On Resistance

No word is more central to the contemporary political imagination and action than 'resistance'. In its various manifestations - from the armed guerrilla to Gandhian mass pacifist protest, from Wikileaks and the Arab Spring to the global eruption and violent repression of the Occupy movement - concepts of resistance are becoming ubiquitous and urgent. In this book, Howard Caygill conducts the first ever systematic analysis of 'resistance': as a means of defying political oppression, in its relationship with military violence and its cultural representation. Beginning with the militaristic doctrine of Clausewitz and the evolution of a new model of guerrilla warfare to resist the forces of Napoleonic France, elucidates and critiques the contributions of seminal resistant thinkers from Marx and Nietzsche to Mao, Gandhi, Sartre and Fanon to identify continuities of resistance and rebellion from the Paris Commune to the Greenham Women's Peace Camp. Employing a threefold line of inquiry, Caygill exposes the persistent discourses through which resistance has been framed in terms of force, violence, consciousness and subjectivity to evolve a critique of resistance. Tracing the features of resistance, its strategies, character and habitual forms throughout modern world history Caygill identifies the typological consistencies which make up resistance. Finally, by teasing out the conceptual nuances of resistance and its affinities to concepts of repression, reform and revolution, Caygill reflects upon contemporary manifestations of resistance to identify whether the 21st century is evolving new understandings of protest and struggle.

With his great and gorgeous intellectual generosity, Howard Caygill has charted the emergent politics of our time: resistance! Caygill constructs a constellation composed of concepts, ideas and arguments, but also of practices, histories, subjectivities, human capacities, artworks, movements and political debates that become a dark and dynamic account of who we are and what needs to be done. Stretching from Marx to Gandhi, from Freud to Pasolini, from Mao to the Women of Greenham Common, from Rosa Luxemburg to Jean Genet, from Fanon to the Zapatistas, Caygill exposes us to the elements for a different kind of philosophy, one that remembers, adumbrates and makes resistance possible. Scintillating, timely, and urgent.

Préface
A brilliant overview of the history of theories of resistance from the origins of the idea to contemporary expressions of defiance.

Auteur
Howard Caygill is Professor of Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University London, UK.

Contenu
October 27 1960 Introduction 1. Conscious Resistance 2. Violent Resistance 3. Resistant Subjectivities 4.Total Domination and the Capacity to Resist 5.The Contemporary Capacity to Resist Outside the Law Bibliography Index