Part IX: Post-Anarchism, chapters 37-42
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.
Chapter 37
A prefix makes a promise, and often more than one. “Post” can mean after, as in postwar. It can mean beyond, as in a problem outgrown. Or it can mean against, the way a successor speaks of what it replaced. When a group of writers in the 1990s began to call their work poststructuralist anarchism, and then postanarchism for short, they chose the word themselves, and it carries all three meanings at once. The “post” is supposed to signify that anarchism came first, with a good idea about power but bad ideas about people, about reason, and about where power sits. What comes after keeps the first and drops the rest. The prefix is borrowed, too. It nods to poststructuralism, itself named for what came after structuralism, a label most of the French thinkers it covers never chose. A name built on its root, one that defines itself by what it negates, never quite leaves that root behind. A tendency this sure it had moved on might have found an original name of its own. Instead it took the almost cheap and generic way out. Adding “post” to anarchism doesn’t really signify that the original is dead or irrelevant, but that is part of the package.
This part takes that claim seriously, because some of it is true. It also takes seriously the reply, which is that the anarchism being left behind was never quite the anarchism that existed. The rest of the part goes thinker by thinker, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, the writers on the subject, and last the machines now being built to stand in for some of what subjects do. This chapter sets out what the tendency claims, what its critics answer, and how to sort the field before walking into it.
Why give a whole part of this book to a tendency most working anarchists ignored? There are three reasons. The first is that this is where much of the academy now meets anarchism. A student who comes to anarchism through a university course may well meet it through Foucault and Deleuze before Proudhon or Kropotkin, and will take the post-anarchist picture of the classical thinkers on trust unless someone checks it. The second is that its questions are this book’s questions. Part I asked who counts as a person and who gets treated as an input, and post-anarchism asks how persons get made in the first place, and so what personhood is. Part IV asked what any claim can rest on, and post-anarchism answers that nothing can, then has to decide what follows. A book that leans on evidence and public tests owes a reply to the case against them. Of the schools that make that case, this one is the newest, the one still being argued, and so the one that feels most live. The third is that the subject has stopped being academic. Once machines are built to predict, sort and steer what people want, the claim that power shapes the self is no longer a thesis about the asylum. It describes the feed. Whether a critique of that power can still say what is true decides whether it can do anything about it.
What postanarchism claims
The name came before the movement. Hakim Bey used it in an essay title in 1987, but the tendency as a body of argument starts with Todd May’s The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism, published in 1994. Andrew Koch had made a first attempt the year before, in a journal article. Neither drew much notice at the time. In Evren’s account they were found later, as forerunners, by the post-anarchism that grew up after the Seattle protests of 1999 (Evren, p. 7). May wanted a politics for poststructuralism that didn’t pass through Marx. He found Marxism, in every version he looked at, to be what he called a strategic philosophy, one that looks for a single center from which power flows, the economy or the state, and so a single place to strike (May, pp. 7–10). Against it he set a tactical philosophy, which treats power as spread through many sites with no master key (May, p. 53). Anarchism, he argued, had come closest to the tactical view. It refused to reduce power to class, and it saw that a revolution which seized the center would only build a new one, which is what Bakunin told Marx in 1872. In his preface May notes that this way of thinking resonates with feminism, then leaves feminism aside (May, p. ix). It is an odd gap, because the word libertarian was born in a feminist quarrel. In 1857 Joseph Déjacque, in an open letter attacking Proudhon’s views on women, called himself libertaire. The tradition that post-anarchism would charge with trusting a fixed human nature began with one of its own accusing its founder of exactly that, about women. Left libertarianism, on this reading, is not something after anarchism. It is the unfinished original, and Déjacque correcting Proudhon is the first example of the move Part I describes, an exclusion named from inside the tradition and pushed to its end.
