Ethics Of Resistance Research Articles

Communities of Fear: The Politics of ‘Strangering’ and the Ethics of Resistance in Naima El Bezaz’s Vinexvrouwen

ABSTRACT This article analyses the Moroccan-Dutch author Naima El Bezaz’s novel Vinexvrouwen (Suburban Women), which explores the interplay between the representation of migrants’ cultural difference, the politics of ‘strangering’ and the ethics of resistance. By means of gendered practice of storytelling, the autobiographical novel unfolds the native Dutch people’s fear of a loss at the hands of globalizing forces: mass migration, cultural relativism and the hybridization of their national identity. This rhetoric of fear is channelled into deep resentment against migrants represented as ‘fetishised’ strangers, excluded them from the ‘imagined community' of belonging. In my close-reading, I focus on how El Bezaz’s novel engages a dialectical process of estrangement and embodiment, of exclusion and inclusion, of solidarity and resistance in its representation of migrants’ cultural difference. Examining the bond between storytelling and the extra-literary reality/new realism, I delve into the way the text narrates the process of ‘strangering' migrants as communities of fear and instead expresses resistance and solidarity in face of exclusionary mechanism.

Terror and the Ethics of Resistance

ABSTRACT: After the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, it took the United States almost two years to forfeit the sympathy of the world. After the terror attacks of October 7 of last year, Israel, a more nimble superpower, accomplished the same feat in just a few days. Because the atrocities committed by Hamas have been eclipsed by the horrors that Israel has brought down on the people of Gaza, a consideration of the way the U.S. left responded to Hamas’s attacks might seem to be of nothing more than historical interest. But some of the questions raised by our responses should still be of concern to those who want to build a better left.

Terror and the Ethics of Resistance

ABSTRACT: After the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, it took the United States almost two years to forfeit the sympathy of the world. After the terror attacks of October 7 of last year, Israel, a more nimble superpower, accomplished the same feat in just a few days. Because the atrocities committed by Hamas have been eclipsed by the horrors that Israel has brought down on the people of Gaza, a consideration of the way the U.S. left responded to Hamas's attacks might seem to be of nothing more than historical interest. But some of the questions raised by our responses should still be of concern to those who want to build a better left.

Democratic Norms and the Ethics of Resistance

Most democratic theories recognize that democracy requires widespread adherence to both formal and informal norms that constrain the use of power and structure relationships among citizens. Most also recognize that a healthy democracy requires some forms of activism or resistance that transgress those norms to disrupt hierarchies, challenge injustices, and drive discursive innovation. Recent systemic theories of democracy show that democratic theory can incorporate these two realities without contradiction, but it is not clear whether an ethic of citizenship can do the same. This article reviews recent literature on the purposes and ethics of transgressive politics while also drawing attention to neglected questions about the functions of democratic norms and how they are maintained amid transgressions. These are questions that must be addressed by an ethic of citizenship that can navigate the tension between the authority of democratic norms and the constructive potential of transgressive politics.

Ethics and Affect in Resistance to Democratic Regressions

Abstract In recent times, it has become increasingly common that elected parties and leaders systematically undermine democracy and the rule of law. This phenomenon is often framed with the term democratic backsliding or democratic regression. This article deals with the relatively little-studied topic of resistance to democratic regressions. Chief amongst the things it discusses is the rather central ethical issue of whether resisters may themselves, in their attempts to prevent a further erosion of democracy, transgress democratic norms. But the argument advanced in the article is not merely about the ethics of resistance. It begins, perhaps unconventionally, by addressing the affective dimension of resistance to democratic regressions, looking in particular at the powerful feelings of anger and despair that pro-democratic citizens living under a regressive government are likely to experience. As the article argues, these feelings have not only motivational but also epistemic potential, which must be adequately theorized in order to understand how resisters can respond to the ethical challenges facing them.

Clenched and Empty Fists: Trauma and Resistance Ethics in Han Kang’s Fiction

Broadly speaking, the literary history of human–nonhuman metamorphoses conveys certain ethics regarding human-to-human relations by mediating these relations through metaphors of inhumanity. Where such transformations appear in the literature of the present, however, the human is often decentered, fostering an uneasy consort between human and nonhuman beings and ways of being. Taking the fiction of South Korean author, Han Kang, as a case study, this essay examines the political or civic value of reinvigorating vegetal or arboreal transformation in contemporary stories that unfold against a backdrop of global climate change and ecological collapse. I argue that Han’s work depicts the mimicry of or engagement with nonhuman forms of life as both passive strategies for resisting human acts of violence and exploitation and alternative models of sociality and care. Drawing especially on the unruliness of plants and non-animal organic matter, Han’s translated works invite readers to consider what human subjects can learn about both individual and networked, interspecies modes of protest from green subjectivity.

