Anarchism, as a political discourse, has consistently positioned itself as a total rejection of authority. The state, the church, capital, patriarchy, and even language itself have been critically dissected—both in classical anarchist traditions (Bakunin and Kropotkin) and in its post-structuralist iterations (Saul Newman, Todd May, and Lewis Call)—as structures of power that must be dismantled. However, there remains a “regime of authority” that is systematically overlooked within anarchist critique: biological authority. The aging body, cells dividing toward eventual decay, the organism perpetually oriented toward death—this constitutes a sovereignty that has never been signed into any social contract, and therefore cannot be revoked by any revolution, including anarchism itself.
This essay departs from the premise that as long as anarchism—including its post-anarchist variants—continues to focus its critique solely on socially and historically constructed forms of authority, it will inevitably encounter a limit point it cannot fully address: the most primitive and irreducible form of subordination, namely subordination to biological time itself. It is at this juncture that the thought of Émile Cioran becomes particularly relevant to anarchism, not as an aesthetic supplement, but as an ontological corrective that forces anarchism to reconsider what is actually meant by “liberation.”
What this essay proposes is a dehumanization of anarchism. In this framework, anarchism is no longer centered on the human subject seeking “freedom,” but instead acknowledges the stark, material fact that human freedom is always already borrowed from—and will ultimately be returned to—a biological system indifferent to any political idealism.
Post-Anarchism and the Body
Post-anarchism, as formulated by Saul Newman (2001) through his reading of Lacan, Stirner, and Foucault, can be said to successfully dismantle the idea that there exists an “essential human nature” that is merely oppressed by power and waiting to be liberated. In this framework, power is not external to the subject; rather, it is constitutive of subjectivity itself. This represents a significant theoretical shift beyond classical humanist anarchism, which assumes a fundamentally good human essence corrupted by institutions. Post-anarchism replaces this with a more suspicious stance—one that rejects all forms of absolute authority, including even the humanist anarchist construction of the subject.
However, post-anarchism’s suspicion toward the subject largely remains at a discursive and relational level. It deconstructs how the subject is produced through discourse, desire, and power-knowledge relations, but it does not fully interrogate how the subject is equally shaped by cellular entropy, biological temporality, and the fact that every act of “liberation” celebrated in the present occurs within an organism that has, from the very moment of its birth, already been moving toward its own decay. Political power can be overthrown, and capital can be restructured, but the power of aging has no palace to occupy and no police force to disarm. It is an authority without an institution, yet one that inevitably erodes every anarchist body over time. Here lies the banal core implied in the essay’s argument, anarchism continuously reproduces its promise of liberation while failing to acknowledge that the subject it seeks to liberate is already, from the outset, a being sentenced to death.
Birth as Catastrophe, Not Beginning
In The Trouble with Being Born, Émile Cioran does not argue that life is miserable because it has been oppressed by particular institutions. Rather, he contends that birth itself is already a form of subordination to which no one has ever consented. Every human being is thrown into time without contract, without referendum, and without any possibility of resistance. This is perhaps the purest form of authority imaginable—an authority that requires no legitimacy because it precedes any capacity for the subject to grant or withhold consent. In this respect, Cioran’s thought resonates with the anarchist critique of the social contract, yet it extends far beyond both Bakunin and Stirner. Even Stirner’s radically individualistic notion of the Einzige still assumes that the “I” possesses a certain sovereignty over itself that can be asserted against the world. Cioran rejects this premise. The body does not belong to the “I” rather, the body is a prison that temporarily leases itself to consciousness, and that lease will always be terminated unilaterally and arbitrarily.
In On the Heights of Despair, written when Cioran was still in his twenties, despair is not presented as a temporary psychological condition but as a permanent metaphysical structure that binds consciousness to a mortal body. The fact that this work was produced at such a young age is particularly significant. It demonstrates that awareness of aging and death does not require the experience of aging itself. Rather, it is an a priori form of knowledge carried by any consciousness willing to confront its condition honestly, without retreating into the comforting illusions of political projects, historical progress, or promises of liberation.
Decomposition as an Anti-Revolutionary Model
A Short History of Decay is perhaps Cioran’s most directly relevant work for a critique of revolution, including anarchist revolution. Throughout the text, Cioran writes with a tone that openly mocks every system claiming to “improve” the human condition, because such systems quietly assume that decay can be overcome through the reorganization of society. For Cioran, this is fundamentally a category mistake. Revolutions tend to treat social symptoms while pretending that the deeper ontological disease—time itself—does not exist.
This line of thought becomes even more striking when read alongside Saul Newman’s critique of the “revolutionary fantasy” the belief that a future society free from power can eventually be achieved. Following Lacan, Newman acknowledges that desire continuously produces new forms of lack, meaning that no final moment of liberation can ever be reached. Yet Newman’s analysis ultimately remains at the psychoanalytic and discursive level. Cioran introduces a colder and more uncompromising dimension: it is not merely desire that remains perpetually unsatisfied, but the very body that houses desire which is, at every moment, losing its capacity to function as that vessel.
From this perspective, the banality of contemporary anarchism lies in its endless repetition of emancipatory projects that refuse to recognize a more fundamental reality, the emancipatory subject itself is a decaying organism. Political ideals may change, institutions may collapse, and new forms of resistance may emerge, yet all such projects unfold within bodies already subjected to irreversible biological deterioration. In this sense, decomposition is not an obstacle that revolutionary politics must eventually overcome; it is the inescapable condition within which every revolutionary aspiration is conceived, enacted, and ultimately exhausted.
