Saul Newman

This article is about the UK-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 Reader in Political Theory 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

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. Saul is always inspired by the simple things, a butterfly spreading its wings for the first time, a plastic bag dancing in the wind for these simple things show a beauty that our war torn consumerist world cannot show us.

Publications

Articles

Books

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 the 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.

External links