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The political writings of the French poststructuralists have eluded articulation in the broader framework of general political philosophy primarily because of the pervasive tendency to define politics along a single parameter: the balance between state power and individual rights in liberalism and the focus on economic justice as a goal in Marxism. What poststructuralists like Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-François Lyotard offer instead is a political philosophy that can be called tactical: it emphasizes that power emerges from many different sources and operates along many different registers. This approach has roots in traditional anarchist thought, which sees the social and political field as a network of intertwined practices with overlapping political effects. The poststructuralist approach, however, eschews two questionable assumptions of anarchism, that human beings have an (essentially benign) essence and that power is always repressive, never productive.

After positioning poststructuralist political thought against the background of Marxism and the traditional anarchism of Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Proudhon, Todd May shows what a tactical political philosophy like anarchism looks like shorn of its humanist commitments--namely, a poststructuralist anarchism. The book concludes with a defense, contra Habermas and Critical Theory, of poststructuralist political thought as having a metaethical structure allowing for positive ethical commitments.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Preface(p. ix)
• Introduction(p. 1)
• 2 The Failure of Marxism(p. 17)
• 3 Anarchism(p. 45)
• 4 The Positivity of Power and the End of Humanism(p. 67)
• 5 Steps Toward a Poststructuralist Anarchism(p. 87)
• 6 Questions of Ethics(p. 121)
• Bibliography(p. 157)
• Index(p. 163)

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May argues that in rejecting Marxists' reductive economic understanding of power, the poststructuralist thought of French thinkers Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-Francois Lyotard has an affinity with classical anarchism. Anarchists such as Proudon, Bakunin, and Kropotikin, however, still conceived power as a wholly suppressive force that restrains a fundamentally good human nature. The poststructuralists find power to be as creative and positive as it is negative, and reject the idea of a human nature. Since power is omnipresent and ineradicable, the problem is not to liberate some true human essence from suppressive force, but to distinguish acceptable from unacceptable practices of power. May contends that although poststructuralists themselves have been reticent about an ethical theory that could provide principles for making such determinations, their political thought, contra its critics, does admit of an ethical justification, which he attempts to sketch in broad outline. Whether or not one agrees with the conclusions of the book, it provides good synoptic overviews of the issues. Upper-division undergraduate through faculty.

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Todd May is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Clemson University and author of Between Genealogy and Epistemology: Psychology, Politics, and Knowledge in the Thought of Michel Foucault (Penn State, 1993).