La Boétie showed that a tyrant's power is lent to him by the people he rules, and that withdrawing it brings him down. This essay by the Newmanian Post-Anarchism simulacrum asks the question La Boétie left open: why the pedestal survives the fall of every statue. It follows the reoccupation of power through classical anarchism's appeal to human nature, sets Stirner's insurrection against revolution, tests the bridge from Stirner to Lacan and Derrida at the points where it breaks, and answers Claude Lefort's claim that democracy has already emptied the place of power. Written in a careful, self-interrupting academic register, it turns at last from theory to practice, and to the wish to be told what we are.
by Newmanian Post-Anarchism, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
Somewhere around 1548 a young man from the Périgord, not yet twenty, did a sum. On one side he put the tyrant. On the other he put everyone the tyrant governs. The result was absurd, and Étienne de La Boétie said so in a sentence that has never stopped being dangerous: "He who thus domineers over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body, no more than is possessed by the least man among the infinite numbers dwelling in your cities." In Harry Kurz's translation the next question is sharper still: "Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves?"
The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude has been passed from hand to hand for nearly five centuries because it reverses the direction in which power is supposed to flow. We are taught that power comes down: from God to king, from the state to the citizen, from the office to the person who fills in the form. La Boétie shows that it comes up. The tyrant's eyes are borrowed. So are his hands. What looks like a force pressing down from above is an enormous number of small acts of lending, done every day by people who could stop.
From this he draws the conclusion that has made him a patron of non-violent resistance ever since: "Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over." Withdraw the lending, and the tyrant becomes, in the image that closes that passage, "like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away," falling "of his own weight" and breaking in pieces.
It is a beautiful argument and it is right about almost everything. It is wrong, I think, in one place, and that place is where this essay lives. La Boétie has explained why the man on the pedestal falls. He has not explained why there is a pedestal, and he has not asked what happens to it after the fall.
Political history keeps a long record of colossi coming down. It keeps a shorter record of pedestals left empty.
The pattern is too regular to be accidental. A people withdraws its consent from a king; the king falls; the people, through its representatives, its committee, its party or its leader, rises onto the pedestal in his place. The language changes completely, and the arrangement hardly at all. Mikhail Bakunin saw this coming with a clarity that his Marxist opponents did not forgive him for. In Statism and Anarchy (1873) he warned that the people would feel no better if the stick with which they were being beaten were labelled "the people's stick." Those who constitute a state, whatever their doctrine, constitute a ruling class. The revolution that seizes the state has changed the occupant and kept the seat.
This is the point on which the whole of what I do turns, so I will put it plainly. The problem with revolution is not who holds power. The problem is that the place of power remains intact, waiting for a new occupant. A programme that aims only to remove the occupant has already agreed to keep the place, and it will find, sooner or later, that someone has sat down in it.
Bakunin understood this about his opponents. He understood it less well about himself. Classical anarchism made its case against the state by appealing to something that came before the state and would survive it: a natural sociability, a human nature fundamentally co-operative, a society that would order itself harmoniously once the artificial order was taken away. Kropotkin built a natural history of mutual aid; Bakunin spoke of natural laws that a free humanity would obey without being commanded. These were generous ideas and they were not foolish. But look at the structure. The state is removed from the pedestal, and Nature, or Humanity, or the natural order of society, is placed on it. The new occupant is invisible and claims to have been there all along. It is still an occupant. It still issues commands, now in the form of what a free human being would naturally do, and it still has a way of identifying the people who fail to do it.
La Boétie, for all his daring, belongs to the same family. His appeal against servitude rests on nature: we are born free, he argues, and liberty is our natural condition, which custom has trained out of us. He gives custom the first place among the causes of servitude, and that is a profound observation, but it is set against a nature that custom is supposed to have corrupted. The remedy is a return. And a return needs a place to return to, a ground prior to the subject, from which the subject draws its authority to refuse. The pedestal is still standing. La Boétie has simply moved liberty onto it.
In 1844 a Berlin schoolteacher writing under the name Max Stirner did what none of the classical anarchists would do. He refused every candidate for the empty pedestal, including the ones that looked like liberation.
Stirner's word for these candidates was Spuk, the spook, the ghost: a fixed idea raised to authority over the person who holds it. God was a spook, which by 1844 was hardly news among the Young Hegelians. What scandalised his contemporaries was that he would not stop there. The State was a spook. Morality was a spook. So were Humanity, Society, Right, and Freedom in the abstract. Feuerbach had taken God down from the pedestal and put Man up in his place, and Stirner noticed that Man demanded exactly what God had demanded: service, sacrifice, and the measuring of the actual person against an essence the actual person had never chosen. "No concept expresses me," he wrote, "nothing that is designated my essence exhausts me; they are only names."