To Show or Not to Show? The Depiction of Terror and Death in Nairobi

ABSTRACT This study examines the metajournalistic discourse reflected in the use of corpse images from the DusitD2 terror attack in Nairobi, Kenya, in January 2019. Drawing from concepts such as responsibility and resistance ethics, this study explores the viewpoints of Kenyan journalists and bloggers. Situated within qualitative research methodology, the findings suggest that the New York Times’ use of victims’ corpse images reflects a double standard and visual bias, and its defense of the news report can be considered an example of professional posturing. Conversely, sharing of perpetrators’ postmortem pictures produced mixed findings among audiences. While online circulation was blamed on bloggers’ inexperience, it was also seen as a sign of victory for the value of visual evidence. This study also contributes to the scholarship on use of graphic images by drawing on African ethical systems and just war theory.

Political authority and resistance to injustice: A Confucian perspective

Those who bear the burdens of injustice and oppression are entitled to act in ways contrary to existing laws and institutions to secure their own entitlements and those of others. This article aims to articulate a Confucian perspective on resistance against injustice. There are reasons for thinking that the notion of resistance is fundamentally at odds with Confucian political thought. In this article, I move beyond this simple conflict/compatibility model and explore the complex relationships between resistance and Confucianism. On one hand, some of Confucianism’s core commitments can be better attained in contemporary societies by allowing resistance; on the other, a Confucian perspective can offer insights into current discussions on the ethics of resistance.

Sorry not Sorry: (Non-) Apology, Satire, and the Vacuum

Abstract This essay considers the theme of apology and what happens when the demand for apology is subverted, using the Vacuum newspaper as a case study. I consider the argument that played out in 2004 between the Vacuum and Belfast City Council, which partially funded its production. The Vacuum’s publication of themed double issues entitled ‘God’ and ‘Satan’ provoked the ire of conservative Council Members who proposed that the publication's editors must apologize to Members of the Council and the citizens of Belfast for the offence they had caused. In so doing, the publication secured its place as one of the most controversial Northern Irish print publications of recent years. In their response to the Council’s demand – a themed ‘Sorry’ issue – the Vacuum’s editors struck a defiant tone. Media discourse around the ‘Sorry’ issue of the Vacuum has centred on the element of public spectacle it generated, but this essay represents a reconsideration of its importance. I read it as informed by an ethics of resistance. By refusing to be co-opted into making a sham apology, the ‘Sorry’ issue illuminates the crucial importance of apology in the place and time of its production – in a country still reeling from the violence of the Troubles.

Por uma ética da resistência: a História na História da Tradução

The main objective of this article is to point out possible positions of History in the History of translation. More specifically, we want to show what the historian's craft in the History of translation consists of. Based on Certeau (2002), Bloch (2001), Burke (2009), Kosellek (2006, 2013), or Loraux (1992), among others, we reinforce that the meanings of “History” are accessed only through the identification of theoretical and epistemological issues constituting the field in question. Then, we analyse the historiographical practice in the History of translation, establishing the historicity of the translating gesture of four translators: Charles Antoine, Antoine Berman, Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas. Finally, from Berman (2002), Petry (2016), Cardozo (2013, 2018), Ricoeur (2011), or Crary (2016), we associate the gestures of these translators with an ethics of resistance in view of the conception of translation as a privileged relationship with time.

The Politics and Ethics of Resistance, Feminism and Gender Equality in Saudi Arabian Organizations

Greater numbers of women are entering workplaces in Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries. Structural features of patriarchy are changing in Middle Eastern societies and workplaces, but women’s experiences of gendered segregation, under-representation and exclusion raise questions around the feminist politics and ethics mobilized to respond to them. Building on and extending emerging research on feminism, gender, resistance, feminist ethics and the Middle East, we use data from an interview study with 58 Saudi Arabian women to explore their attitudes toward gender-segregated and mixed workplaces. We develop a novel conceptualization of how gender is experienced through patternings of resistance and conformity shaped by the ethicopolitical, religiopolitical and sociocultural webs of meaning in Saudi society that permeate workplaces. Saudi women’s attitudes and actions in the workplace are neither entirely individual and private nor entirely collective and public, but made up of nuanced commitments and resistances to context-relevant identity issues. We discuss implications of our findings for the feminist ethics and politics of gendered resistance and conformity to working practices and norms in Islamic and Middle Eastern settings.

When All Else Fails: The Ethics of Resistance to State Injustice, by Jason Brennan

When All Else Fails: The Ethics of Resistance to State Injustice, by Jason Brennan

Socrates and the Ethic of Resistance: Comments on Buss

AbstractI respond to Sarah Buss first by considering Socrates as an exemplar of courageous resistance to injustice, then by adding two caveats: exemplary resistance seems to flow from very diverse psychological profiles, and cowardice may not always be best understood as expressing fearful self‐attachment.

