Being an anarchist philosopher is a difficult thing. This is because—like the round triangles or unmarried bachelors that populate logic textbooks—they may not even exist. As a political tradition, anarchism has long been associated with immediacy: with direct appeals to action that, eschewing sophistries, aim at nothing less than the dislodging of the state (should these fail, its latter-day exponents can at least be relied upon to—say—smash out the windows of a McDonald’s). Philosophy by contrast is at bottom a game of mediations; one that—in addition to containing all kinds of unseemly, statist elements—seems to have, as Noam Chomsky has observed, embraced a labyrinthine complexity at the exact historical moment of its own professionalization circa Kant. Faced with a similar dilemma, Marxists devised a characteristically shrewd solution: if history is dialectical, after all, everything is permitted—including the division of labor upon which philosophy depends. Yet the signal accomplishments of intellectual figures ranging from Proudhon to Goldman to Chomsky himself have never fully dissipated the question: do anarchists really need philosophy?

Given her status as a former student of Derrida as well as her formative vocation as a Hegel scholar, it should come as no surprise that, in her latest English-language volume—Stop Thief!: Anarchism and Philosophy—Catherine Malabou answers this with an emphatic yes. More surprising, though, is the way that she effectively inverts it. Not only is it the case, she tells us, that anarchism needs philosophy. It is also the case that philosophy needs anarchism. At the political level, we’re today confronted by—on one side—a ‘de facto’ anarchism of the atomized individual, severed from the welfare state and increasingly susceptible to non-national transactions. And on the other, a ‘dawning’ anarchism of political action; of a renewed horizontalism that, after its debut in Seattle in ’99, went on to influence a fusillade of movements ranging from Occupy to the Gilets Jaunes to the ZAD (that is, zone à défendre). If the tragedy of our time has been the failure of these two impulses to converge, this failure has been mirrored in the domain of philosophy. Easily outstripping the inverse statism of classical anarchism, philosophers—and in particular, the scions of la pensee ’68—have both revealed the diffuse nature of power relations as well as challenged the primacy of the Greek arche. Where they have not succeeded is in overcoming the aporias of Aristotle’s Politics, which takes equality as its premise only to summarily justify state rule. They have not, in other words, transmuted ‘anarchy’ into ‘anarchism.’

Thinking Anarchism Anew

All of this should alert us to the fact that Stop Thief! is not a conventional work of classical anarchism. Rather, it’s an attempt to steal its thunder, finding in the disavowals of anarchism so readily repeated by contemporary philosophers the repressed means of thinking it anew (though the putatively Foucauldian canon of ‘post-anarchism’ is acknowledged as a decisive precedent). This is pursued through readings of six authors: Reiner Schürmann, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Jacques Rancière. Each of these is superlative, displaying a rigor worthy of a thinker who—at this point—it seems safe to declare one of our finest living philosophers. Though that rigor, that finite textual focus, comes at a cost: namely a remoteness from material struggles that results in the book being bedeviled by underwhelming political prescriptions in its final few pages. So it goes: philosophy giveth, and philosophy taketh away.

That the analysis of Schürmann should lead off is no coincidence, since it is his standpoint that grounds much of what follows. In his most important work, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, his basic gesture is to read the eponymous thinker as an exponent of what he calls ‘ontological anarchism.’ Indeed: through his Destruktion of metaphysics, Heidegger succeeded in revealing—for the first time—the “isomorphism between metaphysics and politics”^[1] hidden in the concept of the archē itself; the way that, as Schürmann argues, the relationship of a general to his soldiers, or of rulers to citizens, is analogous to the relationship between subject and predicate. This clears the way for a critique far beyond classical anarchism—to a rejection of all essentialism, to the point of even refusing the epithet of ‘anarchist’ for fear of falling back into it. But as Malabou notes, Schurmann’s eschewal of politics—if not ‘the political,’ since he does nurture the vision of a society free of compulsion—results in an oddly formalistic schema: when he surveys the destruction of the Inca Empire by the Spaniards, for instance, he downplays the violence of colonialism, basically concluding that the Inca were an archic civilization like any other.

