchists announce the disappearance of militant universalism and its splitting into many different fronts of resistance: local, plural, changing, heterogenous fights that no longer come together under the single category of “class.” At the same time, the knots of conflict composing the social fabric signal discontinuity: the demands of unions, feminists, ecologists, decolonial militants, the fight against racial and gender discrimination, homophobia, transphobia29 … “Human essence” can no longer be the basis of all these agonistic fields. Contemporary philosophers have thus actively contributed to demonstrating that “the problem of essentialism is the political problem of our time.”30
I’m convinced that post-anarchists are missing the point. Philosophers of anarchy have never conceptualized the anarchist dimension of their concepts of anarchy. This analysis is not undertaken with a view to engaging anarchism in a new, postmodern phase; rather, first and foremost, it seeks to dissociate from it.
*
It is this internal dissociation within philosophical thought on anarchy that I intend to analyze as a triple cleavage that engages all at once an unthought, a theft, and a disavowal.
An unthought
The origin of philosophical concepts of anarchy is still unthought. In fact, the very possibility of these concepts depends entirely on a fundamental event: Proudhon’s mid-nineteenth-century semantic revolution of the word “anarchy.” A revolution about which the philosophers say not a word.
In What is Property? (1840), the ancient word “anarchy” inherited from the Greek anarkhia suddenly became a neologism. When Proudhon declared for the first time “I am an anarchist,” connecting the word “anarchist” directly to the question of forms of governing, he conferred on it a meaning it never had before:
What is to be the form of government in the future? I hear some of my younger readers reply: “Why, how can you ask such a question? You are a republican.” “A republican! Yes; but that word specifies nothing. Res publica; that is, the public thing. Now, whoever is interested in public affairs – no matter under what form of government – may call himself a republican. Even kings are republicans. –
“Well! you are a democrat?” – “No.” – “What! you would have a monarchy.” – “No.” – “A constitutionalist?” – “God forbid!’ – “You are then an aristocrat?” – “Not at all.” – “You want a mixed government?” – “Still less.” – “What are you, then?” – “I am an anarchist.”
“Oh! I understand you; you speak satirically. This is a hit at the government.” – “By no means. I have just given you my serious and well-considered profession of faith. Although a firm friend of order, I am (in the full force of the term) an anarchist.”31
Linguists explain that while a neologism usually refers to a newly created word, a prototype, it may also refer to impressing a new meaning on an old word,32 which is exactly what happened here. “Anarchist,” along with “anarchy,” became, so to speak, “an-archaisms.”
“Under the name of Anarchy, a new interpretation of the past and present life of society arises, giving at the same time a forecast as regards its future,” Kropotkin later wrote.33 The neologism is a play with time itself: “anarchy” no longer refers to disorganization as it did in the past; instead, it signals a new type of organization: “Anarchy is order without power.”34 Even if Proudhon did not yet describe his doctrine as the “anarchism” that was to become a fully formed movement some forty years later,35 his redefinition of anarchy identifies it with a political project for the first time.
What was the archaic meaning of the word “anarchy”? Its history begins in Greece with anarkhia (ἀναρχία), referring to
“the state of a people regularly without a government” (Herodotus, Histories IX, 23) or “the occasional absence of a leader” (Xenophon, Anabasis, III, 2, 29), “the lack of authority” (Sophocles, Antigone, v. 672) or “the refusal to obey” (Aeschylus, Seven against Thebes, v. 1030). In Plato (The Republic, VIII, 565e 2–5 et IX, 575a 2), where it is contrasted to eleutheria (“freedom”), anarkhia is associated with anomia (“the absence of law”), anaïdeïa (“impudence”), asôtia (“debauchery”) and hubris (“excessiveness”). In Politics (1302b 29), Aristotle makes anarkhia synonymous with ataxia, disorder.36
For many centuries the word “anarchy” retained these negative connotations, as is evident, for instance, in Diderot’s article “Anarchy,” written for the Encyclopedia: “Disorder in a state, deriving from the fact that no one has enough authority to command and to impose the laws and consequently, the people acts as they will, without subordination and without police.”37 Until the mid-nineteenth century, “anarchy” referred to chaos caused by an absence of governmental authority.
[Chaos] as much in the political realm (liberalism and universal suffrage were labeled anarchic by Maine de Biran in 1817 and by Saint Priest in 1831), as in the socioeconomic realm. In 1830 Fourier spoke of “anarchy of the press” and “mercantile anarchy”; in 1845 Louis Blanc referred to “industrial anarchy”; in 1890 Jaurès described the “anarchy of the market”). Even in the social realm (“social anarchy,” Villeneuve-Bargemont, 1845) and religion (“atheism is religious anarchy,” Pastoret, 1797, Sur la liberté des cultes et leurs ministres).38
Today, in the same vein, cancer cell development is described as “anarchic proliferation.”