Book Review: Drew Dalton, The Ethics of Resistance: Tyranny of the Absolute (London, U.K.: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), pp. 154.

A review of Drew Dalton, The Ethics of Resistance: Tyranny of the Absolute (London, U.K.: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), pp. 154.

‘Cultures of healing’: spirituality, interdependence and resistance in the African diaspora

ABSTRACTConcepts of healing and spirituality have remained crucial to generating agency and empowerment for both black women and black men, especially in their diasporic displacement from Africa to the US. Healing has been consistently deployed to fight against the systemic racism and sexism that has pervaded and continues to persist in the lives of African diasporic subjects. Placing the discussion of healing within the current debates about interdependence and spirituality, the paper traces the notion back to its African roots and enslavement times, and attempts to delineate a genealogy of healing up to the present that grounds interdependence and interconnectedness within an ‘ethics of resistance’.

Incivility as Dissent

State attempts to legislate for civility, such as the UK’s Injunctions to Prevent Nuisance and Annoyance, are usually challenged on libertarian grounds. This article develops a novel democratic challenge to such legislation, arguing that un-civil behaviours sometimes constitute masked expressions of dissent. It first elaborates a conceptual analysis, linking the forms of annoying behaviour targeted by legislation with the practice of incivility. It then articulates a structural association between incivility and dissent and develops on that basis a substantive normative case for the democratic value of incivility. In this way, the article highlights the role of bad behaviour in sustaining liberal democratic institutions and the ways in which the tradition of political thought about civil disobedience can obscure the possibilities of democratic dissent. It thereby informs public debates about the ‘crisis of civility’ in modern society and offers a new perspective on scholarly debates about the ethics of resistance.

When All Else Fails: The Ethics of Resistance to State Injustice

When All Else Fails: The Ethics of Resistance to State Injustice

The Ethics of Resistance

The issues of sovereignty and territory can be discussed through ethics. Foucault's College de France lectures (1970-1984) cover such concepts as governmentality and biopolitics that influenced sovereign states, especially in regards to modernity of the eighteenth century. Foucault performs analyses of how discourses through power-knowledge form structures that define an 'Other' in terms of madness, reason and sexuality. This paper shall argue that these 'molar' questions of states are underpinned by a 'molecular' question of ethics, in which Foucault attempts to practice a new form of ethics, thereby subverting the sovereignty in the lecture hall in which he lectured in, and the scholars writing years later. Foucault argues that modernity has changed the nature of sovereignty and territory. Therefore, these questions are not only a question of ethics, but one bound up by the question of modernity and how it has transformed the eighteenth-century conception. The idea that Foucault uses is the definition of ethics, and thus he uses this as an analogy to describe how sovereignties and territories interact. In conclusion, Foucault views sovereignty and territory as philosophical spaces instead of physical or geographical ones, and that a new ethics of resistance is needed to combat neo-liberal bureaucracy.

Forcing materialism upon metaphysics: Three approaches to Adorno's method

AbstractRecent Adorno scholarship has been shaped by the idea that his critical theory cannot account coherently for its own method. Call this the Problem of Adornian Critical Theory (PACT). In this paper, I examine three recent approaches to Adorno—the “ethics of resistance” (associated with Gordon Finlayson and Brian O'Connor), “negative naturalism” (associated with Fabian Freyenhagen), and “inverse theology” (associated with Peter E. Gordon). Individually, I argue, all three approaches are subject to a key limitation that prevents them from being able to solve the PACT. But, by synthesising them, we can see how the scholarship already—effectively—possesses a solution to it. The synthesis that results is characterised in terms of “materialist metaphysics”—a position Adorno can clearly be read as articulating in the “Meditations on Metaphysics” chapter of Negative Dialectics.

Critique and resistance: Ethical, social‐theoretical, political? On Fabian Freyenhagen's Adorno's Practical Philosophy

AbstractFabian Freyenhagen's impressive reconstruction of Adorno's ‘practical philosophy’ provides a convincing defence of the possibility of making normative claims about the social world we live in without justifying these claims in terms of the right, the good, or human nature. More specifically, and more controversially, Freyenhagen argues that the normative resources Adorno's critique relies on are provided by a negative Aristotelianism. In this paper, I argue that this approach underestimates the extent to which Adorno follows the model of immanent critique, I highlight the socio‐theoretical underpinnings of what Freyenhagen calls Adorno's ‘ethics of resistance’, and I discuss the risk of overstating the danger of co‐optation that collective political action faces.