Ph. D. School University of New South Wales (Australia),1997
DAI-A 60/03, p. 871, Sep 1999

This dissertation compares anarchist and poststructuralist theory to explore problems of power, subjectivity and resistance in radical political theory.

Radical political interventions tend "to reaffirm the power and authority they seek to destroy. This idea is introduced through the anarchist critique of Marxism, which contends that Marxism neglected the problem of power - particularly the power of the state - by reducing it to an economic analysis. This would lead to a reinvention of power in a Marxist revolution.

I then argue that the only way anarchism can present such a critique of power is by positing a theoretical point of departure uncontaminated by it - a place of resistance. This place is constituted by the idea of an essential, rational and moral, human subjectivity, which is irreconcilably opposed to the irrationality, immorality and artificiality of political power. However…the essential moral and rational subject of Enlightenment humanist discourse is not only constituted, discursively, by the very regimes it professes to oppose, it also becomes a figure of authority itself.

As I will argue, human essence becomes the basis of a whole series of rational norms and moral norms which exclude and oppress identities which transgress them. Essentialism is found to be inextricably linked to discourses of domination. For this reason, the idea of the uncontaminated point of departure is a logical impossibility and must be abandoned.

This leaves us, however, at a theoretical impasse which must be resolved if political theory can continue to effectively address the problem of domination: how can resistance be theorised without this point of departure, without this essential ground outside power from which a moral and rational critique of power may be developed? In other words, can there be a notion of resistance which does not refer to essential foundations and absolute moral and rational criteria? I argue that there can be non-essentialist forms of resistance, and I try to construct a space of possibility for such a politics of resistance to emerge, through the different thinkers I am comparing