From here, Malabou moves on to Levinas. With his emphasis on the importance of the ethical injunction arising from exposure to the Other or Autrui, Levinas cannot be said—like Schürmann—to suffer from an acute insensitivity to cultural difference. This does not mean he is beyond reproach. Stressing heteronomy at the expense of individuality, he somehow finds a way to rationalize the state—it is necessary, in his view, to protect from the excess of the ethical, preventing order from being breached by the battering rams of benevolence (a view that’s particularly unsettling in light of his support of Israel). And when he employs the language of ‘slavery’ to explain various forms of psychic subordination, he ends up drawing a dubious, not to mention faintly colonial, line of demarcation between those who resist servitude—such as, notably, the Jews in Egypt—and those who develop a “servile soul,” as with “the masses fanaticized by Hitlerism” and the “proletariat.”^[2]

The next two chapters—on Derrida and Foucault—will be for many the highlight of the book, providing as they do the opportunity for Malabou to show off her pedigree as the post-poststructuralist par excellence. Derrida was—due to his distrust of attempts to desediment the archē—never able to get beyond the idea of power as a necessarily determinative principle. Much of this is bound up with the reading of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle—a text that he can barely be bothered to even deconstruct. For instead of finding within it a “defective cornerstone”^[3] to thereby exploit, he instead resorts to foreclosing the latent anarchist strain within it: the possibility of a world in which, with the dikes of the psyche burst, power would no longer redouble as domination. Further evidence of this statist disposition can be found throughout his oeuvre: the way that, for instance, he reproaches Lévi-Strauss with using his studies of tribal societies to advance the thesis that power is no older than writing, or Levinas for his fantasm of a language “totally free of [the] dialectic of self and other”^[4] (a language that, Derrida insists, could not even communicate). It also impacts his work written in the wake of 9/11, since—while Derrida here upholds a kind of ‘messianic anarchism’ of the ‘non-place’ or khôra —it amounts in practice to little more than an endorsement of Western liberal democracy, deemed ‘undeconstructible’ by virtue of its ability to deconstruct itself.

Malabou is—a bit surprisingly—slightly softer on Foucault. On the surface of things, his view of power might not seem so different from Derrida’s, since he conceptualizes it as being without origin. Yet unlike Derrida, he does not reject the notion of anarchism, offering—as subsequent commentators have argued—the latent program for a ‘post-anarchism’ of transversal struggle; one that privileges resistance over the archic state, transformability over stasis. Ironically, the point where this is most apparent is in the works of his which have been frequently derided as ‘neoliberal’: that of the late, ‘Greek Foucault.’ Parlaying parrēsia—that is, “the binding [of] oneself to oneself in the statement of truth”^[5]—into praxis, what he offers here is a corrective to his earlier writings. No longer is governmentality to be resisted through a process of ‘desubjectivation’ that, by demanding that one makes themselves obedient to themselves, would thereby fail to break out of the logic of obedience. Rather it’s to be overcome altogether, through a refusal of governance so radical it resembles that of the Greek cynics, who found it preferable to live like animals—say, to carry one’s house on their back like a snail—than submit to its injunctions.

Like a piece of paper that’s thickness doubles when it’s folded, much of the late Foucault deals with the strength derived from immanence, from auto-affection. This angle is deepened and developed by Giorgio Agamben, whose work amounts to an extended attempt to kick against the pricks of the sacred. For him, the problem with both traditional anarchism and Marxism is that they both failed to grasp the ‘the mechanism of exception’ that grounds sovereignty. Sovereignty cannot be reduced to capital or the state; rather, it is based on—from the get-go—a sacralization that grants it qualified dominion over bare life (a dominion that is expanded with the rise of governmentality). But since this founding gesture can never be fully justified, power is always compelled to repress the arbitrariness of its premises: to “receive ritual acclamations and hymns of praise” and “to wear cumbersome crowns and tiaras” so as to conceal its originary vacuousness.^[6] Seen this way, the real means to confront it is not to transgress against it, running up against boundaries that—in the age of capitalism—are quickly recuperated and displaced. Instead it’s to deprofanate it, revealing the anarchy that is always internal to power.

Faced with this treatment of exception, though, Malabou takes some exception herself. Agamben rails against sacrality—yet is he really free of it? His conception of sovereignty, undifferentiated as it is ahistorical, could easily be considered an example of this same symbolic inflation he decries. With this foil established, his work thus takes a turn towards the evasion of real politics: to the valorization of the private, and to the upholding of the need for ‘zones’ of indistinction that—by virtue of offering us everything—offer us nothing at all.

