Post-anarchism, the tendency that reread anarchism through Foucault, Deleuze and the French theory that came out of the 1960s, says that anarchism had a good idea about power and bad ideas about people, about reason, and about where power sits. This part keeps what the critique gets right, the reach of power and a suspicion toward one’s own foundations, and checks the rest against what the anarchists actually wrote. Then it asks whether a critique of power can still say what is true, and what is left of the person once it has.
The “post.” What the prefix promises and what the tendency claims. Much of the classical anarchism it left behind was a straw man taken from the textbooks, and the anarchists already knew that society makes persons. Two things survive the reply, the reach of power and the habit of doubting one’s own ground.
Power. Foucault’s power without a center, found in the clinic, the school and the census as well as the state. What his map adds to the anarchist one, and whether it leaves any ground to resist from.
Foundations. Derrida set beside the Münchhausen trilemma. Two roads to the finding that no claim rests on bedrock, and where they split over what follows from it.
Desire. Deleuze and Guattari, desire as production, and the market as a machine. Whether a politics that judges beliefs by whether they work can avoid asking whether they are true.
The subject. Stirner, Bataille and the nihilists. What is left of the person after critique, and why the test this book uses still needs someone who can be harmed, can refuse and can walk away.
The machines. Once systems are built to predict, sort and steer what people want, the claim that power shapes the self describes the feed. Who counts as a person, and who as an input, when the self is partly made by a machine.
Chapters
37. What the “Post” Is Supposed to Mean
38. Power Without a Center
39. Authority Without Foundations.
40. Desire, Markets and Machines. Deleuze and Guattari; Colson’s Spinoza; Berger on market anarchism.
41. The Subject After Critique. Subjectivity, Bataille, Stirner, intersectionality, Nihilism (with the regress fix).
42. AI, the Human and the Arrangement.