May’s own starting point is closer to this book’s than his reading of anarchism is. In his introduction he treats ethics, much as Kant did, as a matter of what ought to be, held apart from what is. Poststructuralist political thought, he writes, offers “an alternative vision of political intervention that articulates the tension between the world as it is and the world as it could be” (May, p. 3). Even the strategic philosophy he rejects, on his account, joins an is-pole to an ought-pole, though he warns that “we must be leery of calling this interaction … a dialectic,” because “‘tension’ seems more apt for characterizing their relationship” (p. 7). Tension is the right word. A tension needs both poles to stay real. This book agrees that an ought can’t be read off an is. But a poststructuralist who questions what is, all the way down, can’t then leave ethics floating free of it, as though the one thing exempt from doubt were the ought. Karl Popper had a better picture, the one the book’s introduction drew on. Science, he wrote, doesn’t rest on bedrock. It stands on piles driven down into a swamp, deep enough to carry the building for now, never to any given bottom (The Logic of Scientific Discovery, section 30). Values can stand the same way. They are named as starting points, as Part IV said, and then held up against what is, with no pretense of a foundation under either.
But May thought classical anarchism had stopped short. In his reading it rested on a picture of human nature as good, or at least benign, and of power as something laid on that nature from outside to repress it (May, pp. 63–65). Take away the state, the church and the boss, and a cooperative human being would be free to appear. That picture, May argued, is a form of humanism, and it is exactly what Foucault had shown to be naive (May, p. 75). Power doesn’t only repress people. It makes them, shaping what they want, what they count as normal and what they take themselves to be (May, p. 67).
Saul Newman’s From Bakunin to Lacan (2001) pressed the charge further. Classical anarchism, in his account, shares the logic of what it opposes. It needs a pure place outside power, an uncorrupted human essence, from which to judge and resist power, and that place is as much a foundation as the sovereign it attacks (Newman, pp. 8–9, 47–48). His name for it is a “Manichean” political logic, which sets a pure place of resistance against an impure place of power, each defined by the other. The word comes from Manichaeism, the third-century religion of the Persian prophet Mani, the “Apostle of Light,” which blended Zoroastrian, Gnostic Christian and Buddhist teaching into a war of light against darkness. It is a fitting name for any politics of pure good against pure evil. Newman drew on Max Stirner, who had mocked “Man” as a new god put in place of the old one (Newman, pp. 60–63), and on Jacques Lacan, for whom the self is never whole and never simply natural. Resistance has no natural outside to stand on. Newman still holds that it needs an outside of some kind, and argues that this one is opened from within the field it resists (Newman, pp. 10, 137, 160).
Others widened the claim. Lewis Call’s Postmodern Anarchism (2002) read Nietzsche and cyberpunk fiction as allies. Jason Adams, in “Postanarchism in a Nutshell” (2003), traced the whole current back to Paris in May 1968, from which, as he noted, most of the French theorists it draws on had come. Adams had spent 1999 organizing the protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle, and in October 2002 he started the email list that, in Evren’s account, did most to turn post-anarchism into an “ism” (Evren, p. 5). By 2011, when Duane Rousselle and Süreyyya Evren edited Post-Anarchism: A Reader, the tendency had a canon, a set of journals and its own internal arguments. A year later Rousselle’s After Post-Anarchism asked what comes after it in turn. Its critics, he argued, had followed the path Slavoj Žižek traces for any new theory. It is first dismissed as nonsense, then granted some merit but said to put old ideas in new words, then tolerated. He names Cohn and Wilbur as the voices of the middle stage (Rousselle, p. 3). What the tendency faced in its third decade, he wrote, was “the problem of the hegemony of epistemology” (p. 8). For two decades it had attacked classical anarchism from a theory of knowledge and left ontology underneath (p. 9). His way out was to borrow from meta-ethics, which keeps what there is apart from what can be known (p. 13). Post-anarchism, in his phrase, is “in anarchism more than anarchism” (p. 33).
Put at its strongest, the claim is this. Anarchism inherited the foundations of the Enlightenment, the rational individual, a human nature that could be known, a reason that stood outside history, and it never questioned them. So it could see power in the state and the church, but not in the very things it trusted, in reason when reason ranked people, in science when science sorted them, in the free individual when that individual turned out to be made to order. A critique of power that exempts its own foundations isn’t finished.
That argument deserves a fair hearing, and this book has already given it one. Part IV found that no claim rests on a final foundation, and that whoever adds a stopping point owes the rest of us a reason for it. The post-anarchists were saying something close to that about anarchism itself.
