272 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
in “ modernist” leftist and anarchist circles, as really being a kind of conservatism
and quietism in disguise, since its proponents seem unwilling to prescribe any
concrete actions, let alone to promise far-reaching change.^128 Despite, or perhaps
in response to, these charges, some writers have emphasized continuities between
poststructuralism and classical anarchism.^129 Todd May argues that even though
some may deny poststructuralism the status of a political theory, “by grafting
poststructuralism onto a tradition in whose light it has not been grasped—the
anarchist tradition—it is possible to articulate a poststructuralist framework
without betraying its fundamental micropolitical commitments.”^130 May argues
that such thinkers as Foucault, Lyotard, and Deleuze share anarchism’s rejection
of a vanguard party, its vision of numerous and intersecting sites of oppression,
and its recognition that “changes of power at the top do not bring social trans-
formation.”^131 Similarly, Saul Newman writes that “anarchism and poststructur-
alism, as different as they are, can be brought together on the common ground
of the unmasking and critique of power.”^132 Both May and Newman recognize
that the critique of Enlightenment humanism prevents poststructuralism from
finding its own precedents in the classical anarchist thinkers; the French think-
ers cannot share the early anarchists’ view of power as purely oppressive or of a
unitary, basically good human nature. However, as Richard Day has recognized,
Landauer had already questioned these assumptions:
Through his contact with Nietzsche’s work, Landauer anticipated poststruc-
turalist theory in analyzing capitalism and the state form not as “things”
(structures), but as sets of relations between subjects (discourses). Based on this
analysis, he was able to understand how small-scale experiments in the con-
struction of alternative modes of social, political, and economic organization
offered a way to avoid both waiting forever for the Revolution to come and
perpetuating existing structures through reformist demands.^133Thus there is a real structural homology between Landauer’s anarchism and an
influential field of contemporary theory.
Many of these shared concerns persist even when theorists like Badiou or
Žižek, under the influence of Lacan, have taken exception to the postmodern
consensus, perceiving it as debilitating or obscurantist.^134 Here various intellec-
tual inheritances, including a concern with ideology (characteristic of Louis Al-
thusser), a concern with the figure of the father and with individual relationships
to authority (characteristic of psychoanalysis), and the idea of biopolitics (char-
acteristic of Foucault’s late work) combine to question authority in all areas of
life. For example, Eric Santner, comparing Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption and
Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence,” notes that coercive law displays not merely
strength and affirmation of legal order but also “something rotten”:
What manifests itself as the law’s inner decay is the fact that rule of law is, in
the final analysis, without ultimate justification or legitimation, that the very