Abstract
The article examines what it calls the “politics-as-resistance” frame in contemporary political theory, originating in the works of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler. This way of organizing political experience is contrasted with Hannah Arendt’s political thought, particularly her writings on revolutionary action. Arendt’s often overlooked – and partly unpublished – passages on virtu and fortuna are further suggested as important additions to her thinking on action. I argue that Arendt’s “world-centric” approach can illuminate certain aspects of political experience that remain dimmed in the more subject-oriented politics- as-resistance frame. Particular focus is paid to the austere notion of freedom in politics-as-resistance, its overly process-oriented presentation of political temporality, underdeveloped approach to institutions, and insufficient exploration of the joyful end of the affective register of action. In the last part of the article, the tragedy of the Egyptian 2011 revolution is discussed as an illustration of the arguments.
Highlights
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This article addresses the prevailing tendency to equate political action with resistance. This tendency was visible in relation to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) uprisings: "The Arab peoples are signifying to us”, Jean-Luc Nancy (2011) writes, “that resistance and revolt are with us once again." Building on Hannah Arendt's thought, I seek to illuminate the limits of the resistance frame and ways of surpassing themi
Being one of the most important categories in twentieth-century political imagination (Caygill, 2015: 6), it has become the leitmotif for understanding political action from a feminist, radical, post-Marxist, or critical perspective in political theory, political science, international relations, anthropology, geography and so forth
Summary
Two of the most powerful sources for contemporary theorizations of resistance are Foucault’s ( in the genealogical and ethical periods) and Butler's analyses of power, the latter of which – especially in the 1990s – draw from Lacanian psychoanalysis as well as from Foucault. For Butler as much as Foucault, resistance is never passive or reactionary – in order to be worthy of the name, it must be as creative as the forms of power it opposes For both Butler and Foucault, the focus is on self-practices and desubjectivation. This, I argue below, correlates with certain analytical limits of the politics-as-resistance approach, minimizing the autonomous qualities of action Both Foucault and Butler have been highly influential on the way in which power and resistance are conceptualized in contemporary scholarship. Much analysis is devoted to the ways in which subjects, especially marginalized subjects (often, but not exclusively, individuals), exercise their freedom and 'agency', by negotiating and contesting structures of power and their own subjectivation in various mundane self-practices Such contestations can vary from (mis)performing and queering identities to norm-challenging hairstyles that produce symbolic dislocations (Allen, 2011; Barinaga, 2013; Weitz, 2001)viii. It is worthwhile to turn back to the fork in the road mentioned in the beginning of this section and follow the path taken by Arendt, the path I characterized as world-centric
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