The straw anarchist
The trouble is with the anarchists they were describing.
Jesse Cohn and Shawn Wilbur put the reply most fairly in “What’s Wrong With Postanarchism?” They begin by granting a good deal. Poststructuralism gives anarchists real tools. It offers a way to read how language frames issues and builds identities, a reminder that what looks natural was made and could be made otherwise, and a challenge to the isolated, self-contained individual that capitalism treats as sacred. Then they question the story the word tells, in which an aging, spent anarchism is rescued by a fresh, vital theory. The anarchists, they point out, were not the naive essentialists of that story. Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid (1902) was written against Thomas Huxley, who had argued that competition and war were simply nature’s struggle for survival carried into society. Kropotkin denied that nature fixes people as competitors. That is an argument against a fixed human essence, not for one. The tendency’s own Reader concedes as much about Godwin. Andrew Koch opens it by setting the classical anarchists’ “ontological” defence, resting on human nature, against the epistemological one post-structuralism offers. Yet his first example, Godwin, held people perfectible not because they reach a final condition but because they can keep improving (Koch, p. 24).
Bakunin is a harder case for the post-anarchists than they let on. He held that individuals are formed by society, that there is no person before or outside it, and that freedom is something people make together rather than something they bring with them. “Society is the root, the tree, and liberty is its fruit,” he wrote, and a person “becomes conscious of himself and his humanity only in society” (“Man, Society, and Freedom,” 1871). Proudhon spent his life on the claim that social forces, not individual wills, set the terms of property and justice. All three made strong claims about human beings. None of them made the claim the post-anarchists most needed them to make, that a finished, good human nature waits under the rubble of the state. A century later the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, no poststructuralist himself, gave their point a name. His habitus is the set of dispositions people take in from their place in society, durable enough to shape what they want and what seems natural to them, yet able to shift when conditions do. He called it a “socialized subjectivity” (Bourdieu and Wacquant, p. 126), neither a fixed nature nor a blank. That is the ground Bakunin stood on, and the post-anarchists wrote as though nobody had.
The most telling admission comes from inside the tendency. Süreyyya Evren, who co-edited the Reader, wrote in “Notes on Post-Anarchism” that the post-anarchists did not invent their thin picture of classical anarchism. They took it from the standard histories, the reference-book account of anarchism as a modernist, rationalist movement led by a few great European men. He makes the same case, with names, in his introduction to the Reader. The short canon of Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin goes back to Paul Eltzbacher, and George Crowder’s Classical Anarchism (1991), written from a liberal standpoint, fixed it just as the post-anarchists were reading. Evren holds Koch’s 1993 article responsible for starting the post-anarchist reductions of the tradition (Evren, pp. 7–8). Their fault, Evren argued, was not invention but trust. Writers who had learned from Foucault to ask how a canon gets built should have asked it here, and didn’t. When Bakunin sounded anti-modern, Call read it as inadvertent. When Kropotkin and Bakunin sounded anti-essentialist, Newman called it a contradiction. The only contradiction, Evren replied, was between the textbook image and what the anarchists had actually written. Rousselle concedes the point too. He lists the reduction of classical anarchism among the problems of the tendency’s introductory phase, a phase he says post-anarchism should not be reduced to (Rousselle, p. 33). In his conclusion he recasts the mistake as necessary. Like Bataille, the post-anarchists had to fail, producing a reductive account of anarchism in order to show what is wrong with reduction (p. 257).
There is a second reply, from the movement rather than the library. Jesse Cohn’s review of Newman, “What is Postanarchism ‘Post’?”, opens with Murray Bookchin and John Zerzan, who agreed about almost nothing. Bookchin wanted reasoned, federated communities and Zerzan wanted to abolish civilization, and both despised postmodernism, Bookchin as a fashionable nihilism and Zerzan as a theory that dissolved the self into whatever technology made of it. William Gillis, a physicist and anarchist, makes the broader historical claim in Did the Science Wars Take Place?(2025). The leading figures of the anarchist movement, he writes, openly scorned postmodernism, and the people doing the daily work of the movement mostly ignored it (Gillis, p. 37). Mostly is the right word. Adams, who organized in Seattle and then spread the name, is the plain exception, and he shows the tendency had at least one foot in the movement from the start. He is harder on May than anyone, as a philosopher who adopted the name without ties to the movement (p. 132), though he grants elsewhere that May tried to build universal ethical principles into Foucault, Lyotard and Deleuze (p. 50). That attempt is May’s last chapter, “Questions of Ethics,” which opens by naming the two questions that have dogged poststructuralism from the start, whether it is coherent as a theory of knowledge, and whether it can ground an ethics (May, p. 121).
