Glossary

Glossary

Authority and Authority-effects

February 10, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur
A CONTR’UN GLOSSARY RELATED POSTS: But what about the children? (A note on tutelage) Bakunin and Proudhon / Authority and Anarchy Anarchy and its Uses The “authority” of the bootmaker Mikhail Bakunin, “What is Authority” (1870) Authority: The OED presents a wide range of definitions, of which the one most pertinent to anarchist concerns is (II.2) “Power or right to give orders, make decisions, and enforce obedience; moral, legal, or political supremacy.” The general heading (II.) is “Power to enforce obedience or compliance, or a party possessing it” and this is distinguished from the following set of definitions (III), which […]
Contr'un

Anarchy: Historical, Abstract and Resultant

February 9, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur
  What follows is a look at three possible senses of anarchy related to Proudhon’s work, together with a sketch of their possible relations as developments from one another. The intention here is to simply present some basic definitions as a kind of hypothetical framework, which can then be tested against close readings of the relevant texts. Historical anarchy: In a society organized around the principle of authority, resistance appears as anarchy, whether it is the active resistance of those oppressed or simply the friction generated by the contradictions of an authority-based society. This is the sense that Proudhon most […]
Glossary

A Contr’un Glossary

December 1, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 10px”] Glossary entries: [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 10px 0 10px”] In the course of developing the ideas that I’m now in the process of summarizing on the Contr’un blog, I have at times given in to the temptation of resorting to new words or at least rather obscure old ones, in order to draw certain ideas out of the web of common associations so that they could be considered as if they were new as well. So, for example, after borrowing contr’un (the counter-one or antinomic one), I cobbled together contr’archy (“the tendency of the quest for ‘full […]
Glossary

Contr’un

May 19, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
Links: A Contr’un Glossary Basically, the Contr’un is the star of the show here, the Whitmanesque subject who contains multitudes and is not contained between hat and boots, who spills out over all the property lines we might draw, at the same time drawing the world in without attempting to claim exclusive domain. It is the subject understood in its general economy. It is an individual characterized by an antinomic relationship with its own individuality, a counter-self, the one against the (absolutist) One. It is frustrating, messy (at least in the context of our attempts to draw clean boundaries, improper […]