richard-day-gramsci-is-dead

160 Gramsci is Deadof philosophy as such’ (1). This is, of course, an extremely widespreadopinion, as indicated in a recent interview with Derrida:McKenna: What’s the most widely held misconception about you and yourwork?Derrida: That I’m a skeptical nihilist who doesn’t believe in anything, whothinks nothing has meaning, and text has no meaning. That’s stupid andutterly wrong, and only people who haven’t read me say this. (Derridawith McKenna 2002)As previously mentioned, it is now quite well established thatdeconstruction is and always has been driven by powerful ethicopoliticalcommitments. Thus it has become increasingly difficult, inthe academic world at least, to avoid embarrassment while upholdingthe idea that poststructuralism equals postmodernism equals nihilisticrelativism. 9The fact that Derrida, Foucault and the rest have repeatedly declaredtheir lack of allegiance to so-called postmodernism has not, of course,done much to convince those who wish to discredit their work byattaching it unfairly to the very cultural trends they themselvesdeplore. Also influential among anarchist circles is Murray Bookchin’sSocial Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm (1995).In this highly polemical text Bookchin laments the rise of what he calls‘lifestyle anarchism’, which ‘is finding its principal expression in spraycangraffiti, postmodernist nihilism, antirationalism, neoprimitivism,anti-technologism, neo-Situationist “cultural terrorism”, mysticism,and a “practice” of staging Foucaultian “personal insurrections”’ (19).The common link between all of these tendencies is that they appearto Bookchin as individualistic and aesthetically oriented, and aretherefore ‘antithetical to the development of serious organizations, aradical politics, a committed social movement, theoretical coherence,and programmatic relevance’ (19). This is a list of charges whichmany readers will recognize, for the same fears have been raisedby feminists, critical theorists and liberal philosophers. Ultimately,what worries Bookchin is the withering away of belief in a ‘basicrevolutionary endeavour’ that would seek to liberate ‘humanity asa whole’ (3).One of the prime targets of Bookchin’s—and Zerzan’s—wrath isHakim Bey (aka Peter Lamborn Wilson), whom Jason Adams creditswith starting all of the trouble with his 1987 essay ‘Post-AnarchismAnarchy’ (Adams n.d.). In this essay, Bey notes that the anarchist