A fallacy has a name for the move these replies catch. Attack a weaker version of a position than the one its holders actually held, and you have beaten a straw man. The post-anarchists did not do it from malice. They inherited the straw man from anarchism’s own historians. But the case for the “post” depends on it. If classical anarchism already knew that society forms persons, and already refused a fixed human nature, then a good part of what poststructuralism was supposed to add was already there. May half says so himself. His new anarchism, he writes, keeps the old one’s ideas of many local struggles that can’t be reduced to one, wariness of representation, politics running through every social relation, and society as a network rather than a hierarchy. What it drops is the strategic scaffolding under them (May, p. 85).
What the critique still adds
Not all of it, though. Two things survive the reply.
The first is the reach of power. The classical anarchists saw power in the state, the church, the landlord and the boss. They saw less of it in the clinic, the school, the asylum and the census, in the slow work by which institutions decide who counts as normal, healthy, sane or productive and then make people into those things. Foucault mapped that ground, and it is no small addition. A left libertarianism that opposes unaccountable power wherever it sits needs his map, and Chapter 38 takes it up.
The second is the habit of suspicion toward one’s own foundations. Anarchists did often speak of reason, nature and progress as if those words settled arguments. Kropotkin did write as though science would bear out anarchism. The post-anarchists were right that a movement against masters can smuggle one in as a premise. That is the point Part IV made with the Münchhausen trilemma, from a quite different tradition. Hans Albert reached it by way of logic and science. The post-anarchists reached it by way of Nietzsche and French philosophy. They even meet the same opponent. May’s last chapter turns on Habermas’s discourse ethics, which claims a foundation for all ethical discourse (May, p. 122), and Albert spent years attacking the transcendental pragmatics of Apel and Habermas behind it. The roads are different, and a portion of this part’s work is to say where they split.
Sorting the field
The split matters because “postmodern” covers many claims, some of them modest and some of them wild, and the writers in this part slide between them. Gillis gives a useful sorting tool. He lists eight kinds of antirealism (pp. 73–74). Six are claims about the world or our knowledge of it. They hold that there is no reality at all; that there are only particular things and no general patterns; that reality is a collective dream; that reality is patchy, holding in some regions and not in others; that there is nothing beyond raw experience; and that society determines what we can know. Two are moral stances rather than claims. They hold that it is better not to grasp regularities, and that language should not try to refer to reality.
These are not the same view, and the difference decides everything that follows. “Society shapes what we can know” is partly true and can be tested, case by case. Anyone who has watched a profession close ranks around a mistake has seen it. “There is no reality” refutes itself the moment it is asserted as true. May puts the same objection to Deleuze, and grants in a footnote that Deleuze cannot always escape it (May, p. 69 and n. 7). Call it Deleuzional. A thinker can hold the first without the second, and the strongest of the post-anarchists mostly did. May claims only that much of what we say we know is partly a product of the power relations we live in, without reducing knowledge to power (May, pp. 68, 74). The weakest slid from one to the other when an argument got hard.
So this part won’t sort thinkers by label. It will ask of each one which of these they actually hold and where they slide. Chapter 38 takes on Foucault, the thinker the whole tendency leans on first, and asks what his account of power adds to the anarchist one and whether it leaves any ground to resist from. Chapter 39 sets Derrida against the trilemma. Chapter 40 takes Deleuze and Guattari into the market. Chapter 41 asks what is left of the subject once all this has been granted, with Stirner, Bataille and the nihilists. Chapter 42 asks the same question of the machines.
What’s left
Grant both sides their best point and see what remains.
