Saul Newman

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article lacks information on the notability (importance) of the subject matter.
Please help improve this article by providing context for a general audience, especially in the lead section. This article has been tagged since March 2007. (help, talk)

Saul Newman (born 1972) is a political theorist and central post-anarchist thinker, currently a professor at Goldsmiths College, University of London (not to be confused with the Saul Newman who works at American University in Washington, D.C.). He received his B.A. from the University of Sydney, and his Ph.D in political science from the University of New South Wales. Newman coined the term "post-anarchism" as a general term for political philosophies filtering 19th century anarchism through a post-structuralist lens, and later popularized it through his 2001 book From Bakunin to Lacan. Thus he rejects a number of concepts traditionally associated with anarchism, including essentialism, a "positive" human nature, and the concept of revolution.

Some of Newman's publications in recent time deal with Max Stirner, a German philosopher of mid-19th century, author of the famous book The Ego and Its Own (1845, engl. trans. 1907). Newman regards Stirner as a key figure in developing a new radical critique of Western society. He calls Stirner a proto-poststructuralist who on the one hand basically anticipated modern poststructuralists such as Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze, and Derrida, but on the other had already transcended them, thus providing what they were unable to: paving the ground for a "non-essentialist" critique of present liberal capitalist society. Newman's interpretation of Stirner has received some degree of attention, including an endorsement by Ernesto Laclau at the beginning of From Bakunin to Lacan.

[edit] Writings

Articles

Spectres of Stirner: a Contemporary Critique of Ideology. In: Journal of Political Ideologies, 6,3(2001), pp. 309-330
Max Stirner and the Politics of Post-Humanism. In: Contemporary Political Theory, 1,2(2002), pp. 221-238
Stirner and Foucault. Towards a Post-Kantian Freedom. In: Postmodern Culture, 13,2(2003), s.p. (e-journal)
Empiricism, Pluralism, and Politics in Deleuze and Stirner. In: Idealistic Studies, 33,1(2003), pp. 9-24

Books

From Bakunin to Lacan. Anti-authoritarianism and the dislocation of power. Lanham MD: Lexington Books 2001
Power and Politics in Poststructuralist Thought. New theories of the political. London: Routledge 2005
Unstable Universalities: Postmodernity and Radical Politics. Manchester: Manchester University Press 2007