I

To explore the relationships between philosophy and anarchism amounts to deciphering a long and complex process of disavowal. If many philosophers have overtly proclaimed their involvement in Marxism, or their sympathy for it, none of them, at least in the continental tradition, have ever declared themselves anarchists. None of them ever produced a detailed and patient analysis of anarchist texts. Decisive readings of Proudhon, Kropotkin, Bakunin, Malatesta, Goldman, Bookchin or others are nowhere to be found. Anarchism has always been and still is almost unanimously condemned for being naive, uncritical and mostly impracticable or unworkable. Alain Badiou, for example, declares that anarchism ‘has never been anything else than the vain critique, or the double, or the shadow, of the communist parties, just as the black flag is only the double or the shadow of the red flag’ (qtd. in Noys 2008). And this, because it ‘sets up a simple-minded opposition between power and resistance’ (Noys 2008: 109). Anarchism would, then, be a simple and immature ‘anti-’ movement deprived of any dialectical elaboration or sophistication.

However, philosophers’ contempt for anarchism remains ambiguous. More than a pure and simple rejection of it, this contempt appears to be a disavowal, a type of negation that is a veiled or repressed affirmation.

Why this claim? It is striking to see how some prominent twentieth-century philosophers, while strongly rejecting political anarchism, have at the same time developed strong concepts of anarchy. Such is the case for Schürmann, Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Agamben and Rancière, mainly. The conspicuous contradiction that exists between their distancing from anarchism and their promotion of ontological anarchy is the reason why I use the term disavowal. This disavowal becomes even more visible when one notices the fact that these philosophers are currently considered to be the new voices of contemporary anarchism, that is, of ‘post-anarchism’.

Such is the paradox of an anarchy without anarchism, of a metaphysical but non-political, ontological but non-practical anarchism. Why has it become important to analyse these twisted, convoluted structures today? Why has it become urgent to think anew the relationships between philosophy, anarchy and anarchism?