Theory & Event

James Martel has made important inroads into new ways of understanding anarchism. We have seen this in his previous work on Walter Benjamin, in which he deploys concepts like "divine violence"¹ and the "one and only law" (the Second Commandment against idolatry)² to depose the foundations of sovereignty and legal authority. In his new book, Anarchist Prophets, Martel applies a similar kind of politico-theological approach to developing a distinctly anarchist vision of social relations. Here, anarchism is treated not so much as a distinct political ideology—there is no discussion of the anarchist [End Page 635] tradition as such—but rather as a certain way of seeing the world: one without arché or the principle of authority. And rather than the anarchist vision proposing a utopia of social relations—a society of federated communes, for instance—it is characterized more by a certain emptiness and absence, as one is confronted with the emptiness of power and authority stripped of all their illusions and pretensions. The experience of anarchism is, first and foremost, one of disappointment: it is to realize that the emperor has no clothes, that authority has no consistency or reality, that it is merely a specter sustained by those who believe in it, as if in a kind of voluntary servitude. The effect of Martel's book is to let the scales fall from our eyes to realize that there is no Big Other to condition our lives; power does not exist; the enchanting spell of authority has dissipated, and we are free to create our own lives autonomously and in collaboration with others. Indeed, this is what we do anyway in our everyday lives—and perhaps the virtue of this book is simply to remind us of the fact that we all live, albeit unconsciously, as anarchists. The shadow that the state casts over us is, in reality, the shadow cast by an empty shell. The anarchism that this book proclaims is therefore a kind of ontological anarchy: one that clears the ground of the theological abstractions that sovereignty is based on, inviting us to see the world differently based on the power of our collective sight.

The central premise of this book is that we have come to be used to living under an archist vision of society, like the denizens who live within proximity to the yet-to-be-built Tower of Babel in Kafka's parable, "City of the Coat of Arms," which is discussed by Martel at the start of his book. Archism is really the principle of sovereignty; it is the assumption that people need to be governed; that one has a right to rule over another; that hierarchy and authority are natural; or, if not natural, then at least necessary for a functioning society and for maintaining a peaceful co-existence. This archist way of seeing things is the original basis for capitalism and the state, and becomes a way of authorizing all kinds of inequalities—economic, political, racial, gender, and so on. It is the primordial foundation of all forms of domination and violence. Archism is something with roots in the earliest theology, but it remains with us today, to the extent we continue to think that life must somehow be governed, that we need someone or something in charge to organize life and tell us what to do. But what if this principle was itself an illusion? And what would happen if we turned away from it and learned to see the world—and ourselves—differently? As Étienne de la Boétie once said in his famous sixteenth-century anarchist treatise, Discours de la Servitude Volontaire, when we no longer support the tyrant, when we no longer acknowledge his existence and refuse to believe in the spell he has cast over us, "then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces."

However, we sometimes need certain individuals or...