Date: Sun, 26 Sep 2004 14:38:09 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Shawn P. Wilbur" <swilbur-AT-wcnet.org>
Subject: Re: [postanarchism] Why are anarchists afraid of resisting conformism?


"I want to learn how to live."

The phrase, it seems to me, is not just one that opens onto servitude.

We live, regardless, until we die. But how we live is not something to
which we, or those around us, can be indifferent. Like it or not, we have
choices to make about *how* to live. Now, we can attempt to make those
choices *once and for all*, in which case we do indeed end up serving some
"god" or another. But this isn't a particularly satisfactory choice. Even
Christianity seems clear on that point. Obedience to the law is the old
covenant, a pre-Christian covenant. Nietzsche does little more than echo
Christianity's new convenant when he says that "God is dead." Stirner's
teachings and Christian teachings agree that we are left to deal with
something like "spooks" or "ghosts." Much of Christiandom has attempted to
avoid this difficulty, looking for a new Law when the new deal is a bit
more complicated than that. Similarly, many egoists have attempted to
simply banish all the spooks, as if one could cut right down to the
authentic reality behind them. I was criticized recently for holding a
rather naive view of reality, ideology, and subjectivity, but the views
attributed to me really more closely resembled the simpler forms of
egoism, which assume that the unique is the proprietor of its self and its
desires. Nietzsche hardly holds to such a personalist psychology. Neither
did collectivists such as Kropotkin and Bakunin.

Kropotkin might be the jumping off point for another reading of the phrase
"I want to learn how to live." From Guyau, he got a particular view of
human sympathy as possible because human beings' time and energy are
simply not consumed by mere survival, the sort of "living" that doesn't
involve choices. The supplement or "fecundity" opens onto most of what we
value as anarchists, starting with the possibility or recognizing another
and feeling sympthy or solidarity, which seems to be that which makes any
work of freedom possible.

Another alternative might be found in Derrida's _Spectres of Marx_, where
a variation of the same question opens a treatment of, among other things,
ideology - and our old friend Stirner.

Russell's piece seems rather too close to the old propertarian egoism to
be much help to us - particularly if we are trying to avoid "naive"
approaches to complex questions.

-shawn