Unlike Agamben, Rancière does not—gratefully—put the overweening sovereign front and center. On the contrary, his work revolves around the ‘radical equality’ that the formalization of democracy invariably seeks to contain—and that ‘anarchy’ serves as semaphore for. When it comes to addressing this, though, he’s far more optimistic about art than politics: while politics, he tells us—in what amounts to a risky generalization—will always need police, there are seemingly no limits to the representation that art can accomplish (a thesis that clashes with the idea, which has become practically a cliché, that there are depths of trauma which are ‘unrepresentable’ to it). This makes it an ideal candidate to help bring about what he calls ‘metapolitics’: a politics beyond politics that makes new subjectivities—say, women and proletarians—appear.

Yet the problem here, as Malabou sees it, is that—in the same breath as he seeks to enable a (non-)politics of bracing spontaneity and indiscrimination, of the Commune and ’68—Rancière silences it. The “rational kernel” of the thesis of unrepresentability lies not in resistance to inscription—since the rise of “Romanesque realism,”^[7] anything can be shown—but in the normalcy of the language through which it expresses itself. Thus Rancière rejects the act of bearing witness altogether: witnessing, he claims, is part of an ideology of victimization. It is for the police. But how, Malabou asks, can anarchism ever get started if it can’t articulate wrongdoing? Giving us a left traumatized into mutism, Rancière here falls into that old Hegelian trap: failing to utter the first, presuppositionless phrase.

Which Way Forward for Philosophy and Anarchism?

After having posed the question over and over of how the works of others relate to political anarchism, for the book’s finale Malabou turns this analysis inward, asking how hers might. Contemporary philosophers of anarchism have imposed a cut between anarchism and being, foregoing the ontologization of politics and the construction of an anarchist paradigm. In a sense this is understandable: attempts to align politics with being have thus far been—from “Maoism” to the “Heideggerian night”—”terrifying dead-ends.”^[8] But how can politics function absent an ontological nucleus? Without it, will we not end up like poor Agamben, whose hero of impotentiality is the prematurely perished Bartleby the Scrivener?

Still, while this call for the bold ontological remaking of reality is surely welcome, it’s a little deflating where it leads her: namely to a glowing appraisal of Taiwanese Minister of Digital Affairs Audrey Tang, whose "g0v 'hackathon[s]'" encourage "citizen-hackers"^[9] to recode government services in the name of transparency—and whose project is contrasted, as if by reflex, with the "omnipotence" and "hegemony" of China^[10] (in fact, Tang has attributed the fact she’s not ‘under sanction’ in mainland China to the widespread experiments in ‘deliberative conversational democracy’ happening there).^[11]

That Malabou should, after hundreds of pages hinting at political rupture, proffer an institutional anarchism of state co-optation feels like the proverbial equivalent of Charlie Brown having the football pulled away from him. Though at least she equivocates a bit over her endorsement: “Is Audrey Tang,” she asks rhetorically, “a symptom of domination or of emancipation? A reinforcement of the logic of government or its defeat?”^[12]Many anarchists have been, since its release, asking a similar question of the book: is it an appropriation of anarchism by an aloof French philosopher who, up until a few years ago, seemed free of any specific political conviction? Or is it a black flag raised in a sea of academic statism?

There may be no easy answer. Measured purely in terms of erudition, Stop Thief! is a titanic work—one that will, long after its detractors have been silenced, surely earn an enduring place in the anarchist canon. Yet with its steely confidence in the ability of thought to ‘intervene’ into politics without ceding much to it, it also evokes the tragic flaw of the German Idealists, who crystallized the French Revolution into philosophical formulations while forgetting its fundamental political core (and, consequently, slipped into reformism). Who knows? Maybe such a move is necessary: anarchist struggles have been so diffuse and so piecemeal, as well as so overshadowed by the retconning of socialism, that the realm of ideas may be—for now—the safest place for them. Either way, give the book this: it doesn’t just need to be bound to a real political movement. It also deserves to be.

1. Catherine Malabou, Stop Thief!: Anarchism and Philosophy (Polity, 2023), 42.

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2. Ibid, 78.

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3. Ibid, 87.

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4. Ibid, 95.

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5. Ibid, 123.

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6. Ibid, 161.

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7. Ibid, 201.

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8. Ibid, 213.

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9. Ibid, 220.

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10. Ibid, 221.

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11. Simon Hattenstone, "The good hacker: can Taiwanese activist turned politician Audrey Tang detoxify the internet?," The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/17/audrey-tang-toxic-social-media-fake-news-taiwan-trans-government-internet.

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12. Malabou, 221.

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