The post-anarchists are right that no foundation is final, and that a movement against domination has to turn that suspicion on itself. The critics are right that the anarchists already knew more of this than their successors gave them credit for, and that a critique of power still has to claim to be true, or it has no grip on anyone. This is where Deleuze parts company. As May reads him, beliefs are to be judged not as true or false but by whether they affirm life, whether they “work” (May, p. 70). But that is a long way round to the same place. Whether a belief works, or affirms life, is itself a question of fact. To say that it works is to say it is true that it works, or at least known, so truth comes back in under another name. “This arrangement harms people who never agreed to it” is a claim about the world. If it is only one story among others, the people harmed have no more reason to believe it than the people doing the harm.
Post-anarchism’s habit, learned from poststructuralism, of quarreling over readings has the same weakness. A dispute about what Bakunin meant can be checked against what Bakunin wrote, and Evren checked it. But once a reader claims to find the latent meaning under the text, no passage can count against the reading, and the quarrel can’t be settled. Arguing about what truth or objectivity is, in general, fares no better. In 1996 the physicist Alan Sokal got a parody published in the journal Social Text, arguing that physical reality is a social and linguistic construct, then revealed it as a hoax. Sokal was then a man of the left, and the worry he voiced in 1996 still holds, whatever one makes of him since. A left that gives up on facts gives up its best weapon against the powerful. Disputes like these are settled, when they are settled at all, against the world. Whether an arrangement harms people who can’t leave is checked by looking at the arrangement, not at a canon.
What survives, for left libertarianism, is a critique of unaccountable power that takes no stopping point as given, its own included, and still says plainly what is the case. Its claims are conditional and open to public test. Its values are named as starting points, not passed off as facts. And it keeps the test this book has used from the start. Is someone being used as an input, and can they leave? That test needs no theory of human nature, good or bad. It needs only that people can be harmed, can refuse and can walk away, and that whatever stops them from doing so needs a reason it can give in public.
Where I part ways: I part ways with Newman less where he attacks than where he lands. We agree on the target. A fixed essence made to decide what may be done to someone is what Part I calls moral essentialism, and his “Man” is one more essence put to that use. We agree too that domination should be resisted, and that a movement against masters has to watch its own premises (Newman, pp. 119, 174).
The first split is over natures. Newman’s answer to essentialism is to treat identity as “a dispersed series of surfaces” (p. 13). Mine is narrower. Beings have natures; a sow is a sow. What I deny is that a nature settles the ought. That keeps the world real enough to test claims against, and his answer gives it away.
The second is the list. Newman ends with a “minimum ethics of singularity,” and says it shows one can respect “human values” without a theory of humanism (p. 170). It does, and the list is still there. He gives up “Man” and keeps the human line, the same stopping place as the humanists he set out to leave. The move turns up even in the work that names it.
The third is feminism, set aside twice. May nods to it in his preface and moves on. Newman files feminist, gay and Black struggles under a “shopping list” of oppressions (p. 171). His target is the binary, not the people in those struggles. But the word libertarian was born in Déjacque’s quarrel over women, and its newest successors left that question at the edge. One book setting it aside is a choice of scope. This book doesn’t make feminism its baseline either, but it doesn’t need to. Its baseline is the line between human and nonhuman, and that line is sexless, since people of every sex and gender are human, intersex and trans people included. Post-anarchism gave up that base along with humanism, and so owed the case it then left unmade. Two books in a row name the question and set it aside, and neither comes back to say how feminism would work inside the post-anarchist frame. For a tendency built on showing how power makes people, gender is the plainest case there is, and a strange one to leave out. The charge was made inside the tendency too. In the Reader, Sandra Jeppesen writes that May, Newman and the rest kept to a “Eurocentric masculine sphere,” and that leaving out anarcha-feminism and black, queer and disability anarchism misrepresents both traditions. She points back to Emma Goldman and Voltairine de Cleyre, who put gender, sex and free love on the anarchist agenda a century earlier (Jeppesen, pp. 151–152). Others in the tendency took it up later, mostly through queer theory and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990). Among them are Jamie Heckert, Lena Eckert, and Chiara Bottici in Anarchafeminism (2021). Heckert came to it by way of May. He opens his chapter of the Reader by noting that the theorists of the new anarchism were “mostly French, mostly male,” then says that when he read May’s book, Deleuze and Guattari’s state form and nomad seemed all too familiar from the stories he had been hearing about sexuality (Heckert, p. 195). The book that left feminism at the edge is the one that led him to the question.
