#postanarchism

For the People to come

What contributes to our anxiety – and we should note that anxiety, along with other mental disorders, is becoming more prevalent today – is the situation of economic precariousness that most of us find ourselves in; haunted by the spectre of unemployment, debt and poverty, we cling on to what we have, terrified of losing our jobs, of sinking into financial oblivion. Therefore we work longer and harder than ever, and, with modern communications technology, we are always at work, always contactable, always willing to do whatever is asked of us. So the precarious subject is also a docile and obedient subject; the spectre of economic destitution, of descending into ‘bare life’, as well as the threat of an increasingly punitive state, works to keep us in line.

“...the chief cause for the impending collapse of the world - the cause sufficient in and by itself - is the enormous growth of the human population: the human flood. The worst enemy of life is too much life: the excess of human life.”

Michel Onfray "Postanarchism, explained to my grandmother"

"I would like to suggest that, when we come to consider who we are and how we resist today, we should think in terms neither of class - although this is still in other respects important - nor of particularistic identities, nor, worse still, of a People awaiting a Sovereign community - but rather of singularities, of self-creating subjects without fixed identity or calling. These singularities, in their very existence - which is becoming increasingly politicized - constitute a form of autonomous life."

Obedience and docility are also induced today through everyday habits of consumption and communication. The contemporary subject is a constantly distracted subject. Much has been written about the jarring, disorienting effects of the superfluous information and images we are overloaded with today, and the cognitive dissonance and subjective unhappiness produced by our total immersion into the circuits of communicative capitalism. We suffer from a kind of technology-induced attention deficit disorder. Not only are we over-stimulated by constant semiotic activation through intrusive and all-pervasive communicative technologies, beyond the limits of what our organism can bear, but we are also lured, through participation in social media and blogging, into circuits of capitalistic jouissance accompanied by networks of surveillance. While there is no doubt that these communication technologies also provide powerful tools of anonymity and resistance, there is a danger here of their fetishization. The abundance of information is at the same time somehow disabling: we know what is going on – the secrets of state and corporate power are revealed and documented in all their obscenity – and yet we often feel powerless to act, beyond the impotent gesture of ‘clicktivism’.

In his only major work, Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum, published in 1845, Stirner, the most radical member of the Young Hegelian circle, launched a devastating assault on the philosophical tradition – in particular, Hegelian thought – as well as the humanism of his contemporary Ludwig Feuerbach. Stirner may be justly regarded as the first theorist of the decline of metanarratives, the one who, even before Nietzsche, peered behind the visage of Man and saw God reinvented. Thus, according to Stirner, the humanist rationalist project, associated with Feuerbach, of replacing God with Man merely reaffirmed the category of Divine by making Man himself into a sacred being and the supposedly secular categories of rational truth, morality, and so on, into theological precepts. Stirner exposes humanism, and its political discourses of liberalism and socialism, as simply part of a chain of substitutions through which the abstract and alienating category of the sacred is rearticulated in secular garb. Therefore, for Stirner, ‘The human religion is only the last metamorphosis of the Christian religion’. So the figure of Man, according to Stirner, imposes upon the subject a new kind of alienation insofar as he is now expected to live up to certain universal standards of rationality and morality and to search within himself for a sacred ‘human essence’. As Stirner declares, then, “Man” is the God of today, and fear of man has taken the place of the old fear of God.