This Pathless Hour | 271cal” anarchism continued for several decades, culminating in the struggle of the
Spanish anarchists against Franco’s fascists from 1936 to 1939, before declining
after the defeat of the Confederación Nacional de Trabajo-Federación Anarquista
Ibérica.^121 In the 1960s, however, the rise of the counterculture and situationism,
especially in France, saw a renewed effort at a libertarian interpretation of Ni-
etzsche. Meanwhile, the failings of the Soviet Union became as clear to the in-
ternational left, including Western Marxists, as they once had been to anarchists
alone. Buber had stated in Paths in Utopia that man “has come to realize that in
spite of everything he likes to call ‘progress’ he is not traveling along the high-
road at all, but is picking his precarious way along a narrow ledge between two
abysses.”^122 But Jean-François Lyotard went further: “The purposiveness that the
twentieth century has witnessed has not consisted, as Kant had hoped, in se-
curing fragile passages above abysses. Rather, it has consisted of filling up those
abysses at the cost of the destruction of whole worlds of names.... Capital is that
which wants a single language and a single network, and it never stops trying to
present them.”^123 Michel Foucault, meanwhile, declared, “One can say to many
socialisms, real or dreamt: Between the analysis of power in the bourgeois state
and the idea of its future withering away, there is a missing term—the analysis,
criticism, destruction, and overthrow of the power mechanism itself.”^124
In its political moments, poststructuralism followed the suggestion of Ador-
no and Horkheimer that the joint failure of capitalism and communism, as well
as the rise of fascism, resulted from their common ancestry in the Enlighten-
ment.^125 Just as Lyotard singles out Kant, the French theorists faulted the notion
of the free and rational Cartesian-Kantian subject for containing implicit op-
pressions. The universal horizon of the liberation sought by the Enlightenment
came to be considered imperialist in itself, responsible for “the destruction of
whole worlds of names”; the desire for “a single language and a single network”
is condemned in favor of the valorization of difference and particularity.^126 This
attack led to defenses: Badiou’s demand for a true universalism in opposition to
capitalism’s false one, and Jürgen Habermas’s defense of the Enlightenment as
unfinished.^127 The debate was about the role of reason: whether it was the sleep or
the dream of reason that produces monsters.
The poststructuralists do not generally consider the various attempts to
create cooperative societies as a particularly important site of struggle. Instead,
they take the critique of rationalist planning as an invitation to think on an even
smaller scale, hoping to avoid Enlightenment imperialism by delving into re-
lationships and practices, including writing, to locate oppressive patterns that
require deconstruction and alternatives. This is the basis for Foucault’s studies
of the clinic, the prison, the classification of sexualities, and so on. The result is
the creation of a micropolitics quite different from the traditional ideas of En-
lightenment radicals, who reacted to the domination of history by states and
their wars by making war on their states. This micropolitics has been criticized