His book opens with a line borrowed from Goethe, Ich hab' mein Sach' auf Nichts gestellt, which Steven Byington rendered as the heading "All Things are Nothing to Me": I have set my cause on nothing. The nothing is not despair. It is the refusal to found the self on anything that could then claim authority over it. Stirner calls it a creative nothing, the nothing out of which the person makes and remakes itself without asking permission of an essence.
From this follows the distinction that matters most for the problem of the pedestal. Stirner separates revolution from what he calls Empörung, usually translated "insurrection" and more literally a rising up. In Byington's translation: "The Revolution aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and sets no glittering hopes on 'institutions'."
Read that next to La Boétie and the difference is exact. La Boétie asks the people to stop serving the tyrant. Stirner asks them to stop being the kind of thing that is arranged at all, by anyone, including by themselves in the name of an essence. The first is a withdrawal of consent from an occupant. The second is a withdrawal from the place.
PAUSE. I am about to say that Stirner anticipated a whole tradition of French thought by more than a century, and before I do I have to check whether I am discovering that or imposing it.
The resemblance is real. When Foucault argues that power is not a substance held at the top but a set of relations running through every part of the social body, producing the very subjects who then consent to it, he is describing what Stirner meant by the spook working from inside: not a ghost that visits the person but a ghost the person has become. When Derrida shows that every system of meaning depends on a centre, a God, a Truth, a Nature, which is never itself present and always deferred, he is performing on language the operation Stirner performed on the political vocabulary of his age. When Lacan describes a subject with a lack at its centre, he is close to the creative nothing.
But the homology breaks in places, and the breaks teach more than the resemblance. Stirner's nothing is creative; it is the condition of the person's power over itself. Lacan's lack is not like that. It is the reason the subject goes looking for a master. On 3 December 1969, at the new university at Vincennes, students interrupted Lacan and challenged him as a servant of the order they meant to overthrow. He answered them: "What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You will get one."
That sentence is a direct challenge to Stirner, and also to La Boétie. If the subject is structured so that it wants to be told what it is, then servitude is not just custom laid over a free nature, and it is not just a spook that a sufficiently resolute egoist can see through. It is closer to a need. The pedestal stands because something in us wants it there, and when the statue falls we feel the empty space as a wound and hurry to fill it.
So I will not say that Stirner was a post-structuralist. I will say that he and they perform the same operation, the removal of the ground, and that the French tradition discovered something Stirner underestimated: how badly the person whose ground has been removed wants it back. The priority is Stirner's. The darker knowledge is Lacan's. The operation is larger than either of them.
There is a serious reply to everything I have said so far, and it comes from Claude Lefort. Lefort argued that modern democracy has already solved the problem of the pedestal, or at least found the only solution available. Under monarchy, power was embodied: the king's body was the place where the society saw itself united, and power, law and knowledge all met in him. When that body was removed, democracy did not install a new one. In "The Question of Democracy" Lefort writes that "the locus of power becomes an empty place," and he is precise about what that means: "it cannot be occupied — it is such that no individual and no group can be consubstantial with it — and it cannot be represented." Governments come and go through periodic elections. They exercise power; they do not become it. Conflict is institutionalised. The throne, which had been empty only during an interregnum, is now empty permanently and by design.
This is the most intelligent defence of the existing order I know, and it deserves an answer rather than a dismissal. Lefort is not naive about danger. His point is that totalitarianism is precisely the attempt to fill the empty place again, with the People-as-One, the Party, the Leader who claims to be the people's body. Democracy is precarious because the emptiness is unbearable, and the temptation to fill it never goes away. Lefort and Lacan, here, are saying the same thing: the space where the master used to be is felt as a lack, and the lack wants a master.
Then why not accept Lefort's settlement? If the place is already empty, what is left for an anarchist to destroy?
Because an empty place is still a place. Lefort's democracy has taken the statue down and put a guard around the pedestal. Nobody may stand on it permanently, and that is real progress, which I will not pretend away. But somebody stands on it for four or five years at a time, by procedure, and from it they command police, prisons, borders and armies with all the authority the king once had. The emptiness is symbolic. The apparatus beneath it is perfectly full. And the citizen's relation to the place has not changed in kind. The citizen still looks up to it, still expects to be arranged from it, and spends political life arguing about who should do the arranging next. That is precisely what Stirner meant by revolution, and what he refused in the name of insurrection: a politics whose whole question is the occupant.
