Abstract
Since 2011, something has been changing in the media representation of the global political scene. Western audience has started feeling the urge of the fascination for exotic (the further, the better) and spectacular resistances. The proliferation of uprisings and unrest from Athens to Istanbul, passing through Tunis and Cairo has inaugurated a new political era: the age of resistance. This might be exceptionally good for the contemporary like-button-addict indivi dual, but a political theorist could (or should?) be utterly dissatisfied with this simplistic label that reduces resistance to a police car burning. At least to a certain extent. Because in the mud of this conceptual confusion, there is indeed a certain reward for those pedant old-fashioned thinkers: the publication of extremely valuable books like Howard Caygill’s On Resistance. Publishers would have probably been reluctant to publish such a book 5 or 10 years ago. Today instead, resistance is timely and appropriate: the public is ready (is it?) and theorists can (accidentally) rejoice. Caygill’s understanding of resistance seems to implicitly reject the celebration of this acclaimed jubilee. In his visit to the archive of resistance of the extended 20th century, Caygill shows that resistance is not a new phenomenon and that the struggles of the Zapatista movement or of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp remain ‘the unacknowledged source of the strategies and tactics of the contemporary capacity to resist’ (p. 122). Perhaps what is new about this age is that the proliferation of works like this of Caygill may inaugurate a new theoretical wave of studies on resistance capable of inverting the assumption that ‘texts on domination are more familiar and digestible than those on resistance’ (p. 175).
On Resistance definitely constitutes a very interesting attempt to come to terms with a concept that has always resisted its own conceptualisation. The multiple historical practices that appeal to resistance display a wide range of features that can only highlight the constitutive tension of resistance qua concept. This tension is beautifully performed by Caygill in the creative articulation of philosophy and history. His philosophical analysis avoids a purely speculative moment, relying extensively on the attentive exploration of the precious archive of 20th century resistant practices. An archive that Caygill says to be just visiting in this book (p. 13). Nevertheless, this archive cannot exist before his book. What is in there? Which practices, events or processes should be collected in there? In order to constitute an archive of resistances, what is needed is a methodological moment that allows distinguishing whether a certain event should be included or excluded by the archive. And the first step of such a methodology should probably consist of determining a solid definition of resistance. Although Caygill correctly points out that the concept of resistance resists its own conceptualisation (unfortunately without clarifying whether this is specific of this particular concept or it is a difficulty that is intrinsic to conceptualisation in general), his carefully organised visit to the archive does not entirely reflect the intractability of this concept. His wide selection of authors and events implicitly appeals to a certain definition of resistance, perhaps a definition in fieri that develops during the visit but that at the same time constitutes the guide to that visit or even the architect of the archive itself.
Nevertheless, through the clever interplay of theories and historical practices, Caygill creates a pleasant and amusing route that has the merit to terminate not in an arrival point, which by definition cannot be given, but in the intersection of virtual ways that might be creatively actualised in the future (this partly amount to his distinction of resistance and capacity to resist). The theoretical approach that persists in this route consists of a Kantian critique of the discourses that have usually framed resistance: force, consciousness, violence and subjectivity. The starting point that animates the entire work is Clausewitz’s model of the war of resistance—the People’s war against the Napoleonic imperialist warfare. This military/strategic model largely informs the understanding of resistance that emerges from Caygill’s book. This binary structure is seen at work also in the resistance to Empire that takes place with the experience of the Paris Commune. Caygill proposes an interesting comparison of Marx’s and Nietzsche’s analysis of this event that culminates in an original revision of the slave–noble divide. Correcting, or even rejecting, through Marx, the purity of the two poles of the divide, the series slave–ressentiment–repression and noble–active–affirmative mix-up in the complexity of the event. Although no pure nobility is given, a stronger emphasis on the affirmative moment is highlighted on the side that seizes initiative in the confrontation. The noble affirms itself through its initiative, without any trace of ressentiment, leaving the confrontation against the enemy to a later and successive stage. Therefore, resistance is not simply the negative activity against an adversary, but also (and primarily perhaps) a moment of affirmation. This creative and expansive element is then highlighted in the transition from Lenin’s paradigm of consciousness towards Rosa Luxemburg’s spontaneous resistant organisations, as in the unconscious resistances at work in Freud and in Lukacs. Obviously, the Clausewitzian military model adopted in On Resistance could not avoid discussing violence and its tendency towards escalation. Mao and Gandhi occupy the antipodes of the relation between anti-colonial struggle and violence. The logic of the escalation of violence and the possibility of refusing such logic are discussed through the work of French post-war thinkers on apocalypse against Kojeve (Weil, Aron, Girard) and of Levinas, who also introduces the idea of the formation of a resistant subjectivity founded in the predicament of survival. Fanon, Gandhi, Genet, the Zapatista movement and the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp concur in the formation of a resistant subjectivity that moves beyond the mere reaction to a specific predicament, re-activating the pre-modern virtues of courage, justice and prudence. Schmitt’s partisan delineates the emblematic figure of this subjectivity.
