Saul Newman

Saul Newman (born 22 March 1972) is a British political theorist and central post-anarchist thinker.

Newman took up 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 Professor 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.

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 hand 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.

Articles

• "Universalism/Particularism: Towards a Poststructuralist Politics of Universality", New Formations, 41: 2000.
• "Anarchism and the Politics of Ressentiment", Theory and Event, Vol. 4.3: 2000.
• "War on the State: Stirner's and Deleuze's Anarchism". Anarchist Studies. 9 (2): 147–64. Archived from the original on 12 January 2011.
• Newman, Saul (2001). "Spectres of Stirner: a Contemporary Critique of Ideology" (PDF). Journal of Political Ideologies. 6 (3): 309–330. doi:10.1080/13569310120083026. 2001
• Newman, S. (2001). "Derrida and the Deconstruction of Authority". Philosophy and Social Criticism. 27 (3): 1–20. doi:10.1177/019145370102700301. 2001.
• "Specters of the Uncanny". Telos 124 (Summer 2002). New York: Telos Press.
• Newman, Saul (2002). "Max Stirner and the Politics of Posthumanism" (PDF). Contemporary Political Theory. 1 (2): 221–238. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300038. 2002.
• Newman, Saul (2002). "Politics of the ego: Stirner's critique of liberalism". Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy. 5 (3): 1–26. doi:10.1080/13698230410001702632. October 2002.
• "The Politics of Postanarchism". Institute for Anarchist Studies. 2003.
• Newman, Saul (14 April 2009). "Empiricism, pluralism, and politics in Deleuze and Stirner". Idealistic Studies. 33 (1): 9–24. doi:10.5840/idstudies20033312. ISSN 0046-8541. 2003.
• Newman, Saul (2003). "Stirner and Foucault: Toward a Post-Kantian Freedom". Postmodern Culture. 13 (2). doi:10.1353/pmc.2003.0007. 2003.
• "Anarchism, Marxism and the Bonapartist State". Anarchist Studies. 12 (1). 2004.
• Newman, Saul (2004). "New Reflections on the Theory of Power: A Lacanian Perspective". Contemporary Political Theory. 3 (2): 148–167(20). doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300105. August 2004.
• "Anarchism, Poststructuralism and the Future of Radical Politics" (PDF). SubStance. 113. 2007.

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
• Politics Most Unusual: Violence, Sovereignty and Democracy in the 'War on Terror'. (Co-authored with Michael Levine and Damian Cox). New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2009
• The Politics of Post Anarchism. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press: 2010 (forthcoming)
• (ed.): Max Stirner. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK; New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2011 ISBN 978-0-230-28335-0