The last is the deepest. Newman’s ethic is not blind; it “must always question itself” (p. 174). The question is what it questions itself against. For him, nothing outside the discourse, so the questioning stays “always undecidable.” For me, against what is, by public test. That is Popper’s piles again. A self-doubt with nowhere to stand cannot tell the people harmed by an arrangement why they should believe it harms them.
Chapter 38 begins where the “post” began, with Foucault.
Sources
- Hakim Bey, “Post-Anarchism Anarchy” (written March 1987; reprinted in Post-Anarchism: A Reader, 2011).
- Todd May, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994).
- Saul Newman, From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power (Lexington Books, 2001).
- Lewis Call, Postmodern Anarchism (Lexington Books, 2002); “Post-anarchism Today” (hosted copy).
- Jason Adams, “Postanarchism in a Nutshell” (2003; hosted copy).
- Duane Rousselle and Süreyyya Evren, eds., Post-Anarchism: A Reader (Pluto Press, 2011).
- Süreyyya Evren, “Introduction: How New Anarchism Changed the World (of Opposition) after Seattle and Gave Birth to Post-Anarchism,” in Rousselle and Evren, eds., Post-Anarchism: A Reader (2011), pp. 1–22. The history of the name, pp. 5–9; the narrow classical canon, pp. 7–8.
- Duane Rousselle, After Post-Anarchism (Repartee/LBC Books, 2012).
- Jesse Cohn and Shawn Wilbur, “What’s Wrong With Postanarchism?” (Institute for Anarchist Studies website, 31 August 2003; reposted at libertarian-labyrinth.org, July 8, 2007; hosted copy).
- Jesse Cohn, “What is Postanarchism ‘Post’?”, review of Newman, Postmodern Culture (September 2002; hosted copy).
- Süreyyya Evren, “Notes on Post-Anarchism” (in Talk on Anarchism, Belgrade, 2008; hosted copy).
- Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902); Thomas H. Huxley, “The Struggle for Existence in Human Society” (The Nineteenth Century, February 1888).
- Mikhail Bakunin, “Man, Society, and Freedom” (1871), in Sam Dolgoff, ed. and trans., Bakunin on Anarchy(1971). full text
- Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (University of Chicago Press, 1992). Habitus as “socialized subjectivity” (p. 126). See also Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge University Press, 1977).
- Murray Bookchin, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm (AK Press, 1995); John Zerzan, Future Primitive (Autonomedia, 1994); John Zerzan, “The Catastrophe of Postmodernism,” Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed (fall 1991): 16–25, answered in Newman, ch. 8, n. 7.
- William Gillis, Did the Science Wars Take Place? The Political and Ethical Stakes of Radical Realism (Center for a Stateless Society, 2025).
- Alan Sokal, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” Social Text 46/47 (1996), and “A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies,” Lingua Franca (May/June 1996).
- Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990); Jamie Heckert, “Sexuality as State Form,” in Rousselle and Evren, eds., Post-Anarchism: A Reader (2011), ch. 13, pp. 195–207; Jamie Heckert and Richard Cleminson, eds., Anarchism & Sexuality: Ethics, Relationships and Power(Routledge, 2011); Lena Eckert, “Post-Anarchism and the Contrasexual Practices of Cyborgs in Dildotopia,” in that volume; Chiara Bottici, Anarchafeminism (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021). Later work on feminism and queer politics in and near the tendency. Bottici, full text
- Andrew M. Koch, “Post-Structuralism and the Epistemological Basis of Anarchism,” ch. 1, pp. 23–40 (first published in Philosophy of the Social Sciences 23, 1993: 327–51), and Sandra Jeppesen, “Things to Do with Post-Structuralism in a Life of Anarchy: Relocating the Outpost of Post-Anarchism,” ch. 9, pp. 151–159, both in Rousselle and Evren, eds., Post-Anarchism: A Reader (2011).
- Hans Albert, Treatise on Critical Reason (1968; English translation Princeton University Press, 1985).