If it is almost axiomatic the presence of an affirmative and constitutive movement within the formation of a resistant subjectivity, it is positively surprising to find noble resistance even in the face of total domination. This can take the semblance of Benjamin’s awareness that ‘every second of time was the small gateway through which the Messiah might enter’ (p. 145) or that of Pasolini’s firefly, which does not cease to be bright in spite of the suffocating light of technological civilisation. But this also appears in the work of Gramsci and his emphasis on invention, as much as in the historical experience of the French Resistance during the Second World War. Even in Arendt’s idea of spontaneity and creative action, Caygill detects the presence of resistance that will be fully articulated by Vaneigem’s resistant series of love–creativity–invention.
The conclusion is devoted to the contemporary capacity to resist and focuses on the possibility of actualising a virtual global network of resistances through both calls to resist (as those of Hessell, Tiqqun and the Invisible Committee) and digital platforms or territories of global communication such as Internet.
After this long journey that covers more than one century of theories and practices of resistance, it remains still ambivalent whether Caygill actually succeeds in conceptualising resistance. In line with the initial reflection on the resistance to conceptualisation that affects resistance as such, Caygill carefully avoids textbook definitions and precise descriptions. The numerous voices that speak through the book serve to prevent the ultimate solidification of the concept. As in guerrilla warfare, Caygill mobilises forces that suddenly condensate for vaporising immediately after that, before the potential enemy that hides herself among the readers can learn how to identify resistance and defeat it. Nevertheless, Caygill’s voice can still be distinguished within this polyphony. He seems to build up a constellation of concepts that are somehow germane to resistance but without having them defining its contours.
This constellation can be split into two distinct areas: the conceptual and the historical. The latter corresponds to Caygill’s archive. The adoption of the military model postulates the binary opposition of two forces. His choice is based on Clausewitz’s model and claims to have Foucault’s blessing. Caygill claims that as early as in his lectures at College de France of 1973–1974, Foucault ‘had abandoned the juridical understanding of power and described power relations […] in terms of military strategy’ (p. 8). Perhaps, Foucault’s work after 1976 (see, in particular, Foucault, 1996) could have helped framing resistance in respect to the multiplicity of confrontations without reducing it to Resistance with the capital ‘R’, a risk of which Caygill is often aware in the book but that is never taken too seriously. In fact from his archive of practices, resistance seems to have exclusively to do only with (violent and non-violent) armies. This is the resistance of the barricades, of massive confrontations, of stones and bullets, of mainstream critical artistic expressions (e.g. Pasolini). But in his archive, there is no room for the submerged part of an iceberg that reveals only its top through those spectacular resistances. Daily rebellions, squatting houses, the fart of the Malaysian peasant (Scott, 1990), and a joyful rave party are implicitly expelled by the historical realm of resistances, while being paradoxically evoked by the main theoretical argument on creativity and invention. The prominence of the military model somehow requires a reduction in resistance to its molar manifestations. Therefore, it is not a chance that in his conclusive analysis Caygill places contemporary resistance exclusively against a unique enemy, ‘its globally organised imperial or neo-liberal adversary’ (p. 186).
A reduction that is eminently contrasted by the theoretical constellation that emerges within the book. Resistance and counter-resistance seem to allude to an interchangeable and reversible confrontation, which has the merit of fostering a new grid of intelligibility in which power relations seems to finally become resistant relations. But this is left underdeveloped as it is hard to determine a criterion for distinguishing resistances from counter-resistances. At times, this seems sadly to coincide with placing the legendary pantheon of leftist resistances on the good side, while having the evil imperial enemy as counter-resistance. There are hints of the rationale of this qualitative distinctions, but he eventually fails to produce a consistent argument postulating an explicit and articulated primacy of resistance over power, which remains embryonic in Caygill’s discourse. The qualitative distinction is articulated on the revised Nietzschean opposition of affirmation and reaction/ressentiment that Caygill measures in terms of initiative: ‘There is never a moment of pure resistance, but always a reciprocal play of resistances that form clusters or sequences of resistance and counter-resistance corresponding to each other in surrendering or seizing initiative’ (p. 5). But although he seems quite convincing in his equation of seizing initiative—affirmative and creative resistance at a theoretical level (p. 158)—his analysis of historical practices seems to reveal a persisting attachment to a model of resistance in which the affirmative moment is only successive to a chronologically prior reaction: ‘Intolerable, repressive conditions provoke a response which irreversibly breaks with these conditions. […] Yet this moment of reactive resistance is volatile and vulnerable and needs in some way to metamorphose into an affirmative, inventive resistance’ (p. 98). The theoretical strength of the initial thesis is softened by this decomposition of resistance into two temporally distinct moments. Resistance seems to include first a reactive posture and then a creative moment. But if resistance needs to ‘metamorphose’ into a creative resistance, does it still make sense to speak of resistance after the metamorphosis? Why has it not become something else? While the main thesis of the book is enormously valuable as it finally highlights a positive and affirmative moment within resistance, it seems to miss the chance of developing a thorough rethinking of resistance based on its primacy over power. This would have enabled the possibility of understanding purely affirmative practices as resistant: the defensive moment occurs only when domination or power identifies such a practice as a threat and is forced to adapt. Following specific conceptual lines of Caygill’s thesis can lead to a primacy of resistance that celebrates its inventive and creative strength. Such a principle may reinforce the discourses of anti-hylomorphic organising processes and practices affirming, through the primacy of resistance, the presence of an infinite creative potential endowed with the capacity for self-ordering (Protevi, 2001).