What is the relationship between post-left anarchy and post-anarchism anarchy?

Answer 1

As I see it none. post-left anarchy is a description of the critical endeavors of a number of active anarchists (including me) who see the continuing attachment of most anarchists to leftism (and to politics in general) as a hindrance to anarchist endeavors. Post-anarchism refers to a conceptualization of academics with some anarchist sympathies that attempts to wed post-structuralism to what they in their academic ivory towers see as the useful (to their careers?) parts of anarchism.

Comments

I would caution you against your knee-jerk reaction to post-anarchism. I admit, there is some truth to the claim -- the new postanarchism book is made up of all but one academic. But, post-anarchism anarchy was something proposed by Hakim Bey -- and, this piece it seems quite clear that there is a relationship between post-anarchism and the post-left position. You know, I was told by a Turkish friend that it is mostly in our continent that people have an aversion to post-anarchism because of its supposed academic foundations.

If we are serious about ridding our lives of authority then we need to begin to let the 'subject' speak and we need to be attentive to the ways the subject thinks s(he) is thinking when in fact somebody else is thinking for her/him. People in academia are a part of different discourses and while many of the post-anarchist crowd are from academia not all of them speak 'the discourse of the university' (admittedly, I would say some of them do). If you are familiar with Lacan's four discourses then I would say that some (Todd May, for example) speak the university discourse, others speak the hysteric's discourse (Tadzio Mueller, for example and Richard Day to a certain extent), and some really do speak the 'discourse of the analyst'. Likewise, there is some value in calling some contemporary anarchists "post-anarchist" even if they do not adopt the label. You will recall that Derrida and Foucault rejected the label post-structuralist and yet still, today, there is a certain descriptive power in using these labels to describe their work. The AJODA crowd, for the most part, I consider to be post-anarchist, for example -- they reject essentialist binaristic conceptions and are critical of rigidly traditionalistic dogmas. However, one still sees traditionalist anarchists playing around, as if to deny the present: see http://libcom.org/ or http://www.anarchistblackcat.org/ucp.php or read the news at infoshop.org ;-)