Peter Lamborn Wilson
Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey, 1945, near Baltimore, Maryland [1]) is an anarchist cultural critic, poet and author of TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone (1991). He has worked with the not-for-profit publishing project Autonomedia in Brooklyn, New York, and has written essays on such diverse topics as Tong traditions, the utopian Charles Fourier, the Fascist Gabriele D’Annunzio, alleged connections between Sufism and ancient Celtic culture, sacred pederasty in the Sufi tradition, technology and Luddism, and Amanita muscaria use in ancient Ireland.
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After studying at Columbia University, he traveled through the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal. He was a consultant for the World Islam Festival, London and Tehran. He worked at the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy in Tehran, leaving the country during the Islamic Revolution.
His early writing concentrates on theology and poetry, but on returning to the US he began to inflect his ideas with anarchism, Situationism, and Deleuzian philosophy. His most influential work, TAZ, argues for the creation of spaces of liberation from authority in everyday life, which are capable of disappearing from sanctions before they can be crushed by government and all powers. Hakim Bey is a central figure in post‐left anarchy and his critical writing has been highly influential amongst rave youth culture and a range of anarchist countercultures – not least in the organization of Reclaim the Streets, a global organization dedicated to unsanctioned events that typified anti‐globalization activism in the 1990s. However, he has also suffered heavy criticism.
Hakim Bey’s thought has been criticizedand publicly attacked by other anarchists (such as Bookchin 1995), and in 1996 the Luther Blissett collective published a hoax collection of his writing. He has also received criticism for writing approvingly of pederasty since 1985 in the NAMBLA Bulletin.
Works
- editor, with Jim Fleming, Semiotext(e) USA, 1987.
- editor, with Rudy Rucker and Robert Anton Wilson, Semiotext(e) SF, 1989.
- Hakim Bey, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, New York: Autonomedia, 1991, viii+141 pp; 2nd ed., new pref., New York: Autonomedia, 2003, xii+147 pp. Contains three parts written 1981-1988: "Chaos", "Communiques", and "Temporary Autonomous Zone".
- T.A.Z. Die Temporäre Autonome Zone, trans. Jürgen Schneider, Amsterdam/Berlin: ID-Archiv, 1994, 161 pp. (German)
- T.A.Z.: Zone Temporaneamente Autonome, trans. Syd MIGX, Milan: ShaKe, 1995; 2007, 182 pp. (Italian)
- TAZ: zone autonome temporaire, trans. Christine Tréguier, Paris: l'Éclat, 1997, 90 pp; repr., Schizoïdes, 2006. Trans. of third part only. (French)
- TAZ: ezor oṭonomi era, trans. Liat Sabin, Tel Aviv: Resling, 2003, 107 pp. (Hebrew)
- Dočasná autonomní zóna, trans. Blumfeld, Prague: tranzit.cz, 2004, 88 pp. Trans. of third part only. [2] (Czech)
- Dočasná autonomní zóna, trans. Yosef, 2007. (Czech)
- Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs and European Renegadoes, New York: Autonomedia, 1995; repr., 2003.
Interviews
- Hans Ulrich Obrist, "In Conversation with Hakim Bey", e-flux 21, Dec 2010.
Responses to TAZ
- Murray Bookchin, "Anarchism as Chaos", ch 4 in Bookchin, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism, Edinburgh/San Francisco: AK Press, 1995, pp 19-26, PDF.
- Colin Ward, "Temporary Autonomous Zones", Freedom, Spring 1997.
- John Zerzan, 'Hakim Bey', postmodern 'anarchist', 1996; repr. in Zerzan, Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization, Los Angeles: Feral House, 2002, pp 144-146.
- John Armitage, "Ontological Anarchy, the Temporary Autonomous Zone, and the Politics of Cyberculture: A Critique of Hakim Bey", Angelaki 4:2, 1999, pp 115-128.
- Benjamin Noys, "Space is the Place", Sep 2009.
- Simon Sellars, "Hakim Bey: Repopulating the Temporary Autonomous Zone", Journal for the Study of Radicalism 4:2, Fall 2010, pp 83-108, PDF.
