In Chapter 4, I explored the relevance of anarchism to questions of radical politics today – particularly those arising within continental theory. Indeed, I suggested that many of themes and preoccupations of contemporary radical political thinkers – particularly the idea of a form of politics that is beyond state, party and class – reflect an unacknowledged anarchism. However, as I have shown, anarchism – in asserting an autonomous politics against the state – provides a more consistent theory of radical politics than that proposed by other thinkers. Central here is the rejection, in the name of greater revolutionary spontaneity, of the economic determinism, historical stagism and technological fetishism at the base of Hardt's and Negri's neoMarxist thesis. At the same time, anarchism refuses the desire to consecrate the political event in the form the Terror, a temptation that in the end only consecrates the state.

To propose an understanding of anarchism as that which asserts the autonomous dimension of politics might sound odd to some, particularly to anarchists themselves. Indeed, anarchism is usually seen as an anti-politics. Yet, as I have shown, anarchism has always found itself in the slightly paradoxical position of proposing the abolition of politics, while at the same time having to organise political movements and invent political strategies and programmes. Postanarchism works around this aporia between politics and anti-politics: indeed, it embodies the seemingly paradoxical position of a politics of anti-politics, or an anti-political politics, seeing this disjunction as generating new and productive articulations of politics and ethics.