Even if this negative semantic constellation has not disappeared, it is impossible to ignore the other meaning of anarchy: the meaning that no longer views the absence of principle or leader as a catastrophe:
Anarchy – the absence of a master, of a sovereign – such is the form of government to which we are every day approximating and which our accustomed habit of taking man for our rule and his will for law, leads us to regard as the height of disorder and the expression of chaos.39
Far from entropic fate, the absence of master and sovereign appears instead as the condition of possibility of new organization. For anarchists, it is the “archic” order that is a disorder precisely because it is not founded on free consent. And if, as with Reclus, anarchy can be described as “the highest expression of order,”40 it is precisely because it gives no orders. Likewise, for Malatesta, order without orders characterizes “the condition of a people who live without a constituted authority, without government.”41
Without this revolution in meaning, none of the philosophical concepts of anarchy developed in the twentieth century could have seen the light of day. Indeed, they all assume that the archaic meanings of the notion – disorder or chaos – have been superseded. Ontological anarchism in Schürmann, “arche-writing” in Derrida, anarchic responsibility in Levinas, “anarcheology” in Foucault, destituent power in Agamben, “democracy” in Rancière – all are indebted to Proudhon’s semantic transformation.
A theft
Contemporary philosophy thus took something from anarchist thought. Perhaps unwittingly, perhaps without admitting to itself that it was doing so.
“What is property? … It is theft.”42 When Proudhon wrote these words, he took aim not only at material confiscation. His sights are not only set on the fact that private property entails the dispossession of most of humanity, nor is he thinking only about the exploitation of workers. He is also describing the way in which a theft always conceals itself. Thus, private property, which comes from an abduction, is protected by the law and covered up by a suit of legitimizing instances. Theft always occurs twice over. To steal is first to despoil, then to conceal – both the stolen object and the theft itself. “The etymology of the French verb voler is … significant. Voler, or faire la vole (from the Latin vola, palm of the hand), means to take all the tricks in a game of ombre.”43 In the thief’s game there is a dual activity of capturing (taking charge of) and disappearance (passing from hand to hand). This dissimulation is the best way to keep the stolen object (“the things that … you have such fear of losing,”44 Proudhon retorts to the defenders of property).
Is it too much to claim, then, that there has been a philosophical theft of anarchy from the anarchists? A theft concealed, knowingly or unknowingly, by an apparent concern for theoretical and political distance? Something dangerous, shameful, explosive, enclosed in the underside of consciousness, something that philosophers have shifted from hand to hand?
How else can we understand their silence? The concept of anarchism is not just any concept. One cannot claim to invent it, to play on the privative prefix (an-arkhia) or simply borrow it from the dictionary without knowing how it was innovated by political anarchism.
A disavowal
The unconscious motive for such poaching cannot be ignored. Most likely this theft is related to a disavowal. Need I recall that in Freud disavowal refers to a defense mechanism in which a desire is spoken, even as it is signaled by negation? The argument presented in his article “Negation” [Die Verneinung]45 is well known:
The manner in which our patients bring forward their associations during the work of analysis gives us an opportunity for making some interesting observations. “Now you’ll think I mean to say something insulting, but really I’ve no such intention.” We realize that this is a rejection, by projection, of an idea that has just come up. Or: “You ask who this person in the dream can be. It’s not my mother.” We emend this to: “So it is his mother.” In our interpretation, we take the liberty of disregarding the negation and of picking out the subject matter alone of the association. It is as though the patient had said: “It’s true that my mother came into my mind as I thought of this person, but I don’t feel inclined to let the association count.”46
What then are we to make of philosophers who announce “I am not an anarchist” even when “anarchy” is everywhere to be found in their work and has the last word? What are we to think except to assume that philosophical reservations about anarchism are also the expression of a form of a partially successful repression?
But a repression of what exactly? A repression of the issue at the heart of the anarchist question, namely, the political viability of the absence of government. In referring to a disavowal, I certainly have no intention of suggesting a psychoanalytic session for the contemporary philosophical critique of the “governmental prejudice.” If it is necessary to have recourse to the language of psychoanalysis, as I often do here (how can you avoid the psychoanalytical when it’s a matter of domination?), it is because anarchism and the unconscious have a special relationship. A relationship whose terms Derrida laid out, especially in The Postcard, as he explored the space that lies beyond all principles, both with and contra Freud.47
The reservation philosophers have about the idea of not having a governing body – and which is shared by Derrida despite it all – is probably largely unconscious. They accept a dismantling of the archic paradigm and welcome the deconstruction of domination – but the possibility that humans might live without being governed and without governing themselves? Unthinkable! The possibility that we simply rid ourselves of the very concept of governing? Out of the question! The former meaning of anarchy hangs over us still. Without the logic of governing, without the divide between command and obey, wouldn’t it be … wouldn’t that be, how shall I put it … anarchy?
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