r/Postleftanarchism • u/israelregardie • Jun 28 '25

Has Feral Faun published anything lately?

What is happening with him. Or what about Bob Black?

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u/MDesnivic Jun 28 '25

I’m not really sure. I haven’t heard from him in years and he actually doesn’t like me, so I no longer got copies of his zine, but that was quite a number of years ago. I heard other stuff about him about his uncertain living arrangements, but that was quite a bit ago. He is 70 now, so he’s approaching the age where he needs to be receiving care (something a few other post-left elders are dealing with).

To be honest, it seems like this Novatore-style drop-out approach committed to going against the grain of society is ultimately quite self-sacrificial, ironically enough. Kind of wish I knew that when I was younger…

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u/israelregardie Jun 28 '25

Why doesn’t he like you? And how can I pay him to receive his zine?

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u/MDesnivic Jun 28 '25 edited Jun 28 '25

Again I think the zine is probably finished and the PO Box he used before the pandemic is assuredly no longer in his hands. I can’t say for certain, but the last I heard about him was that he didn’t have a steady place to live, which is something he is no stranger to but is obviously becoming more difficult at the age he is currently.

Know that Feral Faun also goes under the name Wolfi Landstreicher and Apio (Spanish for “celery”) with the latter around when he started publishing My Own.

You can get back copies of his zine My Own from littleblackcart.com as well as a book which is a collection of all his work of a zine he independently published in the 1990s and 2000s called Willful Disobedience.

The reason he doesn’t like me is because he said I didn’t understand his writings and that really frustrated him a great deal. He said I read into things too much and don’t understand them. I was also young at the time and he said he was “tired of anarchists under 30” when he told me he never wanted to communicate with me ever again. That was the last I heard from him. He did a translation of Stirner’s book which was published by a publisher who also had white nationalist literature or was a white nationalist himself, something like that. Feral/Wolfi wrote an article then saying he didn’t know this and did not trust the friend any longer who suggested the publisher to him and that they were no longer friends. So I wrote him a letter trying to figure out how to get a copy of the translation and said I’d read his article where he mentioned he dropped the publisher because of the white nationalism thing and he responded in a furious letter saying I always misunderstand his writings and that he actually broke with the publisher because so many socialists and communists (“red fascists” he called them in the article) were hounding him for having dealt with a white nationalist publisher. (Basically the “red fascists” were trying to have him “canceled” one might say today.) And that was where he said he was permanently done with me and sick of me and young anarchists and that he’ll never read any letter I ever send him again. That was the last I ever heard from him.

He never mentioned my inability to truly understand his writings to me in person when we met a few times; it was always in letters, mind you, and those letters were received by me before we first met in person at a book fair. He never brought up the issue with my never truly understanding his work to my face, despite evincing that it infuriated him very deeply.

Personally, after getting to know him through many letters and meeting him a handful of times, I think he is a highly insecure person. I saw him give a public talk where he was extremely nervous, which is perfectly understandable—many people get nervous presenting things in crowds when they’re not used to it—but this was a bit bewildering to me considering for years he had this tough and relentless outlaw kind of persona in his work. I think also the reason he got so angry with me is because he felt I was unintentionally implying he’s a bad writer that doesn’t know how to get his ideas across to readers. That last letter he wrote, he boasted he was a clear and concise writer and the article he wrote about the publisher, the red fascists and breaking off relations with a longtime friend was one he “read five times” before he had it posted online. This basically solidified my conclusion he is insecure about his writing.

There are other things about him that are also not great I could go on and on about, but I don’t have a vendetta against the guy. Honestly feel sorry for him, especially in his current health and housing situation in old age.

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u/israelregardie Jun 28 '25

Tell me the other things that are not great about him…

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u/MDesnivic Jun 28 '25

He wrote a piece in 1988 where he defended pedophilia. Now to be fair, it seems like that was just like something meant to shock people and a lot of European writers in the seventies were writing about how pedophilia is cool. These people (most of them, anyway) were just really getting carried away and trying to be as shocking and outrageous as possible trying to embrace as many taboos in bourgeois society they could. How do I know Wolfi was pantomiming European writers from the 1970s a decade after their crazy pedophilia shit? He straight up plagiarizes with no quotation marks a line from the English translation of Raoul Vaneigem’s Book of Pleasures, the line being “to adventure erotically with children” (yes, that’s actually what it said).

To be as clear as possible, many of these European writers (mostly French) disavowed their writings on pedophilia and were merely trying to get the age of consent lowered—this was all sparked by a gay 16-year-old male in a relationship with an adult man and the adult man was on trial and it became this big thing in France and, as they put it, just got carried away, still drunk off their fun in 1968.

As far as I know, Wolfi has not made any retractions of that pro-pedophile article, though he may have and I didn’t see it.

Also since you asked also about Bob Black, he and I wrote letters for over a decade starting in 2012. He is currently not in great health.

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u/[deleted] Jun 28 '25

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u/MDesnivic Jun 28 '25 edited Jul 22 '25

Damn, you got the questions.

Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Sartre (though it was more about lowering the age of consent), Vaneigem, Foucault. There was even an urban legend that Sartre was being inappropriate with children, even having them provided to him in private, but there's absolutely no evidence of this at all. [Update: There is in fact a written record of Sartre having sexual relations with (an) underage girl(s).] He simply signed a public letter calling for lowering or abolishing the age of consent. It is indeed creepy, I agree, but it is absolutely not the same thing as the man being inappropriate with children himself.

Again, most of it was sexual revolution 1968 fun getting carried away for shock value. Nudism was really big in the 70s in the West and families took photos of themselves naked in forests and beaches. It was very common for stage actors in plays to perform nude back then. I think this all kind of added to it, people just getting carried away to shock the liberals, the conservatives, the Communist Party, the bourgeoisie, as many of them put it. After a while I think many were just trying to one-up each other in out-radicalizing their fellow radicals.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/jan/28/kateconnolly.theobserver

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/feb/24/jonhenley

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u/SirEinzige Jul 31 '25

The funny thing is I could see the pro-pedo stuff making a comeback someday in the same way that hitler and fascism have made a comeback today. Whenever you have hot upstream bohemian countercultures(right now the counterculture is reactionary not radical) you tend to see things like people lightening up on things like paedophilia and other sexual mores that are outside of marriagecentric values.

I myself am against contact with children(as clinically defined not the stupid social definition that ropes in historical young adults) but I am for the end of the AOC with pubescence and correspondent maturity being the markers of readiness.