I’m reading Saul Newman’s book, Postanarchism, which builds a theory of anarchism around poststructuralist insights, and I’m curious what people think of the argument he makes here. (You can snag a free PDF of the book from Academia.edu.)
We can see, then, that this notion of insurrection is radically different from most understandings of radical political action. It eschews the idea of an overarching project of emancipation or social transformation; freedom is not the end goal of the insurrection but, rather, its starting point. In other words, the insurrection starts not with the desire to change external conditions which might be said to oppress the individual but, rather, with the affirmation of the self over these conditions, as if to say: power exists but it is not my concern; I refuse to let it constrain me or have any effect on me; I refuse power’s power over me. While some might claim that this is a naïve idealism that leads to political quietism – indeed, this was precisely the thrust of Marx and Engels’s crude attack on Stirner in The German Ideology – I would argue that the consequences of this position are profoundly radical. We must consider the extent to which power is sustained by our interactions with it – even at times by our hostility towards it; and if we manage to distance and disentangle ourselves from power, and from the identities and subjectivities which power imposes upon us, then power becomes an empty husk, a dry and cracked shell which crumbles into itself. So, rather than a revolutionary project which sets itself the goal of liberating people from power – and which risks merely imposing upon them another kind of power in its place – the insurrection allows people to constitute their own freedom or, as Stirner puts it, their ‘ownness’, by first reclaiming their own self – that is to say, reclaiming their autonomy.
There are Buddhist parallels that jumped out at me, but mainly I’m curious how people react to this “just start by exercising your own freedom” approach.