Secularized Sacred Authority
In Tears and Saints, Cioran explores the lives of saints and mystics who attempted to transcend the body through self-mortification, fasting, and religious ecstasy. What makes this work particularly relevant for a post-anarchist reading is Cioran’s demonstration that even the most radical attempts to reject biological authority ultimately remain subject to the logic of the body itself. The body that is tortured, disciplined, or denied is still a body that responds, suffers, deteriorates, and eventually dies like any other. The effort to escape the body paradoxically confirms the body’s inescapable authority. This insight carries important implications for insurrectionary anarchism, especially those strands of post-left anarchist thought and the affective politics associated with Alfredo Bonanno that celebrate the body as the final terrain of resistance—a body that rejects discipline, escapes control, and becomes a site of autonomy. While such perspectives challenge social and political forms of domination, Cioran reminds us that the body is never truly autonomous. At best, it enjoys a relative autonomy from social power while remaining entirely subordinated to its own biological conditions. From this perspective, bodily autonomy within anarchist discourse appears as a borrowed and temporary freedom rather than an absolute one. The body may resist institutions, evade surveillance, or reject imposed norms, yet it cannot escape aging, decay, illness, or death. Consequently, the autonomy celebrated by anarchist thought rests upon a condition that is inherently fragile and finite. The banality identified in this essay emerges precisely, anarchism repeatedly celebrates bodily autonomy without fully acknowledging the temporal limits and inevitable decomposition that make such autonomy provisional from the very beginning.
A Critique of Political Messianism
History and Utopia (1960) contains some of Cioran’s sharpest criticisms of all utopian projects, including anarchism insofar as it imagines a stateless society as the destination of history. Cioran argues that every utopia, no matter how anti-authoritarian its intentions may be, structurally reproduces the same logic of salvation found in the theological traditions it seeks to reject. There is a fallen condition—power, domination, alienation—and there is a redeemed condition—a free and liberated society. For Cioran, this narrative ultimately functions as a denial of the fact that history possesses no absolute redemptive direction. History unfolds within the same biological time that leads every generation, every revolution, and every emancipatory project toward an identical extinction. This is the crucial point at which post-anarchism, despite its rejection of historical teleology as articulated by Saul Newman, may still fail to be radical enough. While Newman dismisses the idea of a predetermined historical end, post-anarchism often retains, however implicitly, the horizon of a better future for the human subject. The dehumanization of anarchism proposed here requires a rejection of that horizon itself—not in the name of passive political nihilism, but in the name of ontological honesty. Such honesty interrupts the ongoing banality of repeatedly reproducing projects of liberation that never confront the one authority that has never been defeated: biological finitude itself.
This argument is further reinforced in Anathemas and Admirations and The New Gods (2013), where Cioran develops elements of his personal gnostic cosmology. In this vision, the world is not the creation of a benevolent deity but the product of a careless or malevolent demiurge. Human beings are therefore not merely victims of political systems that can be reformed or abolished, they are victims of a cosmic architecture in which suffering and death constitute the very material of existence. Political domination may intensify human misery, but it does not create the fundamental condition from which misery emerges. For Cioran, self-interest itself is sustained by an organism unwilling to recognize its own status as temporary matter awaiting decomposition. The desire for permanence, fulfillment, and historical redemption emerges from a refusal to confront the material destiny of the body.
A dehumanized anarchism, therefore, is not an anarchism that capitulates to nihilism. Rather, it is an anarchism that ceases to treat human continuity, well-being, or flourishing as the sole measure of liberation. Instead of grounding freedom in the preservation and fulfillment of the human subject, it begins from the recognition that the subject itself is finite, contingent, and biologically subordinated. Liberation, in this sense, is no longer imagined as the final triumph of humanity over power, but as a confrontation with the limits that no political revolution can abolish.
Conclusion
The central thesis of this essay is relatively straightforward, the persistence of banality within anarchist and post- anarchist discourse—the endless repetition of promises of liberation that never achieve anything definitively liberatory—does not stem primarily from failures of political strategy. Rather, it emerges from a refusal to confront a form of authority that can never truly be overthrown, biological authority itself. Aging, decay, and death are not products of capitalism, the state, or any particular social institution. They precede these formations and will outlast them. As long as anarchism places its emancipatory hopes in a human subject imagined as potentially “whole” once social domination has been abolished, it will continue to reproduce the same illusion that Cioran identified within theology: the denial that the subject itself is a dying being.
The dehumanization of anarchism proposed in this essay is not a call to abandon the question of freedom. Rather, it is an invitation to rethink freedom without anchoring it exclusively to inherited assumptions about what it means to be human, what liberation entails, and what victory over authority might look like. Such a perspective does not reject political struggle, but it refuses to grant that struggle a redemptive status that it cannot ultimately sustain. Perhaps it is only at the point where anarchism ceases to function as a fundamentally humanist project that it can begin to confront, with genuine honesty, the authority that no revolution has ever defeated. This authority does not reside in governments, institutions, or economic systems, but in the biological clock that continues to tick within everybody that declares itself free. To recognize this is not to surrender to despair; it is to acknowledge the limits within which every politics of liberation must inevitably operate. Only then can anarchism move beyond the repetition of emancipatory promises and confront the ontological conditions that make those promises permanently incomplete.
References:
Cioran, E. M. (2013). The Trouble with Being Born. Simon and Schuster.
Cioran, E. M. (1992). On the Heights of Despair. University of Chicago Press.
Cioran, E. M. (2012). A Short History of Decay. Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
Cioran, E. M. (1998). Tears and Saints. University of Chicago Press.
Cioran, E. M. (2015). History and Utopia. Simon and Schuster.
Cioran, E. M. (2012). Anathemas and Admirations. Skyhorse Publishing Inc.
Cioran, E. M. (2013). The New Gods. University of Chicago Press.
Newman, S. (2001). From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power. Lexington Books.
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