Overview

Many contemporary philosophers – including Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben – ascribe an ethical or political value to anarchy, but none ever called themselves an “anarchist.” It is as if anarchism were unmentionable and had to be concealed, even though its critique of domination and of government is poached by the philosophers. Stop Thief! calls out the plundering of anarchism by philosophy. It’s a call that is all the more resonant today as the planetary demand for an alternative political realm raises a deafening cry. It also alerts us to a new philosophical awakening. Catherine Malabou proposes to answer the cry by re-elaborating a concept of anarchy articulated around a notion of the “non-governable” far beyond an inciting of disobedience or common critiques of capitalism. Anarchism is the only way out, the only pathway that allows us to question the legitimacy of political domination and thereby wfree up the confidence that we need if we are to survive.

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9781509555239

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‘Stop Thief! is essential reading for all those committed to understanding and overcoming historic rifts between anarchy (popularly identified with leaderless politics, anti-globalization movements, libertarianism and the deconstructed “administrative state”) and anarchism as philosophy.  Boldly contending that “philosophers of anarchy have never conceptualized the anarchist dimension of their concepts of anarchy,” Malabou devotes chapters to major thinkers - Rainer Schürmann, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Rancière -  whose work has been qualified as “post-anarchist” in spirit and critical method.  Affirming philosophical anarchism with conviction and originality, Malabou reviews historic critiques of political foundationalism and theories of state power that have sought to undo the arké of sovereignty, from Plato, Aristotle and Hobbes to Heidegger and Derrida. She brings to light myriad ways in which structures of anti-domination, destituent power, thwarted mastery and inoperative command arise from their own recursive, self-defeating, autoimmunitarian and negational logics.  Older, semi-forgotten anarchist ideas – like mutualism or alternatives to propertied notions of selfhood and privatized right – are brought back and rendered re-usable for a contemporary revolutionary praxis. And with these reinvigorated conceptual frameworks, protean forms of revolt come into relief, positioned against the toxic fusion of “government violence and the uberization of life” that underwrites late liberal, authoritarian political cultures of today.’ Emily Apter, Julius Silver Professor of Comparative Literature, New York University

Author Information

Catherine Malabou is Professor of Philosophy at Kingston University London.

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