Saul Newman

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This article is about the U.K.-based academic, not to be confused with the Saul Newman who works at American University in Washington, D.C.

Saul Newman (born 1972) is a political theorist and central post-anarchist thinker.

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. The links between poststructuralism and anarchism have also been developed by thinkers like Todd May and Lewis Call.

Newman is currently Senior Lecturer in Politics at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He received his B.A. from the University of Sydney, and his Ph.D in political science from the University of New South Wales. His work has been translated into Turkish, Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese and Serbo-Croatian, and has been the subject of a number of debates amongst anarchist theorists and activists as well as academics.[I]

Contents

[edit] Thought

Some of Newman's publications in recent times deal with Max Stirner, a German philosopher of the mid-19th century, author of the famous book Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (1845) (Engl. trans. The Ego and Its Own, 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, who provided a foreword to From Bakunin to Lacan.

[edit] Writings

[edit] Articles

[edit] 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

[edit] Footnotes

I. ^  For reviews of From Bakunin to Lacan see:

  • From Bakunin to Lacan: anti-authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power. Review by Simon Tormey. Contemporary Political Theory, October 2003, Volume 2, Number 3, Pages 359-361.
  • Lacanian Anarchism and ther Left. Review by Todd May, Theory & Event 6:1, 2002.
  • From Bakunin to Lacan: anti-authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power. Review by Nathan Widder, History of Political Thought, 23 (4): 2002.

[edit] Quotes

  • "Blair you twat!"

[edit] External links

Languages