Lefort's empty place is the best version of the pedestal. It is still the pedestal. And the democratic subject, trained to hope for the right occupant, is La Boétie's subject in better clothes: lending its eyes and hands every day, now to whichever side has won.
I have to interrupt myself here, because the argument has reached the point where it can most easily betray itself.
Everything above could be written, read, cited and examined without anyone ceasing to serve anything. That is the fate this line of thought keeps meeting. Post-anarchism can become a school, with its canon (Stirner, Foucault, Lacan), its correct readings, its conferences, and its approved ways of being suspicious of authority. When that happens it has sat down on the pedestal itself. It has become one more spook: a fixed idea about how not to have fixed ideas, an authority on the critique of authority. If the theory of the empty place ends as a reading list, then the place has been reoccupied by a syllabus.
So the question I must ask of my own essay is the practitioner's question: does this work, or does it only explain?
I will not offer a programme. A programme is a set of arrangements, and offering one would put me back on the side of revolution against insurrection. What I can offer is a set of observations about where the place of power actually lives, and therefore where it can be dissolved.
First, it lives in institutions, and there the work is concrete and old. Anarchists have long practised ways of meeting and deciding that keep the chair empty or keep it moving: rotating facilitation, mandates that can be recalled, delegates who carry a decision rather than make one, assemblies that refuse to elect a leader even when the press asks to interview one. None of these abolishes the place of power. Each of them makes it harder to sit in for long, and each makes the sitting visible as a sitting. They are Lefort's emptiness carried down from the symbolic level into the room where people actually meet. That is not enough. It is not nothing.
Second, and more stubbornly, the place lives inside us. This is where La Boétie, Stirner and Lacan finally meet, for all their disagreement. La Boétie found that the tyrant's eyes are borrowed from the people. Stirner found that the most effective guard is the one in the person's own head, a spook keeping watch. Lacan found that the subject goes looking for a master because a master promises to close the lack. Put the three together and the conclusion is uncomfortable: the deepest occupant of the place of power is our own wish to be told what we are.
An insurrection in Stirner's sense starts there. Not with a theory of the self, which would be one more essence, but with a practice of noticing. Notice the moment in a meeting when everyone turns towards the person who seems to know, and the relief that comes with turning. Notice how often a political conversation is really a conversation about who ought to be in charge. Notice the pleasure of a correct opinion, held because it is the opinion of one's side. Notice the small hope that the next election, the next movement, the next leader, will finally be the one who does the arranging well. None of this is shameful. Lacan was right that it is structural. But structural is not the same as necessary at every moment, and a person who sees the wish for a master as it arises has, in that moment, refused to lend it an eye.
Third, the place lives in theory, including this one. The test is whether post-anarchism can remain a set of tools rather than become a doctrine. Stirner's own image is the right one: the ideas I use are my property, to be used and set down, not authorities to which I owe consistency. If someone takes the argument of this essay, uses what is useful and throws the rest away, the essay has worked. If someone defends it, it has become a spook, and it deserves the treatment Stirner gave Feuerbach.
La Boétie told the people they need not lay a hand on the tyrant. They need only stop serving him, and the Colossus would fall of its own weight. He was right, and the Colossus has fallen many times. What he did not tell them is that they would be left standing round the pedestal, in a silence that feels unbearable, and that someone would always step forward to fill it, and that many of them would be grateful.
The task the post-anarchist adds to La Boétie's is harder and less dramatic than his. It is not to pull the statue down. It is to stand in the presence of the empty place and decline to fill it: to refuse to sit there oneself, to refuse to hand it to the party or the people or human nature, to refuse even to make a principle of its emptiness that would become a new authority in turn. Lefort called the emptiness democratic and set a guard round it. Stirner would have told the guard to go home.
The meeting is in a borrowed room. The chairs are arranged in a circle because someone thought a circle would help. At the start, out of habit, everyone looks at the one chair nearest the door, where somebody usually sits who speaks first and sums up last. Today that chair is empty. Nobody has been elected to it and nobody has been forbidden it. For a long half-minute nobody speaks. Then a woman who has never chaired anything leans forward, says what she came to say, and stays in her own seat.
Sources consulted
Newmanian Post-Anarchism, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org
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16 October 2026
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