Contemporary theorists from Gilles Deleuze to Rochard Rorty have raised a radical question: on what grounds can we claim that any "representation"- whether scientific, aesthetic, or political – adequately stands for its objects, authorizing some of us to speak for others? While some hail this contestation as liberatory, others object that it leaves us bereft of viable practical alternatives, issuing in a general "crisis of representation."

The book responds to the challenge. Rather than seeking to defend a discredited "representationalism" against these critiques, it seeks a more robust critical framework in a forgotten tradition which has resurfaced in today’s global justice movement: anarchism. Drawing on a wealth of heretofore overlooked material (including a number of seminal texts never before translated into English), Cohn argues that anarchism can help us to rethink the foundations of hermeneutic understanding, aesthetic creation, and political economy itself.

Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation is intended to provide readers of literary criticism, art history, political philosophy, and the social sciences with a fresh perspective from which to revisit dead-end theoretical debates over concepts such as "agency," "essentialism," and "realism"-and, at the same time, to offer a new take on anarchism itself, challenging conventional readings of the tradition. The anarchism that emerges from this reinterpretation is neither a musty rationalism nor a millenarian irrationalism, but a living body of thought that points beyond the sterile antimonies of post-modern and Marxist theory.