On resistance: A philosophy of defiance

Howard Caygill begins On Resistance with an interesting double move. First, he points to the problem of forming concepts about practices of resistance, rooted, as they are, in particular actions, specific tactical statements and singular socio-historical situations. In this respect, resistance, as a historically specific and continually evolving series of practices in the actual, is immediately 'resistant to philosophical analysis' and a 'philosophy of resistance has itself to resist the pressure of concept formation' (p. 6). So how does one move from considering particular practices of resistance to a more general philosophical reflection on their significance? And indeed why should we be motivated to do so? For Caygill it is important to understand that, although practices of resistance are lived out and constantly reinvented in the actuality of specific historical situations, this history nonetheless demands philosophical reflection. There is, and this is his second move, a philosophical responsibility that we need to exercise in uncovering and highlighting what the history of resistances has to offer the contemporary philosophical and political imagination. To that end, Caygill raises the possibility of 'organizing the historical archive of resistances and so making the experience of resistance theoretically available to future calls and occasions for it' (p. 7). Indeed, he does more than raise this as a possibility. He consistently makes good on the suggestion, across this quite brilliant book, as he goes about assembling an archive of political resistance made up from a very interesting and diverse cast of characters.

The voices selected, raised and recorded in Caygill's archive of resistance are many and varied. Whether discussing Marx, Lenin, Luxemburg, Gramsci, Benjamin, Mao, Gandhi, Fanon, the Zapatistas, the Black Panthers, the women of Greenham Common, The Invisible Committee, Occupy, The Arab Spring, Pasolini, Genet, Kafka, Arendt, Schmitt, Freud, Levinas, Foucault, Debord, Vaneigem or, the ever present and centrally important, Carl Von Clausewitz, Caygill consistently shows his capacity for intellectual and political generosity and, consequently, the reader is warmly invited to also participate in the plundering of the archive of resistance. Whether engaging with Vaneigem's Revolution of Everyday Life , Clausewitz's On War , Brooke's The Revolution will be Digitised , Huey P Newton's Revolutionary Suicide , Pasolini's Salo or 120 Days of Sodom ,...